The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Naresh Khanal is a graduate student at the University of Maine, studying natural resource economics. His research focuses on sustainable forest management and the economic and ecological impacts of forest pests and disturbances.
The memories are still vivid in northern Maine: whole mountainsides going skeletal, the sky thick with moths around the streetlights, forests stripped bare as far as the eye could reach. The last spruce budworm outbreak, which raged from the late 1960s through the early 1990s, killed between 20 and 25 million cords of spruce and fir across northern Maine and cost the state’s forest economy hundreds of millions of dollars. Salvage clearcutting reshaped the landscape and poisoned the politics of Maine forestry for a generation.
That catastrophe is building again, just across the border. The current budworm outbreak began in Quebec around 2006 and has since caused severe defoliation across more than 15 million acres of spruce-fir forest, growing steadily southward. Its leading edge has already crossed into Maine.
In 2024, aerial surveys documented 3,455 acres of visible defoliation damage along the Maine-Quebec border, and larval monitoring placed more than 300,000 acres of northern Maine forest at the population threshold where budworm escapes natural controls and builds toward epidemic levels.
Make no mistake: The conditions for catastrophe exist. But this time, Maine isn’t waiting for the hillsides to turn brown.
Maine’s spruce-fir forests are far more than scenic backdrops. According to a 2024 economic contribution report by the Maine Forest Products Council and the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development, the forest products sector generated $8.3 billion in output and supported 29,000 jobs and $2.1 billion in labor income, work spread across all 16 counties. A 2016 Maine legislative task force estimated that an uncontrolled budworm outbreak could eliminate nearly 3,800 of those jobs and cost the state $794 million a year.
Beyond the ledger, these forests protect watersheds, offset carbon, shelter wildlife, and define the northland character of this state.
At the heart of Maine’s response is an Early Intervention Strategy (EIS), a science-driven approach developed with partners in Atlantic Canada. Rather than waiting for trees to visibly die, scientists track budworm populations at their most vulnerable stage: tiny overwintering caterpillars known as “L2,” counted on branch samples processed at the University of Maine’s budworm lab, the only specialized facility of its kind in the U.S. When counts exceed seven larvae per sample, the window for effective intervention is open.
That early signal drove Maine’s first large-scale aerial treatment program in more than 30 years. In 2025, the Maine Budworm Response Coalition, a partnership of landowners, the Maine Forest Service, University of Maine scientists, and industry partners, treated 241,416 acres of northern forest with targeted applications of low-toxicity insecticides, applied during a narrow developmental window and buffered at least 100 feet from waterways and sensitive habitat.
The results were decisive: treated sites experienced roughly a 95 percent decline in budworm populations. By winter 2025-2026, the active hotspot acreage had fallen from more than 300,000 acres to approximately 83,000, a reduction that would have been unimaginable under the reactive strategies of the past.
The contrast with Quebec speaks for itself. While that province’s outbreak has grown to 33 million acres and forced the spraying of 2 million acres last year alone, New Brunswick’s decade-long EIS program produced a 60% to 80% reduction in treatment area from 400,000 acres to just 13,000 in 2024. Maine is following New Brunswick’s playbook, and it is working.
Federal investment reflects that confidence. Sen. Susan Collins secured $10 million in the FY2026 appropriations bill for Maine’s treatment program, building on $14 million in prior federal funding, supplemented by state appropriations.
You may not see this story on the evening news. The quiet green of a healthy spruce-fir canopy in July makes poor television. But somewhere above the Fish River Chain of Lakes, the math is working, and the forests are holding. Maine’s working forests have sustained this state economically, ecologically, and culturally for centuries. Protecting them through rigorous monitoring and EIS isn’t just sound forestry. It is the kind of disciplined, forward-looking stewardship that defines Maine at its best.
