Down East Magazine 2006 Environmental Award  

As it happened, the group had recently concluded a $28-million fundraising effort to purchase the conservation rights on the 762,192 acres of Pingree family lands in northern Maine. NEFF was scouting for another project that would have significant impact. A handful of NEFF representatives, including Frank Reed and Keith Ross, ventured to Grand Lake Stream and looked around by car, foot, and canoe. After discussions with the land trust and among its own board, NEFF decided to take the project on.

With one caveat: the project needed to be bigger.

So, with the encouragement of Wagner Timberlands, the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership was born, which included NEFF, the Downeast Lakes Land Trust, and the nearby Woodie Wheaton Land Trust. The partnership had several lofty goals: to purchase that 27,000-acre parcel west of Grand Lake Stream, to acquire a five-hundred-foot conservation easement along fifty miles of Spednic Lake and the upper St. Croix River (which the Wheaton Land Trust had been working on since the 1990s), and then to buy the development rights on an additional 312,000 acres managed by Wagner between Grand Lake Stream and the Canadian border. The whole project would protect, through ownership or easement, 342,000 acres of woodlands, 60 lakes with 445 miles of lakeshore, 1,500 miles of riverfront, tens of thousands of acres of wetlands, and the home of about one in ten loons in northern Maine.

The total cost: just shy of $30 million.

This project had a lot more hurdles than the Pingree project,” says Frank Reed, director of development with the New England Forestry Foundation. The land was both harder to reach and less pristine, which tended to make it a tougher sell with prospective donors. And unlike the Pingree project, which was bordered by just one main public road, the Downeast Lakes project touched on nine organized towns and eleven unorganized townships, each of which had a stake in the project.

But the money came in, from private donors, foundations, and public agencies. Elmina B. Sewall of Kennebunk, the largest individual donor, gave about $7 million before her death last year. The Open Space Conservancy, the Land for Maine's Future program, the Sweet Water Trust, and Wildlife Forever also contributed. The project also got a grant of $1.15 million from the North Cape Oil Spill Settlement Fund - the result of a 1996 oil spill off Rhode Island, which killed four hundred wintering loons and led to agreements to improve the loon's northern breeding grounds. Of the 27,000 acres eyed by the trust, 3,560 were to be set aside as an ecological reserve, a baseline that in part would help calibrate the health of the remaining forest in future years.

The option on the land purchase was set to expire in May 2005. With the calendar pages flipping by and fundraising about $6 million short, NEFF took a deep breath last spring and put up one of its forests in Massachusetts for collateral, securing a loan to close the deal before the option ran out. The papers were signed, the land transferred, and fundraising continues, with about $4 million remaining to retire what's left of the debt.

Another large grant - $6.4 million - came from an unlikely source: Wal-Mart. In April 2005 Wal-Mart announced its new "Acres for America" program, under which the world's largest retailer, in cooperation with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, would buy and conserve at least one acre for every acre the company planned to develop for its stores.

The Downeast Lakes partnership was the major beneficiary - garnering about three-quarters of Wal-Mart's initial grant - in large part because its goal nicely meshed with Wal-Mart's stated goal. They wanted to identify gaps between existing conservation lands, then plug them. As it turns out, the Downeast Lakes Project was not operating in a vacuum. With little fanfare, a number of other projects had been under way to ensure land will remain undeveloped throughout the region.

At the time Georgia-Pacific jettisoned its eastern Maine holdings, it also sold off some 394,000 acres in Canada. The province of New Brunswick snapped it up to manage most of it as Crown Lands (much like our National Forests), and set aside nearly 64,000 acres on the east side of Spednic Lake and along the St. Croix corridor as a wildlife reserve.

On the west side of the Downeast Lakes project, attention was turning to other conservation lands. The state had earlier protected 23,750 acres around Duck Lake. This was adjacent to the Nature Conservancy's recent 33,000-acre Machias River project, which conserves an eighty-five-mile-long corridor flanking the longest undammed river in Maine. The Passamaquoddies own another piece of the puzzle: about 77,000 acres, which they manage sustainably as timberlands. And last December, the Conservation Fund announced yet another $6.8 million acquisition of some 7,700 acres around the upper Machias River.  CONTINUED >