This Land Is Our Land by Ken Ilgunas

Author:Ken Ilgunas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

Making recreation space without breaking the bank

In August 2016, one day before the National Park Service’s one-hundredth birthday, President Obama announced the designation of a new national monument called Katahdin Woods and Waters, made up of 87,500 acres of forestland, mountains, and the East Branch of the Penobscot River in north-central Maine. People in the top levels of the Park Service believe the new monument is ideal for national park designation.* That would be the same path to becoming a national park that led to park status for Acadia National Park, Maine’s only national park, which also was first protected as a monument. Turning a national monument into a national park should be quite simple. All that’s needed is an act of Congress. But getting Katahdin Woods protected, whether as a monument or park, has been anything but simple.

Roxanne Quimby, the co-founder of Burt’s Bees, made Katahdin Woods her life’s work for more than twenty years. Securing the land cost Quimby $74 million. (She’d later give a $40 million endowment to the new monument.) Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on a Washington lobbying firm and a public relations agency.305 Quimby funded economic studies and engaged in many rounds of public outreach to gain the support of resistant locals, one of whom told The Washington Post, “What in blazes are they trying to monumentalize? There’s nothing extraordinary about it, except for a lot of black flies.”306 Maine’s residents, the timber industry, and politicians opposed her plan, including Maine’s governor. Once Quimby and her son realized that they could not get the support of Congress to turn Katahdin Woods into a national park, they began lobbying President Obama, who had the authority to create a national monument. Finally, after twenty years and more than $100 million, Quimby’s efforts paid off. And yet it’s still not a national park. All this trouble for a tiny national monument (one-eleventh the size of Rhode Island) in a relatively uninhabited region of the United States.

Creating a national park is never easy. It took J. D. Rockefeller three decades to surmount local opposition to create a national park in the Teton Range of Wyoming. Because of the unavailability of relatively unpopulated land, the days of big new parks are long gone. Theresa Pierno, the president and chief executive of the National Parks Conservation Association, said in an interview with The Washington Post that Katahdin Woods “may be one of the last, large national parks that we see in our lifetime.”

If there aren’t many more places to designate as national parks, then we might look to our favorite right-to-roam countries for inspiration on how they’ve created recreation lands cheaply and in a way that hasn’t disturbed landowners.

Sweden’s allemansrätten shows that a country can open up pretty much all of its territory to recreation for very little money. Sweden provides generous recreational access to about 80 to 90 percent of its landmass.* Americans are mostly limited to roaming our state- and federal-owned lands (lands considered “public”). The

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