Paradise Lost

Will one family's fortune help save
a New England gold mine?

by Lory Hough

Even the name sounds remote. The North Woods.

This is the Maine few tourists ever venture to, the Maine well beyond the clam shacks and factory outlets and outdoor gear stores open 24 hours a day. This is the land that Henry David Thoreau made famous in Maine Woods, a 328-page journal of his three trips to the forests of the Pine Tree State.

This is, as the state motto boasts, the way life should be.

And it's the way the Pingree family wants to keep it. Which is why last March the reclusive clan (no one in the family even has the surname Pingree anymore), spearheaded the largest private forestland protection project in the history of the United States, giving a small, five-person nonprofit called the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) the option to purchase a $28 million conservation easement option. The end result is that three-quarters of their 1 million acres in the North Woods will be protected for eternity.

It's a move that Henry Foster, an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School and the former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, hoped to see happen when he was teaching a class back in 1992. The class, which focused on the future of the 26-million-acre North Woods — also called the Northern Forest — drafted a report that said one way to provide a stabilizing influence on the economic, social, and environmental future of the forest was to work directly with families that owned large tracts of land.

"Family landowners are typically good stewards of land, balancing the costs of ownership with the desire to preserve the land for wildlife and recreation," explained Jay Winthrop, a former Harvard Business School student whose work in Foster's class contributed to the report. "The most durable and effective conservation deals make landowners partners, not adversaries, in achieving conservation aims. These deals are a model for effective conservation. By partnering with private landowners, the conservation community can extend its reach and preserve wild places."

Foster's work was one report that caught the eye of Keith Ross, NEFF's vice president, who was looking for ways to continue the foundation's 55-year track record of supporting stewardship on private forestland. Eventually, in 1996, Ross approached the Pingree family and proposed working with them to design an easement that would meet the family's economic needs and their mutual conservation goals.

The timing for such collaboration, points out Jim Heyes, education and communications specialist for the NEFF, was ripe. Unlike the western part of the country, where a good portion of land is publicly owned, New England's forests are predominately private — more than 80 percent. The problem with this, says Foster, is that private ownership has become increasingly fragmented. In southern New England, for instance, the average private forest ownership in 1972 was 21.5 acres. By 1985, the figure was down to 10.3 acres. In Maine, the numbers are higher although also declining. According to a 1999 report put out by the Maine Forest Service, the average-size private plot in Maine was 60 acres in 1990, down from 82 less than a decade earlier.

What that means for families like the Pingrees is that with four living generations of family members involved in the ownership of the land — more than 70 people — the threat of fragmentation becomes a likely scenario.

"Reaching 100 percent consensus on a project as far-reaching and unheard of as this one was not an easy exercise," admitted Steve Schley, a member of the Pingree family. For starters, everyone had differing ideas on what was best for the land ‹ some wanted to sell off pieces, others wanted to preserve the whole lot.

Then, there's the issue of estate taxes, which can gouge the family coffer.

"Every time there is an estate transfer," Heyes said, "there are substantial estate taxes to be paid — a force that has caused the sell-off of countless family properties in New England and elsewhere. The Pingree family has done extraordinarily well in maintaining this property through seven generations."

"This easement," Schley said, "will help us combat incredible public policy disincentive to ongoing sustainable forest management, like the U.S. Tax Code and the ever-changing state and federal regulatory rules and climate."

By entering into a legal agreement that removes the land's development potential and transfers property rights from landowner to private group, the easement lowers the market value, which in turn lowers the estate tax that must be shouldered by future generations. The easement, in a way, becomes the critical difference in the heirs' ability to keep the land intact.

Which may explain why the use of easements is on the rise. According to the Land Trust Alliance, as of 1998, local and regional land trusts held 7,392 conservation easements protecting approximately 1.4 million acres. A decade earlier, easements protected just 290,000 acres. In terms of acreage, the Pingree project will become the largest conservation easement of its type, putting Maine on top, ahead of Montana, which has a little more than 258,000 acres protected by easements.

Under- or Overdeveloped?

Removing the land from the development market, says Henry Lee MPA '74, director of the Kennedy School's Environment and Natural Resources Program and an adviser to the project, was an important step.

"Forests are being lost," he said. "Protecting and preserving green space is critical. Some things are irreversible. You don't see us digging up highways and starting forests. We have to protect what we already have."

Surprisingly, New England is more forested today than it was back in the early days. American Indians, early colonists, and farmers had cleared the land for settlements and farms and to stimulate bushy growth favored by certain game species. They had harvested wood for houses, tools, furniture, and fuel. By the time the 1800s rolled around, according to the NEFF, only 20 percent of southern and central New England was forested. By 1860, Massachusetts was only about one-third forested, two-thirds cleared for agriculture. But as Foster points out, this changed with the California Gold Rush. Many New England farmers headed west with bigger dreams, turning much of the farmland back into forest.

Luckily, David Pingree, the family patriarch, looked north, not west, to fulfill his dreams. A clipper ship merchant in Salem, Massachusetts, during the mid-1800s, Pingree had inherited a large portion of his uncle's estate. The money allowed Pingree to travel and trade cod and tea all over the world. According to records held at the Peabody Museum in Salem, he also traveled throughout New England, visiting Maine and New Hampshire with his parents when he was a child. The family vacations must have stuck with him. In 1841, the year he and his wife, Ann Marie Kimball, welcomed a new baby, a boy named David who would later go on to graduate from Harvard, Pingree began buying land in the two states, later passing it on to David, Jr. The Pingree wealth, museum records show, was so big that they were at one point the largest single taxpayer in Maine and the largest individual landowner in New England.

Today, 17 of Maine's 20 million acres are forested — and highly desirable, including the Pingree's 229 miles of undeveloped, pristine shoreline frontage on 110 lakes and ponds, 1,180 square miles of forestland, more than 2,000 miles of major river frontage, active bald eagle and peregrine falcon nests, and several endangered and rare plant sites.

Which is why the NEFF, which had never coordinated a deal as large as this one, jumped at the chance to buy the protection rights — although not the land itself — on the Pingree property.

"The land will be protected forever from the threat of development at a very small price — only $37.10 an acre," Heyes said. "The value of protecting this land as a working forest will only go up over time as populations grow, as development creeps, crawls, and gallops over the land, and as carbon emissions become a larger issue. At NEFF, we think it's a smart move to protect this land now while we can still afford to do it."

Heyes said they didn't feel it was necessary to buy the land outright, something the Nature Conservancy recently did when it purchased 185,000 acres — the size of Baxter State Park — along Maine's St. John River.

"We don't think we need to own the land to protect it," Heyes said. "By prohibiting development and mandating continued good stewardship, we are getting everything we want out of the deal. The only thing the Pingree family can really do under such an easement is manage the land for forest products, and the incentive is to do it well."

Spin City

In fact, forest management is a contentious issue, with the spin as mind boggling as anything Capitol Hill has ever seen. It's particularly explosive in a growing state like Maine.

"God's making more people, but not more land," said Ship Bright MPA 1992, a former deputy commissioner for the Maine Department of Conservation. Bright spent years of his life hotly debating the issues — from clearcutting to sustainable management to leaving the trees untouched.

"What this means for the land," he said, "is that more and more pressure is placed on it. As a result, there's a strong yin and yang pull between the concept of a 'working forest' and a 'pristine wilderness.' Environmentalists want less done to the land, and recreationalists want more access, even if it's privately owned. And then, there are the land owners — like the Pingrees — who have to look at the return on their investment."

Which is why folks like the Forest Ecology Network's Jonathan Carter have mixed feelings about the project. While admitting that the Pingrees do a better job than most in practicing good forest management, he said this deal is a windfall profit for them.

"They're getting $28 million for not doing anything more than they're already doing," he said by phone from the network's Augusta, Maine, office. "It's more accurate to call this a 'development' deal."

Carter, who last year issued a nonviolent "call for armed resistance" against paper companies, said that in order for the NEFF and the Pingrees to label the project a "conservation" deal, all logging activities would have to end on the land. Currently, the easement allows for the continuation of maple syrup production, canoe liveries, sporting camps, and commercial playgrounds. It also allows for some clearcutting — 3 percent, with an additional 7 percent added if each clearcut acre is matched by a planted one.

Foster thinks this is reasonable.

"If you understand the dynamics of forestry," Foster said, "you understand that if you're trying to grow a certain species — the white pines in the Northeast or the Douglas fir out West, for example — you may have to clearcut in order for what you want to come in and not some other species. There are also other beneficial results from cutting, such as starting a new forest with mixed ages, which helps protect against widespread fire and insect devastation. There's also the value to wildlife associated with early-stage succession of forests. You have to look at the whole forest and not just the business of wood products. Then cutting becomes a worthwhile tool for the enlightened forest manager."

Bright adds that although clearcutting clearly "leaves a mess until new growth takes over and people are shocked when they see it," the concept of a working forest — the term used to describe forests like the Pingree's — is something the family understands and does well.

This is one reason the NEFF wanted to work with the Pingrees. Throughout the history of Pingree ownership, Heyes noted, management of the forest has been science-based and attempts to reproduce the cycles of natural disturbances in the forest. If done right, practices like logging, for instance, will "mimic" what fire and insect infestation would naturally do.

"We believe that sustainable timber management is compatible with lots of other things," he said, including wildlife habitat and recreational use. "We all use forest products. Imagine the effect on the other forests of New England if we took the more than 750,000 acres of Pingree lands completely out of use. The loss of that supply would put incredible pressure on the other lands that produce forest products, making it correspondingly more difficult to manage sustainably."

According to a study published in the February ’99 issue of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the impact would go beyond New England. For every 50 acres of forest set aside and protected in North America, the study contends, 2.5 acres of forest in Asia, South America, Africa, and the former Soviet Union are lost.

Foster calls this the "ecological footprint" — the idea that anytime you use something, you leave a footprint where that material came from. One of his students even discovered that in Massachusetts, 95 percent of all wood products come from forests elsewhere.

With land ownership patterns in Maine changing dramatically, some wonder if the footprint will get even larger.

"Big multinationals like Sappi Fine Paper and Georgia Pacific are all moving out," Carter said. "Mills are closing and the pulp and paper industry is down. The reality is that paper makers can grow wood in warmer climates offshore a lot cheaper. You can't grow wood in Maine fast enough. It's just too cold."

Carter acknowledged that while he sees this as a good thing for Maine, he worried about what would happen to the land. Some companies, knowing the dollar value of their holdings, are selling large tracts to management groups who in turn resell to housing developers. Instead, Carter would like to see the government buy the land and create a 3.2-million-acre national park and preserve — an idea that was started about six years ago and seems to be gaining momentum in both the public and political arenas.

Money Doesn't Grow on Trees

Working with the government to protect their land — with potential strings and restrictions attached — was something the Pingrees haven't been willing to do, however. The NEFF, therefore, will have to work extra hard during the next two years to raise the $28 million it needs to purchase the easement.

"There are resources," Foster said. "But the Pingree family doesn't want any public money. Traditionally, you'd turn to a federal agency that provides funding to acquire land. But that's been ruled out. NEFF has to go entirely private on this."

"Regional conservation foundations can help but there is a lot of money on the table in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York right now," said Rob Bryan of the Maine Audubon Society, listing several other "big deals" currently taking place, such as the Nature Conservancy's St. John River purchase. "However, these and other major land sales are a once-in-a-century opportunity, and the timing in terms of potential conservation capital couldn't be better. The conservation community needs to find creative ways to tap new wealth."

One such way could be through carbon sequestration — the process of removing CO2 from the atmosphere and converting it into stored compounds. Trees act as sponges, absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in their biomass, or wood. Conversely, when forests are cleared, carbon that was stored in living trees is returned to the atmosphere — either quickly (through a forest fire), or gradually (as forest products, such as wood and paper, are discarded and decompose).

Foster and Lee have been working with the NEFF to determine if selling carbon offset rights to utility companies would be a feasible way to raise the funds. Currently, more than half of the electricity presently generated in the United States is produced in coal-fired power plants.

By selling offset rights, utilities would pay landowners like the Pingrees to leave the trees where they are, taking in carbon. This would allow them to "make up" for emitting harmful CO2 into the atmosphere — emissions that have affected global climate changes. Several utilities and private companies like New England Electric and Monsanto are currently involved in sequestration programs abroad — Malaysia, Ghana, Indonesia, India, and Costa Rica — but not in the United States.

Fast Forward

No matter how the money is raised, or what the debates on forest management ultimately reveal, one thing is for certain: without conservation projects like the Pingree's, Maine's claim to fame as the most forested state in the nation could be at risk. And observations like Thoreau's that "what is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals than you had imagined," will be found only as distant memories in the pages of literature.