The North Country Doesn't Need Nostalgia. It Needs a New Story.

It has become almost a ritual in North Country political discourse: someone proposes a plan to revive the region's fortunes, and the plan is measured, consciously or not, against the paper mills that once employed thousands of people in Berlin and the surrounding towns. No plan on offer today comes close, and it is worth asking whether that comparison itself has become part of the problem.

The mills are not coming back in anything resembling their old form, and continuing to implicitly measure the region's future against that lost baseline sets every current effort up to look like a disappointment by comparison. Biomass energy, engineered wood products, outdoor recreation tourism, and small-scale manufacturing are not consolation prizes. They are a genuinely different economy, one built on different assumptions about scale and employment than the one the region is still, in some collective sense, mourning.

None of this is to minimize what was lost, both economically and in terms of community identity, when the mills closed. But a region that spends its planning energy chasing an industrial scale it is unlikely to recover will have less energy left for building the smaller, more diversified economy that is actually within reach. The North Country's honest opportunity is not a second act of its old story. It is a first act of a new one, and it deserves to be judged on its own terms rather than against a mill economy that is not returning.