Quite. They also tend to care more about the resource than the people, which the people quite naturally will be inclined to resent.

The thing about this area is that, Merc's counterexamples notwithstanding, we're not talking about strip mines or slash-and-burn agriculture happening if the Nature Conservancy wasn't Ever Vigilant. The paper companies that used to operate in this region were, frankly, pretty good at the stewardship thing. When I was a kid, Great Northern's managers prided themselves on the company's woodlands being in better shape, however foresters measure these things, than the unorganized territories still belonging to the state (absent, e.g., Baxter State Park, which was left unmanaged on purpose as part of its charter). They had a massive woodlands department that was dedicated to things like scientifically managed harvesting, replanting, and so on. It was all very judicious.

(Somewhere here I have the brochure from the grand opening of the company's brand new Engineering and Research Center in the 1950s. It's full of the grandiose optimism stereotypical of the era, about how the state-of-the-art facility would help the company harness the boundless power of science to make everything better forever. Kind of depressing to read now, when the building is a crumbling ruin and everything is not better forever, but at the time it must have been hard not to be swept along by the current. I scanned it once, a few years ago, since as far as we know it's the last copy. Maybe I should dig up the files and post them?)

Also, because the company was run by people who lived where it operated, and not, e.g., Quebecois venture capitalists or hedge fund executives from New Hampshire,* and those people not uncommonly did the same Outdoorsy Stuff as the locals who worked for them, they gave a shit about conditions out there, even beyond the obvious economic prudence of not ruining their own sources of raw materials (the woods) and power (the rivers and lakes). That attitude went somewhat by the wayside in later years, when outside owners of various stripe came in and screwed the company up in various ways, but by then the whole enterprise had become so feeble they couldn't have ruined the woods if they'd wanted to. My point is that in its heyday, when they were powerful enough to do some really substantial damage in the vein of Brazilian jungle clearance or open-pit coal mining, GNP and the other similar companies in this part of the world deliberately set out not to do so.

As such, the prevailing sentiment around here is basically that Maine's woods didn't need protecting from Mainers, and we—myself included, even though I'm not anything like as engaged with the Outdoorsy Parts as a lot of people—rather resent being viewed as somehow ecologically equivalent to Congolese cobalt miners.

The difference, perhaps, is between conservation, which a lot of people around here are fully on board with TYVM, and preservation, which is what a lot of people who call themselves conservationists are really into—the full John Muir "untouched by human hands" business. Those people don't see any difference between a working forest, which is what we've always had around here, and a ruined one. It's a lack of sophistication that's ironic in people who appear to think that the locals in these parts are all ignorant bumpkins.

--G.
* Both of those happened later and were, in fact, just as bad as you were thinking.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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