Mapping Claims on the Maine Woods: Neoliberal Restructuring and Community Responses
Matt McCourt, Tyler Duran, and Scott Havu Geography, University of Maine Farmington
Paper for NESTVAL Conference 2007, New Haven, CT
Introduction: Neoliberal restructuring of the Maine Woods
During the past decade ten million acres of Maine's private forestland have been bought and sold as pulp and paper companies cashed out of their land holdings to be replaced by a new cast of owners including private equity, timber investment management organizations, conservation interests, liquidation harvesters, and kingdom owners. This new ownership, with its more fragmented holdings and the volatility of its transactions, threatens to 'privatize' the de facto commons that had emerged through long-standing traditions of public access granted by the former pulp and paper company owners. A number of citizens groups and NGOs have responded to this episode of restructuring by launching loosely allied community mapping projects in efforts to take stock of their assets, to determine what's most important from the point of view of forest users, and to begin a broad-based conversation about how to plan for the future. This paper draws on the preliminary phase of one such community mapping project, based in the Rangeley-High Peaks region of western Maine, during which students in two upper-
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level geography courses interviewed over 350 project participants, gathering and then digitizing annotated sketch maps. The project was a collaboration between UMF, the Center for Community GIS, and Western Mountains Alliance. It was funded by the Maine NSF-EPSCoR Forest Bioproducts Research Initiative. There is a lot we could talk about in regard to our community mapping project, but in this paper we focus on the implicit critiques of mapping voiced by several sketch mapping participants, as well as the conflicting accounts of rural restructuring provided by our sketch map participants in order to map the challenges and opportunities for resource management in western Maine. Before drawing on the insights of our participants, we will briefly describe the three markers of neoliberalization operating in the Maine Woods: anxieties about access, volatility and fragmentation of land holdings. We will then discuss and examine the community responses to this restructuring. ` So, [threats to access] is one of the main catalysts that drives citizen initiatives,
policy formation, and development decisions in the Maine Woods. Since the early 20 th century, pulp and paper companies have allowed access to hunters, fishermen, campers, hikers, and many other people who used their land according to the principle of "traditional use" (Rolde 15-16). However, with the recent turnover of private forestland the interests of land owners and land users have come into conflict, disrupting the traditions of the de facto commons. While there has been a long history of changing ownership of Maine’s private forestland among different pulp and paper companies, their basic “contract” with citizens had remained the same: they allowed for public access and
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use of their lands. But now, the new owners are barring access, regulating public use, and posting their land, inciting widespread apprehension about the fate of "traditional use." Whereas pulp and paper companies managed lands according to 40 to 100 year timeframes many of the new owners have business imperatives in place that necessitate a much faster turnaround time. So, specific parcels end up being subdivided and sold to liquidation harvesters, get clear-cut and then subdivided again into one or two acre houselots. Thus, the volatility of such transactions has been a major cause for the increased fragmentation of the Maine woods.
Responses to Neoliberal Restructuring
The changes in access, increasing volatility and fragmentation are not going uncontested. There has been a contentious regulatory process, as well as direct actions, in the Moosehead region, especially, over Plum Creek’s proposed development. Alongside that political struggle a group of citizens and tourism operators have launched a community mapping initiative, utilizing the Farmington-based Center for Community GIS. They have been joined by other groups in the Mahoosucs, Rangeley-High Peaks, and Upper Kennebec Valley regions that are at different stages of implementing their own community mapping projects. One of the people involved in the Mahoosucs project, who came under considerable criticism for her role, summed up the spirit of community mapping when she asked, "What could be wrong with gathering information…that'll help people in this region to make decisions…about their future? What could be wrong with communities driving their future rather than allowing outside forces to determine their future?"
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It was in this same spirit that our Rangeley-High Peaks mapping project was initiated. Research was conducted at two local ski resorts, Saddleback and Sugarloaf, and our objective was to conduct a bottom up geographical assessment of landscape values of ordinary recreational users of the Maine woods. The key aspect to our interviews was the use of sketch maps, which we would present to the interviewees and ask them to use a marker and indicate those places which they identified with and especially valued. In general, sketch mappers voiced their appreciation for natural amenities. Many spoke for restricting development, for 'keeping it unspoiled,' pristine, and so on. Some weighed in on current struggles over the expansion of Poland Spring bottling facilities or a proposed wind farm; although probably the largest number of participants simply noted where they pursued various recreational activities. This style of eliciting information through sketch maps also yielded a variety of intriguing responses questioning the politics of mapping—three of which we're going to focus on next. In a context where fragmentation, threats to access and increasing volatility are taking place, it might make sense not to map those places most important to you. We encountered several participants who resisted—in different ways and for different reasons—the explicit practice of mapping the places they valued. In one example a student returned to the group from doing a sketch map and reported that a woman he had interviewed told him we were in league with developers. As soon as he said that, the woman's husband who had appeared out of nowhere, said, "I think what my wife was trying to say is that just by mapping these places you're going to
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make them more open for development." And, he went on to clarify his wife's sophisticated position on the map's power to make places legible for development. It was clear that some participants appreciated a chance to share their landscape values, however, one difficulty we encountered when performing sketch map interviews was the participants' hesitance—in some cases, outright resistance to—fragmenting the map. A significant number of participants would start by saying, 'Well, actually the whole thing's important!' (070-206) then, when asked for more specificity, they sometimes persist in drawing a circle around the entire region and say that the whole place was valuable. In one of our interviews we encountered a couple from Massachusetts who did circle the entire region, however, unlike many other participants, this couple had a very specific reason for not wanting to fragment the map. This couple, told me that they valued preserving the entire state of Maine. They indicated that the landscapes in Maine should be untouched, with no hunting EVER, no logging EVER, no ATVs. Only hiking and ski trails for non-motorized use. Another participant revealed that they knew of a prime hunting location, but when asked to map it he said, "Well, its on my land." When asked to map his land he declared, “Well then I’d have to post it.” In his case, identifying his land on the sketch map would potentially threaten his hunting spot. This in turn would necessitate posting, which would likely be seen as a violation of rural Maine customs. These three critical responses point out to us that, for some people, sketch mapping might be complicit in the development that comes along with neoliberal restructuring; that sketch mapping is in and of itself asking for a fragmenting of the
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cultural landscape akin to that restructuring; or that sketch mapping might bring threats to the access that has characterized the de facto commons. In their responses, these three participants are, in different ways, resisting the map's representation, fragmentation and prioritization of landscape values.
Conclusions
So, while some participants raise questions about the politics of mapping for resource management, other respondents' comments point to a vibrant, ongoing dialogue about restructuring in the Maine woods. On one hand there is a deeply localist response defending Rangeley. [Flash comments] {{economic transactions taint the resources but it is an explicit capitalist interest that allows for the conservation of these resources}} Bought Vacation Spot: shows a concern for the overuse or exploitation of natural resources on the part of people from away, specifically people that are able to secure through purchase as opposed to inheritance. On the other hand there were those who favored development, [but favored] / [favoring] it specifically because it holds out the greatest hope for conservation.
"Bought vacation spot" Rangeley is becoming overcrowded and a bought vacation spot for people not from Maine the resources that are here are being denied to the locals. Rangeley Lake Haley Pond Nile Brooke contain some of the last land locked salmon, lake trout the purity of
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wild life is becoming overhunted, fished while a certain amount of hunting is desirable not the amounts of wildlife left
And the phrase, "bought vacation spot," seems to point to a difference between ownership secured through inheritance and (a tainted form of) ownership secured through a financial transaction. (And if not inheritance, then ownership through through working and stewarding it…
Development is not a bad thing, not a capitalist conspiracy, not an attempt to "oppress" nature. Development provides money to protect sensitive areas and provide political support for recreation efforts.