Even before the sale of Burt’s Bees, Roxanne Quimby had returned her heart and her money to Maine. It was in her blood, it was where she wanted to live. She found a 1,200-square-foot home in the coastal town of Winter Harbor, near Maine’s only national park, Acadia, another conservation project that had received vital financing and land from the Rockefeller family.
She also bought a place in Palm Beach, Florida, thinking that it would serve as a warm getaway during Maine’s harsh winters, but she felt out of place there. The conspicuous consumption and public displays of wealth that are part of the fabric of Palm Beach, the Jaguars and Mercedeses her neighbors seemed to covet, are alien to her. She drives a Toyota Prius in Maine, and one of her best friends runs the local recycling drop for bottles and cans, and sells used furniture next door to it—exactly the sort of little homemade business Roxanne Quimby survived on for many years, the sort of business Burt’s Bees once was.
A few years before the buyout, Quimby started casting about for a mission beyond Burt’s Bees, something to invest in—her money, her time, her passion. She had been consumed by the business for so long, it had only just dawned on her: I’ve got all this money now, more than I need to live, more than I need to sustain the business. What’s the best way to conserve that wealth? What will retain its value through changes of governments and politics and shifting economics? What endures? And when she thought in those terms, the answer was obvious: land. Buying pieces of the Maine Woods would be like investing in a long-term bond, but the forest would be nicer to look at, and better for the world. And since she had no intention of logging on her land, or hunting on it, or developing it, the land would just grow in value, slowly and surely. She figured that big trees are worth more than little trees, whether it’s the oaks or maples in your own front yard, or a forest full of them. Much of the Maine Woods had been cut down and replanted over and over, every thirty to forty years for two centuries. Quimby knew those woods desperately needed some big old trees. Her land would be a haven for them, a wild sanctuary.
The idea appealed to her spiritual beliefs. Quimby is not a churchgoer, nor is she conventionally religious. She prefers to immerse herself in “alternative spirituality”—she’s an astrologer, a tarot card reader, and a regular client of psychics. She meditates daily, at least an hour of yogic deep breathing, longer if she’s “having issues.” Whatever is worrying you before the meditation begins, she says, is less of a problem after. She has read a great deal of “soul journey” literature, and is particularly taken with the idea that animals show themselves to people for a specific reason, to offer up messages and clues. “I find that interesting,” she says. “We ignore all the species but ourselves. We think we’re so important, that every species is subordinate to us. How arrogant! We live without thankfulness, without humility.” She is convinced that, absent some very meaningful and immediate reforms, the universe—through global warming or some other cataclysmic event in the near future—“is going to put humanity in its place in a very humbling way.” She is a believer in karma, the Hindu idea that we bring on our own rewards or punishments by our actions. “Humanity’s karmic debt is off the charts,” she says. “It’s not going to be pretty.”
The second part of Quimby’s quest for an enduring investment came to her in the form of some promotional materials from Restore describing its proposal for a 3.2-million-acre Maine Woods National Park. The vision of a gigantic national park in the woods she knew so well was an epiphany for her. It’s exactly the sort of project she felt must be undertaken if there was to be any hope of staving off her predicted humbling of humanity. And the proposal brought back childhood memories of road trips with her parents to Redwood National Park, the Grand Tetons, Grand Canyon, and—back east—all the national battlefield parks of the Revolution and the Civil War. She had a national parks passport, and each time she visited a park, she’d get a different stamp. She had almost forgotten how much she had enjoyed those traipses. National parks, in Quimby’s view, showed the best of America, the ultimate democratic experience—ten bucks’ admission bought a day of entertainment for the whole family, rich or poor, open to all.
So in 2000 she began making land purchases in the woods: 5,000 acres here, 8,000 there. She found a real estate agent in Bangor who knew the forestlands well, and he called her regularly with early tips about prime land, suitable for a wildernesss sanctuary, about to come on the market. She wanted to focus especially on the forest, wetlands, and mountainous terrain surrounding Baxter State Park, areas that the former governor had always wanted to acquire but never could—land that would enhance and buffer the park, and also form the starting point of a new national park that Quimby wanted to help endow. Baxter, along with Thoreau, had become her inspiration; she hoped, though she was reluctant to articulate the idea, that she might someday be remembered, like Baxter, as a champion of preserving the Maine Woods. Quimby formed two charitable foundations to carry out the work—the Quimby Family Foundation, which makes grants in the arts and environmental projects; and Elliotsville Plantation, named for her first land purchase, which administers her conservation lands and employs a full-time ecologist, Bart DeWolf, formerly of Restore.
Quimby made her initial purchases in relative obscurity, amid a mad scramble of real estate transactions in the Maine Woods as land changed hands more in a year’s time than had happened in the previous century. But then in May 2003, Quimby joined the board of Restore as part of its campaign “Americans for a Maine Woods National Park,” in which 100 celebrities, artists, businesspeople, and others signed on to support the effort. A press conference on the initiative was covered by the media throughout Maine, and Quimby was quoted in her role as the campaign’s cochair. She made it clear that her land purchases would be part of the national park effort. Her days of purchasing forestland in relative anonymity were over.
She next bought a 24,000-acre township on the northeast border of Baxter State Park—an area prized by hunters, snowmobilers, and loggers. Opponents of the park pounced, complaining about anticipated new restrictions on the land by the conservation-minded Quimby—even before she had closed the deal. They called and wrote to other landholders in the forest who were considering selling, warning them not to do business with Quimby and her “cosmetics empire” if they cared at all about the Maine way of life.
As it happened, another 47,000 acres next to Baxter State Park were auctioned by the same seller at the same time, and were bought by two logger-developers, one of them a voracious “forest liquidator”—a company that clear-cuts a forest and then sells it for housing development. This land had been sought by the Maine Department of Conservation; Percival Baxter had tried in vain to buy it many years before for his state park. It is spectacular terrain that includes a last remnant of old-growth and mature forest trees; a pristine remote stream, the Wassatoquoik; and the icy blue Katahdin Lake, just four miles from Mount Katahdin, the centerpiece of Baxter State Park. The conservation department was outbid, however, and the pristine land near the park faced an uncertain future of likely habitat loss, clear-cutting, and housing. Yet Quimby’s purchase next door—the only land that was guaranteed to remain wild—was singled out for criticism.
When Quimby, as expected, declared her land a wilderness sanctuary, open for hiking and human-powered recreation, but closed to hunting, campfires, tree-cutting, snowmobiles, and ATVs, the complaints escalated to something approaching hysteria. Quimby’s signs posting the restrictions were torn down. She received threatening and insulting e-mails, letters, and phone messages. Bumper stickers soon appeared: “Ban Hunting: No! Ban Fishing: No! Ban Public Use: No! Ban Roxanne: Preserve the Maine Way of Life.” Overwrought news stories detailed the plight of various tenants Quimby had inherited from the previous landowner; the tenants’ principal complaint seemed to be that Quimby was not going to let them live on her private land—hunting, logging, and snowmobiling as they pleased—while paying 1970s-era rents. About six months after buying the property, she raised rents to match what other landlords in the area charged. A cabin by the Penobscot River, for instance, was raised from $500 to $1,500—a year. But the sense of entitlement some Mainers had for their “right” to use Quimby’s property was powerful. “The people here are very angry,” one tenant said. “They feel betrayed.” In the state capital, a government task force was formed to look at the issue. Two state senators, a Democrat and a Republican, held a fact-finding meeting in the little village of Shin Pond near Quimby’s new land, where local businessmen and residents gathered to complain about her presumed conspiracy “to depopulate the area” and return the woods to nature. Several people urged the senators to persuade state officials to use the power of eminent domain to seize the land from Quimby. “You can cut her off at the knees,” one man exclaimed. The two senators—Paul Davis and Steve Stanley—were uncomfortable at the suggestion, given Mainers’ usual emphasis on the rights of private property owners not named Roxanne Quimby. But neither of them would rule out the idea.
The concerns went beyond the cultural bias against a former hippie, now a millionaire, who did not want hunters to kill bears and moose on her property. The underlying fear was for a local economy in jeopardy: the hunting camps and snowmobile trails brought tourist dollars to the rural area, supporting a small market and a hardware store—sources of income that might dry up because Quimby desired to preserve rather than exploit the woods. And although the Shin Pond economy was tiny, if Quimby continued to purchase forestland such “collateral damage” would mount. This was a legitimate fear—but no different from the reality every tenant faces everywhere when a home or a business is put up on land someone else owns, and without any sort of long-term lease or binding promise. Landlords sell. New owners set their own rules. The anti-Quimby forces felt they were defending a way of life, but from Quimby’s point of view, she wasn’t doing anything unreasonable by determining the fate of her own land.
Quimby did not expect the vilification she encountered—“Doesn’t everybody love a park?” she had reasoned—but she was not passive when attacked. Her instinct was to strike back. She pointed out the hypocrisy of her critics who slammed a national park as big government run amok even as they sought to deny her the rights every other property owner in Maine enjoyed. She slammed the governor for failing to back a national park even when Restore’s polling showed that a majority of voters statewide supported it (if not so much among residents in the Maine Woods vicinity). Finally, she openly contemplated running for governor with the Maine Green Independent Party, which invited her to be the keynote speaker at its next convention. She later summed up her initial responses to attacks on her land use policies this way: “This land is a treasure made by something larger than ourselves, but there are no guarantees that it will stay this way. I don’t think it should be left to chance. And the millions I’ve put into it gives me the right to determine the fate of the land I paid for. Really, I feel I’m doing what the state should have been doing for years.”
So Quimby continued purchasing land in the woods, ignoring the protests. She made it clear that she truly was leaving nothing to chance when she bought two parcels of land near the state park that gave her ownership of the only road for thirty miles traveling east and west. By closing the road to vehicles, she effectively stopped logging in the area. Land acquisition had made her a sort of general, cutting off the enemy’s supply lines. It was not a particularly benevolent image, but it demanded respect from adversaries, because the roads could be used as a bargaining chip.
Horse trading—that was something everyone in the forest could understand: If timber companies wanted to use her road, they’d have to pay, in money or, better yet, with old-growth forest in a straight-up exchange. In this way, trading land and access, she acquired more than 65,000 wild, pristine acres in the immediate area of Baxter State Park over a period of three years, and 30,000 acres elsewhere in the woods, spending more than $45 million in the process. Almost all her purchases consisted of lands high on the list that state conservationists and wildlife organizations felt were vital to preserve but had never been able to afford, including 20,000 acres surrounding the Wassataquoik Stream—one of the state’s outstanding wild rivers—and the nineteenth-century trails Theodore Roosevelt once used to climb Mount Katahdin. And after each purchase, Quimby systematically closed the land to hunting, snowmobiling, and the particularly destructive all-terrain vehicles, which cut deep ruts in the soft damp soil of spring and spoiled whole habitats very quickly. But hikers, birders, and campers were welcome. She barred use of logging roads that had been cut through her property, and began the long, slow process of restoring the natural contours of the land. Her staff ecologist, Bart DeWolf, began tramping through the lands, inventorying the plants and wildlife, and he soon discovered rare wild orchids and other vanishing species of plants, which Quimby wanted to protect.
Anger continued to well up with each new purchase, and Quimby could not help noticing a disturbing pattern: Conservationists in other parts of the country and the state would applaud her efforts, but the local people, those who knew and loved the Maine Woods best—people she had lived with for nearly two decades—made it clear that they hated what she was doing. They seemed to hate her, too, or at least to hate what they felt she stood for. Quimby and Restore, it was said, were on the open-season hunting list along with coyotes and other pests. She realized she could buy all the land she could afford, yet she might never achieve her goal of a Maine Woods National Park unless she could persuade the locals that she shared common cause with them. And she believed that beneath the rhetoric, ill will, and seemingly irreconcilable differences, there was more in common than not between her and her critics. She decided to change her approach to see if she was right.
She attempted to broker a deal between factions—the loggers, the state, and the conservationists—by offering the first property she had bought near Baxter State Park, the purchase near Shin Pond that started the uproar against her. She hoped to swap it for one of the properties developers had snatched at the same time, where there were still trees as old as 300 years, very rare in the heavily logged forest. Her first attempted land swap failed as negotiations bogged down in the politics of land use and state budgets. Next she proposed another trade with the same developer, who had threatened to build a new road and bridge over virgin river territory because he could not use logging roads on Quimby’s land. This time she left the state out of the mix and dealt directly with the developer. She offered to give him that first big parcel she had bought, where the tenants and snowmobilers were still up in arms—and she would get in return a more pristine wooded property adjacent to the park, where the Wassataquoik Stream flowed free. He would have his road access back; there would be no bridge and no new access road built; and the tenants, the snowmobilers, and the sporting camp that operated on Quimby’s original land purchase would be able to resume living, playing, and working as they had always done. The developer agreed, the deal was sealed, and—this was a new experience—Quimby’s critics began praising her for compromising. No faction had gotten everything it wanted in the deal. The developer wouldn’t be building on prime forestland as he had intended. Quimby had to give up some land she was attached to. Locals would still have to observe her restrictions—no hunting, no snowmobiling—on the land she had just acquired. But everyone came out with something.
Quimby emerged with a new business model for conserving the Maine Woods: compromise. She stopped talking about running for governor—that was just another CEO job, she decided, and she had had enough of that. She distanced herself from Restore, leaving the board and the park campaign, though she made it clear that she remained inspired by the group’s mission and wished it success. The problem was, Quimby said, that Restore was perceived as an outside, interfering Massachusetts-based group of environmentalists having little in common with ordinary Mainers, who liked to hunt and fish in the woods. Quimby thought this was unfair, because the group’s operation in Maine is run by a third-generation Mainer with roots in the logging industry, but that’s the perception nonetheless, and it was rubbing off on her. So for purely political reasons, she left the organization, and then set about introducing herself as a real person, rather than the cartoon that was the object of the bumper stickers and hate mail. She picked up the phone in October 2006 and called her toughest foes: the town manager of Millinocket in the heart of the wood basket, the heads of the Sportsmen’s Alliance and the Maine Snowmobile Association, a state senator who had been her harshest critic. Can we meet, she asked them, face to face? And once they got over the shock that she would call them at all, they agreed to meet.
At the gathering, as her curious guests looked on, Quimby began by saying she knew they had differences: She’d never persuade them to adopt her vegetarian lifestyle, and they’d never convince her that it was OK to shoot animals. Fine. Now let’s talk about what we do agree on. And she started a list.
We are all staunch defenders of private property rights, yes? We may not agree with what the other guy does with his property, but we have to respect the owner’s rights. This was America, after all. Everyone agreed.
And we all love the woods? Vigorous nods. And those woods are changing too fast, and are being diminished in many ways—can we agree on that? Yes, they could. Roxanne Quimby beamed. She presented everyone with a pound of fudge. The people at the meeting were suspicious, uncertain, but Quimby had lived in a cabin in Guilford and had endured the harsh winters that Mainers know so well, the penetrating cold that sears any exposed flesh. She talked their language. She was no longer a rich witch with the millions from a cosmetics empire. She was the woman who had to borrow the town shovel in Guilford when it snowed. And by the end of the meeting, without going into a great deal of specifics, they had agreed that there were probably some compromises they could strike in which all would get something they absolutely had to have, and they all could give up some things they might want but didn’t absolutely need. Important conservation could happen in the Maine Woods, responsible hunting and recreation could continue, what was left of the forest industry could still operate in the younger, well-used parts of the forest. Everyone could win. And as a show of goodwill, Quimby agreed to keep open a prized snowmobile trail on her newest property acquisition for a full year rather than close it immediately as she had intended. And after that, they would see.
The meetings soon became a monthly fixture, each of the members of this informal working group taking a turn as host. Quimby remained straightforward about her goals. She wanted to continue to establish wilderness sanctuaries that, for the most part, did not allow hunting, snowmobiling, or ATVs, and that she hoped someday would form the core of a single new park or protected wilderness. But she would be flexible, she promised, and make some areas open to traditional uses. The rest of the group members appreciated the clarity this brought to the process: Everyone knew where Roxanne stood. Pretty soon, Quimby had become the lesser evil—a person they could deal with, rather than the state bureaucracy or a nonprofit organization with a board and donors to answer to. Quimby could make a decision on the spot; she answered only to her own conscience. “You know, Roxanne,” one of her former critics said after a year of meetings, “you’re a real redneck.” It was a compliment—a statement that she was one of them. A short time later, a new agreement was publicly announced in which Quimby was able to buy another 9,000 acres of prime forest land near her existing holdings in the Wassataquoik Stream region—land the state wanted but couldn’t afford on its own. The purchase nearly completed her plan for amassing a huge swath of contiguous territory east of Baxter Park for permanent preservation. At the same time, she agreed to grant easements for recreation and logging on a 7,000-acre area near Millinocket, land that had low conservation value but important roads for logging and two favorite snowmobile trails. As a result, Quimby’s most vocal detractors appeared with the governor at a press conference, praising her as a good neighbor and steward of the land.
“Roxanne deserves a great deal of credit for bringing together groups with a very different vision from her own,” Gene Conlogue—the Millinocket town manager and an outspoken opponent of the park—said at the press conference. “And getting all of us to roll up our sleeves and develop a solution that works.” Newspaper columnists wrote in amazement about the “thaw” in the Maine Woods that just a year earlier would have seemed inconceivable.
Quimby had also accomplished something much deeper than just placating critics and securing more conservation lands. Her lands were becoming a de facto park. They lacked the infrastructure of a park, but the most onerous part—the restrictions on hunting, logging, and vehicles—was there. And the world hadn’t ended. The restrictions existed in a framework people accepted, because everyone got something. She had succeeded in making the idea of the park real. Restore had never been able to do this as an advocacy group with no land of its own. A resort operator on Roxanne’s former land at Shin Pond, previously angry but subsequently satisfied, talked of making a “180-degree turn” in his thinking about Quimby and her mission. Then, unwittingly, he quoted almost verbatim Quimby’s thoughts when she first convened her monthly working group: “We love our land, and maybe, in the long run, we all want the same thing.”
Far from feeling jilted because of Quimby’s departure from Restore and its campaign for a national park in Maine, Jym St. Pierre was ecstatic. In quitting the group so many Mainers loved to hate, Quimby had done more than anyone else to advance its cause, and for one simple reason. On her own, she was able to make the park idea tangible. The land was there. The critics had embraced the idea. It was a start.
Around the time of the “great thaw” between Roxanne Quimby and her detractors, the Land Use Regulation Commission held a final round of hearings around the state on Plum Creek’s proposal for a housing and resort development at Moosehead Lake. The purpose of the hearings was to solicit public comments on the proposal that would determine the future course of development and preservation in the Maine Woods. One of the best-attended and most impassioned hearings was at Greenville High School in January 2008. Men and women of the Moosehead Lake region gathered to discuss the future of a landscape which they had always thought was eternal, but which now would change, one way or another.
“Saving Moosehead Lake is a cause for a lot of people,” testified Pinkie Bartley, a resident of Greenville for fifty-two years and a proponent of approving the Plum Creek proposal without delay. “They’ll come up here for today and tell you how much they love this place and how it shouldn’t be changed at all—and then they’ll leave. Meanwhile, the rest of us are here to stay. We’re not fighting for a cause. We’re fighting for a say in our future.”
To some, that future looked ominous without Plum Creek in the picture. Stacy Fitts, a local legislator who sat on the Select Committee on Maine’s Future Prosperity, predicted the demise of the region’s economy if the plan was rejected. “The Moosehead region is crying for a change. This is the only place I have ever seen where a McDonald’s sits boarded up. It’s amazing to look at when you pull into this town.” Others spoke of the recreational opportunities that would be preserved with Plum Creek’s development, but that might vanish if the project was rejected. “I’ve hunted and hiked and fished and kayaked and cross-country skied and snowshoed…. To me, as a non-landowner, to have that opportunity is just fantastic,” the attorney Jeff Cummings argued. “We know from the Roxanne Quimby issues what can happen with certain landowners. And if this plan isn’t approved and if this land is subsequently sold to another landowner, we know that a lock can be put on the lands, literally. They can be shut down.”
A highlight in the case in favor of Plum Creek came when a local historian, Elaine Bartley, displayed photos to prove that in the past, development outstripped even Plum Creek’s modern proposal, though nature has largely reclaimed the Moosehead area since then. Lilly Bay had a resort hotel as recently as the 1930s, Bartley explained, built on the foundation of a lumber workers’ lodge—just as big as the one Plum Creek now proposes. Rail service was extensive a century ago, far better than it is today, with trains from New York direct to Kineo Station near the now protected Mount Kineo, the jut-jawed promontory overlooking Moosehead Lake. In 1892, the Coburn Steamboat Company built a wharf next to the train station and ran a fleet of lake steamers serving lodges, hotels, and camps all around the lake. Yacht races and regattas were daily events in the tourist season, and the Kineo Hotel held 400 guests and fielded its own baseball team. For a moment, as Bartley showed off the old photographs, the ghosts of Greenville’s and Moosehead’s past glory filled the meeting room, echoes of a more genteel age—when train and carriage were the principal methods of transport, global warming was unheard of, and the forest seemed as limitless as the technological progress promised by a new century, the twentieth. “An opponent…said that approving the plan would be like breaking up a masterpiece painting,” she said. “I think just the contrary. Approving this plan will give us the opportunity to put back our picture of our history.”
Noel Wohlforth, a member of the school board, was among those who thought the masterpiece was under siege and that Plum Creek needed a new and better plan. “What in the world would a plan like this do to this beautiful town of Greenville? It scares me. The term in here that I found the most startling is ‘Impact Zone.’ We are an impact zone. When I was in the army that meant a bomb was going to drop. I kind of think in a way this is the bomb.”
David Foley, a former town planner, decried Plum Creek’s “dark hints” that a denial of its proposal would spell doom for the forest and the region. “You could almost admire their audacity if the consequences weren’t so devastating…. Plum Creek thinks we’re a bunch of rubes who just fell off the turnip truck. When you make sense, you don’t need battalions of attorneys, spin doctors, and fixers. When you’re a straight shooter, you don’t need bamboozlement and not-so-subtle threats.”
Stephen and Meridith Perkins spoke almost poetically of a small camp they have on Mud Cove on the east side of Lilly Bay, of the lynx they have seen near their cabin, of the sound of the loons on the lake at night, and the answering call of the coyotes, a conversation that has been going on for thousands of years, and that will probably be lost if Plum Creek’s plan is approved. “Are you willing to trade the call of the loon for the ring of the cash register?” Stephen Perkins asked.
Perhaps the most eloquent comments at the hearing from either side came from Jayne Lello, a teacher from the town of Sebec, who had prepared for the hearing by reading from Thoreau’s The Maine Woods and C. A. Stephens’s 1888 Knock About Club in the Woods. The testimony of citizens at these public hearings is seldom reported in the news media and rarely read—the transcripts sit and molder as the wheel of government turns to the next crisis—but Lello’s simple, loving words of caution and her plea to reexamine the proposal, not to kill it but to strike the best possible balance between nature and commerce, are worth noting:
My thoughts on this whole issue are relatively simple, boiled down like maple syrup to two words and one question. How much?
We know that things are going to change. And LURC’s task as our state crossing guard is to answer this question. We know Plum Creek must and will make a profit. How much?
We know some wild and special places will be forever lost when this deal is made. How much?
And there will be some economic gains and losses for this region. How much? I can only imagine the smile on the face of Plum Creek’s land prospector when he or she first flew over the incredible landscape realizing it was all for sale. How much?
At zoned timberland prices, we know it was pretty much a steal. Now, not surprisingly, they want to rezone those acres from timberland to wonderland prices. How much?
Maine people wonder what the fallout and what the advantages will be. Everything will change, but how much?
My husband has always said that Maine is like Vermont’s poor cousin. Vermont, I think, has always realized it’s worth more than Maine. It has good self-esteem and laws that protect its unique land and lifestyle. Too often I fear that Maine sells itself short. We’re a poor state, but we are rich in resources—water, forests, mountains, and coastline. Maine people understand and appreciate the incredible resources outside our backdoors just beyond our woodpiles; but we can rarely afford the real estate prices. We are very proud and feel a responsibility to what happens here because we know these ponds, lakes, streams, woods, back roads, and mountaintops. We don’t own them personally; but like a common-law marriage or an old familiar habit, we are tied together, Mainers and the land. The strong character of the people here has been chiseled from the forceful nature of the place. This Moosehead region with its breathtaking views, slippery sparkling fish, running waters, swift deer, lumbering moose, craggy mountaintops, and ever-resilient forests always takes our breath away and never fails to rekindle our sense of wonder and our exuberance for life. That’s why we’re here and why we stay. Historically the native people who named these landmarks, Henry David Thoreau, C. A. Stephens, Holman Day, and on to eloquent writers in this time, are amazed and inspired. It doesn’t discriminate between natives and visitors. It enriches us all.
“How much?” is the main question.1
When the comments from the public hearings, along with written testimony mailed and e-mailed, were tallied, it became clear that the terms of the debate had shifted, that Lello’s questions were shared by many, and that the compromising approach of Roxanne Quimby was working against Plum Creek and the specter of mammoth development in the Maine Woods. The comments ran twenty to one in calling for the commission to reject the proposal and to send Plum Creek back to the drawing board. It seemed likely that many more months, possibly years, would pass before the issues were resolved and any sort of project could proceed, and that even after LURC made its decision, there would almost certainly be time-consuming lawsuits and endangered species petitions and continued debate. Some sort of development would eventually take place, but it would no longer preclude significant land preservation in the woods.
Quimby, meanwhile, continued to buy up land, and her ability to do so increased significantly in November 2007, when the Clorox Company, best known for making bleach, bought Burt’s Bees for $913 million, with a promise to continue its green policies (and to incorporate at least some of them in other divisions of the company). Quimby’s remaining 20 percent share was worth $182 million—more than she had made from selling the entire company just four years earlier. Quimby acknowledged that the buyer had not previously been known for environmentalism—and that its signature product, bleach, was bad for the environment—but she felt the sale would allow her to accelerate her conservation efforts in the Maine Woods, and to expand her efforts to other areas as well. If selling the company created a karmic debt, she would later say, her use of the money for conservation settled the account.
In addition to continued purchases in the forest, Quimby began buying—acre by acre—the in-holdings in Maine’s Acadia National Park and other national parks around the country. In-holdings are small pieces of privately owned land inside national parks that were retained by the original owners when the parks were formed. Now and then these holdouts come up for sale, and sometimes developers snap them up, then threaten to erect an inappropriate mansion or some other structure that could spoil the ambience or views within the park—a strategy designed to coax an exorbitant purchase offer from the U.S. National Park Service. Quimby decided to try to swoop in and buy in-holdings instead, sometimes acting through intermediaries with sellers who might not approve of her conservationist ways. In 2016, on the hundredth anniversary of the national park service, she says she will present a portfolio of in-holdings to the superintendent of Acadia National Park, and another to the park service nationwide. She plans to donate the land with no strings attached.
And on that anniversary, she hopes to propose something else with the land she has now and plans to obtain in the future in the Maine Woods—the same thing Franklin D. Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller Jr. did in the face of opposition to the creation of a Grand Teton national park. She will suggest a national monument. It is the perfect solution: less than a park, but still protected, and it requires only the order of a president, not an act of Congress.
“We’re not quite ready for a park,” she says. “A monument or a national wilderness area is less threatening. It’s doable. And it will protect nature. And once it’s there, and people find they can live with it, enjoy it, and prosper because of it, then turning it into a park becomes no big deal. That’s what I’m gunning for. And that’s what will save the Maine Woods.”