What is “Protected Land” Protected From?
A Review by David Foster of a New Journal Article
Do working forest easements work for conservation?
Jonathan Thompson, Alexey Kalinin, Lucy Lee, Valerie Pasquarella, Joshua Plinski, and Katherine Simes. 2023. BioRxiv
The conclusion of this sobering study will be a shock to anyone who cares for the conservation of the New England landscape and once believed that those largest blocks of conserved land in New England added to forest conservation in a meaningful way. The answer to the question posed in the title of this new article from the lab of Jonathan Thompson at the Harvard Forest is a resounding “no.”
Fully 50 percent of the land conserved in New England since 1990 is located in the big blocks of so-called Working Forest Conservation Easements (WFCEs) in northern New England. Extremely large WFCEs—conserved industrialized timberlands owned largely by absentee investors—account for 70 percent of Maine’s total conserved land and cover 839,000 hectares, approximately the size of Yellowstone National Park. These lands, the surrounding industrialized forests that lack easements, and the lands owned and protected by private conservation organizations and state and federal agencies lie in the largest unoccupied region of the United States east of the Mississippi. Much of this landscape had been owned since the nineteenth century by integrated regional timber and paper companies. Beginning in the 1980s the potential sale of some of these large timberlands in this Northern Forest region brought alarm to timber-dependent communities, political leaders, and conservationists. Ultimately, this led to a congressionally funded effort, the Northern Lands Study (1988-1990) and its successor, the Northern Forest Lands Council (1990-1994), with the objective of keeping the land intact for the benefit of the environment, local communities, and the economies of northern New England and New York.
Eventually, major funding from federal, state, and philanthropic entities allowed a substantial amount of the land to be conserved from development and subdivision, but not without controversy. Many conservationists argued for the outright purchase of the lands for federal, state, or tribal uses. A small and vocal group of conservationists, including Jym St. Pierre, Jamie Sayen, and Mitch Lansky, supported purchase of the land. They objected that the type of conservation easements proposed for these properties offered little public benefit because they did not address unsustainable harvest practices, but focused instead on development in a region where the threat of land conversion is low. They concluded that these easements were essentially subsidies to the landowners to continue business as usual with no guarantee that the inherent qualities of the land and environment would be improved. Similar concerns were raised by Jeff Pidot, an attorney in the state Attorney General’s office, who shared serious questions about the purported public benefits of the easements. By and large, timber owners and state and federal politicians argued against public fee ownership of the land and favored private ownership with conservation easements to ensure that the lands would be protected intact in perpetuity. The study by Thompson et al. provides bitter vindication for those who criticized the easements.
Figure 1. Map of Maine from the original article, which states that the study analyzed rates of forest loss and harvesting in the 19 working forest conservation easements (green) that span 839,000 hectares and are embedded in a matrix of other unprotected corporate owned timberlands (brown) and protected conservation lands (lavender) throughout the state.
Thirty years later, the ownership and financial structure of the timberlands has transformed the economic setting in the Northern Forest region. The initial purchases of the old timber companies and their break-up in the 1980s and 1990s was the beginning of the broad-scale financialization of timberlands across the region and the United States, which involved incorporating forest lands as financial assets in global networks of investment capital. Today, nearly all commercial timberland in the United States has been acquired by investment interests including timber and real estate investment trusts, university endowments, and others. Meanwhile, most of the old pulp mills, sawmills, and wood processing facilities in New England have closed, employment in the industry has dropped immensely, and depopulation is rife across the northern region. The one constant is that the region’s forests continue to be intensively harvested for low quality material. Today, the industrial forests in northern Maine have the lowest carbon stocks and lowest carbon storage rates of the entire New England region. According to a study at the University of New Hampshire over 40 percent of the region’s forests are characterized by degraded conditions. A separate study by the Thompson lab indicates that 60 percent of New England’s emissions of carbon from forests originate from these lands.
It has been politically untenable for scientists in northern New England to tackle the thorny issue of evaluating the nature of these easements. It took thirty years and the development of the regional land science program and Long Term Ecological Research program at the Harvard Forest for the answer to become clear. That said, the answer the article provides is not surprising to anyone who has traveled the region and walked the land with local inhabitants. “The easements had little effect on rates of forest loss or harvesting…[and] have not produced substantial additional ecological benefits by reducing forest loss or harvest rates compared to status quo commercial timber operations.”
Figure 2. Industrial harvesting landscape in the unincorporated village of Wytopitlock, Aroostook County, Maine. Each of the herringbone strips was formed by a large timber processor cutting all four to five-inch diameter trees as it proceeded ahead and reached out to remove about half of the material on either side. In the process permanent ruts two feet wide and one to three feet deep were formed that transform the surface hydrology of the land changing patterns of water run-off and making walking difficult. Photograph from Google Maps.
Broadly, the easements on these large timberlands are structured like easements in southern New England or any other populated landscape; they focus on limiting the division and development of the land. However, the authors note that “Compared to Maine’s forests as a whole, corporate-owned timberlands, whether protected by a WFCE or not, have a low rate of conversion to non-forest land cover.” The problem in Maine’s former industrial forest is intensive harvesting by absentee landowners.
Thus, the report comes to a startling conclusion. In a region with few residents and nearly no threat of development or land conversion, but where clearcutting, herbicide use, and frequent intensive harvesting have been perennial problems, the easements are focused on the wrong problem. Custom-made to thwart a different set of threats, the easements enable the owners of northern New England landscapes to continue to manage them in ways that degrade the natural environment, undermine the social fabric of the region, and offer no rights to the nonhuman inhabitants of the landscapes.
Figure 3. The protected lands of New England depicting the Wildlands, which are strictly protected to allow natural processes to prevail with minimal human intervention, and all other protected lands. In this map the large Working Forest Conservation Easements in northern Maine appear the same as other protected lands despite the fact that their management and ecological condition are unique. Conservationists may recognize these distinctions but need to do a much better job of conveying these in their work. We also need to do a better job of selecting the appropriate forms of land protection. Figure reproduced from Wildlands in New England. Past, Present and Future.
The authors do offer one flickering glimmer of optimism. “Our analysis of easement restrictions indicates that more restrictions have been imposed over time, and that stricter easements reduced harvest frequency…Effectiveness could be increased with changes in easement design and enforcement that prioritize areas under active threat from conversion and strengthen restrictions on unsustainable harvest practices.” This caveat is important to recognize as it is possible to write conservation easements that do provide strict forestry guidelines that allow wood products to be harvested while protecting forest ecosystems, forest soils, and the environment. The authors note that the easement on large tracts of land purchased in the last five years by Apple include such guidelines. The same is true for the former industrial lands that have been purchased by the Appalachian Mountain Club affiliate Maine Woods Initiative LLC. While much of the more than 100,000 acres controlled by AMC has been secured as permanent Wildlands, many tens of thousands of acres are being managed in a manner that will allow the forests to grow, the stocking of trees and carbon stores to increase, and better quality timber to be harvested more selectively in the future. Across northern New England many private landowners with smaller tracts of land have similar forestry guidelines built into their permanent conservation easements that are overseen by conservation organizations such as the Vermont Land Trust, Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, and New England Forestry Foundation. It is possible to craft strict and effective language for Working Forest Conservation Easements. In the case of the extremely large easements reviewed by Thompson et al. there simply was not the will to advance environmentally sound practices.
As we move forward with our regional conservation efforts, we clearly need to question each of our conservation maps more carefully. What exactly is being protected? In the case of these Northern Forest lands, the easements were clearly focused on a non-threat rather than addressing the true threat to the land and region. While the timber investors made out well (“[these easements] were also attractive to the new fiduciary owners, who could enhance short-term returns from the land investment from selling the restrictions on development”), nature and society did not. Although I have asked many experts, I have not been able to find a single individual who could explain how these easements were originally valued or whether these large timber lands that are restricted by easements would fetch a different value than adjoining lands lacking easements but subjected to the same kind of intensive management. It simply is unclear what all of that money purchased.
One thing is clear. When we look to meeting the regional goals for 30x30, these 839,000 hectares of Working Forest Conservation Easements, and other lands that are as intensively managed, should not count as supporting biodiversity and sound environmental conditions.
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.