"The blend of tradition and sheer competence achieved by the Conovers is startling and probably unique in Maine guiding today."
John March, Audubon
Maine LURC Hearings
- Background
- Testimony given Dec. 1, 2007, Greenville, Maine at the LURC hearings regarding the Plum Creek corporations’ rezoning proposal for its timberlands
- Final Public Hearing before the Land Use Regulation Commision, Greenville, ME, January 19, 2008
Background
During the month of December, 2007, Maine’s Land Use Regulation Commission is having public hearings on the largest development proposal that Maine has ever seen. Plum Creek, out of Seattle, Washington, is the biggest private landowner in the United States. In 1998, the company bought over 900,000 acres of forestland in Maine, for $200 per acre. Now they are proposing rezoning to enable massive development on forest and shore lands of Moosehead Lake and the Greenville, Maine region.
LURC’s decision will not only determine the future of this area of currently wild timberlands, but will perhaps more importantly, set a precedent for Maine’s “unorganized territories”. These territories are the lands that encompass the famous St. John, Allagash, and West Branch Penobscot rivers among many other beautiful undeveloped forest lands that comprise the famous Maine Woods.
For further information on this rezoning proposal, please visit LURC@maine.gov . Letters should be sent to: Catherine Carroll, Director Land Use Regulation Commission 22 State House Station Augusta, Maine 04333. Also: Catherine.M.Carroll@maine.gov For perspectives on this proposal from some Maine organizations, please visit: www.nrcm.org , www.maine.sierraclub.org , www.mooseheadfutures.org , www.fsmaine.org , www.restore.org or www.forestecologynetwork.org.
Testimony given Dec. 1, 2007, Greenville, Maine at the LURC hearings regarding the Plum Creek corporations’ rezoning proposal for its timberlands
Hello, my name is Alexandra Conover of Willimantic, which is twenty miles south of Greenville. I am a Board member of a number of Maine outdoor organizations. I have served the State in an advisory capacity on several land or river use committees for nearly three decades. Since 1980 my husband and I have run North Woods Ways, a year round guide service. We run canoeing and snowshoeing trips in the Maine Woods. Almost all the land we guide on is within LURC jurisdiction.
I want to thank the LURC Commissioners for the attention and consideration you are giving each of our perspectives. You are saddled with a staggering responsibility. I want to talk about Maine’s wild lands, heirlooms, the Goose that lay the golden eggs, and our future. I am speaking from the perspective of a guide in the ecotourism market.
I want to ask a rhetorical question about heirlooms. Who of you owns a treasured well worn firearm perhaps given to you by your grandfather? Have you inherited a China doll that has been in your family for generations? Are you wearing a ring that has been passed down to you by a family member? I want to ask you a key question: When comes the point where you would be willing to sell that gun, that doll, that ring? At what point could that heirloom become so valueless to you, that you would put it on eBay?
The Maine Woods is an heirloom that has been passed down to us for countless generations. For the first 12,000 years they were homeland to Indians. In the last 300 years they have evolved into a working resource that produced not only fur, fish, fresh water, game and timber, but recreational opportunities. These were and are annual perpetual cash crops. No one thing exploiting or dominating the other, each thriving. The Maine Woods and the lands of the Moosehead region is an heirloom unique in the world. They define us as individuals, as a community, regionally and within this country. Crucial to my testimony, the Maine Woods define us in the global marketplace.
Maine has the biggest wild land left east of the Mississippi. I have made my living all my adult years here, bringing people to the Maine Woods. We train young apprentices each season. Our clients come from Damariscotta to Los Angeles; from Europe to Australia. They come here to the Greenville area and the currently remote W. Br. Penobscot region – a mere 35 miles from here- precisely because it is wild. They don’t travel here to look at our malls or our museums, or our marinas. They come to the wild lands of Maine to commune with nature. Because we have here one of the last places on Earth that has a nature dominated landscape.
Ecotourism is not just a buzzword. It is a serious economic sector that is burgeoning as the globe looses its wild places. Plum Creek is well aware that they own lands that have far more value as wild destinations then as timberlands - precisely because of the world’s dwindling remote places.
I view the Maine Woods as the Goose that lay the golden eggs. If you kill the Goose – no more golden eggs. These lands have been producing “golden eggs” for time out of mind. These “eggs” are our natural resources, the clean water here, the productive forests, the fur, the food and the fine rural communities we live in. One of its most valuable eggs is the global markets desire for wild places. Timberlands or not, the Maine Woods is a place where nature dominates. So, how do you kill the Goose?
By creating permanent human structures. Once you transform a formerly nature dominated landscape to a human dominated landscape, whether it be a golf course, or a fancy home or a resort area, you have irreparably changed that landscape to a fixed commodity - something that can only produce money in a limited, finite way. So who cares? Why care?
Because once we rezone even 2,000 acres of land, let alone 20,000 acres, to be commercially developed, they are gone. They don’t come back. You cannot create wild lands. There is a finite supply. If we rezone the Plum Creek lands, then the rest of the Maine Woods, close to 12 million acres, will be up for grabs. For who is going to hang on to land as timberlands when you can make gobs of money instead, as commercial real estate?
If we citizens, through LURC, choose to rezone these productive timberlands, these globally viable wild lands, we will kill one of the most rare commodities we govern over in America’s lower 48 states. The Goose’s head will be on the chopping block. Our heirlooms will be up for sale.
Why are we thinking, even for one minute, to cash in on an heirloom that will forever pass from our hands? We will never again have the chance to govern its stewardship as we have now with the current LURC zonings. The productivity and essence of these lands can never be returned to us nor give us all they have been able to give for these many centuries.
Plum Creek certainly can and will make money from their lands regardless of current zoning. And of course they would make lots and lots of more money if they were able to turn even a small acreage of their lands into commercial use. A few local people would initially have a spike upwards in their income. But then what? Will the rezoning make the North Woods and the Moosehead region a more viable place to live? Will it become a more attractive global ecotourism destination?
I propose that, instead, #1.We as communities and as a State should begin promoting the Maine wild lands ourselves as a global ecotourism destination and do our utmost to secure these lands. #2. We should encourage our young people to stay by using community funds to sponsor a promising student’s education. For every year that their education is subsidized by their community, they, in turn, live and work back in their hometown. #3. It is paramount that LURC formulate a public plan for this region and all the lands in your jurisdiction. We must cease looking to mega-corporations to solve our problems or create our future, for that is when we give up our autonomy, our uniqueness and just become someone else’s serfs.
In summary I ask the Commissioners to look in their deepest hearts and think about this productive vibrant Goose. Think about this irreplaceable heirloom that has given us our identity, our livelihoods and something that is unique in the world. Help us turn away from this Silver Bullet of Plum Creek’s. If you do so, you will empower us to keep our heirlooms within our families and within our communities for perpetuity.
Final Public Hearing before the Land Use Regulation Commision, Greenville, ME, January 19, 2008
Plum Creek Hearing Notes
I’m Garrett Conover from just down the road in Willimantic, Maine . For the past 27 years Alexandra Conover and I have been guiding as North Woods Ways, leading 5 to 14 day canoe and snowshoe trips in Maine, and Labrador. I’m concerned about the dangerous precedent setting nature of granting a zoning variation to enable a development proposal of this scale to make windfall profits on lands purchased and taxed as forestry lands.
When I look at residents who are in favor of the proposal (and I’d like to mention here that I have friends and neighbors who are on the favoring side, and I respect their difference in opinion), it is clear that each stands to make something in the short term, and for a few, perhaps the longer term. Those opposed, accept and expect a more widely spread return from a wilder watershed which will yield sustainable dividends rather than one-time quick profiteering for a few. One of the things that interests me here is that the micro-capitalists in favor of development are already successful and will remain so whether Plum Creek is given a green light or not. I’ve used the term micro-capitalist deliberately to show an important point of relativity. Many of us in this region are in danger of perceiving a rather meager spilling of glittery coins as riches, while the real bricks of profit are hauled away, distributed to global stockholders, and banked elsewhere.
Another point of relativity appears on the ground. Environmentalists have long bemoaned unchecked “liquidation forestry” practices; yet those tragedies, horrifying as they are to an ecologist, are benign when compared to the liquidation harvesting that takes place when timberlands become developed lands, and all shreds of potential recovery are eliminated forever.
If we can be bold enough to oppose this proposal it would be the first time in over a century of being under the thumb of national and multinational powers that some autonomy was granted to the people of the region. Just as Plum Creek has done research for all other major landowners via this proposal; we as a citizenry and State can likewise make use of the data. After a decade of investment, overhead, legal fees, and buying of strategic grease for politics and public relations; there can be no doubt of the value of this resource. We can let it be sold out from under us and hope for the best; or we can take the more difficult path that prefers to keep a sustainable picture intact, to accept less in immediate profits spread among more people farther into the future; and to keep those dollars in danger of leaving the state, as an investment with returns available to coming generations of residents .
I don’t believe this region is so impoverished that a handful of crumbs might be seen as better than no crumbs, and confused with corporate generosity. As of five minutes of ten this morning the local snowmobile club had rallied 23 machines to the hearing, providing a bit of an economic indicator. At the mid and high end of the range these retail at $7,000.00 to $10,000.00 each. That represents $161,000.00 to $230.000.00 of disposable income spent on expensive toys. I would hope this might mean that the residents of this area are not so destitute that pawning the heirloom crown and jewels for some immediately available shiny trinkets, (or another tank of gas or two), could possibly be seen as fair trade, a good deal, or anything but legal thievery on a gigantic scale.
I’m enough of a Yankee skin-flint to not want to be a willing victim of this proposal and the zoning variation; and I hope that it does not look like a good deal to the LURC committee members either.
Thank You.
An Encouraging Observation after the Final Public Hearing:
While there was a roughly equal split between those for and against the proposal, an interesting difference did appear as the hours of testimony passed. I counted only two people who looked to be under 25 -30 years of age who spoke in favor. While in the opposition camp which is pretty much composed of big picture environmentalists, there were close to twenty college age people representing at least three different campuses in Maine. In addition there were probably at least another ten or fifteen people under 30, including the final speaker , a fourteen year old boy who had just come in from a morning of snowmobiling with his father, who amazingly spoke on the side of all those dastardly “tree huggers, skiers, and snowshoers”. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to applaud or cheer as it would lengthen the hearing time.
Maybe we should take the advice of the younger speakers who had the gumption to come, after all, it is their future.