Transcription of Lucas St. Clair for the show Accessing Maine #259
Dr. Lisa: Today on Love Maine Radio, we have with us Lucas St. Clair. Lucas was born and raised into a subsistence living family in the north woods of Maine with no running water or electricity for most of his childhood. He left that lifestyle to attend a boarding school in the western mountains of Maine and went on to study abroad pursuing a culinary arts degree at Le Cordon Bleu in London. Lucas worked in the beginning of his career in the restaurant and wine industry in New York City, Maine, and Seattle.
In 2011, Lucas took over his family’s operating foundation Elliotsville Plantation Inc. EPI on its 125,000 acres of timberland in northern and central Maine that they have been purchasing since 1998. They have been managing the land and adding infrastructure for recreation over the last several years. The goal is to create a national park and recreation are with the land by donating it to the National Park Service and passing legislation to authorize it. Thanks so much for coming in.
Lucas: Thanks for having me.
Dr. Lisa: You actually have a really interesting story and there’s so many places that we could pick up on in this part of what I’m really interested in this whole subsistence family that you came from.
Lucas: Yeah. My parents were living on the West Coast in California. My mom went to arts school at San Francisco Art Institute. They, on the late ‘60s, started reading about Helen and Scott Nearing’s living off the land here in Maine. My grandfather, my father’s father was a steel salesman for Bethlehem Steel, and his territory was northern New England, and in the early ‘50s built a camp on Parker Pond in the Belgrade Lakes. My dad, as a young boy, would come up and spend time there.
There was this connection to Maine. They weren’t sure whether they wanted to leave the West Coast. They had a couple of thousand dollars to buy land. They wanted to live off the land somewhere. Lived at California, and Oregon, and Washington was too expensive. They went to Vermont. The real estate agent in Vermont said, “For a couple of thousands of dollars to buy a land, the only place you can really do it is Northern Maine.”
That’s where they headed and built a cabin and woods in Piscataquis County. My twin sister and I were born there. It was quite an existence. It was very rural and rustic. They lived like that for 13 years, but it was a great place to grow up, a great way to grow up. We didn’t know about television. We didn’t know about electricity. We didn’t miss it. We just got to spend a lot of time outside and it’s very healthy. We ate very well and we got to spend a lot of time outside playing. Really, it’s the best way to grow up, I think.
Dr. Lisa: Were you homeschooled?
Lucas: No. We went to the public school for a bit. We went to a co-op school that friends of family’s friend, and they all started together. We just bounced around schools in Piscataquis County. My parents were divorced when I was four. We split up then until high school. Then, I went to Gould in Western Maine.
Dr. Lisa: What was that transition like?
Lucas: It was a little strange going from rural Maine to … Staying in rural Maine but my freshman year, I went to the dorm and my roommate was from Hong Kong, and still learning English. It was quite a transition but it was great. It’s great exposure to a much more diverse group of people. The school also had a lot of emphasis on being in the outdoors. I really was able to continue this passion for being outside, and hiking, and camping, and I loved being at Gould.
Dr. Lisa: How did this interest in food, and the restaurant industry, and wine, how did that enter into all of these?
Lucas: It was from the outdoors. I did a lot of hiking, and camping, and climbing, kayaking post high school. I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I took a middle semester in Patagonia. I paddled the Northern Forest Canoe Trail. During all of those trips, everything evolved around world. People’s attitudes were better when the food was better. It became such an integral part of group dynamic. I thought, “Wow, if I could learn how to cool well, this would be a good thing.” In between trips, I would work in restaurants and bakeries as a prep cook or making muffins in the morning, and things like that.
I decided I’d go to culinary school to hone the craft, and did that. Once I started working in kitchens, I recognized I was such an extrovert. I really wanted to be out where the customers were, and being with them, and having the interaction because I like watching people enjoy food. I like that more than I like actually preparing food. The entry point for that was wine. I knew a lot of about food, and I knew living in Europe, wine is like a condiment. You really learn how to pair it with food. I started working as a sommelier, and got into wine distribution and importing. It was a little bit of an unusual segue into the wine industry but it makes sense to me.
Dr. Lisa: How did you segue your way back to the Elliotsville Plantation?
Lucas: I lived in Seattle for eight years. My wife and I had just had our first child. We’re thinking, I didn’t want to work in the restaurant industry. It was all working nights and my wife and I were just passing. We’d see each other at 4:00 in the afternoon when she was leaving and I was going to work. I was starting to think about what I wanted to do next. My mother was working on the National Park Project here in Maine. It was really frustrating. It was becoming the personal attacks and it was very controversial. I thought that it would be a fun thing to work on with her, just provide cover for her. Being from Maine and being a sportsman, I felt I like I can relate to people in a different way.
I started working part time in 2011. Then, by a year into it, by the summer of 2012, I thought if we’re really going to move a needle on this, I have to move back to Maine because I was flying from Seattle to Washington DC, and then going to Northern Maine, and this is not going to work from the West Coast. In 2012, the fall of 2012, my wife and I have decided we move back, and we move here to Portland. Then, I’ve been working on it ever since. It’s been unbelievable learning curve, learning about public policy, and how our congressional delegation operates, the forestry industry, land management, and all of those things have been really interesting dynamic learning curve, but it’s been great fun. I just absolutely love it.
Dr. Lisa: As I’m listening to you talk about your mother getting attacked for taking this position, and you saying, “I thought it would be fun to jump in there and do that,” that’s interesting to me. Some people shy away from that conflict. It sounds like you have embraced it in some ways.
Lucas: Yeah. I also recognize that every national park that’s been created happen under the same, they’re always controversial. David Rockefeller was attacked for creating Tetons. The same happened in the Smokey Mountains. The same thing happened to George Dorr when he was trying to create Acadia a hundred years ago. They’re always met with tremendous opposition. I thought, “We’re probably on the right track if people are opposed to this and it’s controversial.” I have a thick skin. I wasn’t going to take anything personally.
The Katahdin Region is going through massive transition right now and they have been really for a long time. A thousand people were laid off from Great Northern Paper in 1986, and it’s been a slow steady decline until 2013 where the mills finally closed for good. Now, they’re being torn down and the population has shrunk by about half. Unemployment is really high. People are going through a really tough time. A lot of change.
Change is never easy. Because we’re talking about something new and different that embodies that change, we can be the target for some of this uncomfortable transition that people are having to make, but I don’t take it personally. I know that what we’re trying to do in the end will help those communities. It will provide long-term traditional recreation. It will bring people to the region that haven’t been there before. It will provide jobs. All that feels like the right thing to do.
Dr. Lisa: What types of opposition are people coming to you with? What is it that they don’t like about this idea?
Lucas: A lot of it misguided. A lot of it is because people don’t have experiences with national parks. They’ve read in other national parks that snow billing wasn’t allowed, or hunting wasn’t allowed, and they assume that that’s the case for all national parks, but parks can be tailored to certain communities and certain environments. They’re all very different from one another.
I think a lot of it is fear of the federal government, and fear of change, and the unknown because Maine has so little public land, federally-owned land. It’s like 4% of the state of Maine. The rest is private. When you compare that to western states, Washington, Oregon, almost over half are federally-owned. We just don’t have that understanding here. There’s this education that has to go on.
I certainly had to go through it myself. What are the different land management agencies in the federal government? What do they all do? They all do different things, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife, National Parks Services, the Bureau of Land Management, they all do very different practices and motives but the Park Service feels like the right thing for me and the right thing for the region. The legislation that created the Parks Service sassy to conserve unimpaired for future generations’ enjoyment. It’s really about conservation but conservation for people.
That’s what I think is really important in the Katahdin Region because people love the outdoors and there’s a long tradition of being outside, and hunting, and fishing, and horseback riding, and hiking, and everything that happens at Acadia, rafting, on, and on, and on. I feel like the Parks Service is the right agency to own land in the Katahdin Region. Really, across the country, that is the driver for rural economics. Look at all the gateway communities around the country near national parks, and they’re just thriving. We don’t have to look further than Acadia, 2.7 million people visited Acadia last year. Bar Harbor’s existence relies on that park. In a place like Millinocket or Patten which has been slowly shrinking and jobs going away, a boost like that would be really helpful.
Dr. Lisa: Having spent quite a bit of time in Northern Maine and driving back and forth to Northern Maine and having been to Nantucket and Katahdin, it takes a while to get there. It’s a hike.
Lucas: Yeah. I went there yesterday morning. I spent the whole day on the East Branch of the Penobscot. I drove the loop road in the proposed park, did a small hike, and then drove home. I was back by 8:30.
Dr. Lisa: You don’t think that being that far north should be any impediment?
Lucas: No. National parks, by nature, are in rural places but it’s to drive to Arcadia from here, it takes the same amount of time to take the drive to the proposed park. When you think about where we are situated in the country, there are 90 million people within a day’s drive of the Katahdin Region. It’s a quarter of the population in United States. Then, you think about when people come into the United States from Europe especially, Boston, New York, Washington DC, those are points. To have natural parks very close to those areas, I think, would really drop people to Northern Maine.
The Park Service gets about 20 million visitors a year from Europe alone. If they fly to the East Coast, they would very likely come to Northern Maine. When you look at a map of where national parks are, there’s Arcadia and there’s isn’t another one until the Shenandoah all the way down to Virginia, in this very dense part of the United States. It feels like a long day drive to shoot up there for the day. If someone is on vacation, the family is on vacation, they’re excited to go to Arcadia, they’re likely go to Bangor, and an hour to Arcadia, and then an hour to the North Woods. It seems like a trip. That’s going to keep people in Maine longer, in Penobscot County longer. I think that people certainly go.
Dr. Lisa: It seems like there’s an actual process that, I guess, communities go through when you’re proposing a national park and getting to the place where the community lies in, but there’s also a process that you have to go through that’s fairly logistical. It has to do with the federal government. Describe that for me and what’s that been like for you.
Lucas: Sure. There are two ways to create units of the National Park Service and there are, I think, almost thirty different units of the Park Services, the National Parks, there’s the national seashores. There’s national monuments. There are national historic parks, battlefields, reserves, preserves, and there all have various different areas that they protect. There’s two ways to create those units. One, the president can do it or the congress can do it.
For a long time, we worked on a bill, a piece of legislation that would be introduced by a congressional delegation and pass through congress. We worked on that for several years. We drafted a piece of legislation, we worked with our congressional delegation, and we worked with people in the Katahdin regions and say, “Are we addressing your needs within this piece of legislation?” As we address more and more the concerns and the needs, more and more support grew, and our congressional delegation became more interested and intrigued by the idea.
In the end, we wanted to do something to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service which is here this year, 2016. We were putting pressure on our delegation saying, “2016 is the year so we really want to have the introduction of legislation then.” They weren’t ready. They weren’t willing. We worked on that last fall, the fall of 2015 with them. When we got signals that they weren’t going to introduce the legislation, we started to have conversations with the White House and said, “Okay, if we can’t do it this way, we’ll go to the President and see if he will do it.”
In order to have the President do it, he can use the 1906 Antiquities Act which creates a national monument. It can be administered by the Park Service. That’s what our goal is now. About half of the national parks that were created were initially created as a national monument. Acadia was done, Woodrow Wilson, President Wilson in 1916 used the Antiquities Act to create Acadia or it was called Sieur de Monts National Monument. The Grand Canyon, Zion, the Olympic Mountains, all of the big parks in Alaska, they’re all created by being a monument first. Often times then, it’s followed up with a piece of legislation that creates the national park.
That’s the path that we’re on now hoping that the President will use the 1906 Antiquities Act to create a national monument. We will transfer the land that we own to the National Park Service and we’ll also provide a $40 million endowment for operations and maintenance of the park. You’ll often times hear about a backlog of maintenance and the parks can’t pay for themselves. It’s a challenge that we saw that needed to be addressed. The foundation will donate that $40 million to take care of the operations and maintenance so it will essentially pay for itself.
We are hoping that support continues to grow. Senator King has had a public meeting. Almost 1300 people came to it. There was about 12 or about 1100 people in support of it. It was a great showing of support. Congressman Pollock went and had a congressional field hearing in East Millinocket. About 60 people spoke at that and 47 of them were in support, included elected officials in the local towns. Both King and Congressman Pollock have heard that there’s more support than opposition in the region. They’re moving into a more comfortable space but in the end, it will be the President’s decision and we’re getting signals from people that work for him that it’s positive and we’re moving in the right direction but we don’t know anything definitively yet.
Dr. Lisa: Is there a bit of a time crunch given that he’s an outgoing president?
Lucas: Yeah. When we have a new president, there will be a new Secretary of Interior, and a new Director of Park Service, and all the people of the council for Environmental Quality which is the environmental arm of the house will be the new. There will be a massive re-education that would have to happen then. We said we’ll work on this project through 2016. If we don’t get it done, we’ll decide something else to do with the land. We felt like we had to have a deadline in order to keep things on pace.
The president has done this a lot. He’s using Antiquities Act, I think, 21 times. He seems comfortable doing this. He put almost 270 million acres in the conservation. He brought his family to Yosemite over the weekend and spoke about there’s more work to be done. Hopefully, he’s talking about Maine. It’s considered.
Dr. Lisa: I’m not sure if you know the answer to this but percentage-wise of the proposed monuments that go into parks, how many generally are successful?
Lucas: I’m not sure what a percentage but there’s a long list. I was at a celebration that the Pew Charitable Trust had in Washington DC the other night. It was all the monument proposals around the country and all the grassroots organizers. There were a lot of people there. There’s the national monument proposal in El Paso, Texas and one in Owyhee Canyon in Oregon that I’d never even heard of.
He can’t do them all. I think, in a lot of ways, it’s really about his legacy and the president, what he wants to have is the body of work of the conservation work that he has completed. A lot of what he has worked on are places of cultural significance. Cesar Chavez’s home, Pullman in South Chicago where the first black middleclass existed, and the Labor Movement started. They built Pullman Railcars. A lot of it has been cultural and heritage sites. I think there’s a desire to do a landscape-sized park.
This is an ecosystem. It’s not represented in the park service. It’s Northern Hardwood Forest, the parks are a lot of rock and ice, a lot of canyon, a lot of glaciers, and big mountains, and there’s not a lot of forest, especially Northern Hardwood Forest. This is appealing, I think, from that standpoint. It’s just a unique ecosystem within the system.
Dr. Lisa: If you were to be successful with getting this piece of land to be considered a monument, and then ultimately considered a park, what would this look like? What would your ultimate national park look like at that location?
Lucas: It would be somewhat similar to Acadia, probably not quite as designed as Acadia is but there would be loop roads, and visitor centers, and kiosks, and campgrounds. Obviously, there will be rangers there, places to get information about what to go and visit, scenic vistas, hiking trails, biking trails. More amenities exist there now but I also imagine an infrastructure growing in the local communities.
Towns of Patten right now, they have what they need to get by but not much beyond that. I can imagine a law of just some sort there and more visitor services that would begin to grow. Imagine Bar Harbor a hundred years ago when Acadia was created. It didn’t have a lot. It’s grown to meet the expectations of visitors. I can imagine the communities around the proposed monument doing the same thing. For the most part, the beauty of the landscape would speak for itself. It would still be similar to what it looks like now.
Dr. Lisa: In the time I spent hiking Katahdin, I’ve noticed it’s actually a fairly busy mountain for the size of it and for the remoteness of it. Do you have any concerns that if we were to bring a large number of people up in that area that it could negatively impact the environment or?
Lucas: No, I don’t. Baxter has designed a very specific way and there are very specific rules that Percival Baxter set up in order for that to maintain its wilderness characteristics. It will be that way forever. The rangers that work for the state park and the rangers that will work for the National Park Service would have a great, cooperative agreements and working relationships to make sure that the resource in Baxter’s protected and protected the way it was mandated by Percival Baxter.
About 90% of visitors that go to Baxter want to climb Katahdin. I think by having a monument or a national monument next door would bring people that way. It would also bring people and distribute them a little bit more evenly throughout. The north entrance of Baxter, for example, gets very, very little attention. The Travel Arrange, and the Brothers, and South Turner, and all those mountains are so spectacular, no one really goes there.
I think a monument could perhaps spread people out a little bit more but if you think about what Acadia is like, I don’t feel like the Acadia National Park is an unspoiled landscape. They got 2.7 million visitors last year, and you could fit almost 2.5 Acadias within the proposed monument. Baxter is even bigger. Baxter is 209,000 acres. There’s a lot of space. The management plan that we’d put together would make sure that all of the resources are protected, and they have a mandate to do that. In the legislation that created the Park Services is conservation, first and foremost. It would make sure that the resources is protected.
Dr. Lisa: I know that this is not the only thing that you do. You also have an interest in other various organizations around the Portland area and around the State of Maine really. What are some of the other things that you really feel passionate about?
Lucas: The natural resources of Maine are just so spectacular. Then, they’re so intact. I spend a lot of time working in conservation-related activities. I’m on the board of the Maine Island Trails Association. I love spending time on Maine islands. I spend all weekend out there. They’re so spectacular. That’s a big interest of mine. Then, I’m also on the board of the Maine Conservation Voters. I spend a lot of time in the statehouse and working to promote good conservation laws and good conservation candidates to run our state. It’s a little bit more complicated right now. We’ve had some tough times and some tough opposition but I think because of the great work that Maine Conservation Voters and other environmental organizations have done, we’ve held the line as much as we can.
Then, I lived in Seattle for seven years, and being back in Portland, it’s like a neighborhood of Seattle without traffic. It’s such a fantastic place to live. My wife is from Seattle, and just absolutely love it, and it’s great to raise children here. It’s such a dynamic state. We have a farm in Gouldsboro, Maine, up on the coast. We spend a lot of time up there. I really love the young, organic agriculture movement that’s happening here. We do a lot of work with MAFCA. It’s a dynamic state that I feel like is really on the verge of some really great stuff.
Dr. Lisa: Why did you choose Portland?
Lucas: I spend a lot of time in DC. Being close to the airport is helpful. My wife, who grew up in Seattle, is like, “We’re not going to move to Millinocket right off.” She knew Maine a little bit but the community of people that she got to know when we’re living in Seattle were all in Maine. All my friends were all in Portland. She also was finishing graduate school when we came here. She finished her program at USM. That was part of the decision. Portland is a great town and it’s easy to get out really. That’s a huge plus about Portland. I day tripped to the east branch of the Penobscot yesterday and it didn’t feel that tough. I could leave my house an hour before a flight to Washington DC which is also really easy. It’s walkable. It’s a really great town.
Dr. Lisa: Why does your mother care so much about this and why do you care so much about this?
Lucas: When she sold the Birds Bees, there was a real sense of giving back. She moved the company to North Carolina in the early ‘90s, and felt like because it was so successful, she could give back some of the money that she made in the Northern Maine, and land conservation seemed like the most appropriate thing to do because there was a real need and a lot of the land was for sale.
For me, I grew up in Northern Maine. My dad worked in Millinocket. When I was a kid I saw Millinocket thriving really at its peak. Not maybe in its peak but in the early ‘80s, it was doing really well. It’s really suffering. I feel like there’s an opportunity to help the local economy and to really change some of the hardships that they’ve experienced over the last 10, 20, 30 years. It’s about the people, for me. I want to have people be successful, and live fulfilled lives there, and the question they had about wellness. Wellness, for me, is about communities working well together, and people really enjoying where they live, and being able to be successful in places they live. That’s super important.
Dr. Lisa: I agree with you. You’re referring to a questionnaire that we have everybody fill out when they first come in to the radio show. It’s interesting that you said striking the right balance between living and work, family and friends, community and self, if I can read your handwriting.
Lucas: Yeah.
Dr. Lisa: I thing that’s a really important way to look at it that there’s always going to be competing demands in every direction but if you can try to find a way to be measured in your response to all these demands so that, I guess, all boats will float, I guess
Lucas: Yeah, exactly. It’s really hard to do in interior Maine too. There’s not a lot of obvious jobs where a lot of people work a lot of different jobs, work close to the land. I want people to be able to stay in those communities and still have a positive experience. It’s imbalance. That balance is tough to strike, I think.
Dr. Lisa: Lucas, is there anything else that you think people would like to know about regarding your hope of creating a national park?
Lucas: I think, first and foremost, I want more people from Southern Maine to go to Northern Maine, and know how accessible it is, and know how beautiful it is. It’s worth the trip. I know a lot of people down here that have not been to Millinocket, or not been to Baxter, or not been to the East Branch. I encourage people to make the trip. When they’re there, encourage people to come here, and see what Portland is like, and see what’s Southern Maine has to offer because this idea of two Maines drives me crazy.
We are one state. We’re a big state. You can drive along way and still be in Maine. We need to understand each other. What’s happening in Jackman and what’s happening in Millinocket, and Presque Isle, and Portland are all really different but worthy of happening. More of an understanding of all that, I think, is super important. I encourage people to go up and check it out, and come down and check Portland out, and get to know one another because it’s a great state with a lot of great things to offer.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve been speaking with Lucas St. Clair who, in 2001, took over his families operating foundation, Elliotsville Plantation Inc., which owns 125,000 acres of timberland in Northern and Central Maine that they hope to create a national park and recreation area with. I think that you’ve convinced me.
Lucas: All right.
Dr. Lisa: I was convinced before but you’ve convinced me even more and I really wish you all the best.
Lucas: Thank you so much.
Dr. Lisa: I hope that you’re able to make this happen. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to come talk to me.
Lucas: Absolutely. Maybe next time, we’ll do it in the Katahdin Region
Dr. Lisa: That sounds good.
Lucas: All right.