Eataly is nice, but there’s still plenty of room left to reinvent the supermarket.Photo: Samantha Decker

In the process of solving the puzzle, we all get to know the commercial topography of our chief foraging zones very well: dairy, meat, breakfast cereals, canned soups. But then this: We get to the end of our shopping list and discover a solitary item that’s been missed. This phenomenon is known, at least by me, as “The Caper Problem.” (Sometimes the “The Horseradish Problem” or “The Mini-Gherkin Problem.”) This fugitive item forces us to retrace our steps through aisles that suddenly seem unfamiliar, walking and scanning slowly in a slow-motion search.

When I first walked into Eataly New York — the 50,000-square-foot Italian-themed food market and dining experience that opened in midtown Manhattan late last August — my impression was that everyone was looking for the capers. They moved slowly. They stopped to marvel. No one knew where they should be heading, and apparently by design — the sprawling store feels like a series of little villages and outposts to be explored. Here, you roam the aisles of unpronounceable pastas. Over there, you elbow your way to a stand-up table in the enoteca. Everyone seemed relaxed and to be enjoying the experience. The sight of happy and slow-moving New Yorkers is a striking if slightly alarming spectacle.

Eataly is truly a marvel of social-commercial engineering. But it also struck me as a hugely missed opportunity.

I’d visited the original flagship Eataly in Torino, Italy, about a year after it opened in 2007. I stopped by mostly to be polite — an Italian friend had told me I should go. (“It’s Dean and DeLuca meets Whole Foods on steroids!” he said. “Whatever,” I thought.)

Then I ended up spending six hours and two meals there. Eataly — which Italians seemed to pronounce in a drawn out manner that pains them slightly — upended the very notion of how and where we shop for food. It was endlessly fascinating to me.

Like Eataly New York, Eataly Torino forced me to slow down at every step, with culinary areas neatly curated — meat here, seafood there, baked goods a little further along.  It featured nine dining areas where you could buy meals prepared from foods sold a few yards away.

But Eataly Torino did something even more sly. Through a sort of clever alchemy, it converted the mundane experience of buying groceries into an educational experience. Eataly was a Trojan horse of a supermarket — a place that lured you in for shopping and dining, then educated you about local foods and the complex connections between producer and consumer.

That process starts early in Torino. Shoppers are faced with a large, reliquary-like display near the entrance, showing what’s currently in season. Nearby is a library and reference area with Apple computers rigged for exploring food culture; people were slumped down in chairs reading. Reading! In a supermarket! The slogan “Facciamoci Furbi!” was emblazoned nearby — which someone translated for me as “Be more clever!” Cloth shopping bags and shirts were for sale emblazoned with the Slow Foods logo.

And that logo was telling. Eataly Torino was founded by Oscar Farinetti, an entrepreneur who created the UniEuro chain of electronics, then sold it for a handsome profit. His longtime friend was Carlo Petrini, who founded the Slow Foods movement not far from Torino in 1989. Farinetti wanted to establish a shop that would support and build upon the concept of Slow Food, and the two worked together to do so.

The Slow Food movement is not just about speed, of course, but also about place. And Eataly Torino stuck me as a wonderful portal to local fare, with the great bulk of offerings sourced from the Piemontese region. The shop felt intimately connected with the city, with the hills on the horizon just beyond, with the region’s past. Eataly is even housed in an old vermouth factory, and on the top floor is an engaging museum that plumbs the Italian invention of vermouth, one of the nation’s many remarkable contributions to civilization. The shop’s mission statement claims that we “reach our objective when consumers understand that they are co-producers… therefore responsible not just for the quality of their own lives, but also the lives of those who produce food, the farmers, fishermen, bakers, cheesemakers and so on.”

At least the bread is local.Photo: Samantha DeckerI admit I walked into the New York Eataly with high hopes after Torino. But once I slowed down and enjoyed the village sensibility, something seemed amiss. It was celebration of a place — but a place thousands of miles away, not this place. Esquire magazine proclaimed Eataly to be  “a fever dream of food love — a fantasy, an orgy, a theme park” — and that theme park didn’t involve local food, but what the Wall Street Journal dubbed “Mario World,” after one of the partners behind it, star chef Mario Batali.

There’s Italian wine and beer and soda and imported pasta by the shelf. The Piemontese beef? I read that it originates from Italian cow embryos, which were flown to Montana and raised there, and then shipped back to New York. So it’s local food only if you count unborn cows changing planes at JFK. Even the wood-fired pizza ovens were brought in from Italy. 

It’s not that the local is overlooked — Eataly carries produce grown on a rooftop garden in Queens, fish from local waters, and fresh-baked bread — but local here tends to feel like the “local” section that every chain supermarket feels obligated to install these days — a sort of begrudging nod to a trend. It’s not the driving force behind the store, as it is in Italy.

There’s still an opening here. I hope someone exports the idea that undergirds the original model of Eataly to our shores. Someone with vision and star power could combine education and a celebration of the local, can move the local farmer’s market to a bigger stage, can bring to the attention of a broader swath of consumers an understanding that they’re “responsible not just for the quality of their own lives, but also the lives of those who produce food.”

That is, of their neighbors.

My advice to entrepreneurs: Be More Clever. There’s plenty of room yet to reinvent the supermarket.

Wayne Curtis is a freelance writer who’s written for The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, American Scholar, Preservation, and American Heritage, and is the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. He recently traded Maine winters for New Orleans summers.

Thursday, 24 May 2007

NEW ORLEANS, La

Someone once wrote that eating a tomato grown on a fire escape demonstrated the highest order of faith in civilization and technology.

To hell with the tomato. If you really want to show your faith, move to New Orleans.

My wife and I did just that, buying a house about a year after Hurricane Katrina knocked holes in shoddy levees and left the city to stew for weeks in an unsavory broth of salt water and toxic sludge. (Our faith was not without limits: we bought a house that was unflooded and sat on high ground.)

We moved from Maine, where we had lived on a coastal island for nearly a decade, and where we had structured our life around the ferry and learned to accommodate the moods of the ocean. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the concept of being surrounded by water.

I didn’t know the half of it. New Orleans is an island, and then some. The Mississippi River wraps in a wide arc around one side of the city, and two saltwater lakes border much of the rest of it. But the city also literally sits atop water: we learned that houses here don’t have basements because water lurks just below the surface. Digging down evidently provokes it.

Perhaps most surprising to me was the discovery of how much water the skies can hold. Torrential rains are quite literally part of the ebb and flow of city life, often producing what New Orleanians dismiss with a shrug as “street flooding.” Storms stalled over the city have dumped 14 inches (1927), 12 inches (1995), and nine inches (1978), amounts that still are inconceivable to me. Earlier this month, on May 4, a storm released more than five inches of rain in a matter of hours. One of my neighbors, apparently quite at peace with it all, hauled out a canoe and paddled down Prytania Street, a minor artery overarched with live oaks and lined with elaborate homes.

A freighter at rest.

Photo: iStockphoto

New Orleanians deal with street floods the way people in Maine deal with two-foot snowfalls: they prepare for it, then wait it out. Many older houses, including ours, sit atop brick piers designed to let the water in, and then let it out just as easily.

But getting the water out of the city is where that great faith comes in. Left to its own devices, water will loiter here, pooling in the lowest neighborhoods, like Broadmoor and Gentilly. About half of the city sits below sea level, so there’s nowhere for water to flow without human intervention. The lower neighborhoods were mostly developed in the early and mid-20th century, when they were carved out of drained cypress swamps. Stout levees of earth and grass — the pinnacle of medieval technology — and more reliable mechanical pumps had made widespread flooding seemingly a thing of the past. The city is still dependent on the descendants of these pumps, although they’re rather less revered since Katrina stormed the gates and overwhelmed them.

When watery incursions do occur — such as on May 4 this year — 21 brawny pumping stations and a network of massive pipes nearly large enough to race a Mini Cooper through give water the bum’s rush, ushering it to the far side of the levees that encase the city like a 15th-century wall. Along the riverfront near the French Quarter, the Mississippi River levee is augmented with a concrete and steel floodwall with gates that slide into place when the river threatens, like a portcullis ready to shut out the Visigoths.

Fire up your Mini.

Photo: Wayne Curtis

Of all the water around New Orleans, the Mississippi River is most closely linked to the city, and for an obvious reason: without the Big Muddy, the Big Easy wouldn’t exist.

The French laid out the original network of swampy streets here in 1718, putting it as close to the mouth of the river as feasible in order to control this critical avenue into the middle of the continent both militarily and commercially. The gamble paid off: the French, the Spanish, and, finally, the Americans oversaw a New Orleans that in the 19th century would become one of the greatest and most prosperous of American cities.

Given the rich history of city and river, I’ll admit I felt a bit cheated when I first moved here. The river is not terrifically impressive as it flows past downtown. It’s actually quite narrow between the French Quarter and Algiers Point, a historic part of the city connected by ferry and bridge. (It is, however, massively deep — about 200 feet.)

And with the levees flanking it on either side, the Mississippi lacks a certain nobility — the cafe au lait color, the plastic flotsam floating by, the rundown industries flanking the river, the rusty barges yawing past. It lacks the thick forests and tumbling falls of the Potomac above Washington, D.C., or the heroic Palisades along the Hudson above Manhattan. The Mississippi feels captive and underappreciated, like an old lion kept too long in an ill-tended zoo.

“We live in an engineered environment, there’s no doubt about it,” said Matt Rota, water resources program director at the Gulf Restoration Network.

Rota was one of the people I spoke with over the past few weeks in trying to get my arms around New Orleans’ relationship with all this water. And over the next several months, I’ll be reporting back on what I’ve learned about my soggy new home.

But I already know this: I’ve been here long enough to view New Orleans as the New Atlantis. As is often the case here, the city got things turned upside down and inside out. Because this isn’t a mythological place that slipped beneath the waters, but a nearly mythological place that has improbably emerged from the waters, more than once, and has always bounced back.

At least so far.

Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality says some 15,000 houses are slated to be torn down, and demolition is the likely fate of 80,000 more. As a result, DEQ estimates, the city will ultimately truck off and dispose of some 20 million cubic yards of waste.

Where will it go? To a number of landfills in the region, most of which are designed to handle hazardous materials. But to speed the process, the city converted a deep pit located amid the wetlands of eastern New Orleans into a landfill in April. The thinking was that using this close-in area — called Chef Menteur, after an adjacent highway — would speed the clearing of ruined homes, and blaze a faster road to the city’s recovery.

Opening a new landfill at the edge of a major city would normally require elaborate permitting and public comment, but Mayor Ray Nagin signed an order bypassing the usual process. The Chef Menteur was slated to accept some 2.6 million cubic yards of waste; if that goal was reached, a mountain of debris would rise eight stories over the wetlands, as well as a nearby neighborhood of low-slung brick homes.

The landfill started accepting trucks filled with waste immediately. Reaction — to Nagin’s order and the dumping that followed — was swift. The landfill sits across a canal from the largest urban wildlife refuge in the United States, the 23,000-acre Bayou Sauvage, provoking the ire of environmentalists in the region. And some 1,000 Vietnamese-American families who live in a nearby neighborhood called Versailles rallied opposition as well. Their community has been among the most active in rebuilding since the flood, yet those who returned found themselves coping not only with their own personal disasters, but with the prospect of toxins making their way from the landfill through their neighborhood.

Joel Waltzer, an attorney who worked with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network to oppose the landfill, puts it simply. The Chef Menteur, he says, has made “a second disaster out of the first one.”

From Mad to Worse

The Chef Menteur was never designed to be a landfill. It was an open pit created when construction companies excavated sand to use in their projects. It isn’t lined with clay to prevent toxins from leaching out, nor was it set up with a system for detecting any leaching that might occur.

“Whatever you put in it leaks into the water table, which is hydraulically connected to the groundwater,” says Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant and Superfund site expert based in New Iberia, La., 125 west of the Big Easy.

The DEQ claims that the landfill is intended only for non-toxic demolition debris, and that steps have been taken to keep hazardous materials out. But Subra says the wholesale demolition of homes in New Orleans leaves much to be desired when it comes to sorting.

The order creating the landfill allows everything within the four walls of a house to be deposited here. This includes not only decaying mattresses and rotting food, but “all the petroleum products you might have for your lawnmower, all the cleaners and the pesticides, the degreasing solvents, and toner,” Subra says. All of these things have been observed in the waste stream destined for the landfill, she reports.

Subra has spoken with debris removal crews in the field. She says they’ve been instructed to set aside any hazardous material they see on the surface of a debris pile, but to not bother with anything within the piles. Hired spotters at the landfill perch on stands and watch as the debris is dumped, but can catch only a portion of hazardous waste going by. U.S. EPA officials told CNN last October that only 20 to 30 percent of the hazardous material would likely be diverted.

Sorting out toxins from more benign debris is “not happening, and we’ve done sampling to prove that’s not happening,” Subra adds. She notes that leachate was observed coming out of the face of the Chef Menteur landfill a month after it opened.

The city and the state DEQ maintain that the landfill doesn’t pose an environmental hazard. But Waltzer disagrees. He says the environmental tests cited by officials are flawed — they were conducted shortly after the dump opened, when less than one-tenth the intended waste had been deposited. What’s more, these tests were conducted not at the main pit, but in a nearby excavation that had been diluted with rainwater. “I’ve never seen a worse case of junk science,” he says. “I don’t know how they can sleep at night.”

When One Roar Closes, Another Opens

The Vietnamese community in Versailles, where any toxins that leach out will eventually flow via canals, charge that the neighborhood was selected for a landfill because the city didn’t think the residents had the political clout to stop it.

If so, the city has been proved wrong. Led by Rev. Nguyen The Vien, pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, the neighborhood quickly rallied.

The Old Gentilly landfill may be an even
bigger problem.

Photo: Louisiana DEQ

“I believe that every community needs to shoulder the burden of the debris — at least the amount we have generated,” Rev. Vien told Heather Moyer of Disaster News Network in June. “The problem is that we are shouldering all the burden while the benefit goes to everyone else. … It’s a question of environmental justice.” Protests drew media attention, which in turn shined a spotlight on the hasty opening of the landfill and its potential consequences.

In mid-July, the efforts to end the dumping appeared to pay off. Mayor Nagin abruptly reversed course on Chef Menteur, announcing that he would let expire his earlier order that opened the landfill. A backlash surfaced quickly. DEQ announced that closing the landfill would add six months to a year to the city’s cleanup, a charge disputed by landfill opponents who say that bureaucracy has set the pace of debris removal, not the proximity of the landfills. And Waste Management Inc., Chef Menteur’s operator, recently filed suit to keep the dump open. That case will be heard on Aug. 11 in Louisiana district court.

Assuming the courts uphold the closure, trucks will cease adding to this accidental monument to Hurricane Katrina on Monday, Aug. 14.

Will the story end if the trucks stop rolling in? That’s not so clear.

Even assuming the Chef Menteur landfill closes as scheduled and remediation plans are launched — highly uncertain given the more pressing needs regionwide — the larger battle to avert a local environmental disaster is still far from over.

Another unlined landfill not far away, called Old Gentilly, was also hastily reopened in the wake of Katrina and is again accepting construction and demolition waste. In many ways, this presents a worse scenario than Chef Menteur, since it was never fully sealed after being shut down in 1986. Subra says that the new dumping is already squeezing out leachate from the older dump, which is now seeping into the adjacent wetlands.

“It’s going to be a nightmare,” she says.

Beyond a set of granite gates on a hillside in Rumford, Maine, a lost city sits amid silver maples and oaks, just across the river from a sprawling paper mill.

It’s called Strathglass Park, and it’s a vestige of an experiment in corporate benevolence. Designed in 1904 by noted architect Cass Gilbert, who later designed the Woolworth Building in Manhattan and the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, this cluster of regal brick homes and boarding houses was built by a paper-company mogul for 266 workers and their families.

Same as it ever was?

Photo: iStockphoto.

The complex offers a glimpse of an almost Oz-like past, when the forest meant prosperity. The pulp and paper mills of New England were far-flung seats of an economic empire — humming with activity, blazing with lights through the night, and spilling money into neighboring communities like drunken lords.

Mill workers were in demand and were paid handsomely. Loggers made a comfortable living. Some companies offered employees loans at favorable rates, built libraries and other public works, and established mutual relief societies to help those in need. Right up into the 1960s and 1970s, mill workers commonly owned lakefront summer homes, which they built on lots leased to them for a pittance by their employers.

That era is past. Today, older mills face mothballing because of tough competition from more modern and efficient facilities overseas, especially in countries where environmental regulations are few. Meanwhile, working in the woods has become ever more mechanized and less labor-intensive — while the output of forest products has remained fairly constant, employment has plunged.

Between 1997 and 2002 in Maine, employment in the forest industry fell by 23 percent, with a loss of more than 5,000 jobs. The prognosis for New England’s outlying counties, which once lived off the fat of the forest, is not favorable: one in four residents in Maine’s Somerset County and one in five in Washington County now live in poverty. Communities at the fringe of New England’s timberlands are fraying.

What’s more, across the region land is being carved up and sold off, which some see as a dagger in the heart of the old economy. Investment trusts and wealthy families have acquired their own fiefdoms — the new owners are locally called “kingdom buyers” — and longtime timberland owners are getting out of the tree business. Nearly one acre in four in Maine has changed hands in the past decade. Nationwide, about 30 million acres, or half the private industrial forestland, has been sold since 1996.

So where does the timberland economy go from here? Increasingly, communities are reclaiming their working woods, with residents and towns banding together to purchase tracts for two purposes: to protect the land and to bolster the local economy. In some cases, the land is set aside specifically for low-income residents. As sustainable forestry advocate David Brynn puts it, “Something interesting is happening in New England.”

This Land Is Our Land

When a 115-acre hillside forest came up for sale in rural western Vermont last year, about 60 potential buyers showed up at three different sales events to learn how they could get a piece of it. The clamor for the land was no surprise — the parcel, on Little Hogback Mountain, is home to stands of lovely red oaks, along with beech and maple, and has a footpath that winds up to a rocky outcropping with valley views. And it came on the market amid a small land rush, with real-estate prices soaring locally, as they have elsewhere in New England.

Whose woods these are we think we know.

Photo: iStockphoto.

What’s surprising about the everyday event is this: those interested parties were exploring the idea of buying the land with others. If all goes as planned, not one but 16 people will end up owning it. Not as individual lots for second homes, but as a communal forest, to be kept undivided and undeveloped. The buyers, each of whom will pay $3,000 for a share, will have access to the land for firewood and recreation. Every 10 to 15 years, a commercial harvest will be carried out, with the proceeds paying forest-management fees and property taxes.

“The democratic approach of chopping the land into tiny pieces so everyone could afford some just wasn’t working,” says Deb Brighton. The area resident and former state conservation official worked with a small group of others — including the Vermont Land Trust and Vermont Family Forests, a nonprofit devoted to keeping timberlands healthy and intact — to arrange the deal. “It was better to manage it as a unit, and to put it into the hands of community members who live and work here, but have less and less opportunity to own land.”

During her stint on Vermont’s Housing and Conservation Board, Brighton realized large tracts of the state’s forestland were increasingly being broken up, and longtime, lower-income residents couldn’t afford to buy and maintain the parcels as productive forestland. Toward that end, half the shares in the Hogback project are reserved for those who earn less than the county’s median household income of $59,000; people in that category are also eligible for a deferred loan to cover half the purchase price. The rest of the shares will be sold to those who have less than twice the median income — in other words, no kingdom buyers need apply.

Brighton and her fellow organizers are currently awaiting a ruling from the IRS to determine how shareholders will be taxed before the project is carried out. But the parcel, currently owned by the Vermont Land Trust, is already contributing to the community. About 6,300 board feet were cut by local loggers last summer, and milled into flooring at mills in Vermont and Quebec. A 40,000 board-feet cut is currently under way on this and other nearby parcels. The flooring bears the Vermont Family Forests name, so buyers know it’s a local product made by local people from a certified, sustainably cut, local forest.

The Hogback deal is just one example of a growing trend. The largest project in the region of late has been the May 2005 purchase of a 27,000-acre community forest by the five-year-old Downeast Lakes Land Trust, in cooperation with the New England Forestry Foundation. The land lies just west of the remote village of Grand Lake Stream, and the buyers are now seeking certification from the Forest Stewardship Council. A 3,560-acre ecological reserve has been set aside within the forest, and 312,000 adjacent acres will be protected by a conservation easement. Hundreds of miles of wild shorefront will be managed for recreation, with the goal of bringing outdoor travelers here to patronize local businesses, including a number of historic sporting lodges. The forest is viewed as an economic engine to keep the community running.

Other acquisitions have included the purchase by Randolph, N.H., of a 10,000-acre forest it feared was destined for development. And late last year, a 5,300-acre community forest known as the 13 Mile Woods was purchased by the town of Errol, N.H., with the assistance of the Trust for Public Land. Rural New England, in effect, has become a laboratory for a series of landscape-sized experiments in building new bridges between forests and their communities.

You Can Get There From Here

“The community forest movement is growing rapidly nationwide,” says Jeffrey Campbell, head of the Ford Foundation’s Community Forestry Initiative. “People are realizing this offers an opportunity for a social and economic benefit.”

“Community forestry” is a one-size-fits-all catchphrase. It’s one thing in Mexico, another in Switzerland, another in Nepal. In the United States, it varies from one coast to the other, and on the lands in between. In the Pacific Northwest, where the federal government owns roughly half the land, the phrase often refers to a process in which loggers, environmentalists, and others come together to craft a vision for the management of public lands.

In the six New England states, which together could fit inside Washington state, only 5 percent of the land is owned by the federal government. Industrial landowners, investment trusts, schools, towns, and states own and manage the rest. So community forestry means something very different in this patchwork of ownerships, and approaches are as varied as the ecosystems and communities from which they spring.

In Vermont, for instance, it’s estimated that about 120 of the state’s 251 municipalities already own a total of 140 forests. These “town forests” are a New England tradition: In the early 20th century, all six states passed laws allowing the establishment of such forests, which were acquired through donation, purchase, or seizure when tax bills went unpaid. Most were set aside for a combination of recreation and forestry.

Few people have paid much attention to these pockets for a half-century or more — local forestry simply fell out of fashion. But that’s been gradually changing, thanks to both rising interest in their economic potential, and — in Vermont — to the Vermont Town Forest Project, a concept that emerged two years ago during a meeting of conservation groups.

Jad Daley, campaign director of the Northern Forest Alliance, heads up the town forest project and said he’s hoping it produces “cross-pollination” — showing how communities with existing town forests can benefit, and encouraging those without to consider acquiring them.

Sweet.

Photo: iStockphoto.

Daley cites tiny Goshen, Vt., by way of example. The town has owned a 1,000-acre forest for the past two decades, and has contracted with area loggers to selectively harvest wood. To date, the forest has yielded more than a quarter-million dollars of revenue, which has been used to fund local road work, among other projects. That, in turn, reduces pressure to raise property taxes. (And sometimes yields other benefits: in the past, a maple-syrup maker provided a half-pint of syrup to each resident in exchange for access to the forest.)

Other communities, such as Stowe, Vt., have concluded that their forests are best managed for recreation, the better to attract tourist dollars. And still others have taken a multi-pronged approach. After a committee of residents in Lincoln, Vt., studied options, they decided to harvest one of their town forests and set a second aside as an ecological reserve.

Daley says the process of debating what to do with a piece of land is often as important as the product: “At the end of the day, the plans are going to be as different as the 251 towns of Vermont.”

Yet they all share a single, powerful notion. “A community forest is broadly defined as [a place] where people get together, either joined by place or by interest, to become involved in how trees are managed for the benefit of all,” says Ajit Krishnaswamy, director of the National Network of Forest Practitioners’ National Community Forestry Center. “And it doesn’t have to be economic; it can involve cultural and social benefits as well.”

“Like communities, no two forest parcels are the same — the history is different, the soil is different,” says Shanna Ratner, a former NCFC staff member who is president of Yellow Wood Associates, which consults with rural communities on economic development. “As people get closer to seeing what’s true — seeing how much you can take out of the forest without damaging it — they see there are all sorts of possibilities.”

Treasure in Them Hills

From an environmental perspective, the hillsides and towns of the old forest economy more resembled Mordor than Oz. Large industrial-scale logging all but strip-mined the forest to feed the mills; the forest fell prey to erosion and monoculture. The paper factories left the rivers caked with scum and increasingly devoid of life. Over the years, much of that damage has been cleaned up. But the mind-set that created it is slower to change.

Brynn, who serves as director of the Green Forestry Education Initiative at the University of Vermont, is also the founder of Vermont Family Forests. He says the organization has been striving to flip an outdated paradigm on its head. The old approach was to develop wood products from the forest, then find a market, then worry about forest health later, if at all. “What we’re trying to do is get people to be aware of forest health first,” Brynn says. “Without healthy forest ecology, there can’t be a healthy forest, or a healthy forest community economy. It’s marketing more of what the forest wants to give.”

Community forest supporters are working to enhance the value of that wood — and working to ensure that the value remains in the community. In 2000, Vermont Family Forests partnered with Middlebury College to provide certified local wood for a $47 million construction project. Architects resisted, since what the local forests offered was less perfect than what they wanted. But eventually the designers came to embrace local material and its imperfections.

Farther south, the New England Forestry Foundation is hoping to help reinvigorate the lagging forest economy in north-central Massachusetts by backing the North Quabbin Woods project, which is striving to bring nine area communities and their landowners together (about 60 percent of the forest is privately owned) to manage the forest sustainably. The program includes training guides for outdoor recreation and operating a two-year-old retail storefront in Orange, Mass., where two dozen artisans and artists showcase products they’ve made from the forest, including burl bowls, cutting boards, cabinets, and other home furnishings.

Other retail shops promoting local forest products have been launched by nonprofits in Farmington, Maine, and Stowe, Vt. It’s a useful first step in highlighting the dependency that exists between town and trees, and showing that local people benefit from local control of the forest. “It’s not how many logs we can take out of the forest, it’s how many dollars we can take out of each log,” Spencer Phillips of The Wilderness Society noted at a community-forestry symposium in Maine last year.

Community forests likely won’t ever be flush enough to underwrite a utopian workers’ paradise. And some of the current efforts — such as developing local markets for local wood — are not happening as quickly as many would like. But never underestimate a powerful idea. Some in the movement compare community forestry to local agriculture. After years of hectoring, the public is slowly and steadily paying attention to where their dinner comes from. Fans of community forestry say the same thing can happen with wood.

“The local message seems to really resonate,” Brynn says. “It’s the whole notion of having a product that comes from a place you know, and you know who the players are. It’s another way of cultivating the human sense of place.”

The Flip Side of Forestry

If community forestry has an evil twin, it might be the brand of internationalized forestry documented earlier this winter by The Sacramento Bee. In a three-part series, the newspaper chronicled the lives — and, in some cases, the deaths — of “Pineros,” Latino foresters, many of whom come to the United States through the federal guest-worker program.

The guest-worker Pineros are in this country legally, but their treatment is often both unlawful and unethical. Over the past decade, forest contractors certified by the U.S. Department of Labor have shorted foreign guest workers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in wages and violated scores of state and federal laws. Some employers have created a kind of modern-day indentured servitude, charging workers for everything from chainsaws to lodging, and taking away their visas and personal papers.

And tragically, the guest worker program often adds injury to insult — literally. In too many cases, contractors fail to provide adequate training and safety equipment, and workers are discouraged from reporting safety hazards or on-the-job incidents. The Sacramento Bee found that the labor done by guest workers in this industry constitutes one of the most hazardous occupations in America, and one of the most overlooked by state and federal regulators.

The 10,000 or so guest workers in the forestry industry are charged with tending our national commons — but their treatment is a blight on our national conscience. To learn more, read the entire Sacramento Bee series.  - Eds.

Here’s moose. Where’s squirrel?

Photo: Wayne Curtis.

About half of Maine (itself nearly the size of the other New England states combined) is composed of what are called the “unorganized territories” — privately owned land with no local government and few residents. The unorganized territories consist mostly of industrial forestland laced by dirt roads that are traversed by logging trucks piled as high as three-story buildings.

The region keeps a pretty low profile. But in recent months this unpopulated corner of the country has emerged as a sort of petri dish for an unprecedented experiment in land conservation. The experiment involves conservation easements. Really, really big conservation easements.

You’re probably somewhat familiar with easements — they’re a decades-old tool used to protect privately owned land. Citizens concerned about the changing character of their communities typically band together as a local land trust, then purchase (or request a donation of) development rights on a piece of land, often property with a beloved view or a historic farm. The land doesn’t change hands, but development restrictions remain an irrevocable part of the deed, binding on all subsequent owners.

Land surrounding Big Spencer
Mountain could be protected
with a mega-easement.

Photo: Wayne Curtis.

This new generation of Maine North Woods easements — dubbed mega-easements by some — are on a scale large enough to be classified as almost wholly different species. How mega is mega? The Pingree family, which owns nearly 1 million acres of Maine timberlands, has offered to sell development rights on 757,000 acres of land. And Wagner Timberlands is currently negotiating to sell development rights on 656,000 acres of timberland that it manages for two other landowners.

Let’s put these numbers in perspective. In 1998 the Land Trust Alliance identified 1.385 million acres nationwide protected by conservation easements held by the nearly 1,000 local, regional, and state land trusts that responded to the survey (this out of 1,213). These two Maine deals, if completed, will more than double that amount. (Another 888,000 acres is protected under conservation easements overseen by the three most prominent national organizations, including The Nature Conservancy; no figure is available for easements held by the federal government.)

In Maine, it’s as if easements have gone overnight from bit role to center-stage star. And with the starring role comes a key question: Do large-scale easements really make sense?

New Boss — Same as the Old Boss?

About 11.5 million acres of Maine is commercial timberland interspersed with fast-flowing streams and pristine lakes. Traditionally, most of these lands were owned by paper and lumber companies, and when they sold their land — which wasn’t often — it was almost always to like-minded companies more interested in standing timber than house lots. What’s more, landowners have traditionally allowed public access for hunting, fishing, and canoeing, so much of the state’s huge private forest has served as de facto park land.

Maine stream.

Photo: USFWS.

But these long-established patterns of land ownership are rapidly changing. Since October 1998, an astonishing 22 percent of the state’s land has changed hands. Many Maine-based paper and lumber companies have exited. Taking their place are international corporations, pension funds, family trusts, and even the occasional billionaire (such as cable TV mogul John Malone); these new owners have snapped up thousands of acres of timberland.

A change in ownership always brings uncertainty, and it’s as yet unclear to what extent new owners are interested in trees and to what extent in the land’s potential value as second home lots. Fueling conservationists’ concerns about the latter possibility is the fact that one of the newcomers is Seattle-based Plum Creek Co., a timber management firm that has actively subdivided and sold off vacation home lots in other states, including Montana.

A public consensus seems to be emerging that the Maine North Woods, the largest tract of forestland in the East, should remain undeveloped and unbroken. But how? Some environmental groups have been pushing for a new 3.2 million acre national park — but the viability of this plan is questionable. The national park system may be much beloved nationwide, but in much of rural Maine — home to a notably cranky group of land rights advocates — the park system is associated with black helicopters and jackbooted government agents. (In one memorable episode two years ago, a land-rights crusader held a press conference in which he hacked a watermelon in half to make the point that environmentalists were green on the outside and red on the inside.) Politically, a new national park faces extremely longs odds, at least in the short term — especially given the outcome of the presidential election.

Appeasement Through Easements

Enter conservation easements. According to Alan Hutchinson, executive director of the Forest Society of Maine, easements are something of a hybrid, a tool that allows the marriage of “public values with private lands.”

The Pingree family, which has owned and managed Maine forestland for 159 years, has offered to sell development rights on 757,000 acres of its land for $28 million, or $37.10 per acre. The family will get cash up front to help pay inheritance taxes, and it will retain ownership of the land on which it can continue logging. The public will get a guarantee that its lakes and backwoods will never be besmirched by blue tarps and A-frames, and that vast tracts of timberland will remain home to moose and marten and veeries. The deadline for fundraising was December 31, 2000, and Keith Ross of the New England Forestry Foundation says money is still trickling in. He expects the deal will close in mid-March.

In the case of the 656,000-acre Wagner Timberlands easement, the public will pay more and get more. Although the exact terms are still being hammered out, the easement will likely include guarantees of public recreational access and may incorporate reduced timbering rights on more sensitive portions of the holdings. The price for the easement is estimated to be upwards of $50 per acre.

The West Branch of the Penobscot River.

Photo: Wayne Curtis.

The first phase focuses on 67,000 acres surrounding the headwaters of the West Branch of the Penobscot River (which Henry David Thoreau paddled in the mid-19th century). The terms have been already agreed upon; the two sides are still wrangling over what the final price tag will be. The first phase is expected to be completed by the end of February. The deal also includes a sale to the state of about 10 miles of shorefront on Moosehead Lake (the state’s largest lake) and 4,000 acres surrounding Big Spencer Mountain, one of the region’s most
prominent peaks. The second phase, encompassing the remaining 589,000 acres, will probably include a similar mix of easements and acquisitions.

The public gets irrevocable guarantees that huge tracts of open space will not be developed. The timber companies get to retain and manage their lands. A classic win-win. So what’s not to like about easements?

“I’m not saying that they don’t have a value,” says Jym St. Pierre, Maine director of Restore: The North Woods, a group advocating a new national park. “They can be a useful, long-term step in preserving real wilderness.”

Moosehead Lake.

Photo: Wayne Curtis.

But St. Pierre has worries. He’s concerned that the mega-easements will do little to address some of the central problems facing the North Woods. “What people are clamoring for is wilderness, and that’s not what these easements are protecting,” he says, noting that timber companies have failed to manage their lands sustainably and that monocultural, plantation-style forests are fast eroding the region’s biodiversity. “These aren’t ‘forever wild’ easements,” he says. “Some people call them ‘forever logging’ easements.”

St. Pierre adds that while it’s admirable that much lakefront land is being protected, millions of dollars are also being diverted to protect scrappy backlands that would never have been in high demand as second home lots. Those millions could have been used instead to purchase lands more deserving of broader protection, he says, and to create more wilderness.

Yet the biggest concern may be one of perception — the public may hear about these deals and breathe a sigh of relief that the forest has been preserved in perpetuity. “I don’t want people to read about these big easements and think we’ve finished the job,” says St. Pierre. “We haven’t. We’ve only started the job.”

The mighty Machias.

Or for that matter, a good-sized river stone. “I remember schoolkids hitting them with rocks,” says Nate Pennell, who grew up near the river in the village of Whitneyville in eastern coastal Maine. “When I was 11, I saw one kid throwing rocks from the bridge and another waiting downstream to catch the wounded fish. That kid took a pretty good beating from one salmon, and blood was coming from his elbows and knees. But he held on to it. He got it home.”

Poached salmon had a different meaning six decades ago. Back then, the sleekly muscular fish were as abundant in the rivers of Downeast Maine as crows in the skies. The fall salmon runs meant huge numbers of large fish, many returning to spawn after two years or more of fattening in the North Atlantic. Locals caught and canned the salmon, subsisting on it through the winter. Beginning in the 1950s, the river was beset each year by hordes of excitable anglers, including fly-fishing luminaries like Ted Williams, Bud Leavitt, and Lee Wulff, who would clog riverbanks and swell local coffers.

Salmon layin’ low.

Photo: Gilbert van Ryckevorsel.

But that was then. Today, to make a long story short, the wild Atlantic salmon have all but disappeared from Maine’s rivers. And Whitneyville, like many other towns in far eastern Maine, is just a ghost of what it once was.

Pennell, who still lives in Whitneyville, says that as recently as the 1960s you could pull a 30-pound salmon out of the river. Last year, according to official counts, no salmon at all were caught on the Machias River, down from just five caught in 1998. Only 29 wild salmon returned to spawn in all seven of the Downeast salmon rivers in 1999.

Whodunnit?

So what happened? Like in the game of Clue, there’s no shortage of suspects. Scientists are eyeing these possibilities:

• A decline in river quality. The upstream watersheds of most rivers are commercial timberlands and blueberry barrens. Heavily mechanized forestry in recent years has led to more silting, according to Nate Pennell, who works for the state soil and conservation service. What’s more, blueberry growers have become more dependent on pesticides. And once free-flowing springs (which create salmon-friendly cold zones in the rivers) have been abandoned, overgrown, and silted up.
• A rise in natural predators — among them, harbor seals and cormorants. These two salmon-eaters are as common as they are voracious along the Maine coast these days, forcing migrating fish to run a formidable gauntlet of teeth and beaks, narrowing their already long odds for survival. Officials say the number of seals is up fivefold from the early 1970s, and an estimated 50,000 pairs of cormorants now nest along the coast.
• Commercial fishermen off Greenland. Migrating fish that do make it to the open seas and survive the arduous migration north may end up in the nets of the fishermen. Although international agreements have limited the catch to domestic consumption, an estimated 19 million metric tons of salmon are still caught each year by Greenland fishermen.
• Global warming. The gradual rise in ocean temperatures may be having a subtle but profound impact on Atlantic salmon, which thrives in cold waters. Salmon runs are down in Canada as well, but researchers note that the decline is less dramatic in cooler, more northerly rivers.
• Gang activity. Finally there’s the possibility that all these suspects (along with accomplices like beaver dams, changes in water chemistry, and competing species such as smallmouth bass) are unwittingly conspiring to force salmon from the rivers.

The Best Laid Plans …

Salmon in the swim of things.

Photo: Gilbert van Ryckevorsel.

Efforts to aid the salmon date back to 1947, when Maine established the Atlantic Sea-Run Salmon Commission (now the Atlantic Salmon Commission) to oversee management of the fishery. By 1997 it was evident that tweaking management plans wouldn’t do the trick, so the state crafted a long-range restoration plan. The idea was to assemble stakeholders — timber and blueberry interests, anglers and conservationists — and have them work in concert with biologists to revive the salmon runs.

The plan at first gained the stamp of approval of the federal government. But last November, the Department of Interior, spurred by environmentalists who had filed suit a few months earlier, abruptly shifted its position, announcing that the salmon’s plight was more dire than previously thought. Maine wasn’t acting fast enough, officials concluded, and the agency immediately started the process of placing the Atlantic salmon on the federal endangered species list in seven of Maine’s easternmost rivers.

In Downeast Maine, the proposed listing did not go over terribly well. In fact, some residents reacted as if Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt himself had leaned over a bridge and dropped a very large rock right on them.

“There’s a million salmon within 20 miles of me right now,” says Joe Robbins, a lifelong resident of East Machias. “Does that sound endangered to you?” Robbins is a committed angler who now travels to Russia to fulfill his passion for salmon fishing. He’s not plagued by hallucinations or odd visions. In fact, there are about a million Atlantic salmon in the ocean waters of eastern Maine today. They’re contained in floating pens at 42 sites scattered along coves and inlets along the state’s coast.

Salmon pens in Eastport, Maine.

Washington County — Maine’s easternmost county — is afflicted with the highest unemployment rate and the lowest average household income in the state. Yet the region is blessed with near-ideal conditions for raising farmed salmon, and aquaculture is one of the few bright spots in the local economy. The water’s neither too cold in winter nor too warm in summer. It’s clean and largely free of pathogens. And it’s flushed by the highest tides in the east, which rise and fall as much as 28 feet twice daily in Passamaquoddy Bay, ridding the areas around the pens of waste and excess nutrients. The industry produces an annual harvest of 30 million pounds of restaurant-ready salmon, providing revenues of $68 million and jobs for some 750 people.

Aquaculturists say that an endangered species listing for the wild Atlantic salmon would destroy their industry in two ways. First, they say, concerns that escaped farmed salmon will breed and compete for resources with the wild fish could lead to restrictions on what types of salmon may be pen-raised. Salmon farms currently use a fast-growing European strain of salmon; a listing could force them to switch to smaller, slower-to-market native broodstock. “It could add 45 or 50 cents per pound to the cost of production,” says Joe McGonigle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association. Farms in Chile or Europe wouldn’t be subject to the same restrictions, he adds, “so we would effectively be driven out of our own market.”

The second problem is of pen location. “What the listing would do is essentially remov
e all aquaculture from within 20 miles of the rivers,” McGonigle says. That’s a problem because there is no place along this coast that’s not within 20 miles of one the seven salmon rivers, unless you go straight out to sea. And that’s just not practical.

Maine Squeeze

Maine Gov. Angus King (I) and the state’s congressional delegation have lashed out at the proposed listing, claiming that it’s a blunt club that could deal a mortal blow to the region’s economy. They’ve pegged their fight on a simple if melancholy notion: Wild salmon are already extinct, they claim. There’s nothing left to save.

Salmon on the run.

Photo: Gilbert van Ryckevorsel.

Backed with arcane scientific data, opponents of the federal listing claim that the few salmon that straggle into the rivers today aren’t wild at all. They point to river stocking programs that the state has managed for decades — all manner of salmon have been introduced to the river by well-meaning program managers, including Canadian salmon and even Pacific salmon. Over the years, listing opponents say, interbreeding has effectively eliminated the wild salmon once native to these rivers.

The fish that are left, the opponents argue, are from a mongrel horde — part native, part introduced, only distantly related to the salmon of a century ago. One opponent told the Portland Press Herald that if the salmon were a dog, it wouldn’t be recognized by the American Kennel Club. Maine officials are currently poring over genetic studies to bolster their case.

Genetic studies are so complex that some doubt that anything can be proven at all — other than the fact that eminent scientists can argue ad infinitum over what the genetic data means. Those in favor of federal action insist that you don’t need reams of data — just trust your eyes. They’re quick to point out that the behavior of the local salmon strongly suggests — if it doesn’t exactly prove — that local salmon have remained a distinct species despite the fraternizing with interlopers from the stocking program.

Wild salmon or mangy mongrel?

Photo: Atlantic Salmon Federation.

Case in point: Young wild salmon spawned in Maine’s rivers almost invariably leave the river and spend two years away before returning to spawn, then swimming far upstream when they return to their natal rivers. Just across the border in Canada, most salmon return after one year’s migration, and then tend to spawn near the mouth of the rivers. These varied behavioral traits have been fixed since people first began to notice the singular habits of these salmon, suggesting that Maine’s salmon have remained a population apart throughout it all.

While the debate shifts into high gear in committee rooms and biology labs this summer, the banks along the Machias River and other area rivers will likely be as lonely as many of the shuttered Downeast villages. Fishing for Atlantic salmon was banned by the commission statewide last fall over the objections of the state legislature, which is seeking to reverse the ban before this year’s fishing season ends.

In the meantime, conservationists, government biologists, and hopeful anglers will be watching the rivers to see how many of the Atlantic salmon return from the open ocean this year.

It might be a handful. It might be none.