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Bob Seymour of Orono is professor emeritus of silviculture at the University of Maine, a fellow of the Society of American Foresters and a 35-year member of Maine’s Bureau of Parks and Lands Silvicultural Advisory Committee.
On June 12, I learned, to my astonishment and dismay, that the Maine Legislature had passed L.D. 125; what I consider a flagrantly anti-environmental and discriminatory proposal to ban aerial herbicide spraying, but only when used for silvicultural purposes. How could silviculture — the science and practices underpinning the sustainability of Maine’s forests, which I taught for over 30 years and practice widely on nearly 500 acres of my own lands, including Maine’s 2020 Outstanding Tree Farm — be under attack? Without silviculture, the sustainability of our managed forests would be imperiled, especially when it comes to their renewal.
The most critical question facing Maine forestry is building resilience against the inevitable effects of a changing climate. Forests currently capture and store about 70 percent of the carbon from fossil fuel emissions in Maine, so they are not only the victims of climate change — they can also be our savior by raising that 70 percent to something much higher.
Here’s where silviculture comes in. Dr. Adam Daigneault, the University of Maine’s forest economist and member of the Governor’s Forest Carbon Task Force, has identified that increasing the area of spruce plantations is among the most effective ways to store more carbon in large amounts that would actually make a big difference if done on a meaningful scale. These plantations cannot be established unless weeds are controlled, and decades of research and experience have shown that targeted herbicide treatments are essential.
Yes, we should reduce fossil fuel use, and yes, other silvicultural practices such as growing trees longer and bigger are also important, but are more challenging to implement unless we are willing to reduce timber harvests and the industry they support.
Our forests are already experiencing a climate crisis. One would think that to face this crisis, all environmentally minded folks would rally with all means available. Instead, some have chosen to pursue a narrow agenda — targeting a practice that affects less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Maine’s forest every year — that would halt forest landowners’ voluntary efforts to build a modest resource of spruce plantation forests. Yes, such plantations support their lumber business, but they also capture more carbon, both temporarily in the trees while growing and more permanently, in lumber products.
Treatments are applied only once on a given site, at very long intervals of many decades, at remote places where any inadvertent exposure to the public is non-existent, using chemicals at low rates that are deemed safe to users. Contrary to the exaggerated claims of opponents, off-site drift is minimal, and water bodies are buffered generously. This practice has been going on without incident, to great effect, for nearly 40 years, and I see no new evidence to challenge this historic silvicultural success.
Opponents claim that alternatives to aerial spraying have been adopted by other jurisdictions. In Maine this has already happened to a large degree, where manual brush cutting has mostly replaced herbicides in naturally regenerated forests, which are far more common than plantations. When planting, the main threats to the planted spruces are many thousands of small stems, species like raspberry, ferns and other non-woody plants. It is physically impossible to use manual cutting to control these weeds.
Why not spray from the ground? Such systems exist, but involve negative impacts from driving heavy equipment over the site, and require higher volumes of spray that are more difficult to target. Alternatives are also twice as costly, and have lower efficacy.
Readers who don’t know me might think that I’m merely echoing a pro-industry position, but nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve taken many positions over my career that at times made the forest industry uncomfortable. I firmly believe that if enacted, L.D. 125 would be a terrible forest policy for many reasons, a fact that the Agriculture Conservation and Forestry Committee recognized after extensive testimony and the original bill was rejected and replaced by an amended version.
Apart from climate issues, aren’t we also almost desperate to get economic investments in Maine’s rural economies? Shouldn’t we encourage, not stifle, long-term investments in forest stewardship to both support forest industry and contribute to climate resilience?
I urge legislators who acted to pass this bill to reconsider their votes in light of these links between silviculture and climate, and that if called upon to act again, they will sustain Gov. Janet Mills veto.