First of all, let's tone down the rhetoric.

The clear-cutting referendum was not initiated by eco-terrorists who never want a single tree to ever meet a chainsaw, and don't care if loggers can't feed their kids.

And Maine loggers are not slash-and-burn types out to cut down every tree on the horizon by the fastest means possible, the future and the ecosystem be damned.

It was woods-workers who put together the clear-cutting referendum, and it is mill and woods-workers on both sides who are worried about saving their jobs. Opponents fear that harvesting restrictions contained in the bill will put them out of work in the short run, while proponents fear that over-harvesting and clear-cutting will put them out of work in the long run.

There is truth in both positions. If, because of this referendum, you can't cut the closest and handiest trees, or can't cut them all in one swipe, it will take more effort to harvest the same amount of wood. If the price per cord stays the same, you end up working harder for less money. If the price per cord goes up to reflect the extra work, you risk a revolt by the paper companies, who just might take their ball, leave Maine, and go home, wherever home is. And then the game is over.

On the other hand, if loggers and paper companies collectively continue to harvest more stumpage than can grow back in a given year, it is only a matter of time before Maine runs out of trees worth cutting. Then, too, the paper companies are out of here. And then the game is over.

Either way, workers who depend on the paper industry for income will find themselves on the short end of the stick – the same stick, incidentally, that fishermen are now holding.

For years, fishermen resisted catch restrictions, insisting that the sea was full of fish, the environmentalists were full of baloney, and fishermen needed the freedom to harvest all they could, just to make a living. And now the fish are gone, the government is buying up fishing boats, and working for a credit card company is looking better and better all the time.
The issue is one of sustainability.

My logging experiences have been limited to my younger years, as half of a two-person team cutting firewood, and felling trees for timbers and boards to build two post-and-beam buildings. We selectively cut, and hauled the logs and bolts out by mule, oxen or tractor.

To fill out my firsthand experiences, I had some long talks with several people on different sides of this issue. And I have to say that while I support the goal of sustainability, I have some concerns about this particular bill.

I can't help but think that some of the referendum details are so inflexible they will prevent, rather than promote, good forestry operations. The half-acre clear-cut window seems small; the insistence on maintaining existing tree diversities does not recognize naturally occurring successions of species over time, let alone a planned succession; and the limit on removing no more than one-third of any bulk in any 15-year period would not allow for different thinning needs or improvement plans.

And I was concerned about recent reports by Seven Islands Land Company that it could not continue to be ''green forestry'' certified if it conformed to the proposed regulations. I owned a farm which was certified ''organic'' under a similar third-party program, and I can't help but think that if this clear-cutting referendum is not compatible with that type of recognized ''green forestry'' certification, something is very wrong.

But a dismissal of this bill as imperfect will not result in the problem going away. You must admit, those recent aerial views of cutover wasteland are impressive. And the data exists to back up those impressions. According to one retired forester I talked to, new U.S. Forest Service inventories on some Maine counties show serious over-harvesting and depletion of the capacity of important species to regenerate.

He likened it to fattening the pig with seed corn.

One thing for sure, this bill has prompted a new public focus on the situation. With this proposal, the paper industry is having to pay serious attention to public concerns it has had a history of dismissing as being irrelevant, based on urban misunderstanding, or as an unwarranted intrusion on private business and property rights.

The response of the paper industry to this bill, unfortunately, has been to whip its woods and mill workers into a frenzy with inflammatory rhetoric – and then to air commercials saying that everything is hunky-dory beyond the beauty strip. It's not, and everyone who has anything to do with the Maine woods knows it's not.

The difficulty comes in figuring out how to get to sustainable levels of harvesting with the least pain for woods-workers and paper companies – in an industry which, incidentally, has seen a 40 percent loss of woods jobs in the last decade because of the development of efficient machinery such as feller-bunchers.

I would caution the paper industry against thinking that defeat of this referendum is its only goal. If voters think the alternative to this bill will be business-as-usual in the Maine woods, this referendum is a shoo-in.

My advice to the forest products industry is to come up with a better management plan, backed by state legislation and enforcement powers, and to offer it as a reasonable alternative. The Maine Council on Sustainable Forest Management, set up last year by Gov. Angus King, is working on just such a plan, with a deadline of October 1, 1996.

For everyone's sake, it had better be good.