Maine’s land trust boom: How community-led conservation masks extractive land policies and Indigenous dispossession

Wabanaki Nations have stewarded Maine’s ecosystems for millennia, using fire ecology, seasonal migrations, and reciprocal land management to maintain biodiversity. Their land reclamation efforts—like the Penobscot Nation’s 2022 lawsuit to restore the Penobscot River’s fish passage—challenge the state’s conservation narrative by centering Indigenous jurisdiction. Land trusts, however, often collaborate with state agencies to suppress these claims, framing them as 'disruptive' to 'unified' conservation goals. The erasure of Wabanaki knowledge in mainstream narratives reflects a broader pattern of settler-colonial conservation that prioritizes scenic value over ecological integrity.

Maine’s conservation landscape is a direct legacy of 19th-century timber barons who clear-cut forests and displaced Wabanaki peoples through the 1820 statehood act. The 1970s land trust boom emerged alongside neoliberal environmentalism, where conservation became a tool for land value appreciation and tax avoidance for wealthy elites. This history mirrors global patterns, from the U.S. Park Service’s displacement of Indigenous peoples to the creation of 'protected areas' in Africa that criminalized Indigenous land use. The land trust model’s emphasis on 'working forests' often perpetuates the same extractive logic it claims to counter.

In Aotearoa (New Zealand), the Te Urewera Act (2017) granted legal personhood to a forest, recognizing Māori cosmology in conservation law—a stark contrast to Maine’s private land trust model. Similarly, the Māori concept of *kaitiakitanga* (guardianship) centers intergenerational responsibility, while Maine’s trusts often prioritize recreational access over ecological reciprocity. Across the Americas, Indigenous-led conservation (e.g., the Amazon’s *territorios indígenas*) demonstrates higher biodiversity outcomes than state-protected areas, yet these models are systematically excluded from U.S. conservation discourse.

Studies show that Indigenous-managed lands exhibit higher biodiversity and carbon sequestration than protected areas managed by governments or NGOs (e.g., Garnett et al., 2018). Maine’s land trusts often rely on flawed 'working forest' models that prioritize timber revenue over ecological resilience, despite evidence that unmanaged forests sequester more carbon. The scientific literature also highlights the role of conservation easements in locking land into private hands, reducing adaptive management flexibility. Meanwhile, Wabanaki fire ecology practices—long suppressed by state foresters—are now being revalidated for their role in maintaining fire-adapted ecosystems.

Wabanaki basketmakers like Jennifer Neptune (Penobscot) frame conservation as a spiritual act tied to ancestral lands and reciprocal relationships with non-human kin. Maine’s land trust narratives often reduce nature to a commodity for recreation, ignoring Indigenous cosmologies where rivers, forests, and animals are sacred kin. Artistic expressions like the Passamaquoddy *wolastoqiyik* (river people) songs encode ecological knowledge, yet these are sidelined in favor of white, settler-colonial aesthetics of 'wilderness.' The erasure of Indigenous spiritual frameworks in conservation discourse reflects a broader devaluation of non-Western ways of knowing.

Scenario modeling suggests that Maine’s land trust model will fail to meet 2050 climate goals without integrating Indigenous land stewardship and dismantling extractive land tenure systems. Alternative futures include Wabanaki-led conservation corridors, where rivers and forests are granted legal personhood, and land trusts are restructured as community land trusts with Indigenous co-governance. The current model risks accelerating land consolidation, as seen in the 2023 sale of 185,000 acres to a private equity firm, despite land trust 'protections.'

Wabanaki Nations, Black farmers, and low-income rural communities are systematically excluded from Maine’s conservation decision-making, despite bearing the brunt of environmental degradation. Land trusts often prioritize wealthy donors’ tax benefits over ecological justice, as seen in the 2021 acquisition of 30,000 acres by the Appalachian Mountain Club, which restricts public access to Indigenous peoples. The narrative of 'community conservation' centers white landowners while erasing the voices of those displaced by conservation policies, from the 19th-century timber barons to today’s real estate developers.