This commentary is by William Sargent, a lifelong Vermont woodsman and the author of the memoir “50 Years a Dirt Forester: Always Outside and Never Behind a Desk.”
Since the announcement of the closure of the Finch Paper mill in Glens Falls, New York, on July 17, I’ve received multiple emails, texts and phone calls asking for my take on the situation.
Without a doubt, it is one of the most impactful events in my 50-plus-year career as a forester in Vermont. The economic impact on loggers, truckers, landowners and anyone involved in the forest products industry in the Northeast is immense. A facility that has been buying pulpwood from the region’s loggers since 1865 will stop making its own pulp from local logs and will transition to buying it from suppliers outside the area.
At a speaking engagement this past winter, I was asked if the tariffs were the biggest single event that I’d been involved in throughout my career. I said then that if Finch Paper ever closed, that would be much bigger and impact more people.
Those words have come back to haunt me.
Someone said to me recently, “It’s just one mill. What is the big deal? Just sell it somewhere else.” This person, like many others, has no idea of the sheer volume of the low-grade material purchased by Finch Paper. The wood yard handled about 60 tractor-trailer loads of roundwood seven days a week, or 420 loads weekly. An average of 20,000 trucks annually. By comparison, the biggest mills in Vermont take in around 75 to 80 loads weekly. In addition to it being a loss of volume, there are no other markets available for some of their intake. No one else in the Northeast purchases low-grade hemlock pulp. There’s no doubt that the loss of this market will have a huge long-term impact.
Loggers and truckers across the Northeast are a pretty resilient crew. They will adjust. They did it when the mills across Bennington County closed. Burke Lumber closed. They adjusted. They did it after the fire at Rutland Plywood in 2014 and the more recent closing at A. Johnson Company in Bristol. They will figure out a way to bounce back from this.
Legislators have asked what they can do to help. It is a nice thought, and I’m not going to go off on a tangent about the lack of help the forest products industry has gotten in the past. Tempting but not productive. I’ll offer one major suggestion and save the others for another day.
Please stop allowing our working lands to be conserved and protected out of existence by out-of-state organizations. Stop the sale of carbon credits on land in the current use program. It is a shell game. Insist that we do something with our state and federal lands. Make them multiuse again. Forestry uses have been forgotten.
I’m pretty sick of the excuse that we are doing all we can with our limited resources. These are the things that will help your local loggers and truckers survive in the long term. It is the Vermont way. Make it happen.
