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Shaping
the Northern Forest Economy
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By
Bill McKibben
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The forest that has covered this region since the ice retreated is the setting for our lives. Our economies, our culture, our sense of what is beautiful all are shaped by this amazing spread of birch and beech and maple, of spruce and pine and hemlock. But though the forest has been here thousands of years, its meaning for people has changed over time. Once it was the haunt of the Abenaki and the Iroquois. Early settlers found masts for the Royal Navy. Early industrialists found hemlock bark for tanning hides. In our parent’s time, pulpwood was the great economic force. Now we’re at another moment of enormous change, exemplified hy the huge land sales that rip through the region, leaving everyone unsure of what they will be doing, and for whom, a year or a decade hence. Every set of statistics, and even a casual glance at Millinocket or Berlin or Glens Falls, shows that the past simply can’t continue into the future. The forest, though, can continue. Wisely conserved, it offers an economic base for the years ahead. If large lands are left intact and protected, their beauty and recreational potential will lure new money to the area, just as the Northwest has prospered even as logging has declined. If savvy and sustainable timber harvesting is promoted, it will provide good jobs for our young. Look - we live in the twenty first century. We don’t need hemlock bark for tanning; we don’t need potash from burning maples. But we need the forest still - need it for hiking trails, need it for locally milled crown moulding, need it for hunting and birdwatching, need it because are are people of the forest. We have an enormous competitive advantage over other parts of America. Not transportation, perhaps; not climate. But a sense of place the suburbs will never know; a sense of place strong enough to draw new settlement, new strength. And strong human communities that will get stronger still if we educate our children to stay, and give them opportunities so they won’t leave. We worry about the future, but that’s only because we can’t see how the present can continue. It can’t but something even better can gradually take its place. This report offers a hard-headed, clear-eyed, realistic vision of what that something might he. It would be easier to ignore it and keep on doing what we’re doing it always is. But we owe it to the forest, we owe it to our communities, and we owe it to the future to try harder than that. |
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