By Misty Edgecomb, Of the NEWS Staff
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Misty
Last updated: Friday, August 27, 2004
Bush official promotes project for 'cooperative conservation'
A $30 million land preservation project that would protect 339,000 acres of northern Washington County from development is being lauded as the type of "cooperative conservation" that the Bush administration wants for its legacy.Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and the environment, visited Maine on Thursday to promote the president's ethic of ecological and economic balance and to hold up the efforts of the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership as exemplary.
Meanwhile, in Crawford, Texas, his boss was announcing an executive order charging federal agencies with promoting conservation projects that rise up from local communities and protect resource-based industries - often without the involvement of large environmental groups."They're protecting the environment and a rural style of life as an integrated whole," Rey said. "Some of the best environmental efforts result when landowners and conservation groups work together."The Washington County partnership was formed in 1999 when the residents of tiny Grand Lake Stream faced the sale of 446,000 acres of commercial forestland that surrounds their town to a group of unknown investors. With the value of lakeside property skyrocketing and so-called "liquidation" loggers transforming commercial forests into home lots, local residents worried about the fate of their hunting, fishing and logging businesses.Initially, the group was primarily concerned with the shorelines of the 60 lakes and ponds contained within the project. But soon, the land trust realized that wildlife and forestry needed landscape-scale security, and they called the New England Forestry Foundation, a nonprofit group aimed at preserving working forests and a facilitator of the state's largest-ever conservation land deal - 760,000 acres on the Pingree lands in northern Maine. "This project is not designed to protect land for conservation. It's designed to protect an economy for rural people," said Amos Eno, executive director of the New England Forestry Foundation.Indeed, the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership proudly lists "550 jobs at a local paper mill" among its preservation accomplishments.However, the project also secures a 27,000-acre community forest with 62 miles of undeveloped shoreline on six lakes, which will seek "green" certification from the Forest Stewardship Council. The area, known as Farm Cove, includes several thousand acres of ecological reserve land near Fourth Machias Lake, where no harvesting will occur. And the project has the support of environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Council of Maine and the Nature Conservancy, which donated $1 million."They don't want to see a house every few hundred feet," Eno said, arguing that the local people are taking over the role that professional environmentalists have traditionally played.When deeper knowledge is required - for instance, to conduct an ecological analysis - the group has hired experts.But the effort remains rooted in the community."We could tell the story better," said Steve Schaefer, president of the trust.When asked about the possibility that partnerships could be misused to promote the interests of business over that of the environment, Rey argued that conservation today must be cooperative."The paradigm that economic interests will dominate conservation is 10 or 20 years out-of-date," he said. "This is a quantum shift in conservation thinking."Now, federal agencies need to update their approaches so that cooperative projects seeking funding are not "square pegs in round holes," he said.Already, the group has raised more than $4 million to complete in March the first phase of the project, a long narrow corridor along Spednic Lake and the St. Croix River.Rey announced Thursday a $1.15 million grant earmarked for loon conservation, another $250,000 grant for Atlantic salmon restoration, and a third $1 million grant for wetlands conservation. Rey also stated that $1 million for the project has been included in the president's proposed fiscal year 2005 budget, and more likely will be proposed next year. But with about $12 million in the bank, the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership has to raise another $14 million over the next six months "in a soft if not downright mushy charitable environment," Eno said.Already, a majority of local businesses and people have given to the effort, and their belief in the project is beginning to draw donations from afar in support of the project's cooperative approach and local people "taking matters into their own hands.""The answer isn't just to buy up and lock up land," Eno said.For more information, visit the partnership's Web site at http://www.downeastlakes.org.GREAT PULL QUOTE POTENTIAL: "This project is not designed to protect land for conservation. It's designed to protect an economy for rural people." Amos Eno, executive director, New England Forestry Foundation
