PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • August 14, 2025
During the 20th century, a dozen or so corporations and family businesses owned roughly 12 million acres of northern Maine. It was a vast industrial woodlot. Then private owners began selling off their land. From 1990 to 2015 four million acres were entered into some kind of conservation. “Loving the North Woods” introduces the issues, participants and processes behind this transformation, then describes seven conservation agreements that protected some two and a quarter million acres. But the account, told entirely from the point of view of protection groups, glosses over limitations to what was actually achieved. The biggest issue is that the majority of these lands are protected by conservation easements rather than fee ownership. The easements prevent development. But they allow landowners to continue logging. And most of the big agreements involved payments of millions of dollars. A new paradigm may be emerging. In 2016 President Obama created the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. ~ John Alden