Tweet

Burt’s Bees cofounder Roxanne Quimby wants to hand the government a new national park in northern Maine—election-year politics and residents’ NIMBYism be damned. Brian Kevin investigates the boldest conservation plan in decades.

DEPENDING ON which direction you look, the taxiing strip at northern Maine’s tiny Millinocket Municipal Airport is either New England’s most blighted runway or its most picturesque. Out the left-hand window of an accelerating Cessna, I see the twin smoke-stacks of an abandoned paper mill surrounded by chain-link fences and corroding storage tanks. To the right is the cambered whaleback of Mount Katahdin breaching up from the green swells of the Maine highlands. It’s like watching establishing shots for two different documentaries: on the right, a soaring, Planet Earth–style aerial; on the left, an image from Roger & Me.<<<Read More>>>