You Had a Job for Life Page 32
Economic Diversity: The mill, as Hadley Platt and Sylvia Stone asserted, was the life of the town. Unfortunately, the mill so dominated the area economy that when it closed, that economy went into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover. A healthy, new economy will offer a diverse array of niche products such as maple syrup and maple sugar, local farm produce and goods, high-quality wood products, and low-impact outdoor adventures. Care must be taken to assure that these products and services impose a light carbon footprint and do not degrade ecosystem integrity.
Support Downtowns: Storefronts that are vacant today could sell locally produced goods, if people shop locally. Keeping one’s friends and neighbors in business is good for everyone. A downtown ghost town discourages tourism and drives talented youth away from their homes and families.
Absentee Ownership: Absentee owners shut down the Groveton paper mill and placed the hated covenant on its deed. Absentee timberland owners have treated forests as a commodity as they overcut and degraded millions of acres of timberlands in northern New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont in recent decades. Public economic development programs should support locally owned businesses and services rather than continue to offer tax breaks and other subsidies to outside investors with scant commitment to desperate communities.
AT A TIME OF RAPID, HUMAN-CAUSED, CLIMATE CHANGE, HOW CAN WE DESIGN A PROSPEROUS, LOW-CARBON ECONOMY THAT MAKES CREATIVE USE OF OUR NATURAL LANDSCAPE WHILE CONSERVING, PRESERVING, AND RESTORING THE ECOLOGICAL INTEGRITY OF OUR NATIVE ECOSYSTEMS? Perverse as it may seem, Groveton’s bleak and protracted economic crisis affords it a rare opportunity to design a new economy that best meets its basic necessities while protecting its greatest asset—its natural landscape. The forested communities of the Upper Connecticut River Valley are wonderful places to live. The mountains of Nash Stream and the lakes of Pittsburg are beautiful, relatively undeveloped, remote, and, by twenty-first-century standards, raw and wild. The Connecticut River divides the valley into New Hampshire and Vermont politically; yet ecologically, culturally, and economically it joins those two states.
Activities that exploit and degrade our forests, soils, farmland, rivers, lakes, and mountains harm our long-term economic health. The great wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” When we speak of “community,” we are referring equally to both natural and human communities. Our deliberations must include the needs and perspectives of all species native to the region, from humans to loons to lichens.
Half a century ago, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins described Paleolithic hunter-gatherers as “the original affluent society.” “There are two possible courses to affluence,” Sahlins suggested. “Wants may be ‘easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little.”2 Desiring little is the surest way to reduce our dependence on the global economy and dramatically shrink our carbon footprint. We are well positioned to follow this path because we are already a frugal, rural culture that engages in considerable barter and often comes together for communal endeavors such as barn raisings and church suppers.
We need to focus on production of necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, fuel, and basic leisure entertainments. Luxuries and superfluities that degrade ecosystems or impose a heavy carbon footprint are not worth the cost. Let us live simply and refuse to be slaves to fashion and frivolities. Freedom, happiness, and fulfillment are discovered in nature, not in material geegaws and the latest technology that Thoreau scornfully described as “an improved means to an unimproved end.”
Local business districts will remain ghost towns as long as we patronize box stores and buy commodities produced by cheap labor in factories that degrade the environment. A vibrant downtown is essential to reversing the “brain drain” and luring the region’s talented youth back home following college or military service. We can revive our downtowns by offering locally grown foods and niche farm and forest products for sale and services such as Internet cafés, movies, a variety of live music venues, and small museums scattered around the region that celebrate the region’s history, culture, and natural beauty.
The mill site in Groveton or the old Campbell’s complex in North Stratford would make beautiful locations for a college that offered courses in the ecology, history, culture, and trades that are distinctive to this region. A local college or university would strengthen and diversify the economy, help reverse the brain drain, enrich local cultural resources, and be a boon to local farmers, builders, woodlot owners, merchants, and service providers.
Recreation opportunities abound in the greater Groveton region. In this 2013 photo, kayakers paddle by the Groveton paper mill during the demolition process. (Courtesy Doug White)
Human-caused climate change threatens the health of forests. In 2007 the Union of Concerned Scientists published a study of the potential ecological impacts of climate change on the forests of New England. The report provided a map showing that New Hampshire’s climate a century hence would resemble the current climatic conditions of North Carolina if mankind fails to act aggressively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Iconic species of northern New England, such as sugar maples, red spruce, loons, and moose, could lose all or most of their necessary habitat in northern New England. Decline or loss of beloved species will compromise iconic economic sectors such as maple sugar production, leaf-peeper tourism, maple and spruce woods products, and moose viewing and hunting.
Nonnative invasives, pests, and pathogens, such as the hemlock wooly adelgid and the emerald ash borer, have been limited by extreme winter temperatures. As the climate warms in the coming decades, they can expand their range north and wreak havoc on native forest species and the wildlife that depends on them for food, reproduction, or shelter.
Northern New England, one of the most heavily forested regions in the world, can contribute significantly to the mitigation of human-caused climate change in several important ways. Trees and other aboveground biomass sequester huge amounts of carbon. Undisturbed soils sequester even more carbon than aboveground biomass. Species threatened by a changing climate require un-fragmented migration routes to climates better suited to provide for their biological needs. Unsustainable forestry, road building, and development fragment and degrade habitat and pose often-insurmountable obstacles to small, migrating species such as salamanders, worms, lichens, and mosses. Habitat fragmentation isolates populations of stressed species and can cause loss of genetic diversity that is essential for successful adaptation to rapid climate change. Protecting large tracts of undeveloped former paper company forestlands as publicly owned wilderness optimizes long-term forest carbon sequestration potential and improves the chances of survival for climate-stressed species.
It will be centuries before northern New England’s forests are again dominated by large, old trees—the ancestral forests that covered the entire region for thousands of years before the Civil War. The degraded condition of so much of today’s forests limits, but does not close off, our economic options for niche forest products. Local landowners who placed forest health over a quick buck will enjoy a head start over more shortsighted owners.
Local woodlot owners can earn a respectable return from careful logging if they view forests as communities to which they belong, not commodities to be exploited. Mitch Lansky, author of an important book on low-impact forestry, has written: “For a forest to be ‘functional,’ it must have all the required parts, and all the required processes.” Low-impact forestry (LIF) is, Lansky suggests, “forestry as if the future mattered.” It represents a commitment to long-term management and requires the collaboration of landowner, forester, logger, and timber buyers. It utilizes smaller, lighter machines, or, better yet, horses. The cutting standards for LIF are reasonably easy to follow, and they can be profitable, provided that local markets for high-quality wood exist.3
To restore healthy forests, pub
lic policy must reward responsible forest landowners, managers, and loggers while holding irresponsible actors accountable for their ecologically damaging actions. Nonregulation of destructive forestry practices constitutes a massive public subsidy to irresponsible landowners and logging contractors and an unjust, counterproductive penalty to caring, responsible woodlot owners and loggers who practice low-impact forestry. When we internalize the costs of destructive logging by holding landowners, foresters, and logging contractors responsible for the consequences of their logging jobs, profits go to conscientious landowners, and the benefits of maturing, carbon-sequestering, forest habitat accrue to everyone.
TWO APPROACHES TO A FUTURE FOREST-BASED ECONOMY
The small, water-powered Garland Mill in Lancaster, New Hampshire, and the huge seventy-five-megawatt Burgess biomass plant in Berlin, New Hampshire, offer contrasting visions of a future forest-based economy in northern New England.
The Burgess pulp mill in Berlin was demolished in 2007, but its massive boiler was spared. Six years later, it began to burn wood chips to generate electricity for the New England grid. The output of the biomass plant is marketed as “green energy” that does not release greenhouse gases. These claims are demonstrably false. Each day roughly one hundred truckloads of wood chips are hauled to the plant, a round-trip that averages about one hundred miles to and from the plant (assuming a cutting radius of seventy-five miles around Berlin). This amounts to several million miles of diesel-powered trucking annually—an enormous amount of hydrocarbon release for a supposedly clean, green energy source. The fossil fuels burned by chainsaws, skidders, and wood chippers in the woods also release substantial amounts of hydrocarbons during the procurement of the plant’s wood chips. And, of course, burning wood chips releases carbon sequestered in trees into the atmosphere.
Burgess is recklessly inefficient, capturing only about a quarter of the potential energy of the wood it burns. A recent report suggests that carbon emission standards for inefficient mega-biomass plants are significantly laxer than regulations for traditional fossil fuel plants. As a consequence, large biomass plants emit more carbon than coal per megawatt-hour generated.4
The timber industry and some conservation organizations claim that large biomass plants offer markets for “junk wood”—low economic value, short-lived hardwoods such as poplar, pin cherry, red maple, and paper birch. Supposedly, these markets allow landowners to thin the so-called junk wood while leaving behind vigorous stands of valuable species. Patient, low-impact forestry allows sugar maple, red spruce, and other long-lived tree species to shade out the sun-loving low-value species. However, because of the huge cost of chipping machinery, the relative low price wood chips fetch, the lack of regulations, and the long distances from forest to biomass plant, large contractors invariably practice intensive wood chipping rather than low-impact, timber stand improvement cuts that yield a modest amount of chips but leave behind a healthy forest.
Low-economic-value tree species were relatively rare in the forests that covered northern New England before the nineteenth-century woodsmen arrived. The current abundance of “junk wood” is a legacy of 150 years of overcutting—as if the future did not matter. Another round of clear-cuts or intensive whole-tree harvesting exacerbates and perpetuates the problem that biomass markets were supposed to alleviate.
A 2013 review of research into the impacts of whole-tree harvesting and energy wood harvesting presents compelling evidence that chipping operations cause serious ecological damage. Intensive chipping operations are likely to reduce soil productivity by depleting soil calcium, potassium, and magnesium. Removal of trees, especially whole trees, releases carbon. It takes many decades to sequester the carbon released during conventional clear-cuts. Disturbance of soils during and following intensive logging and wood-chipping operations releases substantially more carbon. Chipping operations conducted at short intervals severely limit the amount of carbon a forest stand can sequester before it is cut again and the sequestered carbon is again released.
The removal of the forest overstory and coarse and fine woody debris on the forest floor can significantly degrade habitat for soil microbes, fungi, and beetles. Small mammals and birds thrive in the forest overstory and in cooler, shaded, moist forest floors characteristic of stands with large trees, snags, or downed wood. Amphibians are more abundant in uncut forest stands than in clear-cuts where sun-parched soils are hotter and drier. Lower-quality habitat reduces reproductive success.
Whole-tree harvesting and energy wood harvesting operations disrupt the interception, retention, and cycling of water, materials, and energy. Less water is stored by trees after aboveground biomass has been removed. Diminished shade increases stream temperatures; this can be lethal to trout and aquatic insects. Removal of most of the living and dead biomass of a stand can increase sediment in lakes and streams and cause long-term reductions in stream productivity and diminished reproductive success of fish and aquatic insects.5
In a landscape where intensive whole-tree harvesting is allowed, climate-stressed species will be forced to migrate through a wasteland that is hotter and drier than intact, healing forest ecosystems. The migrators will have to travel through areas with disrupted hydrological cycles and eroding soils. Perhaps a winged creature or a large omnivore such as a black bear can successfully navigate this habitat nightmare. Smaller, less-mobile species—salamanders, soil microbes, mosses, and many native wildflowers—will be unable to traverse a fragmented landscape.
Large biomass plants enjoy tax breaks and incentives, and subsidized rates for the electricity they generate. This misguided public policy underwrites increased carbon emissions and the degradation of our most important terrestrial carbon sequestration system. It undermines the development of a local, low-impact energy policy. Tourists and recreationists don’t come to frolic in whole-tree clear-cuts. Public subsidies to mega-biomass plants must be redirected to low-impact forestry practitioners, local value-added manufacturers of niche wood products, forest product marketing co-ops, and public works jobs in ecological restoration, energy audits, and retrofitting buildings.
The Burgess biomass plant, with its huge carbon footprint, rates a zero on the “controlling uncontrollables” scorecard. It is absentee-investor owned. It relies on expensive technology for cutting, transporting, and burning wood chips. Its inefficient use of the potential energy in wood makes it a counterproductive energy policy. Wood chips are commodities that earn the lowest value-added returns for the local forest economy. Burgess’s voracious appetite for wood chips drives destructive forestry practices that jeopardize the production of future quality sawlogs that could sustain high value-added woods product manufacturing in the region.6
THE GARLAND MILL, founded in 1856, thirty-five years before ground was broken for the Groveton Paper mill, is New Hampshire’s last continuously operating, water-powered sawmill. It is owned by a family with a strong commitment to the welfare of the community. It uses nineteenth-century technology to produce a valuable twenty-first-century niche product.
The mill diverts water from Garland Brook to power the sawmill and generate water-powered electricity that it sells back to the grid. After passing through the mill’s penstock, the diverted water returns to the brook. The overall ecological impact on the brook and its watershed is slight, and the energy generated helps in a modest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The mill secures its spruce and pine sawlogs from loggers and landowners who cut lightly and protect the ecological integrity of their lands.
The small-scale operation cannot compete in commodity markets with large sawmills that rely on expensive, energy-intensive, high-speed saws to produce huge volumes of lumber. However, the Garland Mill has become a successful niche business by adding great value to its sawed wood. Its skilled and resourceful in-house construction crew create energy-efficient buildings using the posts and beams sawed by the old water-powered mill. When the mill erects a building, neighbors come to watch the spectacle, and
former clients show up to join as unpaid helpers.
The 160-year-old Garland Mill earns high scores on the controlling uncontrollables scorecard.
See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).
Marshall Sahlins, “The First Affluent Society,” in Stone Age Economics (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1972), 1–2.
Mitch Lansky, “Principles, Goals, Guidelines and Standards for Low-Impact Forestry,” in Low-Impact Forestry: Forestry as If the Future Mattered, ed. Mitch Lansky (Hallowell: Maine Environmental Policy Institute, 2002), 22.
Mary S. Booth, “Trees, Trash, and Toxics: How Biomass Energy Has Become the New Coal,” Partnership for Policy Integrity, April 2014, http://www.pfpi.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/PFPI-Biomass-is-the-New-Coal-April-2–2014.pdf.
Alaina L. Berger, Brian Palik, Anthony W. D’Amato, Shawn Fraver, John B. Bradford, Keith Nislow, David King, and Robert T. Brooks, “Ecological Impacts of Energy-Wood Harvests: Lessons from Whole-Tree Harvesting and Natural Disturbance,” Journal of Forestry 11, no. 2 (March 2013): 139–53.
For a comprehensive examination of problems associated with large biomass plants, whole-tree harvesting, and the carbon sequestration potential for older forest stands see Mitch Lansky, “The Double Bottom Line: Managing Maine’s Forests to Increase Carbon Sequestration and Decrease Carbon Emissions,” April 2016, http://www.meepi.org/lif/.
Acknowledgments
OVER THE COURSE of seven years, I have received assistance and encouragement from many people. I took a course in ethnography from Millie Rahn at Plymouth State University in the winter of 2009–2010. She required her students to develop oral history projects. Immediately I chose the Groveton paper mill.