A multimillionaire skin-care maven wants to create a new national park in Maine, but local residents worry that wilderness protection measures will end the lifestyle their families have known for generations.
Roxanne Quimby, co-founder of Burt’s Bees natural care products, wants to buy as much land as she can in northern Maine to piece together a national park where hunting, snowmobiling, and logging would be off limits.
“It’s my intention to donate this land to the people of America,” Quimby told the Portland Press Herald.
In November, 53-year-old Quimby bought more than 24,000 acres of forest east of Maine’s Baxter State Park. This land, which sold for $12 million, brings the total of Quimby’s land holdings to 40,000 acres, making her the second largest individual landowner in the state. With the recent sale of 80 percent of Burt’s Bees to an investment firm at a price of $179 million, Quimby is poised to increase her purchasing power. The ultimate goal is a national park that would cover 3.2 million acres of what some consider the most spectacular wilderness east of the Mississippi River.
The proposed national park is supported by a host of high-profile environmentalists
