By Anne Mitchell
When President Obama appointed Roxanne Quimby to the National Park Foundation Board of Directors in 2010, the NPF press release bio of Ms. Quimby, included a reference to having “bought and conserved approximately 120,000 acres of wild lands in Maine at risk of or already damaged by logging for timber.”
Her choice of words is revealing and should be part of any discussion regarding the creation of a north woods national park in Maine and its potential impact on the logging industry.
Early efforts to rally support for a national park in Maine were laden with language encouraging conservation, preservation and protection of these lands for future generations of Mainers. However Quimby’s disdain for the traditional uses of hunting, fishing and cutting timber was demonstrated by blocking timber roads and posting her land. This did not sit well with the people of northern Maine, and Quimby took the proposal off the table in late 2012 to regroup and develop a new strategy.
Today we see a retooled effort to influence public opinion. The controversial Roxanne Quimby, no longer the public face of the push for a park, is succeeded by her son, Lucas St. Clair. Environmentalism is no longer the leading argument, replaced by promises of an economic boost and increased jobs. But not an increase in timber harvesting jobs.
St. Clair has been touting the results of a study commissioned by his mother’s Elliotsville Plantation, Inc., which attempts to minimize any negative impact on the logging industry by declaring that the industry is nearly dead anyway. “Since peaking in the 1970s, the significance of the forest products industry has declined in importance relative to the region’s overall economy.” Boasting about the creation of higher wage jobs in the tourism and travel sectors and increases in non-labor sources of income, the Quimby report suggests that the relatively small number of logging jobs will hardly be missed when the park opens.
Also revealing is the recent release of a list of Maine businesses that purport to support a new national park and recreation area in the Katahdin region. Not a single logging company is on that list. Plenty of cafes, hair salons, even a surf shop and a funeral home signed up, but conspicuous by their absence are the Maine Guides, loggers, and others who actually make their living in the Maine woods. Would anyone who makes a living in the woods dare hand it over to the federal government to manage?
In addition to Quimby’s anti-logging statements and practices, Maine people whose livelihoods depend on a healthy forest should be concerned by the recent history of timber harvesting in our national parks. The federal government’s track record in America’s West enables us to anticipate what a national park would mean for Maine’s forest products industry. The Northwest Forest Plan of 1994, put in place by the federal government to manage nearly 25 million acres of federal forests in Washington, Oregon and northern California, resulted in an 80 percent reduction in the allowable timber harvest! The increased fires and disease that have become part of life out West are reasonable expectations of a federal forest management plan being introduced to Maine.
Roxanne Quimby, meanwhile, is not the only Mainer to be appointed by President Obama to the National Park Foundation board of directors. David Shaw, founder of Idexx Laboratories, was also appointed to the Board in 2010. Make no mistake: Maine has been targeted for a national park. This is no longer the musings of the over-active imaginations of conspiracy theorists. The plan is in place. Maine people need to prepare legal, preventative measures necessary to reassert citizen sovereignty over Maine lands that are under the real threat of being subject to a federal land transfer in the very near future. Remember, Ms. Quimby once declared her goal of making a gift to the National Park System on the occasion of their 100th birthday in 2016.
Anne Mitchell is chair of the Maine Woods Coalition, organized in 2000 to fight RESTORE’s plan for a 3.2 million acre federal park. Please visit www. mainewoodscoalition.org.
