“What moves us is love for our home turf, love for a river, love for a cluster of mountains, for steep, wooded valleys, for the headwater brooks rising there. It’s respect and affection for plants and animals that live there, for the sounds and smells of those places and the feel of them underfoot.” - Bob Kimber, Temple, Maine.
Vast Expanse
This is a land of loons, moose, deer, bear, lynx and hundreds of other plant and animal species. The Northern Forest reaches from western New York State northward and into Maine. Comprising 26 million acres, the Northern Forest is the largest continuous expanse of undeveloped land east of the Mississippi.
Maine's share of the Northern Forest amounts to around 15 million acres and is locally called Maine's North Woods. Only five percent of Maine, though, is in public ownership and less and one percent is protected as wilderness. By tacit agreement, honored for generations, Maine residents have had free and easy access to these lands.
The timber companies that have long held these lands are now selling these lands on a huge scale. Depending upon who buys the land and for what uses, long-accepted privileges of public access could disappear, along with much else that makes the North Woods special.
Since 1998 massive land sales have swept the region. In the past five years, over six million acres have changed hands. That amounts to nearly 20 percent of the region and to 22 percent of Maine alone. Public access to these lands, a long-standing tradition in Maine, is already beginning to suffer. Mainers are being gated out of lands they long used as though they were public.
There is good news here, too. More than 1.5 million acres in the Northern Forest have achieved additional conservation protection since 1998.
That’s why a key component of The Wilderness Society’s Northern Maine program is to gain additional federal funds for conserving these and other lands in the Eastern Forests.
