Saving the North Woods

NEFF suggested that the Downeast Lakes Land Trust collaborate with it in an undertaking called the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership. Farm Cove Peninsula would be purchased outright, then conservation easements would be obtained on additional forestland, bringing the total area protected to 342,000 acres. The project would include 78,000 surface acres of lake habitat (60 lakes in all), 54,000 acres of wildlife-rich wetlands, 445 miles of lake shoreline, 1,500 miles of river and stream shoreline. Last March the partnership (with its other member, the Woodie Wheaton Land Trust) completed the St. Croix phase, raising $3.2 million and purchasing a 500-foot wildlife corridor/buffer along 13 miles of Spednic Lake (another world-famous smallmouth fishery) and 36 miles along the St. Croix River (the international boundary with Canada). Purchase of the Farm Cove Peninsula will cost $12.5 million, the easement on the remaining land $13 million. The partnership has committed to close on the deal by Dec. 31, 2004. It's a tough time to be raising money, and help is needed. Still, at this writing, everything's on schedule.

Moreover, the timing has been perfect. As the partnership was signing options to purchase the land and easements New Brunswick had just bought and protected 390,000 acres from Georgia Pacific's Canadian holdings, 72,000 acres of which, mostly on Spednic's north shore, has been designated as wilderness reserve. Throw in state federal reserve lands, Passamaquoddy and Penobscot lands, and other protected parcels, and you get a nearly contiguous block of one million acres of fish and wildlife habitat saved from development.

Aspects of the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership offer important lessons. First, nothing like this has ever been attempted anywhere. Other protection projects-even NEFF's monumental Pingree coup-have targeted unpeopled woods. No other project has been community based, community spawned and designed to preserve the local economy and traditional lifestyles. People live and work in these woods. The Baileyville mill, now owned by Domtar, is the biggest employer in the region. Without it the economy, along with the forest products industry, would collapse and Wagner would be forced to sell outright to developers. The partnership guarantees continued logging under responsible, though not oppressive, guidelines. Guaranteed also is public access and all traditional uses including hunting, fishing, trapping, snowmobiling, and even ATV riding. The project is a model and a mold-breaker, the only practical way to avoid the Californication of Maine. As NEFF's director and Maine resident, Amos Eno, comments, "We should strive to lead, consistent with our motto 'Dirigo,' [I lead] and not follow California's example. . . . A half century ago California was self-sufficient in wood. Today the state imports 80 percent of what it uses. . . . Maine is a state on its knees financially, and Washington County in downeastern Maine is on the economic floor." The Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership offers salvation of the environment and the economy, which, here and everywhere, are one and the same.

Washington County is the epicenter of the Wise-Use movement in Maine, but there's been little noise. In all my research I was able to turn up only one published harangue-a June 19, 2003 op-ed in The Portland Press Herald by Wise-Use guru Jon Reisman of Cooper. "I expect more than half a million acres between Routes 1 and 6 will be 'protected' in one manner or another, creating the Down East National Salmon Wilderness Reserve, or DENSWR," lamented Reisman. ". . . Wilderness is winning over jobs, and for most of Washington County it means less opportunity. Unless you're in the business of protecting salmon habitat or publishing beautiful multi-colored Green propaganda."

The partnership's project manager, Frank Reed, met with Reisman to try to reason with him. "He couldn't call this a bad idea," recalls Reed, "because then he'd being saying the landowners shouldn't do what they want with their land. I kept saying: 'Jonathan, are you saying you want to tell the landowner what to do with his land?' 'Oh, no, no, no,' he'd say. 'Then what are you trying to tell me here?' He finally said, 'Well, landowners ought to be able to do what they want, but uh, uh, uh. . . . '"

If you follow FR&R's conservation column, you may recall my report about the nasty and embarrassing tiff over the Champion lands acquisition in Vermont in which a tiny group of opportunists whipped up paranoia and property-rights fervor among economically and intellectually disadvantaged residents by claiming (falsely) that the deal had been put together in secret by government bureaucrats and the green mafia from out of state. But because the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership involves neither government nor environmental groups and because it was hatched and is being steered by locals, especially guides and sportsmen, wise-users have no one to co-opt. The big peg for the wise-users in Vermont had been the ecological reserve in which the prescribed management was no management. "Come and watch healthy trees grow old, fall over and die," puffed James Ehlers in (Vermont) Outdoors Magazine. But last January the board of the Downeast Lakes Land Trust unanimously voted to a establish a 3,500-acre ecological reserve in the upper Machias River watershed-habitat of Maine's endangered anadromous Atlantic salmon-that will abut a 3,800-acre ecological reserve established by the state and a 3,700-acre parcel to be managed by the land trust on 100- to 150-year cutting rotations.

"Ecological reserves are important," says Bill Cherry, who worked 29 years as an industrial forester for St. Regis, Champion and International Paper and is now the coordinator of Machias and East Machias River Watershed Council. "They provide valuable controls, baseline data. If we're doing something wrong elsewhere in the forest, ecological reserves can tell us what it is."

And ecologist Janet McMahon, a consultant for the project, told me this: "These woods are all pretty young. The oldest stands are along the water, and they're only about 90-year-old hemlocks, about a third of their natural age. What's missing is older, closed canopy stands. Most of the beech has been cut; that has hurt bears. The oaks have been cut off the ridges, and that has hurt both deer and bear. We know old growth is good for deer yards, and in most cases reserves in Maine are surrounded by land with lots of browse. Reserves provide big trees and snags for species like marten, woodpeckers, wood ducks, hooded mergansers and owls. That's the part of the North Woods that's missing." In Downeasat Maine at least, sportsmen are starting to understand this.

I did not argue with the land trust's Steve Keith and NEFF's Tim Storrow when they proclaimed that if you just walked around in these woods (or "puckerbrush," as Downeasters call it) you wouldn't see much of anything, that the only way to get a feeling for this country is by water, and that since I was going to be on the water anyway, I thought I might as well tote a fly rod. First stop was Tomah Stream, a bit of an anomaly in the area known for its smallmouths, landlocks and lake trout, because in spring it provides spectacular wild brook-trout fishing. One of the reasons is that Tomah sustains the highest diversity of caddis species ever found in the United States. It also sustains the state-threatened Tomah mayfly, one of the very few predatory mayflies.

But in high summer Tomah is low and warm, and I'd have to content myself with smallmouths. For half a day we paddled and pulled canoes through the heart of the project area via as wild and lovely a stream as I have ever encountered. Raptors (barred owls and red-shouldered hawks I think, but couldn't get positive IDs) flushed ahead of us and sailed toward Grand Lake Flowage, only to flush again. A ruffed grouse and her brood buzzed out of the alders. Ebony jewelwing damselflies in fantastic numbers fluttered over dry sandbars and perched in iridescent, green-black clusters on brush, sedges and the drooping seedheads of grass. We drifted over fallfish nests-piles of gravel three feet across and a foot high. Smallmouths, some a foot and a half long, ghosted out of the shallows. Jeff McEvoy, my stern man and new owner of the storied Weatherby's Lodge at Grand Lake Stream, regaled me with local lore, while his Springer bitch, Madison (named for the river), pranced along the bank. McEvoy, formerly with the Natural Resources Council of Maine and, before that, a US Fish and Wildlife Service refuge manger, has been a source of biological enlightenment and political savvy for all committed to the protection of woods, waters and traditional livelihoods. We caught smallmouths-clean, ruby-eyed fish with caudal fins you could shave with-and fat, grunting fallfish on Clousers and beadhead Woolly Buggers. I enjoyed the plucky fallfish nearly as much as the bass. "Cousin trout," Thoreau called them.