A History Of Lumbering In Maine 1861 1960

"When one thinks of Maine, one usually thinks of trees, forests, lumber, saw, pulp and paper mills. In many ways to forest and its uses are central factors in Maine history. Professor David C. Smith has written in other places about that history, but this book puts much of that knowledge together in a detailed unfolding of logging from 1860 to 1960 and its influence on the state and its economy. The book ranges from a description of life in the woods for the logger, through driving the rivers with the product of forest, to the saw mill and its manufacture and finally the shipping and sale of the end product in its foreign and domestic destinations. Attention is paid to the economy and social structure of the state and the effects of the national economy on the logger. The shift in the Maine woods to pulpwood logging and the growth of the paper mill is discussed along with the long and bitter fights for control of the rivers between downriver loggers and upriver papermakers. The long fight for the establishment of a state forestry and conservation policy is outlined, along with the career of Austin Cary, a pioneer forester. Life in the Maine woods in the twentieth century is portrayed, and such factors as the depression, the CCC, and the Second World War are also discussed. A handsome portfolio of photographs illustrating the lumbering process from the woods to the users of the products demonstrates the ubiquity of the logging business. Maine has had its forests from the beginning, their utilization is the lifeblood of the state's history. This book discusses that lifeblood and illuminates the history of the Pine Tree State. Among David Smith's published works are... "- Publisher.

The Maine Bulletin, Volume 43, Number 15, April 10, 1961.

The ecology of the ever-changing Maine forest

This no-holds-barred narrative of the failure of conservation in northern New England's forests envisions a wilder, more equitable, lower-carbon future for forest-dependent communities Jamie Sayen approaches the story of northern New England's undeveloped forests from the viewpoints of the previously unheard: the forest and the nonhuman species it sustains, the First Peoples, and, in more recent times, the disenfranchised human voices of the forest, including those of loggers, mill workers, and citizens who, like Henry David Thoreau, wish to speak a kind word for nature. From 1988 to 2016 paper companies sold their timberlands and closed seventeen paper mills in northern New England. Policy makers ceded veto power to large absentee landowners, who tried to preserve the status quo by demanding additional tax cuts and other subsidies for economic elites. They vetoed measures designed to restore and preserve forest health; at present, about half of the former industrial forests are classified as degraded, and the regional economy continues to be trapped in low-value commodity markets. This book operates as a case study of how a rural resource region can respond to a global economy responsible for climate change, habitat loss and degradation, and environmental injustice. Sayen offers a blueprint for restoring vast wildlands and transitioning to a lower-carbon, high-value-adding, local economy, while protecting the natural rights of humans, nonhumans, and unborn generations.

The first book to look at wilderness in the northeastern US, Wilderness Comes Home features a new approach based on ecological reserve design to protect biological diversity, rewilding and restoring lands to wilderness, and embedding wilderness in a landscape of sustainably managed farmland and forestland. It addresses major theoretical and practical aspects of this important issue -- whether, why, and how to reestablish wilderness areas in the Northeast. Although Western wilderness models already exist for undeveloped areas, Eastern models are still evolving. Protection and social management are being urged not for the "forest primeval" but for recovering areas, in which returning species such as moose and peregrine falcons roam over new growth softwoods and hardwoods, interspersed with the stone walls that once marked field boundaries.

The once denuded northeastern United States is now a region of trees. Nature Next Door argues that the growth of cities, the construction of parks, the transformation of farming, the boom in tourism, and changes in the timber industry have together brought about a return of northeastern forests. Although historians and historical actors alike have seen urban and rural areas as distinct, they are in fact intertwined, and the dichotomies of farm and forest, agriculture and industry, and nature and culture break down when the focus is on the history of Northeastern woods. Cities, trees, mills, rivers, houses, and farms are all part of a single transformed regional landscape. In an examination of the cities and forests of the northeastern United States-with particular attention to the woods of Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont-Ellen Stroud shows how urbanization processes there fostered a period of recovery for forests, with cities not merely consumers of nature but creators as well. Interactions between city and hinterland in the twentieth century Northeast created a new wildness of metropolitan nature: a reforested landscape intricately entangled with the region's cities and towns.