I’ve had an attraction to forests for a long time. It’s right there in my high school yearbook: “I will be studying forestry at ….” After college, I thought I would end up out West in the big woods. Funny then, that I could leave the Midwest, head east to the more settled and populated Northeast, and find “big woods.” This big chunk of woodlands here was a source of surprise to me, and it has been my livelihood, my recreation, and in many ways my identity. I know I share this deep connection with many of the readers of this magazine.
I joined the board of the Center for Woodlands Education, which publishes this magazine, because I strongly appreciate and believe in what the organization is trying to do: inspire forest stewardship and promote inclusion of both economic viability and conservation values. This is a balance seldom seen in other organizations. Too often it seems that policy and land use issues today are resolved around the extremes, with the “winning extreme” being the one that manages to generate the biggest fuss. The Center is a center not just in name: it does not spend time out there on the extremes; instead, it tries to draw people together to common ground.
This summer our geographically dispersed board met at a camp in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. This camp has been donated to the Center by the owner of the land it sits on, the Essex Timber Company. Board members came from across this far-flung region. Ed Wright traveled 500 miles from near Buffalo, New York, while I, coming from the other end of the territory, traveled nearly 300 miles from our home near Millinocket, Maine. Ed and I hold down the outer boundaries – other directors came from various points in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine.
Most of our board meetings look the part of a typical board meeting, with a dozen or so people seated around a large wooden conference table, sometimes with a speakerphone in the midst so people can join in from afar. But this one was different. This was our first field-based board meeting, and we were sitting in lawn chairs in the shade of a hardwood forest, with the sound of a brook tumbling by. Beyond our customary business meeting, with a discussion of the financial statements and a review of our strategic plan, we had a session in the field with board member Tii McLane, who is a forest ecologist. We toured the woods around the property, and Tii identified many different ferns and other herbaceous plants. There are many clues about the site that are provided by the herbaceous plants that grow there. They can reveal much about the soil and about the bedrock that feeds the soil and influences groundwater and stream chemistry.
We followed that woods walk with a discussion of Timberland Investment Management Organizations (TIMOs), which now own most of the land formerly owned by the region’s paper companies. Like many other foresters in the region, I started out working for a paper company that had extensive timberlands (Great Northern Paper) and am now responsible for managing a company (Katahdin Forest Management) that was formed from part of that ownership and which is managed as a long-term financial investment, as opposed to being dedicated to providing wood supply to the parent company mills. Although the ownership and focus has changed, the land managers are often the same as before. There are significant differences in the objectives of the two kinds of owners and sometimes between the same types of owners, as our discussion revealed.
Not only is the board geographically dispersed but we also come from a wide variety of backgrounds. All of us have a deep connection to the woods. Among us, we buy wood, sell wood, work on forest policy, do environmental fieldwork, manage forestland, audit land managers for SFI and FSC certification, insure loggers, and work with teachers to incorporate forestry into daily lessons. Any organization benefits from this kind of diversity, and so do we as directors, because it helps create wider understanding and appreciation of many different perspectives.