Children of the Northern Forest: Wild New England’s History from Glaciers to Global Warming
Written by Jamie Sayen
Published by Yale University Press, 2023
Reviewed by David Foster
It is one of the most underappreciated natural history facts in America. The single largest uninhabited area in the lower forty-eight states lies in the Northern Forest Region of New England. Nearly ten million acres, predominantly in northern Maine and spreading west into New Hampshire and Vermont, comprise part of the Acadian or Wabanaki Forest that connects beyond New England to the Adirondack region of New York and across the international border to multiple Canadian provinces. The rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, mountains and rolling landscape are an untapped national treasure. When Henry Thoreau visited the region in the mid-nineteenth century its forests were as well. From The Maine Woods:
“It is all mossy and moosey. In some of those dense fir and spruce woods there is hardly room for the smoke to go up. The trees are a standing night, and every fir and spruce which you fell is a plume plucked from night’s raven wing. Then at night the general stillness is more impressive than any sound, but occasionally you hear the note of an owl further or nearer in the woods, and if near a lake, the semihuman cry of the loons at their unearthly revels.”
Today, another underappreciated fact characterizes this region. Following two centuries of relentless and intensifying logging and harvesting (for what is removed these days are often not worthy of calling trees), this same Northern Forest comprises the most degraded forest region in the northeastern United States. Owned today largely by national and international investment interests, including timber and real estate investment trusts and university endowments that focus strictly on short-term investment with no stake in the environment, local communities, or the long-term future of the land, this forest is subjected to endless harvests of small diameter material that gets chipped for pulp, biomass, or other low value products. The timber that is harvested largely gets exported for processing and addition of value in Canada. This vast “forest,” which could be a major national asset in fighting climate change as one of the largest stores of carbon in the eastern United States, instead has the lowest density of carbon in the Northeast and is barely accumulating carbon.
On the ground, two- to three-foot deep ruts from immense wood processors create a distinctive herringbone pattern on aerial photographs, impede easy passage, and leave a permanently altered soil surface and hydrology. The absentee owners that manage these lands maximize short-term profits by paying low wages and benefits, minimizing capital investment, leveraging their political power for tax breaks and subsidies, and manipulating well-intentioned federal conservation programs and private funders to purchase conservation easements that may keep the tracts intact but confer no measurable ecological or environmental benefit (see the associated review of Jonathan Thompson’s new paper “Do Working Forest Easements Work for Conservation?”). The result is a vast series of landscapes that are degraded environmentally and characterized socially by high unemployment, a declining and aging population, and progressive closures of mills, local services, and villages as well as the formal dissolution of many towns themselves.
Map of the distribution of forest harvests from 1986 to 2019 indicates that intensive logging covers a surprising percentage of the state of Maine and that few areas are free from harvesting, such as Baxter State Park in the upper middle of the map. Map compiled using satellite imagery by Dr. Valerie Pasquerella and the Harvard Forest Land Science laboratory.
How did this come to pass? What combination of human desires and energies drove one of the country’s most magnificent regions of waters, forests, and diverse nature to become an industrialized wasteland? More importantly, what could be done today to turn such a dismal history around in ways that the region and globe desperately need in this era of crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and declining human welfare?
Children of the Northern Forest provides answers to these questions. In many ways, its author, Jamie Sayen, has been investigating, living, and telling this story for nearly forty years. Thus, the perspective provided, though from one impassioned participant in this history, is as immediate and first-hand as any great environmental story that has been written. Sayen’s background as a journalist (Coös County Democrat), editor (Northern Forest Forum), and book author (Einstein in America: The Scientist’s Conscience in an Age of Hitler and Hiroshima; and You had a Job for Life: Story of a Company Town) coupled with his willingness and easy ability to interview and get deeply into the thoughts and motivations of people on all sides of the issues makes this an easy and enjoyable read.
The book benefits immensely from the artwork contributed largely by Jon Luoma, a gifted, insightful, and playful artist whose work covered many front pages and articles in the Northern Forest Forum; from the detailed maps developed by Brian Hall at the Harvard Forest; and from numerous photographs by the author. Collectively, these illustrations complement the written pages beautifully.
The precarious landscape context for Wildland conservation due to intensive harvesting in the Northern Forest region is illustrated here. The Allagash Wilderness Waterway in north-central Maine provides a narrow (500-foot-wide) buffer of Wildland on either side of the river, which is embedded in industrial forests subject to intensive harvesting and supporting a dense system of logging roads, log landings, and log-processing areas that impact the tributary streams. Less than 25 percent of the surrounding landscape supports continuous forest cover. Aerial photo source: Scot Miller / ScotMiller.com with aerial support from LightHawk.
The book is tremendously important given the compelling narrative and the global significance of this chunk of land that comprises nearly one-quarter of the New England region. While there is no need to provide a synopsis here, the author’s solution to reversing the region’s condition for the benefit of local and global environments and communities has broad significance and warrants mentioning. In many ways Sayen’s response to the deteriorating social and environmental condition of the Northern Forest region is relevant to the work of all reformers everywhere. At some point in addressing the wrongs to humanity and the environment, incremental changes, working within the established system, must be abandoned in favor of radical, wholesale change. Our global crises mandate such action today in many arenas. In the case of the Northern Forest, a long history makes this conclusion undeniable. For fifty years activists, insiders, local communities, and political leaders have attempted to alter the management approaches applied by forest ownership using a variety of inducements including science and compassion supported by huge monetary subsidies and regulatory reforms. Thirty years ago, authors throughout the Northern Forest Forum predicted that without change, a future would eventually arrive that looks just about as bleak as that landscape looks today. Now, the forest owners seek special treatment on climate change reforms, new subsidies through investment in mass timber, biomass facilities and other plants that could process low value wood, and short-term (40-year) carbon sales, as well as other incentives. All of these requests come with the promise that the new investments will finally allow practices to change on the ground and real forests to grow.
A Wildland Vision for Northern New England. The proposed Northern Forest Headwaters Wildland Reserve System conceived by Jamie Sayen would be comprised of numerous nearly contiguous Wildland reserves stretching across northern Maine into northern New Hampshire and northeastern Vermont. The Maine Woods National Park proposed by RESTORE falls within this larger area in north-central Maine. By comparison, existing smaller Wildland areas are highlighted throughout the region in dark gray and form a highly discontinuous pattern. Map developed by Brian Hall at the Harvard Forest.
Sayen has heard this argument numerous times and from many mouths, and he has also watched over decades as conditions worsen. His solution is a wholesale change through the purchase of much of the industrial ownership from its absentee ownerships, with the intent to return it back to the people—local, Indigenous, state, regional, and national—who could use it for the benefit of all rather than for a minority of absentee investors. He proposes a Commons of many diverse parts owned by many peoples. One result would be a vast series of Wildland Reserves, creating one of the largest wild regions in the country and generating immense local, state and regional value through tourism, diverse recreational activities, and the recovery of native biota and ecosystem processes. Of equal importance, the demise of the huge industrial base of land and its monopoly over political power and the wood products industry would allow the expansion and profitability of the many “small” local landowners and timber operators that own hundreds to tens of thousands of acres of forest. Release from the economic race to the bottom of low value wood and its products would enable these owners to focus on longer term timber products that generate more profit and offer much greater benefit to local communities and nature. The solution is a recasting of the Headwaters Reserve proposal that Sayen proposed in the 1990s, and that incorporates the complementary proposal by RESTORE to establish a National Park on 3.2 million acres in that region. In an era when all species and every community are recognized as having rights and value, Sayen’s vision resonates and beckons.
For more information and to order, click here.
To the reader: If you are intrigued by this history, and as you read Sayen’s book, you can learn much more and dive deeply into insightful writing, art and poetry by reviewing old issues of the Northern Forest Forum (1992-2002) on the Harvard Forest Website.
David Foster is an ecologist, Director Emeritus of the Harvard Forest, and President Emeritus of the Highstead Foundation. He co-founded the Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities initiative in 2010 and was lead writer of Wildlands in New England: Past, Present, and Future in 2023. David has written and edited books including Thoreau’s Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape; Forests in Time: The Environmental Consequences of 1000 Years of Change in New England; Hemlock: A Forest Giant on the Edge; and A Meeting of Land and Sea: The Nature and Future of Martha’s Vineyard.