The loud laments that surround the closing of the Bucksport and East Millinocket mills are drowning out a pitiful truth. This is no campaign pitch, but Mainers need to know Eliot Cutler is absolutely right that this vast two-mill job loss was preventable and should have been foreseen, because it was – by me, back in 1975 and 1976, when I served on the official Commission on Maine’s Future and was fiercely ignored.

At the age of 29, I was the youngest of Gov. Longley’s appointees asked to envision Maine going forward from the year 2000, and the age gap between me and the other commissioners was at least 20 years.

I saw the future much differently from those 50- and 60-year-old bureaucrats. My ideas were actually so threatening, the education commissioner once threw her cane at me.

After two years of meetings, this supposedly blue-ribbon commission’s great vision for the 21st century was six lanes for the Maine Turnpike, mill jobs and lobstering. Basically: Nothing changes.

We’d just been through the ’60s and the oil and dollar crises of the ’70s, and everything everywhere else was changing. My research on a future filled with ecotourism, boatbuilding, woodcrafters, food production, arts education and craft co-ops – titled “A Symphony is 100 Jobs” – wasn’t even included in the final report.

That report from the Commission on Maine’s Future turned out to be so pointless, it was buried before being officially issued. With one exception, I’m probably the only survivor of that catastrophe who’s lived to see how Maine keeps suffering from that lack of vision.

So I want everyone to know that this new lamenting over two predictable mill closings just goes to show how bad the vision thing was and still is in this most beautiful state, which could do so much better for its people if it could only see that.

Sandra Garson

West Bath

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