North Woods

Why should it be a National Park?

There may be no area as undiscovered by tourists and nature enthusiasts as Maine's North Woods. This is the largest stretch of uninterrupted wilderness remaining in the eastern United States. While several conservation groups and public land advocates have been vocal about protecting northern Maine for decades, the first prominent person to espouse this desire was Henry David Thoreau, who traveled to the area in 1846, 1853, and 1857. He eventually published a book "The Maine Woods" in 1864 detailing these visits and why the region's wild nature was worth conserving in its natural state. Fortunately, much of the setting that Thoreau encountered remains. The population density remains less than one person per square mile.

The centerpiece of the North Woods region is Mount Katahdin, the tallest mountain in the state at 5,267 feet. The peak is also the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail and located in Baxter State Park, which encompasses over 200,000 acres. Neighboring Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument protects 87,000 acres of additional forests and waterways. Roxanne Quimby, the co-founder of the company Burt's Bees, and her son Lucas St. Clair, spearheaded the effort to establish the national monument in 2016 by donating their lands to the federal government. This donation was met with both loud support and skepticism.

New public lands almost universally receive negative feedback from the local community, but over time border communities come to love and honor their association with a nationally recognized landscape. Acadia National Park, also in Maine, was preserved as Sieur de Monts National Monument in 1916, under very similar circumstances. Wealthy conservationists, Charles W. Eliot and George B. Dorr, championed the idea of Acadia becoming the first National Park east of the Mississippi River. John D. Rockefeller Jr. then bought up additional lands so not only the rich, but everyone could enjoy Acadia's beauty. While the era of wealthy conservatism seems to be mostly over, Quimby's is still one family trying to live up to that standard.

Much of the controversy surrounding the new monument comes from the logging industry and hunters who do not want the productive and sportsman-friendly forests to become off-limits. The land donated by Quimby helps enlarge the protected area of the North Woods, but critics say that turning over the land to the government means the forests can no longer be logged and that will harm Maine's economy. This argument is disingenuous because before the donation, Quimby did not allow logging on her land. The change in ownership simply provides an additional layer of protection for a tract of land that would never have been logged in the first place. Katahdin Woods and Waters is instead an example of a way forward not only for the magnificent North Woods region but for the future of conservation in America.

Henry David Thoreau famously called for the protection of this region. While he may have been one of the first, he was not the last. Several campaigns, including the well-known 'RESTORE: The North Woods' have been focused on creating a National Park. The most recent attempt resulted in, not a National Park, but Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument.