2006 Down East Magazine Environmental Award

Starting with thirty people meeting in the basement of a town hall in 1999, the Downeast Lakes Land Trust sparked a $30 million conservation effort that has resulted in the protection of 342,000 acres of woodlands, 60 lakes with 445 miles of lakeshore, and 1,500 miles of riverfront. The trust's work filled in the gaps to create more than a million contiguous acres of forestland in eastern Maine and western New Brunswick that will now remain forever free of development. For these accomplishments, the editors of Down East magazine are proud to name the Downeast Lakes Land Trust as the recipient of the 2006 Down East Environmental Award.

This is a Grand Laker Canoe. It's a twenty-foot square-stern boat typically made of northern white cedar ribs and planking and ash thwarts and an oak transom and fitted out with a ten-horse outboard. The boat was first built around 1923 by Grand Lake Stream guide Herbert "Beaver" Bacon, and it quickly caught on among other guides on this chain of lakes around this part of eastern Maine, not far from the Canadian border. The Grand Lakers are crafted such that they can slice through the swells that often roil these long lakes, yet can be paddled into shallow coves by simply flipping up the outboard.

The canoes are still used by many of the region's guides, and keeping them in good repair remains a cottage industry in Grand Lake Stream, population 150. If you're up early enough, guides are often spotted piloting Grand Lakers up West Grand Lake through the mists of early summer, the weight of their clients and gear keeping the bows low to the water. Grand Lake Stream has to date resisted the invasive species that have spread through much of Maine, like the metallic tangerine-flecked bass boats equipped with sonar. It's a town that keeps one paddle in the past.

But here's the thing about these canoes: like the moose, loon, and eagles who live here, Grand Lakers require unbroken wildlands to survive. These lakes are ringed by hundreds of miles of undeveloped shorefront, and they attract the anglers who hire the guides who pilot the Grand Lakers. Without the wildlands, the Grand Lakers would soon become dusty cultural artifacts. "Nobody pays a guide to sit off the end of someone's private dock," is how one guide sums it up.

Just a few years ago, an outbreak of private docks appeared in the region's prognosis. In the mid-1990s, timber companies throughout Maine decided to get out of the timber-owning business in order to concentrate on the timber-processing business. Along the way they sold off hundreds of thousands of acres, and in just a few years the ownership of one-quarter of Maine changed hands. The people who were buying - family trusts and pension funds and foreign investors - arrived with a mindset more like corporate raiders than long-term timber managers. Some cut the forest hard and fast, producing as much value from their investment as was feasible without violating environmental laws. Some also set about platting the land for camp lots to ensure further returns down the road.

Grand Lake Stream, long accustomed to being too far away to even hear the distant rumble of such trends, suddenly found itself standing in the crossroads with the big-rig headlights of progress barreling down. In 1998 Georgia-Pacific sold nearly a half-million acres surrounding the village to a holding company that declined to identify its actual owners. (The owners were later revealed to include the Yale University pension fund.) The forest management firm hired to bolster returns from this asset stepped up operations. The two or three logging trucks that once passed through the village each day en route to the paper and strandboard mills in Baileyville became a dozen or more. Within months of the ownership change, some residents noticed the 'logging roads' heading north up one peninsula to potential lakefront lots had grown suspiciously solid and wide, as if designed more for Subarus than skidders. A plan for wholesale lakeshore development seemed imminent.

So one day in November 1999 about thirty local residents descended into the slightly musty basement of the town hall, where a bingo machine stood in one corner, to swap notes on what was going on in the woods. CONTINUED >