Millinocket, Maine–For 85 years, all roads around Millinocket have led to the two Great Northern Paper Company’s pulp and paper mills that sit at the edge of Maine’s huge North Woods. Four generations have enjoyed high-paying, cradle-to-grave jobs. Unrestricted hunting and fishing on the company’s
The cool evening breezes have not yet evaporated the remainder of the sweat between the spectators’ shoulder blades. Shielding their eyes from the sun, they stare transfixed at the rushing water before them. “Yea! Looky there.” Twenty-one heads swivel in time to catch a shadow
Yale University’s David M. Smith, the country’s preeminent silviculturist, once believed it was impossible to clearcut the Maine forest so totally that it wouldn’t immediately renew itself naturally. “I was wrong,” he now says with dismay. “I underestimated the impact that heavy-handed clearcutting with ponderous
Maine’ vast wildlands contain the most uncommon forest in America. Known in the Eastern U.S. as the legendary Maine Woods, the tall stands of spruce, fir, pine, and hardwoods sweep across almost all of the 10-million acre region, making Maine the most heavily wooded state
In late 1982 in a Salt Lake City courtroom, the United States mounted a complex and costly legal battle against a small group of its own citizens who struggled to prove that their government had knowingly subjected them and thousands of others to dangerously high
