The Great North Woods Park: a guest blog by Paul Doiron

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING:  Paul Doiron is one of my favorite writers. Not just for his terrific Mike Bowditch series - although I love following the Maine game warden as he struggles and grows into his role as a hero. Not just because he's a great dinner companion and stalwart tourer - ask him about our "Death to Bookstores" appearances in '10 - but because he cares passionately about Maine. From the bucolic coastal villages to the dying mill towns, from the metropolitan south to the almost-uninhabited north, he writes - in both his fiction and his nonfiction - wisely and well about the state we love.

  Who hates national parks? No one, right? According to the National Park Service, 278,939,216 people visited the United States’s crown jewels in 2011. My own state of Maine is home to one of the most popular in the East—Acadia National Park—which generally receives more than 2 million recreational visits a year. So it might surprise you to learn that one of the most controversial issues in Maine right now is whether to create a new national park in the state’s celebrated North Woods as a potential sanctuary for caribou, wolves, and lynx.

For more than a decade environmentalists, joined by entrepreneur and philanthropist Roxanne Quimby, famous as the founder of Burt’s Bees*, has been lobbying to create a new park in the vicinity of majestic Mount Katahdin—and their efforts have been met with fear, resentment, and in some cases, violence. Quimby has gone so far as to buy 70,000 acres herself to give to the National Park Service, but state politicos — and the feds, at the behest of local politicians — have so far given her the cold shoulder.

The fear in Maine is that the park would signal the death knell of the state’s wood-products industry (what most people call “logging”). And Quimby hasn’t helped matters by halting lumbering on her lands and banning access to hunters, snowmobilers, and ATV riders who had previously used it for years. Novelists know that a crisis is very often the truest expression of someone’s character. That statement can be as true of place like Maine as it is for a person.

A crisis can also be the precursor to murder, of course. That’s why I decided to focus my new novel, Massacre Pond — the fourth in my Mike Bowditch series — around the creation of a fictional Moosehorn National Park. My protagonist is no Anna Pigeon; he’s a young Maine game warden who starts the book unsold on either the virtues of the park concept (he likes to hunt and fish, after all) or the virtues of the wealthy woman promoting the radical idea. But when a seemingly senseless moose massacre occurs on her property he finds himself dragged into the debate—which escalates very quickly to human murder, as well.

These days we’ve become used to books and television shows being “ripped from the headlines,” but from the days of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, fiction has also been a useful tool to start a public debate. And that’s what I aim to do. “Sensational” and “serious” aren’t always antonyms.

I used to have misgivings about a North Woods National Park, primarily out of a respect for the small Maine communities that would be most affected by its creation. (Some sort of preserve modeled on Adirondack Park was always my preference.) When asked about Massacre Pond, I’ve said that I had to write an entire novel to get my own conflicted views on the subject on paper.

One irony to the present situation is that it was Henry David Thoreau himself — the popularizer of Mount Katahdin (and the effective creator of Maine’s tourism industry) — who was the state’s first advocate for a Maine woods national park. He wrote:

“The kings of England formerly had their forests ‘to hold the king’s game,’ for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them . . . Why should not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth,’ — our forests, not to hold the king’s game merely, but to hold and preserve the king himself also, the lord of creation,—not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation?”

How this crisis will all play out is unanswerable by my Magic 8 Ball. The political winds aren’t currently in favor of the park, but we know how quickly those can change. And the fate of the American woods-products industry depends less on what happens in the Maine capital of Augusta — or even Washington, DC — and more on what’s going on in South Africa and the Amazon and Indonesia.

One of my newest concerns is this: By the time Mainers finally decide whether they want a North Woods park, will global climate change have already transformed our beautiful boreal forest into someplace subtropical? Instead of the Canada lynx will we have the feral pig, and instead of the sugar maple, will we have the pecan?

I call this dystopian vision of the future: “No Country for Old Moose.”

*By the way, did you know that Taiwain has a national holiday devoted to Burt Shavitz, the namesake of Burt’s Bees. Yep, they do.

The fourth Mike Bowditch mystery, Massacre Pond, comes out on July 16th. You can find out more about Paul and read excerpts of his novels at his website. You can read more of his thoughts at his blog, friend him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter as @PaulDoiron. Paul is also a contributor to the Maine Crime Writers blog.