One of the largest land conservation easements ever proposed in the United States has taken a huge step forward with help from an unlikely source - Wal-Mart.
The world's largest retailer pledged Tuesday to put up $35 million to help conserve an acre of wildlife habitat for every acre it has developed, and will develop, over the next decade. Maine will receive the lion's share of the initial effort - $6 million of the $8 million that Wal-Mart is contributing immediately - to conserve 312,000 acres of forestland in northern Washington County through an easement.
The "Acres for America" program was developed by Wal-Mart and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit conservation group begun by Congress. It selected the stretch of Down East forestland, lakes and rivers as one of five "signature projects" to kick off the program.
The money will go into a pool of $30 million being raised by the New England Forestry Foundation, the Downeast Lakes Land Trust and The Nature Conservancy from private donors and state and federal sources to buy a 27,000-acre tract and put the 312,000-acre property under a conservation easement. The groups leading the effort face a May 20 deadline to complete the deal.
The easement will allow the land's owner, Wagner Timberlands, to continue to harvest wood under sustainable forestry standards while preserving it from residential, commercial and industrial development and guaranteeing public access.
"Everything about this land is special," said Larry Selzer, president of The Conservation Fund. "It's just a spectacular, untouched wilderness area."
"We're very happy. It gets us much closer to completing this whole project by the end of May," said Stephen Keith, executive director of the Downeast Lakes Land Trust. "We think this is one of the last large-scale projects that has a good price tag on it, that's affordable. The real threat was it being chopped into lakeshore lots, and then it's gone."
Keith said the land includes 445 miles of shoreline on more than 60 lakes and ponds, thousands of acres of wetlands and scores of species of birds, fish and mammals. It's home to 200 loons, about 10 percent of the total in northern Maine, he said.
Carlton Owen, vice chairman of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation's board, said he came up with the idea of asking companies to offset their development with a corresponding amount of undeveloped land to "leave a legacy of conservation."
Another board member suggested Wal-Mart as a corporate sponsor, and the company readily agreed about a year ago, Owen said. The company and the foundation decided not to announce the program until they had identified the projects that the money would fund, he said.
Owen said he's familiar with the North Woods in Maine because he was an executive with the Champion Paper Co.
"I know those forests of Maine and they are rapidly changing," he said. "I think we have a very historic opportunity, probably in the 10- to 12-year range . . . to make some conservation gains that are of a landscape scale. Those opportunities aren't common."
Tom Kelsch, eastern regional director for the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, said it wasn't hard to decide that the project in Down East Maine deserved to be one of the first to get help under the Wal-Mart program.
The rapid pace of land sales by paper companies has pushed prices up, Kelsch said. Easements are cheaper than buying land - Keith said it's about $40 an acre, versus $462 acre - and allow the land to continue contributing to the economy and supplying sawmills and paper mills.
The amount of land that will go under conservation easement is the second largest in U.S. history. The largest was four years ago, when the Pingree family agreed to a $28 million easement covering 762,192 acres along the upper St. John, Machias and Allagash rivers and part of the Rangeley Lakes region.
"Between the Pingree project and this, it's national leadership, quality conservation projects designed in Maine," said Amos Eno, executive director of the New England Forestry Foundation, which is based in Yarmouth.
Eno, who was executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation until 1999, said he heard that the foundation was working on a new project that would have significant corporate backing. Eventually, the foundation approached him about the Down East project.
"Without this grant, we wouldn't have gotten this deal done," said Eno, who is still working on raising another $5.8 million to complete the purchase and set aside money for monitoring the land in the future.
The land is bordered on the east by New Brunswick, where the Canadian government has set aside about 600,000 acres of conservation land, and on the west by state, federal and Native American land in Maine.
"It's the hole in the doughnut, linking a million acres of contiguous land in Canada and Maine," Eno said.
Wal-Mart had no role in picking the "signature projects," but is happy with the list, said Sarah Clark, a spokeswoman for the retailer.
She said Wal-Mart recognized the program as the right thing to do, but she admitted that the company also has been trying to counter an image of a rapacious retailer that leaves downtowns vacant when it moves into an area.
"A lot of our critics were defining the company for us, as opposed to us being out there explaining who we are and what we're about," Clark said. "Over the past couple of years, we've tried to be a more transparent company."
Not everyone is convinced that the program, as large as it is, can erase Wal-Mart's impact on the landscape, geographically and economically.
"We're certainly pleased to see Wal-Mart investing in the conservation of Maine's northern forest," said Brownie Carson, executive director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine. "Having said that, I think everyone realizes that Wal-Mart has been one of the greatest causes and contributors to sprawl - urban sprawl, suburban sprawl and rural sprawl. The malling of Maine."
Carson said Wal-Mart could show its commitment to environmentalism by locating more stores downtown, instead of on the edges of cities and towns, forcing people to drive miles to reach the stores.
"While we appreciate their investment here," he said, "this is not by any stretch of the imagination a serious response to the environmental problems that Wal-Mart locating all over the rural landscape has created."
- Susan Butler, staff researcher, contributed to this story.
Staff Writer Edward D. Murphy can be contacted at 791-6465 or at:
emurphy@pressherald.com