AMC Outdoors, September 2006
It's an ordinary June morning on Bethel’s Main Street. Brilliant fuscia blooms on the front porches of stately homes. Quaint shops like Café DiCocoa line the town’s quiet two-lane thoroughfare. The Bethel Inn’s squash-yellow clapboard buildings and manicured golf course overlook the rolling Mahoosuc Mountains.
Beneath this western Maine town’s placid exterior, however, the pace is downright bustling. Over on Mount Will in Newry, they’re starting to cut roads for The Peaks, a 63-lot neighborhood overlooking Sunday River Valley. Large houses in subdivisions with names like Eden Ridge and River Glen dot the hills and riverbanks around Bethel’s town center. The town’s real estate market has seen exponential growth in the last decade, driven by second-home buyers and relocating retirees. Five to 10 percent of her business, says Sudbury Inn owner Nancy White, comes from people looking at real estate.
The growth isn’t pleasing everyone. Bethel has long been a pocket of intellectualism and culture in the rural, timberoriented Mahoosuc region. But landscape and life around here are swiftly changing. The catalyst for much of it is the recent sale of large parcels of former paper company lands. Developers, liquidation harvesters, and investment companies are often first in line. "The land-base ownership is changing so quickly it’s hard to figure out what the hell’s going on and what we’re going to do about it," says Robin Zinchuk, executive director of the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce. "A lot of things are in flux."
A crisis in the making? Many believe it could be. But, as Roger Krussman, a Trust for Public Land project manager, says, "Human nature sometimes needs a crisis to get the ball rolling."
Jim Mitchell sits in his small office in the west end of Bethel and points to a map of the Mahoosuc region. The area encompasses 600,000 acres from Maine’s Ellis River to Gorham, N.H., and south to north from Shelburne to Errol, N.H. About one-fifth of these acres is protected from development and Mitchell, executive director of the Mahoosuc Land Trust, would like to see that number increase. "Though artificially divided by a state line, the whole region is really facing the same issues," he says. "It makes sense for us to deal with them together."
Mitchell and the Trust work with the Mahoosuc Coalition, an alliance of individuals and organizations from around the region. They’re looking for potential conservation opportunities —outright purchase of lands, acquisition of easements, or partnerships with sustainably-minded developers—that are supported by local values and thinking. The coalition’s timing is critical.
For most of the 20th century, Mead Paper (most recently known as MeadWestvaco) ran a mill in Rumford and owned hundreds of thousands of acres in the Mahoosuc region. The land provided wood fiber for the mill and public access for hiking, skiing, hunting, and paddling. In 2003 the company sold 650,000 acres to the investment company Bayroot LLC. Wagner Forest Management oversaw the land and, that year, sold off more than 30,000 acres of smaller parcels not needed for its plans. Places that had for generations been owned, harvested, and managed by a single owner with an eye to the future, were now being bought, cut hard, and liquidated. As with other former "company land" across the region, recreational access was threatened. Some community members wondered whether century-old enjoyment of their favorite places might end.
Bruce Clendenning leads AMC’s policy work in New Hampshire. He says these are the people the coalition is looking to hear from. "Where historically everyone but the local communities decides what happens, the coalition is giving people a voice." Instead of responding to opportunities as they come along, says Clendenning, the coalition is "finding out in advance what the desires of the people are so that we’re ready when the opportunities come our way."
Coalition members include the Androscoggin River Watershed Council, the Bethel Area, and the Northern White Mountain Chamber of Commerce, with support from AMC, the Northern Forest Alliance, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, and The Wilderness Society. Their pioneering efforts put the Mahoosucs on the national map when Maine’s Grafton Notch Forest project achieved top ranking in President Bush’s 2007 Forest Legacy budget. The project calls for conserving land on the state’s fourth highest peak, Old Speck, and expanding the protected corridor around the rugged piece of Appalachian Trail through adjacent Mahoosuc Notch.
Pulp Friction, cont'd >>
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