S3E5 200 Years of Maine’s Forests: Navigating Vacationland

On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. This episode covers an article by Lloyd C. Irland, author of five books, fellow of the Society of American Foresters, and participant in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and National Assessment on Climate Change. Irland gives us an inside perspective on Maine’s Forests from 1820-2010 in his article titled, “From Wilderness to Timberland to Vacationland to Ecosystem: Maine’s Forests, 1820–2020”. This article was published in volume 29, number 2, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Lloyd Irland’s article: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1863&context=mpr

Transcript

This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I am Eric Miller, research associate at the Center.

On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. Today, we will be covering an article by Lloyd C. Irland, author of five books, fellow of the Society of American Foresters, and participant in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and National Assessment on Climate Change. Irland gives us an inside perspective on Maine’s Forests from 1820 to 2010 in his article titled, “From Wilderness to Timberland to Vacationland to Ecosystem: Maine’s Forests, 1820–2020.” This article was published in volume 29, number 2, of Maine Policy Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center. For all citations for data provided in this episode, please refer to Lloyd Irland’s article , which can be found in the episode description.

Want to know the history of Maine as a vacationland and how the forest has changed over the last 200 years? Lloyd Irland has some answers.

The story of Maine’s forest has many themes across American economic history, including technology and markets for wood products, labor-management conflicts, financial technology, and logging equipment to name just a few. Irland touches on these topics by focusing on how Maine’s forests have changed over time. He examines many aspects of Maine’s forests, and in this episode we focus on Maine’s forest at statehood, as timberland, as part of Vacationland, and as ecosystem, and carbon sink.

Maine had a rough start at its statehood. Communities were trying to restitch a political society after three devastating events: Jefferson’s embargo, the War of 1812, and 1816—the “year without a summer.” Two years of unprecedented harsh weather brought famine to the countryside and stimulated significant outmigration. In1820, most of Maine’s population of 300,000 people lived along the coast and by a few inland rivers . In rural areas, many people spent some part of a year cutting wood. 1820s Mainers preferred fishing and lumbering to establishing farms, which they say contributed to the slowing down of Maine’s development as a state.

In 1820, Maine’s land was 92% forests (only 1% of which was managed for timber),11% wetlands, 4% farmland, and 1% urban. In 1829, Moses Greenleaf, one of Maine’s earliest cartographers, predicted a future in which Maine’s northern forests were replaced by thriving farms and small towns along with managed woodlots and town forests. But a combination of events, including transportation revolutions, westward migration, and new agricultural te