The future of the last great wild forest east of the Rockies came striding through the sunlit fairgrounds of Unity, Maine, with dark hair flying and long beige skirt snapping in the autumn breeze. Roxanne Quimby stepped past the sheepdog demonstrations and the organic orchard, past the beehive exhibits and the folk art tents, past the solar panels and seventeen different models of composters, and then spied a shady spot on the grass outside the social and political action tent. She wound her way through the crowds with the practiced ease of someone who knew the Common Grounds County Fair well. She had spent many a weekend in years past hawking her wares at this annual gathering to promote organic farming—her homegrown honey, the beeswax candles, the lip balm in quaint small tins she painstakingly prepared on an old wood stove. She would work her small booth all day, then spend the night in her truck because she couldn’t afford a motel. Then it was up early the next morning to restock her display with the homespun products of her tiny company, Burt’s Bees.
But that was thirty years and many seventy-hour workweeks ago, and today she had come to sell ideas, not products. Her company wasn’t small anymore. It had become a 60-million-dollar-a-year enterprise, the leader in natural personal care products such as shampoos, salves, and her trademark lip balm, featuring the funny little pen-and-ink drawing of a sharp-nosed, bearded fellow in a railroad cap: Burt, a melding of myth, man, and marketing that took off in a way no one could have predicted. In the last few years she had cashed in and turned her formidable and iconoclastic business skills—not to mention a few hundred million dollars—in another direction, conservation. Her focus was to chart a possible future for the immense Maine Woods in which spruce, pine, and icy blue lakes prowled by moose and lynx and loon would trump the real estate investors’ vision of resorts, golf courses, and suburban homes on clear-cut lands.
In the not so good old days, Quimby likes to say, the forces of progress and industry routinely crushed the tree huggers with barely a glance. Now some sort of balance would have to be struck, a weighing of public good versus private gain for the vast and rugged part of Maine called the “Unorganized Territories,” America’s last ancient forest, 10 million acres of largely unoccupied woodlands, a wet, green place on the map with more square miles than the entire state of Connecticut, a place where air and water are cleansed by nature by the millions of tons. Here Quimby’s conservation vision was up against America’s largest landowner, a timber and real estate company with a reputation for rapaciousness and with roots stretching back to the robber barons. The company was looking for windfall profits on timberlands it had picked up at a bargain price—assuming its plans were approved. Quimby was more interested in a long-term investment in land and trees, focused not on profits but on her “mission”—her “third career.”
On paper, she seemed outmatched, an idea that made her smile, because the one real certainty in this contest is a matter of record: The woman who started her multimillion-dollar enterprise in a log cabin with no electricity, water, or phone has always thrived on being underestimated.1
About 14,000 years ago, when our ancestors hunted with flints and spears and a toothless old man might be all of thirty-two, the glaciers that covered half of North America began to retreat. The frozen tundra that would later be known as Maine (along with the rest of the northeastern United States and Canada) warmed as the last Ice Age waned, and life took hold in an explosion of green. Gradually, over thousands of years, the land was colonized by vast expanses of pine, fir, spruce, beech, and maple—towering trees that covered the region and stretched west as far as Minnesota, a forest for the ages. Deer, elk, moose, bear, wolves, lynx, eagles, hawks, and innumerable other birds made the forest their home. Thousands of lakes, rivers, and ponds teemed with trout and salmon and remain an enormous and famously pure freshwater supply to this day.
The worldwide retreat of the glaciers warmed the planet and stabilized shifting coastlines, paving the way for the first permanent human settlements and the birth of civilization in the Middle East about 11,000 years ago, when Jericho’s first settlers arrived to build a new way of life. Yet even without the year-round ice, the lands of northern Maine remained beyond the reach of civilization, a vast, silent kingdom of impenetrable forest canopies and frigid, unforgiving winters. The region continues to resist humanity’s dominance and quickly reclaims artificial intrusions; the rusting hulks of old steam engines can still be found in forest clearings on half-buried rail lines that the logging companies painstakingly built, then abandoned after a mere six years of backbreaking use.
The Penobscot, Abenaki, and Passamaquoddy peoples eventually came to hunt and canoe throughout much of the forest in Maine, but the northern reaches remained barely touched and uninhabited, perceived as mystical, powerful, a force to be reckoned with and respected. By the time Europeans established the first settlements in coastal Maine at the beginning of the seventeenth century, old-growth trees dominated the forest—towering, majestic, and hewn greedily by the settlers for buildings, forts, and ships. Giant white pines, straight and strong, were marked with the king’s emblem and reserved for use as masts on royal sailing vessels. Huge swaths of forestland were burned to make room for farming, but not in the northern reaches of the Maine territory, which seemed as daunting to the transplanted Europeans as to the Native Americans before them.2
Most of Maine and all of the North Woods were publicly owned and part of Massachusetts when the American Revolution ended. But in an experiment in privatization unrivaled before or since, the government of Massachusetts, followed by the leaders of the new state of Maine, decided to auction off not just a portion of the lands, as other states had done, but virtually all the public lands and forests. This served the dual purposes of paying off war debt from the revolution and encouraging homesteaders to settle in the sparsely populated territory, with its immense natural resources.
The government divided northern Maine into townships. The term “township” summons images of frame houses and shops on Main Street, but in this case it was a legal fiction: mere lines on a map that carved up the forest and the surrounding lands into six-mile-square blocks. These were then sold off in lotteries, auctions, and tax sales, and in a few instances in the form of grants to veterans of the Revolutionary War who had been promised land for their service, though only a small number ever managed to collect it. The privatization process started in 1783 and continued steadily for the better part of a century, reflecting the state’s early and enduring libertarian personality. Little if any thought was given to creating any public parkland or preserve. The Maine Land Office sold the last parcel of public land in 1878, and for many years less than 2 percent of the land of Maine was publicly owned (by 2008, the proportion was closer to 7 percent)—one of the lowest proportions of all the states. (By contrast, 15 percent of Pennsylvania is publicly owned lands, as is 44 percent of California, 68 percent of Idaho, and more than 90 percent of Alaska.)
In the midst of this vast sell-off of the public domain, the forests of northern Maine captured the attention and imagination of America’s great philosopher, naturalist, and writer, Henry David Thoreau. His book The Maine Woods—published in 1864, two years after his death—documented his treks of the 1840s and 1850s through the wilderness on foot and canoe, most of them in the company of Penobscot guides, though sometimes he had just a compass for company. At his famous, pastoral Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, he championed a simple life close to nature, but in the far wilder forests of Maine he honed what was then a new and revolutionary idea about wilderness—as something to be valued, experienced, and preserved rather than feared, harnessed, or exploited. In the Maine Woods, he found “primeval, untamed, and forever untamable, Nature.” Man needs wild nature, Thoreau maintained, to balance and cleanse the artificial life of the city, the pretensions of society, the stale air of the street, the corruption of political discourse. Before Thoreau, there had been attempts in England, France, and colonial America to preserve forests as valuable resources, and deforestation had been linked to soil erosion, drought, and climate change as early as the 1760s, after ecological disasters in several island colonies. But the notion of preserving nature without regard to any benefits to mankind—other than spiritual ones—had never been advanced to a mass western audience before Thoreau.
Dismissed as an oddity by many of his contemporaries—in his day, it was the wide-open spaces of the West that captured America’s imagination about wilderness, not the dense foliage of the East—Thoreau is now one of the most widely read American thinkers of his or any other time. An ardent abolitionist and an early champion of the idea of civil disobedience in the face of a lawless sovereign, Thoreau has been claimed as inspiration and hero by such diverse and important figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy Jr., Justice William O. Douglas, John Muir, and the legendary environmentalist David Brower, and he has been recognized as America’s (and perhaps the world’s) first ecologist. Thoreau, in turn, said that the wilds of Maine were one of his chief inspirations and touchstones, and he feared for their future at the hand of man. In one essay he lamented that man’s mission seemed to be “to drive the forest all out of the country…as soon as possible.” He urged the creation of a national preserve in the Maine Woods before that wilderness was lost entirely.
At least during his own life, Thoreau’s idea did not catch hold in Maine. His vision of a nature preserve could not compete with the profitable business of harvesting trees, which was growing rapidly in his lifetime and would become an economic leviathan in the last half of the nineteenth century. The port at Bangor shipped more logs than any other in the world, and by mid-century there were 1,500 sawmills in the state. The nascent mass media rapidly became an essential part of modern life in America and the world, a by-product of the new technologies of mass-produced photographs in newsprint, industrial-grade high-speed printing presses, and typesetting machines. The demand for newsprint presented an enormous business opportunity for those who controlled the supplies of wood pulp and paper. An explosion of mill construction and logging operations began in the Maine Woods as the first timber barons accumulated one township after another, consolidated their holdings, and vied for supremacy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Maine had become the world capital for logging, lumber, and wood pulp. Log drives filled the rivers and lakes with tidal waves of cut trees, a mesmerizing sight. The log drives also wreaked horrendous damage on the rivers and fish habitats, as some riverbeds were dredged and bulldozed to facilitate the log flows. New towns sprang up, and resorts for vacationing, hunting, and fishing opened at Moosehead Lake, a scenic wonder that was the gateway to timber country. The lakeside town of Greenville became a bustling place where the forest economy dominated all other activities. Whole communities were formed for logging and milling, company towns that existed to mine the forest.
In time the industry consolidated, until seven large paper companies dubbed the Seven Sisters3—among them International Paper, Scott Paper, and Georgia Pacific—bought up most of the 10 million acres of the Unorganized Territories, turning the Maine Woods into a vast tree farm. For nearly a century, these mammoth companies owned the wild third of the state, maintaining the forest’s size, clear-cutting the old growth but allowing the young trees to mature. The timber companies and workers called this seemingly endless supply their “wood basket”—a constant flow of timber, which meant a sustainable economy, even if the trees were meager in size and quality compared with the towering pines of old. Before the Seven Sisters, the privately held land had traditionally been open to all for hunting, fishing, camping, and public recreation, and the big timber companies allowed the tradition to continue. Maine has unusually broad public access laws, dating back to a 1641 law still on the books that grants public access to all ponds on private land. To this day, old-timers in Maine consider “no trespassing” signs in the forest to be in bad taste, and even when such signs are posted, their effectiveness is questionable. By continuing to allow virtually unfettered public access to their lands, so long as it did not interfere with the harvesting of trees, the Seven Sisters generated a great deal of goodwill. Generous leases were offered for hunting camps, and in more recent years there have been trails for snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles, and outdoorsmen, hikers, and birders—pretty much everyone with an interest or passion in the Maine Woods—could continue to treat these private lands as if they were public. Many people came to look on this tradition as a birthright. A frequently expressed observation was, “Who needs parks when we’ve got the paper companies?”
Even with the logging roads and mill towns woven into the forest, and the public access granted to hunters and campers, most of the vast woods remained unsettled and filled with wildlife. Much of the forest is impassable in the winter snows and during the “mud season” that arrives with each spring thaw. The U.S. Census of 2000 found only twenty-seven people—five families—scraping out an existence in the 2,600-square-mile northernmost section of the woods, known as Northwest Aroostook. Those twenty-seven people occupied an area the size of Delaware. One hundred fifty years after his last journey there, Thoreau would have had no trouble recognizing the terrain.
But change was under way by then; the century of relative stability in the woods was about to end. The change started in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s, as the global wood and paper market shifted overseas to new centers thousands of miles from Maine. Enormous, inexpensive forestlands in South America and Asia, where wages were low, environmental regulations were minimal, and transportation was less daunting, replaced the Maine Woods as the leading global wood basket. One by one, the Seven Sisters began to close most of their mills and sell their holdings. Unemployment rose in the region as logging declined and the big companies pulled up stakes. Greenville—the town at the southern edge of the forest, the gateway to the scenic gem, Moosehead Lake—saw its jobless rate climb to twice the national average and its residents and businesses begin to move away.
Then, in 1998, the Plum Creek Company of Seattle, the largest private timberland owner in the nation, bought 1 million acres of the Maine Woods near Greenville, and promised a better future.
Plum Creek was a new kind of corporate entity in the Maine Woods—a real estate investment trust (REIT), rather than a traditional timber company. An aggressive buyer, seller, and developer of land that offered consistently high earnings to investors, Plum Creek delivered a 20 percent return in 2007 (five times what Standard and Poors delivered that year). Such bounty is not obtained by growing trees, despite Plum Creek’s initial promise that it had no plans beyond the traditional timber harvest for its new land—a promise that would have been in keeping with the pattern followed by earlier land sales in the forest. Before Plum Creek, new owners continued traditional forestry and even sold off more than 1 million acres scattered through the Maine Woods to private conservation organizations.4 Plum Creek’s million acres were, however, irresistible to the company, encompassing the region’s most spectacular scenery. Plum Creek had bought the shores, coves, and inlets of Moosehead Lake; the pristine Lilly Bay area; and a large slice of the Hundred-Mile Wilderness—the longest stretch of unsullied wildlands on the entire Appalachian Trail, where the 400-foot gorge of the Gulf Hagas, Maine’s Grand Canyon, can be found. The land also provided important habitat for the endangered Canada lynx, a brown-gray big cat with distinctive black ear tufts, whose last refuge in the eastern United States was the Maine Woods.
As an officially designated “working forest,” which is taxed at a very low rate to benefit timber companies, the 905,000 acres Plum Creek bought cost the company only $198 an acre. In working forests, Maine law permits the cutting of trees and related activities, but no other development. It did not take long for Plum Creek to figure out that if the land was rezoned and mansions, summer homes, and resorts were placed around Moosehead Lake and its spectacular views, those same acres would be worth more than $16,000 each. By 2002, the company decided to test this profit potential by requesting permission to build eighty-nine luxury homes twenty miles north of Greenville, in a remote, mostly wild area called First Roach Pond. Would Maine officials alter the law to accommodate Plum Creek, or would they impose limits and expensive environmental modifications to preserve the wilderness? Would buyers pay top dollar for such remote properties in an area not generally known outside Maine? And would the locals, whose average income couldn’t come close to what was needed to buy one of the new properties on wildlands they had previously enjoyed free, express outrage or delight at the new economic activity?
The answers were everything Plum Creek could have hoped for and more. The plans for First Roach were quickly approved by the underfunded, understaffed, and weak agency in charge of zoning in the Unorganized Territories, the Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC). At the time, this was the single biggest development LURC had ever had to evaluate, and Plum Creek’s lawyers, lobbyists, and planners outnumbered the LURC staff assigned to the case four to one. The public’s perception was largely favorable—communities in desperate financial straits embraced the project and the prospect of new jobs and money entering the local economy. And finally, Plum Creek’s offerings at First Roach were snapped up quickly, the bare lots selling for between $60,000 and $130,000 apiece, an enormous return on the investment.
Conservationists objected, as expected, but company officials said there was nothing to worry about. The development was small and there were no similar subdivision plans on the drawing board.
Less than two years later, Plum Creek announced plans to create in the Maine Woods the largest development in the history of Maine.
Beginning in the early 1990s, a New England environmental and advocacy group called Restore: The North Woods (with funding from, among others, Doug Tompkins) has advocated the creation of a large national park in the Maine Woods to preserve the still pristine landscape, and to forestall developments such as Plum Creek’s.
In the vast system of America’s national parks, Restore argues, there is nothing like the Maine Woods. Few existing parks could even come close to its scale: At 3.2 million acres, Restore’s proposal would create one of the largest parks in the country, bigger than Yosemite and Yellowstone combined, and only slightly smaller than the largest park in the contiguous United States, Death Valley National Park. It would protect some of the most significant terrain, scenery, habitats, and wildlife corridors in the northeastern United States; set aside areas for snowmobiling and other, traditional recreational uses; and still reserve two-thirds of the Maine Woods for commercial use.
“It’s one of the last big places,” Restore’s director in Maine, Jym St. Pierre, likes to say. “There really is no other place this big, this wild. There’s nowhere else we could be even be having this argument.”
A soft-spoken outdoorsman and former state planning official, St. Pierre is passionate, reasoned, and convinced he has a vision that’s right for Maine. He also may be one of the most patient men in the state, somehow maintaining his enthusiasm for a Maine Woods National Park despite a dauntingly long list of setbacks and disappointments.
“Everybody wins with Restore’s plan,” he says wistfully. Yet to date, despite fifteen years of lobbying and proselytizing, there is still no park. His organization is frequently reviled. He has been insulted, threatened, and derided as a carpetbagger trying to lock up the woods for radical environmentalists—notwithstanding the fact that he is a third-generation Mainer whose father and grandfather worked in the timber mills. “That’s what happens when you propose a national park,” he says resignedly. “It’s a decades-long project.”
Statewide polling suggests that a considerable majority of Mainers statewide like the idea of a Maine Woods National Park, and the cause has attracted some big-name supporters: Robert Redford, Harrison Ford, Jane Goodall, Walter Cronkite, Morgan Freeman, Don Henley, Holly Hunter, Meryl Streep. But the opposing forces are formidable, and no politician will embrace the park. The powerful hunting, snowmobiling, and gun lobbies are against it. So are leaders in Greenville and the other timber towns of the Maine Woods, who would rather see private development than a national park. Jym St. Pierre cites studies showing the proven economic benefits national parks have brought to surrounding communities elsewhere in the country, through tourism, jobs, and increased real estate values. But Maine’s old bias against public lands is still strong in those towns, where bumper stickers urging Restore to “Leave our Maine way of life alone!” have proliferated.
This is the longstanding problem big parks, both national and state, often face. Percival Baxter, a popular governor of Maine for two terms in the 1920s, was mocked as a crackpot, a socialist, and a closet homosexual after he proposed a large state park in the Maine Woods centered on the state’s tallest peak, Mount Katahdin. The legislature refused to fund his idea. So he spent his personal fortune and more than thirty years of his life accumulating the land necessary for the park he envisioned, beginning with a 6,000-acre donation in 1930 and ending in 1962 with his twenty-eighth donation of land. By the time he finished, 200,000 acres had been preserved—more than 300 square miles—which Baxter insisted be kept “forever wild.” Baxter State Park is now a much-loved destination and one of the most used and most popular state parks in the country—and home to some of the few pristine, preserved, old-growth forestlands left in the Maine Woods.
The same pattern of disdain followed by embrace has occurred throughout the nation. A proposed Grand Canyon National Park was denounced in editorials as a “fiendish and diabolical scheme” and its champion, President Theodore Roosevelt, as an “idiot.” Now any attempt to decommission the park would be similarly attacked. In California, there were public protests against Redwood National Park by loggers and labor unions; and there were similar protests in the 1970s when President Jimmy Carter sought to expand the park’s boundaries by adding the last remaining giant redwoods. Now a new generation of locals mourn the loss of ancient trees that a previous generation insisted be cut down in the name of progress. And even Wyoming’s beloved Grand Teton National Park, which lies between Jackson Hole and Yellowstone National Park, was bitterly opposed by the local populace, for many of the same reasons Maine residents cite in opposing a Maine Woods National Park: loss of local control, restrictions on land use, an end to hunting (and in Wyoming’s case, grazing) on public parklands, and a deep distrust of the federal government’s intentions.
It took more than thirty years, from 1897 to 1929, for Congress to finally accept the idea of a Grand Teton park, and even then, the park that was authorized in a hard-fought compromise was cramped and incomplete. Only the mountain peaks themselves and their six adjacent lakes were included. Opponents of the park succeeded in excluding the surrounding lowland forest and range—the land that would make an accessible and usable public park. Opposition was so great, and local landowners were so suspicious of potential buyers, that the park’s most important booster, John D. Rockefeller Jr., heir to the Standard Oil fortune and a dedicated conservationist, created a dummy corporation called the Snake River Land Company in 1927 to slowly buy up land near the Grand Tetons without revealing his involvement. When Rockefeller had accumulated 35,000 acres and his intention to donate it for a park became known, there were mass protests in Jackson Hole, Rockefeller was burned in effigy, and the Wyoming congressional delegation demanded that he be investigated for fraud. He was forced to testify before the U.S. Senate in 1933; and though he was later cleared of any wrongdoing, resistance in Wyoming and in Congress remained so great that it took him ten years more to persuade the U.S. government to accept his $1.4 million donation of land. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally accepted the donation in 1943 in the midst of war, combined it with adjacent public lands, and declared the creation of the new 221,000-acre Grand Teton National Monument. Establishing a national park requires an act of Congress, but under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a president can create a national monument by executive order alone.
FDR’s unilateral decision outraged the Wyoming delegation to Congress, and legislation cleared both houses that would have overturned the monument designation and killed Grand Teton, but Roosevelt vetoed it.5 It took until 1950 before Congress finally agreed to combine Roosevelt’s monument with the existing park to make the current, highly popular Grand Teton National Park. It is now a beloved part of the local economy, attracting tourism and raising real estate values; and it is one of the ten most popular national parks, with 2.6 million visitors annually.
The late congressman and conservationist Morris K. Udall of Arizona, who sponsored legislation in the 1970s that over time doubled the amount of land in the national park system, observed in his autobiography, Too Funny to Be President, “I’ve been through legislation creating a dozen national parks, and there’s always the same pattern. When you first propose a park, and you visit the area and present the case to the local people, they threaten to hang you. You go back in five years, and they think it’s the greatest thing that ever happened.”
Whether the Maine Woods National Park could follow that same pattern is unclear. St. Pierre certainly thinks it can. As he has often pointed out, at the $200 an acre working forest price, the land needed could be purchased for less than the price of one fighter jet or two days of the Iraq War (at the rate it reached in 2008, $10 billion a month). Americans spend twice as much on Christmas trees each year as would be needed to buy land for the park.
But Restore’s plan for a park could remain viable only so long as the Maine Woods remained untouched by sprawling development. Plum Creek’s plans for resorts and suburban development in the heart of the woods could mean the end of the park dream, and so Restore became its most vigorous opponent. This, in turn, hardened opposition to the park, as the long-suffering mill towns embraced Plum Creek as the improbable savior who would return prosperity to the forest. Yet it seemed clear that Plum Creek’s plans, far more than Restore’s proposal, called for transforming the face and character of the Maine Woods dramatically, altering landscapes that people and animals have used and depended on for generations, with uncertain benefits for anyone other than the company’s investors. The Plum Creek proposal envisioned a sprawling development in pristine areas that included 975 home lots, additional space for condos and town homes, two resorts, three RV parks, and a variety of commercial and industrial areas to support this new community. The new housing—primarily luxury and vacation homes—would dwarf nearby Greenville with its 700 home lots in both size and real estate value. The buildings would not be concentrated in a single area but spread around Moosehead Lake. From the architect’s vantage point, every hotel guest and homeowner would have a fabulous view. But from outside—from the vantage point of a canoeist, fisherman, hiker hoping for a wilderness experience—critics feared the view would become one of suburban sprawl, a place of buildings, cars, and Jet Skis, not wildlife and quiet. The project would bring traffic congestion, added air and water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and destruction of important habitats for rare and threatened species. Regulations governing land use in the region would have to be rewritten just to make the extensive construction legal—the law at the time Plum Creek bought the land made such a development impossible.
The promise of local prosperity, which residents were counting on, appeared less certain. There would be temporary construction work and service jobs at the resorts, and Greenville might see increased shopping dollars, an increase in school enrollment, and possibly more patients for the cash-strapped hospital. Sales tax revenues would not grow, however—the planned resorts would be built in the Unorganized Territories, so local governments in Greenville and the other mill towns would receive no tax income from spending at the Plum Creek properties. Tourism for the area might be harmed by the development, critics feared, because visitors to Moosehead come to see moose, not condos. They come for quiet, unspoiled nature, not the roar of motorboats that the resort could introduce.
But Plum Creek’s strategy was flawless. First it put forward a “concept plan” for the region, before the Land Use Regulatory Commission could complete its own plan. LURC’s planners were supposed to have written a concept plan for the area that balanced wilderness, forestry, jobs, and development far into the future—a plan, in essence, for what would and would not happen over the next thirty years in the Maine Woods. Towns, counties, and states adopt such plans all the time, to preserve the character of parkland, residential areas, historic sites, commercial districts, and industrial parks. These plans prevent a car dealership from opening on a quiet residential street or an amusement park from erecting a roller coaster next to the Lincoln Memorial. With no official plan in place, Plum Creek filled the void. Instead of having to conform its development to the wishes of the people of Maine and a comprehensive plan for all of the Maine Woods, Plum Creek submitted a plan describing exactly what it wanted for its own holdings, and demanded that the people of Maine accommodate it.
The company’s next move was to win the support of the 50,000 members of the state’s major sportsmen and snowmobile associations—powerful lobbies with considerable clout in the state capital and backed by the even more powerful lobbies of the gun and snowmobile industries. Plum Creek offered them continued access to favorite hunting grounds and snowmobile trails if the project went through; and this offer, coupled with the fact that support for Plum Creek meant taking a stand against Restore and its proposed park, cinched the deal. The leadership of Greenville and another major mill town, Millinocket, as well as other smaller towns in the area, supported Plum Creek for similar reasons.
Next, Plum Creek succeeded in dividing Maine’s environmental community by offering to place about 400,000 of its acres in various conservation and working forest easements, and putting select environmental groups in charge of that land—if those groups agreed to back Plum Creek’s development plans (and paid the company $35 million). The Appalachian Mountain Club, an environmental group whose focus is protecting the Appalachian Trail, could not resist the offer of a 28,000-acre corridor in the Hundred-Mile Wilderness Area. The Forest Society of Maine and the Nature Conservancy, meanwhile, were offered control over 270,000 acres of forestland east and west of Moosehead. This would make Plum Creek’s proposal not only the largest development project in Maine’s history, but also the largest conservation project in its history, twice the size of Baxter State Park. But it would happen only if Plum Creek’s development project was approved. Critics called this blackmail and “greenwash,” but Plum Creek had played its cards brilliantly—until the fine print of its offer and its environmental record began to be noticed.
Other environmental organizations not included in the deal soon found loopholes in the conservation proposal that would allow Plum Creek’s continued industrial logging on the “protected” land, as well as the construction of cell phone towers, the stringing of power lines, the dumping of wastewater, road construction, commercial water extraction, gravel mining, wind farms, and the building of backcountry “huts” as large as 5,000 square feet and three stories tall. Meanwhile, Plum Creek received a record fine of $57,000 for breaking Maine’s timber harvesting laws in 2006, and had to be ordered to stop destroying important deer wintering areas and causing a survival crisis for the animals. And then there was the matter of the threatened Canada lynx. No protected critical habitat was ever designated for this rare creature, twice the size of a house cat, until a successful lawsuit by the Washington-based Defenders of Wildlife forced the issue. In November 2005, as Plum Creek sought to advance its new development proposal, biologists at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed designating most of the Maine Woods—more than 10,000 square miles, roughly one-third of the state’s area—as part of the lynx’s critical habitat. Over half of Plum Creek’s land in the Maine Woods, much of it in the proposed development zone, would have been inside the protected habitat. Critical habitat designation on its lands would not necessarily stop the Plum Creek project, but it would bring the feds into the process, would limit the size and placement of developments, and would probably require leaving untouched several of the pristine areas frequented by lynx that Plum Creek considered essential parts of its proposed resort and housing complexes.
Company lawyers and lobbyists went to work at the highest levels, asserting that Plum Creek would suffer grave economic hardship if compelled to observe safeguards for an imperiled species. The company recruited the Democratic governor of Maine, John Baldacci, and both of the state’s U.S. senators, the Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, to intervene on its behalf. It also asked Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne to arrange an in-person meeting with senior officials of the fish and wildlife service so that Plum Creek’s representatives could plead their case outside the usual public comment process. Staffers for the senators sat in on the meetings, indicating the clout Plum Creek wielded.
None other than Julie MacDonald, soon to be investigated for political interference in endangered-species cases, was given the task of dealing with Plum Creek. The case for preserving habitat was strong: MacDonald’s own scientists reported that the Maine Woods critical habitat was essential for the lynx’s survival. In recent years, Maine-based biologists noted a precipitous decline in the denning and birthing of lynx in the woods. And there had been a mysterious shooting of several of the animals living in the woods—a federal crime, punishable by six months in prison and a $25,000 fine, though no one was caught. MacDonald, after meeting three times with Plum Creek’s representatives, overruled the science and sided with Plum Creek’s view. The entire Maine Woods was removed from the lynx’s critical habitat—a huge victory for the developer.6
But then the MacDonald scandal erupted, as a result of the work of the Center for Biological Diversity, and the lynx decision became one of seven cases in which manipulation of the underlying science was so clear that the head of the fish and wildlife service reluctantly conceded they had become a “blemish on the scientific integrity” of the Interior Department. The question of critical habitat for the lynx was reopened. In February 2008, the agency once again proposed designating a large protected habitat for the lynx that would encompass almost all of the Maine Woods, nearly one-third of the entire state, including portions of the land around Moosehead Lake that Plum Creek wanted to develop. At Restore, Jym St. Pierre was ebullient. “Blocking habitat protection…was no way to demonstrate a commitment to protecting wildlife and the environment,” he testified during a final round of public hearings before LURC. “How can the company be trusted on its Moosehead plan?”
But the controversy over the lynx and the proposal to extend its habitat did not provide a path to resolving the debate over the future of the Maine Woods—it only polarized the factions further. As record numbers of Mainers submitted comments on Plum Creek’s proposal during the public hearing process, it became clear that none of the options on the table had generated much enthusiasm—not St. Pierre’s cherished proposal for a national park, nor Plum Creek’s proposed mega-resort complex. Both ideas had large, vocal groups of opponents. It seemed the perfect time to propose a third way.
This is when Roxanne Quimby made her move.