Forester Ernest Carle is a graduate of University of Maine and worked at Georgia-Pacific, Domtar, and Woodland Pulp for most of his career, before transitioning to working with the Passamaquoddy tribe and then Downeast Lakes Land Trust. When Ernest is not in the woods, he enjoys hunting and spending time with his family.
I grew up on a farm in West Princeton, Maine. It’s just the next town over from where I live now. My dad, Norman Carle, was a farmer, and his father, Bobby, was very much present during my childhood – he lived in the house next door. Beginning at the age of 8, I was on a tractor as much as possible. I enjoyed it a lot. Dad was also a hunter and fisherman, and he cut wood in the wintertime for a local pulp mill. I got a taste of logging back then, and a taste for farming potatoes and dry beans and oats.
I enjoyed the competition of school growing up. I competed with a girl in grammar school, trying to get the best grades. And I had a friend that was real fast at math and it was fun to race him through a test. I grew up with four brothers, and my oldest brother, Barry, was a mechanical engineer. I kind of gravitated towards that before I discovered forestry.
I went to University of Maine in Orono and studied forest engineering. It was a great blend of engineering and forestry and silviculture. My father was working as a mechanic at the local Georgia-Pacific garage, taking care of the equipment. I wanted to come back and live at home; I had a strong desire to live near my folks. My wife, Ellen, had some deep roots in the Princeton area too. I graduated in 1978 and through connections with my dad, I landed a summer job. I like to think I earned my keep after that and got assigned to a different company logging job.
I stayed with Georgia-Pacific for 25 years. Then they got bought by Domtar, a Canadian company, and then Woodland Pulp, a Chinese investment company. Across those three companies, I was there for 34 years. In the beginning, I was a field forester assigned to one operation, but then I became a district forester. I worked with two other foresters to care for 900,000 acres – we each had 300,000 acres to manage. I didn’t mind working alone at all, and I liked the physical and technical challenge of it. I dealt with company crews, and then we switched to using contract crews, and I worked with a small group of loggers.
Then I worked in wood procurement for about 15 years and became the procurement manager. I worked the whole of eastern Maine from Ashland to Bangor and east. I was in Washington, Aroostook, Hancock, and Penobscot counties, so I got to do a lot of traveling. I got to be involved in a trade association, the American Pulpwood Association – currently called the Forest Resources Association – and I became quite active in that group. There were people challenges in that work; dealing with managers who didn’t have the background to supervise my area of expertise was hard. I went on to work in a support role for a few more years, but the work was a lot of accounting and there was a lot of pressure. Through a series of mistakes and downsizing, I got caught in the crossfire and was terminated from that job. It was a real hard few months there, but then I got a job with the Department of Transportation for six months because I had a tractor-trailer license, and that helped me in the interim.
I got a job working for the Passamaquoddy tribe and was happy to be back in forestry. I like to say the hardest day working for them was easier than the easiest day working for corporate industry. With the Passamaquoddy foresters, I was a timber sale forester, so I would cruise the areas to be harvested and help a technical forester prepare plans. I would take the crews and show them what to do and build access roads with road building contractors, and then get the harvests going, dividing up blocks for each crew to harvest, and work with the broker that was selling the wood. They developed a sugarbush while I was there, and for me, that was kind of the frosting on the cake. I’d always been curious about sugaring, and I got a chance to help develop a sugarbush that grew to about 11,000 taps. On Mondays, I’d drive 200 miles out to Jackman and work with the crews over near the Canada border and then come home on a Thursday evening. For about five years, that was my typical week. My wife made it very doable; she got everything ready for me to go and was always happy to see me get back, and I was always glad about that. This June, it’ll be 50 years that we’ve been married.
In 2019, I started with Downeast Lakes Land Trust as a managing forester. Their community forest is one of the largest in North America, at 57,000 acres. I served on their board and forestry committees before, and this job opportunity came up that fit my training and expertise. They practice some of the best forestry I’ve ever been a part of, as close to textbook forestry as it gets. All of the logging plans I help develop for them take wildlife habitat into account. They’ve got eight different patch cut systems promoting grouse and woodcock habitat. Last summer I worked with a few different great logging crews, two doing cut-to-length and another that was a regular cable skidder crew. Part of the joy is working with good loggers that can give you a good finished product. I helped with resurfacing roads and even some pollinator projects. That was something I never thought I’d do in my whole career: we planted something like 19 plant species for a certain kind of bee. There was a lot of interesting diversity in the work.
I retired from full-time work in 2023, but I still work a day or two a week for them on contract. I do some forestry work for a landowner in Lubec. And I work for an elderly forester, Phil Andrews, in Lincoln. Forestry is a close-knit community in Maine; you can’t go to meetings without getting to know pretty much everyone in the state. I don’t remember when I first met Phil, but he’s 92 now, I believe. He no longer takes long walks, but he still manages properties, so now he calls me up and I do field checks on woodlots for him. I get to be his legs, and it’s real enjoyable for me.
I’ve got two daughters and they thankfully have moved back home, so I have four grandchildren living within a mile of me. We’re very privileged to have them close by. I also am a pastor at a small church here and I’ve been doing that for almost 14 years. We have a small group that worships on Sunday mornings. I remember the day I heard God’s call on my life, and I stood and gave my heart to him and never regretted it. I just want to praise the Lord for being with me through the whole thing and giving me such a good life.
Since I’ve retired, I’ve also taken up turkey hunting. In Maine, you don’t need to buy a turkey license when you’re 70, so this is the first year I don’t have to do that. I’m a lifelong deer hunter. I shot my first deer with a crossbow last fall; these new methods are a lot of fun. I’ve done some moose hunting with some friends. I play cribbage with my wife a couple times a day, so that qualifies me as a retired person. Ellen would like me slow down, and I’m sure I will, but as long as I’m physically able to keep working in the woods, I like to be busy.
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