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Tom Saviello served as the environmental manager for International Paper’s Androscoggin mill, as the manager of the Northern Forest Research Center, and as a state senator and representative. He presently serves as a Franklin County commissioner.
Earlier this year, public officials welcomed the moment when the New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC) began delivering electricity from Quebec to New England. Since then, the NECEC and a similar transmission line to New York have had rocky starts. According to an article in Politico, the transmission lines are operational but delivering substantially less power than expected due to a cold winter and drought.
As a critic of the NECEC, I could say, “I told you so,” and leave it at that. But I won’t. My sincere hope is that Hydro-Quebec meets its contractual obligations without tapping into fossil fuel generation on the spot market. The NECEC has been built, and now the promises for delivering hydropower to New England must be met.
My larger concern is with a different promise, the one having to do with how the NECEC will provide mitigation for habitat fragmentation caused by the corridor.
As part of its permit, NECEC is required to conserve 50,000 acres in large blocks, with a primary goal of conserving mature forests and connecting habitat for species that prefer mature forests.
I believe what NECEC came up with, however, fell far short of meeting this requirement; and then, inexplicably, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) approved the plan. That decision drew an appeal to the Board of Environmental Protection (BEP), which will hear the case on Sept. 17. I believe the BEP should approve the appeal and require NECEC to comply with conservation measures that actually meet the terms of the permit.
The fundamental problem with the NECEC Conservation Plan is that it involves 50,000 acres that have been heavily cut, with almost no mature forest to speak of. As noted by John Hagan, one of Maine’s pre-eminent forest ecologists, these are some of the most intensively harvested forests in Maine in the last 20 years.
From personal experience, I can attest to Hagan’s analysis. As a forester and former environmental manager at a paper mill, I am very familiar with the condition of the forest in the NECEC Conservation Plan area. I have been there many times.
It is not mature forest and won’t be for a very long time because nearly all the trees are young and less than 35 feet tall now. NECEC acknowledged this fact by telling regulators they would need to wait nearly half a century for the trees to grow taller than 50 feet.
I won’t even be alive in 2065 when NECEC says at least 50% of the trees will be more than 50 feet tall — still not a mature forest in my book — and neither will many of the DEP and BEP members who established the permit requirements in the first place.
But there’s another problem that warrants attention, and that’s the fact that NECEC’s plan allows Weyerhaeuser, the company CMP plans to acquire the conservation land from, to continue harvesting through a “shifting mosaic” management strategy that will effectively prevent older stands from ever becoming the type of mature forests envisioned through the permit conditions.
The shifting mosaic strategy essentially allows business-as-usual harvesting to continue, at the expense of the very species that the mitigation plan was supposed to protect — those that depend on low rates of canopy disturbance and machinery impacts, multi-layered age classes, and an accumulation of dead standing and down wood as the forest matures.
When the appeal is heard, the BEP will have the opportunity to ensure that NECEC complies with the permit requirement to conserve mature forests. To me, it seems obvious what needs to happen: BEP should require NECEC to improve its plan with the purchase of significant blocks of forest that will be transferred to a land trust or the state to be allowed to grow into mature forests, with no harvesting.
NECEC should also be required to designate substantially more land within the conservation easement area that will be allowed to grow into mature forests without being subjected to the shifting mosaic harvesting strategy.
It may take years before we know whether NECEC meets its promise of delivering 1,200 megawatts of clean electricity, but the Maine BEP can act in the weeks ahead to ensure that the NECEC complies with the permit requirement to conserve mature forests.