This is where the secrets are kept.

Somewhere inside the headquarters of the state’s Nature Conservancy office, on the banks of the Androscoggin River in an abandoned brick mill in Brunswick, hangs a map depicting in cheerful blocks of color the 264,370 acres of Maine owned by the nation’s largest and wealthiest environmental group, and the untold acres of private land that have been targeted for future acquisition.

Private property rights advocates and environmental activists would love to get a glimpse of that map. But Kent Wommack, the state Nature Conservancy director, is known for his ability to keep a confidence. He is probably the only environmentalist in Maine who has the private telephone numbers of timber company CEOs at his fingertips.

During a recent interview, Wommack scoffed at rumors he is creating a north woods national park, but wouldn’t go so far as to reveal the Nature Conservancy’s master plan for Maine.

“We like Maine just the way it is right now,” he said with a Mona Lisa smile. “Unfortunately, it’s not staying that way.”

The Nature Conservancy was America’s first national land trust, founded in 1951 by a group of ecologists hoping to save unique habitats by buying up land before its natural value was developed away.

Today, the group’s success in coaxing large chunks of land from corporate ownership has no peer. The Nature Conservancy owns more than 92 million acres worldwide – 12 million in the United States alone – all selected because of their ecological significance.

The conservancy selects its properties based on hard science and pays top dollar for land that it considers biologically priceless.

“None of us really knows how nature works, but we’re using the best science we can, to make the best judgments we can,” Wommack said. “Our mission is biodiversity, and our goal is trying to preserve the best examples.”

Shifting focus

The Nature Conservancy opened a Maine office in 1955, when naturalist-author Rachel Carson and a group of her peers founded a chapter here. Dozens of small parcels were purchased or protected with conservation easements, creating a pattern of habitat “islands” – a salt marsh here, a riverbank there – scattered all over the state.

Then, about a decade ago, the organization changed its focus and began looking at the world not as towns and neighborhoods, but as “eco-regions,” areas of biological homogeny that can stretch for hundreds or thousands of square miles.

This national shift was prompted by the large-scale development projects that threatened to interfere with the natural world, explained Bruce Kidman, communications director for the Maine chapter. Nationally, 1,000 acres are preserved each day, but 7,000 acres are lost to development, he said.

In Massachusetts, Connecticut and even southern Maine, forests and marshes have been carved up into dozens of tiny lots, destroying the biological continuum. But in this new “eco-region” context, Maine’s remote, wild lands have become particularly important.

“What we have in Maine is the opportunity that has foreclosed south of us,” Kidman said. “I think in the last three or four years, Maine has woken up.”

In 1998, Maine’s Nature Conservancy owned only about 22,000 total acres, and its largest purchase was 5,000 acres of forestland. Over the past five years, however, the group has increased its holdings more than tenfold, to today’s 264,370-acre tally.

“This has been an evolution for us as an organization,” Wommack said. “We began to realize that we need to think at a huge scale.”

Sometimes, as in the case of a preserve near Mount Agamenticus in York County, the Nature Conservancy has spent years patching together a landscape with purchases from dozens of landowners.

But increasingly, it has been working on a much larger scale, locking up hundreds of thousands of acres of forest with a single agreement.

In 1998 the conservancy purchased 185,000 acres of land along the St. John River in Aroostook County, at a cost of more than $35 million.

And just last month it announced that 240,000 acres around the borders of Baxter State Park would be preserved using easements and outright purchase through a $50 million agreement – the largest the national Nature Conservancy has ever negotiated.

Critics’ fears

These giant deals have made news nationally, and mainstream environmental groups have applauded.

“They have an impeccable record,” said Chris Hamilton, spokesman for the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. “They’re on the cutting edge of conservation in the country.”

More politically active groups like the Sierra Club agree.

“It’s great to have all kinds of public demand and advocacy, but if there’s no money to actually purchase and protect these areas, there’s only so far you can go,” said Karen Woodsum of Maine’s Sierra Club chapter. “From our perspective, however it happens, preservation is good.”

But the sheer scope of these closed-door agreements frightens private-property rights advocates. Counting lands the Nature Conservancy owns or has helped to protect through easements and sales, the group has had a 616,477-acre impact – that’s nearly 3 percent of the entire land area of the state of Maine.

Mary Adams, an activist who edits a conservative-leaning political Web site from her Garland home, has frequently criticized the conservancy’s efforts, linking them to activists who want to turn lands north and west of Mount Katahdin into a north woods national park.

Jon Reisman, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Maine at Machias and a longtime member of the Maine Conservation Rights Institute, cited the Nature Conservancy’s history of turning land over to the federal government. Two of Maine’s federal wildlife preserves – the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in York County and Petit Manan National Wildlife Refuge off Washington County – started out as Nature Conservancy holdings.

“There’s a long history of being a middleman, of flipping land to the government, sometimes at a profit, sometimes not,” said Reisman, raising concerns about taxation and local control of land.

“It’s antithetical to the system of our country,” he said. “Capitalism is a system where the resources are controlled by private landowners, not the government.”

For Wommack, this criticism is nothing new.

The Nature Conservancy often becomes a target because the people involved in passionate debates over land use can’t believe that a large and powerful organization could truly be pragmatic, with no ulterior motive, he said.

The Nature Conservancy refuses to choose sides. The only political stand in its long history in Maine was its support for the 1987 Land for Maine’s Future bond, an ongoing program to make state funds available for local land conservation.

“We’re totally nonpartisan,” Wommack said. “That makes ideologues nervous on both sides.”

Cozy with corporations

Environmental think tanks, such as the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity, have criticized the Nature Conservancy’s cozy relationship with corporate America. The group’s national board includes corporate players who spent time at such companies as Georgia Pacific, General Motors and Cisco. The Maine chapter’s 12,000 supporters include such names as L.L. Bean, MBNA, Poland Spring and J.D. Irving Ltd.

The group often purchases easements on corporate land that permit commercial uses, such as grazing, drilling for oil, or forestry to continue with little oversight. For example, Great Northern Paper will continue to harvest timber from the 200,000 acres of land near Baxter State Park protected under a conservation easement just last month.

Wommack said the Nature Conservancy cultivates its moderate reputation through these “win-win situations.” Cooperation with businesses earns the group trust and credibility in land negotiations, whether its partner is a multinational conglomerate or a small family business, he said.

“We are who we are, and we treat everybody the same,” Wommack said. “We’ll work with any and all landowners, with anybody who’s willing to sit down and talk with us.”

Limiting their partnerships to businesses with perfect environmental records just wouldn’t be practical.

“It would be nice to wait until every landowner in the state of Maine passed some environmental test, but the extinction problem is not going to wait for that,” Kidman said. “There are a lot of folks who offer forestland, and it makes sense to them for reasons that aren’t particularly green, and that’s fine with us.”

The Nature Conservancy’s pragmatism doesn’t hurt its fund-raising efforts, either. The national organization is by far America’s wealthiest environmental group, with assets of just under $3 billion, according to 2001 tax filings.

A survey done by the Chronicle of Philanthropy indicated the Nature Conservancy ranked 10th among U.S. charitable institutions in the value of its private donations, with $445 million raised in 2000 alone.

A revolving loan fund is available to all the local chapters, making the conservancy’s larger purchases possible. Local chapters must raise the funds to pay back the national organization with interest.

“It’s really up to us here in Maine to figure out what’s important to protect in our local communities, and to figure out how to pay for that,” Wommack said.

History’s judgment

The importance of the Nature Conservancy in Maine’s history is measured both by the scale of its work, and by its innovation, said Richard Judd, an environmental historian who teaches at the University of Maine.

“We have special problems here,” Judd said.

“You can’t carve out a 10 million-acre wilderness – you have to take a little bit of wilderness and make it work, or you really have to do innovative things,” he said.

Judd cited the organization’s pioneering use of conservation easements in Maine 30 years ago, as well as the recent debt-for-nature swap with Great Northern: one of the first times that an environmental group has become a creditor for a corporation in exchange for conservation promises.

With private ownership of land increasing nationwide, Judd predicted Maine’s Nature Conservancy will continue to set precedent with its pragmatic, business-friendly approach to environmentalism.

“What we’ve had to do, the rest of the country will come around to at some point,” Judd said.