Plum Foolish

The other alternative Lund sees is “getting really tough,” something Maine agencies, including LURC, tend not to do and something Lund thinks isn’t going to happen. “LURC is a permitting agency,” he says. “Their thing is to give permits.”

Jym St. Pierre is no more hopeful, noting that “LURC has a very weak leadership now and not a particularly strong commission.” St. Pierre is a lifelong Mainer. He is unconfrontational, low-key, laconic even. And besides being the former director of LURC, he is the current state director of Restore: The North Woods. I have never believed that Restore is radical, just that the people who rail against it are parochial and naive. The idea for a national park in northern Maine is neither radical nor new. It has come out of Concord, Massachusetts, twice now—the first time in 1853, when Henry David Thoreau, inspired by the view from Maine’s highest peak, Mount Katahdin, called for “national preserves where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth.’ ”

Thoreau was much on my mind the bright summer day I climbed Big Spencer Mountain with Jym St. Pierre. From the 3,230-foot-high summit we gazed out over Plum Creek’s holdings and most of the 3.2-million-acre Maine Woods National Park that Restore and its allies are promoting. To our east rose tundra-cloaked Mount Katahdin and OJI Mountain, named for the landslides that carved those letters. Lakes and rivers—which belong to the people of Maine and America, not to REITs—stretched as far as we could see. To the northeast lay Chesuncook, Ragged and Caribou lakes; to the northwest, Lobster Lake; to the southwest, Moosehead. Apart from the chartreuse scars of clearcuts and a cloud of dust over a logging road, the scene from this elevation hadn’t changed since Thoreau described it: “There it was, the State of Maine. . . . Immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on. . . . No clearing, no house. It did not look as if a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking stick there. Countless lakes—Moosehead . . . Chesuncook . . . Millinocket . . . and mountains, also, whose names, for the most part, are known only to the Indians. The forest looked like a firm grass sward, and the effect of these lakes in its midst has been well compared, by one who has since visited this same spot, to that of a ‘mirror broken into a thousand fragments, and wildly scattered over the grass, reflecting the full blaze of the sun.’ ”

WHAT YOU CAN DO

Urge your state and/or federal legislators to support public acquisition of Northern Forest lands. For updates on Plum Creek’s development proposal, log on to www.maineaudubon.org and www.maineenvironment.org. For information on the proposed Maine Woods National Park, go to www.restore.org.