Jamie Sayen. Children of the Northern Forest: Wild New England's History from Glaciers to Global Warming. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. xiii + 299 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-27057-0.

Reviewed by James Finley (Texas A&M University - San Antonio)
Published on H-Environment (April, 2024)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)

Like the forest landscapes and communities of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the Adirondacks that it takes as its subject, Jamie Sayen’s Children of the Northern Forest: Wild New England’s History from Glaciers to Global Warming is resource-rich, dynamic, and complex. Sayre provides a highly detailed and necessarily multidisciplinary account of the Great North Woods, a region often stereotyped, misunderstood, and exploited by those from “away.” Across nineteen chapters, along with a preface and a conclusion, Sayen synthesizes environmental and social histories of the region with deep, firsthand knowledge of and love for the social and biotic communities that call the northern forest home. Sayen’s book is not just a history, however, but is also an intervention into debates about the region’s future. As he explains, he hopes that his book will help “communities and conservationists [to] transform the conventional ‘jobs versus environment’ argument into a ‘jobs and environment’ conversation focused upon developing and implementing strategies to revive local economies and restore ecosystem integrity in an age of rapid climate change” (p. xii). To frame the stakes of such debates, Sayen situates himself and others fighting for a sustainable future for human and nonhuman communities as part of a centuries-long struggle against enclosure. The economic, social, and ecological damage wrought by industrial forestry, alongside the sixth extinction, climate change, and the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Sayen compellingly argues, collectively shows the failures of US electoral and environmental politics and the urgent need for new ways of living with the land and with one another.

Sayen’s book is, in part, a memoir, and begins with recounting his move to a rural cabin in Northern New Hampshire in the mid-1980s and his subsequent work with the Coös County Democrat, for whom he wrote about both human and natural communities. It was an era when scientists were raising the alarm about species loss and threats to biodiversity and when paper companies began cutting jobs and offering up vast areas of land for auction. Sayen thus reported on anxieties about wages and the economic future of the region, along with concern about what would happen to land that had for generations been accessible to the public. Sayen recognized this moment as an opportunity to, as he puts it, “begin the restoration of our wildland heritage” (p. 8), and he started making the case that greater public ownership of forests would help to heal both ecological and social problems. His increasing advocacy for publicly funded land purchases precipitated the end of his career as a journalist and the beginning of his multiple decades as an activist committed to defending the human and nonhuman communities of the Great North Woods.

The rest of the book is structured chronologically, moving from the Pleistocene to the present and drawing from an impressive archive of sources across a number of disciplines. Sayen provides readers with a synoptic view of a landscape in flux, ranging from the ice age to the influx of plants and animals following the glaciers’ retreat, to the effects of human settlement, both Indigenous and European, and focusing most extensively on the multiple eras of logging that transformed the region and human communities. Children of the Northern Forest thus illuminates the geopolitical forces that drove the harvesting of white pine, the transition to plant-fiber paper making, the rise of clearcutting, and the closures of paper mills, all the while recounting the ecological and social damage wrought by such transformations, including the migration of tree species both in and out of the region so as to adapt to global warming and the migration of Mainers to other states in search of work.

Sayen’s book devotes particular attention to industrial forestry, and he provides an essential history of the technologies and market forces that fueled it; the political will and public subsidies that sustained it; and growing resistance to it from local workers, grassroots environmentalists, and major nonprofits. In recounting the struggle over industrial forestry Sayen masterfully synthesizes scientific studies about timber harvesting’s ecological impact with a reporter’s careful examination of both policymaking and public opinion. Such work provides the foundation for his compelling call for public ownership of forestlands and a commitment to rewilding.

The ecological and social histories told in Children of the Northern Forest make plain, as Sayen states, that “there is no future for industrial forestry” (p. 201). Sayen’s book, accordingly, mourns those futures foreclosed by centuries of extraction and antidemocratic practices, as local communities have seen jobs disappear and public money go toward bailouts and subsidies that benefit shareholders. As a result, northern New Englanders must envision other futures, and Sayen provides a couple promising examples. Groups such as Vermont Family Forests are working to create conditions whereby logging can benefit local communities, in their case by enacting forestry practices that support the biological health of forest lands, including cutting less than growth, stabilizing microhabitats, and minimizing soil damage and carbon emissions. As Sayen explains, this work can be economically viable only if subsidies and tax cuts that have traditionally gone toward industry, large-scale landowners, and conservation easements that have resulted in few ecological and social benefits are instead directed to small-scale farmers, and that externalities such as carbon and other pollutions are accounted for. Politicians can also support the communities devastated by mill closures, as is shown in the example of Lancaster, New Hampshire, where Greg Cloutier, a former mill worker, purchased and revitalized the downtown movie theater and helped to open a nearby bakery, brewery, and art gallery. Cloutier’s neighbors launched a year-round farmers’ market and other small businesses, so that now Lancaster now sustains “a low-impact, low-carbon economy” that benefits its residents and workers (p. 221). We also see Sayen’s own work for the Northern Forest Alliance and his proposed Headwaters Wilderness Reserve System, an 8.7-million-acre area that would extend from northern Maine to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, and which would, Sayen argues, provide enough space for regional rewilding, a dramatic amount of carbon sequestration, and recovery for native species. With such efforts, Sayen exhorts, “We can reclaim common lands and our roles as commoners” (p. 214, emphasis in original).

Largely absent from Children of the Northern Forest is the history and ongoing presence of Wabanaki people, despite the fact that Sayen’s focus on Maine centers on the ancestral homeland and sacred landscape of the Penobscot Nation. Although he gestures on a couple of instances toward Native removal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sayen does not address colonialism alongside his critique of neoliberal capitalism, nor is there any indication that Indigenous peoples might play a role in redressing interrelated ecological and social harm across the region. While it is understandable that Sayen’s journalism and activism orients him toward certain contexts and particular struggles and not others, a book about how a whole region can respond to environmental injustice limits its relevance when it does not account for the ongoing violence of settler colonialism and when its examples of sustainable futures does not include efforts such as those from the Penobscot Nation to control pollution and bring about the very rewilding that Sayen celebrates. We read, for instance, about dams going into the Penobscot River and how early loggers transported their timber to market along its waters, but not about the essential role that Penobscot people’s activism and traditional ecological knowledge played in removing those same dams, reintroducing salmon, and repairing polluted waterways in the wake of mill closures. Such a critique is not to discount the importance of Sayen’s book, nor his decades of advocacy, but rather to suggest that considering this region as strictly forest lands and not also as a watershed and orienting one’s thinking solely around white environmentalists, such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Gary Snyder, undermines the fight for a true commons democracy.

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Citation: James Finley. Review of Sayen, Jamie, Children of the Northern Forest: Wild New England's History from Glaciers to Global Warming. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. April, 2024.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60454

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