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Sauntering in the Industrial Wilderness b e r n a r d w. q u e t c h e n b a c h  On New Year’s Day, 1997, the following prediction appeared in a ‘‘crystal ball’’ article in the Bangor Daily News: ‘‘The paper companies will come together to propose the creation of an 1850s theme park in northern Maine, a place where Thoreau will be the hero and we’ll all travel by canoe.’’1 The prognosticator was Stephen Wight, chairman of the Land Use Regulatory Commission known, of course, as LURC, the agency that oversees the vast and sparsely populated forests of Maine. Granted, it is difficult to tell how seriously he intended his prediction to be taken. But Chairman Wight’s prophecy captures succinctly a great contradiction in the traditional role of the wilderness as both the land of the radical individual in search of spiritual truth and knowledge and the place ripe for large-scale exploitation, in each case because the land is ‘‘open’’ or away from the restrictions and scrutiny of ‘‘the settlements.’’ Whether we crave ‘‘reality’’ or windfall profits, we find them in the wildlands. Wight’s prediction hints at a kind of unholy and, hopefully, unconscious alliance between Thoreau and the paper barons. That Thoreau ’s ghost should be working for Boise Cascade and Georgia Pacific is unthinkable, isn’t it? Maybe not in Maine. When Thoreau came to the Maine woods in the 1840s and 1850s, the lumber industry was already established. Among Thoreau’s information sources is Forest Life and Forest Trees, John Springer’s 1851 classic, which is occasionally held in Maine to be better than The Maine Woods, precisely because it was written by a real logger rather than a tourist. Thoreau acknowledges Springer’s authority by citing him several times in ‘‘Ktaadn’’ and in ‘‘The Allegash and East Branch.’’2 Since Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820, the state has maintained two conflicting images of the northern woods. Here, in Thoreau’s 165 words, ‘‘waves the virgin forest of the New World,’’3 a dense, impenetrable , fundamentally uncivilized wildland, virgin at least in the total effect of the unbroken forest if not in the size and cathedralesque stature of the individual trees. This image of the Maine woods as wilderness persists today in the tradition of the guided adventure, a watery safari into the largest statistically uninhabited area in the lower forty-eight. But for generations the Maine woods has been a ‘‘working forest,’’ the home to large-scale industrialized extraction of natural resources. Many observers, from Springer and Thoreau to Helen Hamlin, have commented on the speed with which the original giant ‘‘mast pines’’ and ‘‘pumpkin pines’’ were eliminated. William Cronon dates the removal of white pine from Maine as beginning in the 1630s.4 Helen Hamlin, in Pine, Potatoes, and People, her informal history of Maine’s Aroostook County, documents the industry’s shifts to smaller trees and different species over time. Edward Hoagland attributes the pattern of landownership in Maine to a speculation boom designed to benefit Massachusetts interests when Maine became an independent state. This event ‘‘froze the patterns of settlement much as they were at the time. The population remained concentrated near the coast, and the large timber companies formed from these nineteenth-century holdings still continue to own two-thirds of Maine.’’5 More precisely, says forest activist Mitch Lansky, nine out-of-state paper corporations control two-thirds of what are variously known as ‘‘the unorganized territories’’ or ‘‘wildlands’’; 90 percent of the wildlands belongs to twenty companies.6 In The Uncensored Guide to Maine, Mark Melnicove and Kendall Merriam quote a United States Forest Service source as saying that ‘‘in no other state does industry ownership account for such a high percentage of forest land.’’7 Individual landowners are often dependent on corporate markets and expertise, as in the case of writer-naturalist Bernd Heinrich, who contracts with Boise Cascade to selectively cut his woods. Companies producing forest products practice a variety of harvest techniques, but only a few, including Seven Islands, which considers itself a land management firm, are widely recognized as environmentally responsible. If, to use the popular metaphor of the woods as an agricultural crop, the forest is a farm, then corporate forestry in Maine is agribusiness, complete with monoculture row-cropping and chemical inputs. These two visions of the Maine woods can be seen coexisting in the publications...

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