Dear Editor:

In response to Helen Meserve's two line “tragedy” letter, I had the pleasure of meeting with Adam Rice, the “local” woodcutter doing the work on Kenniston Hill. He gave me some “positive” info I would like to share with everyone.

Some of the hardwood went to the Gaecklein brothers for local firewood (to keep us warm). Marketable pine logs and hardwood logs went for lumber and veneer. Several loads of hardwood and poplar pulp logs went for magazine paper (that would be used for your Down East magazine you often read).

Wood chips went to Sappi paper as biomass to create electricity for their plant and often sell excess electricity back onto the grid (that would be green energy by the way).

And for all the history buffs and environmentally concerned people out there, this woodlot is considered by a licensed forester to be overgrown pasture land (devoid of trees a little over 100 years ago), in turn becoming "neglected woodland" with mostly low grade timber because of a lack of any forest management.

A side note: Like many areas on our peninsula, we are doing more harm to our forests by not selectively harvesting them. To let a tree grow till death is a waste of an amazing renewable resource and fails to encourage new growth for extended periods of time. They have carefully harvested all these trees (way more than 200, by the way) and are saving the “grand entrance trees” among others which are indeed so beautiful.

But in the end, it’s just “wood” and I personally have cut truckloads of it. All sense of history and place is not lost. If harvesting these trees is a “tragedy,” you need to get out and speak to all the young people in our community that are praying for jobs to come into town so they don’t have to leave. Our youth are leaving because the lack of opportunity, that's the real tragedy we need to address.

Please let us all focus on the positive things happening in our towns and stop inciting negative commentary.

Win Mitchell

Boothbay