Every few years, another Maine paper mill closure makes statewide headlines, and with it comes another round of coverage treating the forest economy as an industry in terminal decline. I understand why that narrative persists. Mill closures are dramatic, visible and genuinely painful for the towns that depend on them.
But that narrative misses a quieter shift happening across the same forestland: a slow diversification into mass timber construction materials, biomass energy, specialty wood products and forest carbon markets that, while smaller in employment than the paper industry at its peak, represent real and growing economic activity.
A Story Still Being Written
None of this replaces what was lost when major mills closed, and I will not pretend otherwise. Entire towns built their identity and tax base around single large employers that no longer exist. That loss is real and deserves honest coverage.
But treating the forest economy as simply finished ignores the landowners, small manufacturers and entrepreneurs building something different on the same land base. Maine's forest economy is not the industry it was thirty years ago. It is also not nothing. Coverage that only tells the closure story misses the one still being written.
