'There's nothing pretty about a clear-cut,' admits timber baron accused of 'rape and pillage' to feed America's demand for wood
By KATHARINE WEBSTER / Associated Press
Saturday, May 7, 2005 Page F3
BERLIN, N.H. -- Logging trucks often outnumber cars on the roads between the Canadian border and this city built around paper, pulp and lumber mills.
But local residents worry that the trucks will be gone in a generation, along with the working forest and the mills, because of indiscriminate logging spurred by fallout from the long-running softwood lumber dispute with Canada.
They also worry about destruction of wildlife habitat and the loss of access to private timberlands for hunting, fishing, hiking, snowmobiling and even blueberry picking.
The catalyst for the debate is T.R. Dillon Logging Inc. of Madison, Me., which bought 9,100 hectares last year in Success, an unincorporated township east of Berlin.
Owner Thomas Dillon, who plans to "commercially clear-cut" about 1,200 hectares a year for three years, also has bought 4,856 hectares in other nearby towns in the past two years.
"He's liquidating the land," says Robert Brown, a member of the Berlin Planning Board who often walks on the land in Success.
"When this guy Dillon is gone -- and I don't blame him personally -- the land's going to be worth nothing. He's going to subdivide it. We know that, and it's tearing people apart up here."
Mr. Dillon's cutting practices in Maine helped to inspire a law restricting "liquidation harvesting," defined as removing nearly all the commercially valuable timber from a parcel. The law, which took effect on Jan. 1, bars owners from selling such land for subdivision within five years.
"A way of doing business here is you buy land, you cut it and you sell it, and if that's a timber liquidator, that's exactly what I am," Mr. Dillon says cheerfully.
But he says he plans to keep the land in Success over the long term and has no plans to subdivide it. "I'm just doing what I need to do as a business person and pay my bills and pay my people," he says. "But say you did want to sell it -- it would be sold as a working forest. To go in and completely butcher, it would defeat your purpose, so it would be bad business."
With clear-cutting rising to meet the demand sparked by the slowdown in wood imports from Canada, neighbouring Maine and Vermont have passed laws to restrict the practice and penalize landowners who cut and run. But the Live Free or Die state places no limits on the amount of timber landowners can cut except in wetlands, buffer strips along lakes and streams and "beauty strips" along town and state roads.
Jasen Stock, executive director of the New Hampshire Timberland Owners Association, says that's as it should be, because good forestry cannot be legislated.
Mr. Dillon agrees. The controversy over his cutting practices "has never really been about forestry," he says. "It's about aesthetics, and there's nothing pretty about a clear-cut."
Berlin Mayor Bob Danderson defends Mr. Dillon as a critical supplier of pulpwood to the struggling Fraser Paper Inc. paper and pulp mills in Berlin and Gorham, which employ about 600 people. He also says the timber man is co-operating with city leaders on economic-development projects.
"Dillon is a logger through and through. He's looking at logging not only for now, but for the future of his family, because his son is in the business. I trust that."
Henry Swan, chairman of Wagner Forest Management Ltd. of Lyme, isn't convinced. Mr. Swan, whose company manages timberlands for private and institutional investors, doesn't think the state should buy land Mr. Dillon has logged.
"I don't like states picking up the carcasses of land that somebody's been able to rape and pillage," says Mr. Swan, who also is state chairman of the Nature Conservancy.
But even his detractors say Mr. Dillon's practices are the result of economic forces bigger than any one landowner: the accelerating turnover of land ownership, new types of owners and vacation-home development.
Over the past two decades, the giant paper companies whose mills lie along rivers in northern New Hampshire and Maine near the Quebec and New Brunswick borders have sold most of their lands to timber investment companies, which have sold to other timber investors or loggers-turned-landowners like Mr. Dillon.
Each new owner must cut more heavily to recover his costs and turn a profit. Once all the commercial timber has been logged from an area, it becomes ripe for subdivision or commercial development, permanently removing it from the working forest and fragmenting wildlife habitat.
"Uncertainty of land ownership and the certainty of land turnover on an unprecedented scale have really rocked this state and this region to its roots," says Jym St. Pierre, of the environmental group RESTORE: The North Woods.
The greatest concerns are probably destruction of deer wintering areas and habitat for pine marten, members of the weasel family and a threatened species that relies on forests that aren't too "clean" or clear-cut to provide prey, protection and den sites.
Charles Niebling, policy director of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, says it's time to consider more regulation. His group and the Timberland Owners are collaborating on a survey to figure out exactly how much timber is being cut, and where.
Mr. Niebling also says one thing is clear: What Mr. Dillon is doing is not sustainable and it's not good forestry, and will take much of the land out of timber production over the long term.
"Trees grow back in New Hampshire," he says. "But you're not going to have a mature forest resource for another 40, 50, 80, 100 years." (*)
