Park Debate Is a Battle Over the Future of Maine

The nearly full moon sets beyond the mountains of Maine's Baxter State Park. The state's highest peak, Mount Katahdin, is at left. (AP)

"Areas under consideration to become parks need to meet some standard for ecological, cultural or recreational significance, and this would seem to make the grade," said Robert E. Manning, a professor at the University of Vermont's Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, who has worked on several national park projects.

"In most parks, hunting and motorized sports are banned, but some of the newer ones are more amenable to mixed uses," Manning said. "This might be a good candidate for something like that."

But detractors say that as a potential tourist attraction, the Maine woods have plenty of drawbacks. They lack a high-profile land feature, such as Yosemite's picturesque Half Dome mountain or Yellowstone's Old Faithful geyser. And the vast forest contains only a few stray stands of old-growth trees, which environmentalists deem most important to protect.

Many Mainers also mock the proposed park's stable of celebrity backers -- such as actors Harrison Ford, Jeff Bridges and Morgan Freeman.

"Answer me this: What right do these people have to make a decision that concerns us?" said Conatser, a retired Marine whose rustic Bowlin Camps has been in operation on its current site since 1895. "You couldn't find five people up here who think it's a good idea. It would ruin what makes Maine special. It would ruin us."

But Quimby, 54, a self-described flower child who founded the natural cosmetics company Burt's Bees in Maine in the 1980s and has bought up more than 50,000 acres of woodlands in the state, is undeterred by such arguments.

Many of this country's 58 national parks were established with the help of wealthy individuals, some of whom were vilified by locals opposed to the projects. John D. Rockefeller, who donated much of what became Montana's Grand Teton National Park, was pilloried as out of touch with rural needs and sensibilities.

Here, Quimby has emerged as a lightning rod for criticism. As a resident of Guilford, Maine, in the 1980s, she collaborated with Burt Shavitz, a local beekeeper, on products including beeswax lip balm. She moved the company headquarters to North Carolina in 1993 and recently sold 80 percent of the firm for a reported $180 million.

Since she began investing in land, she said, she has received threatening phone calls and e-mails that led her to live outside the state for much of the year.

"I think there's enough land here for all of us to use the way we want to. I never expected such controversy, but at this point I have $20 million at stake in this argument," said Quimby, who splits her time between Winter Harbor, Maine, and Palm Beach, Fla. "At the end of the day, I insist that this is my property. I paid for it, and I paid to control its fate while I own it."

Proponents say the park would give a much-needed kick to Maine's struggling rural economy, which has suffered as northeastern paper companies have begun to lose out to overseas competitors.

The civic symbol of that decline is Millinocket, on the eastern edge of where the park would be. The once bustling mill town's two nearby paper mills, which were shuttered in recent years, have returned to operation, but with only half the 1,100 jobs they once provided. The town's desolate Main Street bears the visible scars of economic depression: boarded-up shops and storefronts unchanged in decades. Unemployment there is estimated to be as high as 30 percent.

An economic impact study commissioned by Restore estimates that a park would generate $109 million to $435 million in annual retail sales and bring the state 5,000 to 20,000 new jobs.

But Millinocket Town Manager Gene Conlogue, a leading critic of the proposed national park, calls those numbers a pipe dream. He has printed bumper stickers that are plastered on more than a few pickup trucks in town and that say "RESTORE: Boston, Leave our Maine Way of Life Alone."

"Are things ever going to return to be the way they were? No. But a national park is not the answer. It would be death of the wood products industry," Conlogue said.

Pointing to the revival of the mills and the recent arrival in town of a manufacturing company, he said: "The answer is to diversify the economy through industry. A park would just be bringing in seasonal, low-paying, trinket-selling jobs that'll make people even poorer."

Quimby, meanwhile, is pressing on. She met with state environmental leaders recently to discuss plans to designate a hiking and canoeing trail along the eastern branch of the Penobscot River, commemorating the route traversed by Henry David Thoreau in 1857.

"It's not a park, but it would be a start," she said. "We still have a long way to go."