Thanks to a small handful of people back in the early 1980s, residents and visitors Downeast are able to find respite from the pandemic and other pressures by stepping onto a trail, setting off from a boat launch or sitting at water's edge, all on lands that are a part of the region's rich land trust resources.
     "When we started we had no clue," says Alan Brooks of the early and instrumental work he and others did for the land trust movement in Washington County. While Maine Coast Heritage Trust (MCHT) is known today as a significant organization, back then it was tiny, remembers Brooks. There were just a handful of land trusts in the state, and they were not understood and were often met with hostility.
     Brooks and his partner, Nancy Nielsen, and others who lived around Cobscook Bay started in 1981 what eventually became Quoddy Regional Land Trust (QRLT). He explains, "The area attracts people with big ideas" that would have had profound consequences for the culture and environment of the county. One was to create a tidal power project with two dams, one at Half Moon Cove and one at Straight Bay, where Brooks and Nielsen lived. "We looked into what this would mean and thought it would be environmentally devastating for the bay," he remembers. The group of people living around the bay, who knew it as a special place, were successful in making the case to the majority of towns that needed to sign on to the project and stopped the proposal from proceeding.
     Then there was the giant coal fired power plant set for Eastport, with a tie in to coal supplies from South America that would have gone through the Port of Eastport. Brooks says, "It was going to provide more power than the whole state could use at the time." The project fizzled out, but no one was able to rest as a second tidal power project was proposed and then subdivision developers "started sniffing around." Brooks explains, "It was a big boom. Land was changing hands really rapidly, and some land, particularly on the shore, was being sold not because the landowners wanted to but because they were being priced out -- the taxes were too high."
     Brooks will never forget the day when he was working at Pine Tree Legal and a woman came in who said that in all her life she had never felt poor until the day she went back to a place where she had always picnicked and a chain was across the road. "We had been focused on the big industrial projects that could have turned the whole region into a place like Shreveport, Louisiana," says Brooks. Her words reinforced the need to recognize and understand the shift in the land base with subdivision development and the potential adverse impacts on local culture, the environment, the tax base and more.
     MCHT was the impetus for the formation of Quoddy Bay Regional Land Trust in 1987. "They were very small then, but they recognized the development pressures all up and down the coast and that some effort was needed" to identify with local input what was unique and special and worth preserving for public access into perpetuity. Brooks and Nielsen admired the model of long lasting change through positive inclusion of many different voices. "It took a few years to learn about the land trust movement," he notes, but with the encouragement and help of the Land Trust Alliance, MCHT and The Nature Conservancy, QRLT was born.
     "QRLT always felt distinct. It had a better sense of local needs," explains Brooks. "There was plenty of opposition and differences of opinion, but many saw the value of protecting land for scenic value, keeping it open for recreation, for hunting and fishing" and other uses. For almost 25 years QRLT followed that mission. "We tried to be careful. We never took a project on just because we had a source of funding. It needed to meet our mission." Sometimes that meant turning down a proposal. "We did have some corporations with subdivision proposals approach us that we did reject." The reason, he says, was because "sometimes a developer just wants you to do a fig leaf" in order to meet land use laws.
     "I couldn't be prouder of the work" that QRLT achieved, says Fred Stocking, a lawyer who rolled up his sleeves with Brooks, Nielsen and others to figure out the land trust movement. "I loved the work," and that love of conservation led to a career that was dedicated to working with land trusts exclusively for the last 10 years of his career. Brooks notes that Stocking was instrumental in QRLT's easement work and became one of the preeminent conservation easement legal experts in the state. Stocking retired in 2018, but not before finding someone to replace him with the same love of the not always lucrative but always rewarding work.
     Figuring out how to carry forward the mission with new hands at the helm was on the QRLT horizon by the early 2000s. QRLT was working in tandem with other well respected land trusts in the area, as well as the state's Land for Maine's Future Program. Together they were looking at a large conservation vision. "That can sound scary," Brooks admits, "but it just meant not thinking haphazardly."
     When the 2008 recession hit, QRLT and the Great Auk Land Trust built on conversations that had started a few years earlier and merged to create what is now the Downeast Coastal Conservancy (DCC). From its founding in 1987 to the time of the merger, QRLT conserved, through 40 projects, 2,013 acres via conservation easement and 828 acres via fee acquisition -- land ownership -- for a total of 2,841 acres. The easements protected 14.6 miles of saltwater and freshwater shorefront, and the fee acquisitions protected 7.7 miles, for a total of 22.3 miles. Brooks notes that QRLT also assisted other organizations, through 15 projects, in conserving an additional 2,008.5 acres via easement and 1,358.5 acres in fee acquisition, a total of 3,367 acres. This resulted in protection of another 6.3 shorefront miles via easement and 19.9 miles via fee acquisition, a total of 26.2 miles.
     With the formation of DCC, Brooks retired as executive director but stayed on for a while as land steward. The story of QRLT "is not a one person story," he says. Brooks, Nielsen, Stocking and many others took on the work even though they hardly knew what they were getting into when they started. The landowners who wanted to donate land and easements are the heroes, he adds.
     Looking at the legacy Brooks helped to build, DCC Executive Director Jon Southern says, "What a lot of forethought it took, especially looking at what's happening now," with the real estate boom. "Alan was a pioneer." Southern pauses. "Alan was innovative. Land trusts were new. People were very suspicious, they didn't know what they were," and also, he explains, there had been a long standing ethos of allowed access to privately held land. People did not yet understand that the dynamic could change and the access be denied.
     Today DCC's usage rates are "off the charts," says Southern. The pandemic is partially a driver of that use, and he is seeing the land used by families and children for learning and curriculum purposes, a trend that he hopes continues and that DCC is nurturing with outreach efforts.
     The current real estate boom concerns Southern. He echoes the same issues that alarmed Brooks in the early days. He fears year round communities turning to summer residents only as locals find they cannot afford rising property taxes, and he worries that the area is losing access "at an unprecedented rate." He adds, "It certainly makes our work more critical" than ever.
     For more information, visit downeastcoastalconservancy.org .