MAINE VOICES
George Neavoll

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Maine Woods National Park and Preserve worth supporting

It would create new opportunities for many and preserve access to land
that is at risk of being lost.

The newpaper's editorial board is right. Maine doesn't "need" a Maine Woods
National Park ("Sound forestry, preservation will head off a national park," Jan. 26 editorial).

Maine doesn't "need" an Acadia National Park, either, nor does California "need" a Yosemite
National Park nor Arizona a Grand Canyon National Park. Yet we would be impoverished if
we did not have these treasures - the nation's "crown jewels," as they often are called.

The National Park System was created in 1872 to preserve, in part, representative landscapes
of the great American mosaic.

The Maine Woods is one of the few pieces of the mosaic not represented in a system that
now stretches, literally, from Pacific sands to Atlantic headlands on the rocky coast of Maine.

A federal feasibility study, focusing largely on the economic impactof establishing a new
federal park in Maine, may answer whatever concerns led the paper to dismiss the
park idea outright.

Such a study on the state level more than 80 years ago might have headed off some of the
blind opposition - including that of the Portland newspapers - to legislative
proposals to establish what would become, in time, magnificent Baxter State Park.

Similar opposition was expressed, in the beginning, to National Park System units from
Crater Lake in my native Oregon to Redwood in northern California, from Voyageurs in
Minnesota to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in the Kansas Flint Hills. Few today
argue that any of these has not contributed much to its state's economy and image. (The new
Oregon quarter features Crater Lake.)

Greenville's Moosehead Messenger editorialized in the late 1990s about northern Maine
being in motion: "The lifestyle that we fear losing now isn't the right to work in the woods.
That occupational lifestyle has been slowly but steadily diminished over the years as the
harvesting technologies have changed. The lifestyle that we fear losing now is access to the land."

That right will be preserved in a Maine Woods National Park and Preserve. The "and Preserve"
part often is ignored by opponents. A national preserve is a full notch lower than a national park,
whose "fundamental purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects
and the wildlife therein . . . unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."

The "fundamental purpose" of a preserve is to maintain access to good hunting, trapping and
snowmobiling without any concern that such access might be suddenly terminated with
ownership changes - as increasingly is happening in northern Maine.

The national preserve portion of the Maine Woods National Park and Preserve would, in fact,
increase the acreage where hunting and trapping privileges for Maine sportsmen would be
assured - in perpetuity - while preserving the land base on which they depend.

Baxter State Park and other state-owned land would be unaffected by creation of a national
park and preserve. State and federal lands would, indeed, richly complement one another.

An unbiased, comprehensive feasibility study would be the first step, if the conclusions
were favorable, in establishing a Maine Woods National Park and Preserve. Such a study,
with full participation of the public, would be an honest analysis of all the potential costs,
benefits and possible alternatives.

Congressional passage of national park legislation and its signing by the president would begin
the acquisition of lands within the authorized park boundaries, excluding "existing human settlements"
and "significant public road mileage."

The lands would be acquired, over time, only on a willing-seller, willing-buyer basis.
It would take years to put the park together, just as it has other dedicated public lands.
(Acadia still is acquiring authorized acreage, after 86 years, to fill in the patchwork of park
ownership as land comes on the market.)

Establishing a national park with the world-class attributes of a Moosehead Lake, soaring
Mount Kineo, fabled Allagash River and primeval Debsconeag Lakes could spur the economic
revitalization of northern Maine.

Millinocket, Greenville and Jackman would become gateways to a region rivaled only in Alaska.
The foundering forest products industry would be supplemented with new jobs and new businesses
created to serve a public drawn to some of the grander scenery on Earth.

It can happen if the people of Maine have the wisdom and the vision to make it happen.
The state's largest newspaper should help lead the way.

- Special to the Telegram

With writer's permission as published in the Maine Sunday Telegram, March 20, 2005

 

Copyright © 2005 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

 

About the Author
George Neavoll of Portland is the former editorial page editor of the Maine Sunday
Telegram and Portland Press Herald. He has been a member, since his retirement in 1999,
of Americans for a Maine Woods National Park.

 

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