BANGOR – The Allagash is a wilderness at risk, according to Tim Caverly.

“The river has been through a lot of loss of its identity,” he said. “Thirty years of turmoil – that’s enough.”

Narrating a slide show for about a dozen people at Epic Sports in Bangor on Tuesday night, Caverly emphasized the importance of providing buffers for a unique place like the Allagash. Slide after slide showed heavily harvested industrial forest cut right up to the beginning of the state’s conservation ownership, just 500 feet from the water.

Since the waterway was created in 1968, the state has owned about 23,000 acres of narrow buffer all up and down the 92-mile river corridor. Caverly hopes that someday, the waterway will include 139,000 acres – a full mile on each side of the river.

The state already holds some rights to approve or reject development projects within the one-mile corridor, and in some areas those projects can be seen from a canoe on the river. But clearly, the protection isn’t sufficient, Caverly said, showing industrial logging and road construction just outside the state’s buffer zone.

Allagash Lake, one of the waterway’s most popular and unique attractions, has no view protection at all, Caverly said.

“The very jewel of the [waterway], Allagash Lake, doesn’t have the protection,” he said.

In his new position as Maine director for the national nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Caverly is a member of a coalition that has been advocating for more land acquisition on the waterway. The coalition, Citizens to Protect the Allagash, recently presented Conservation Commissioner Pat McGowan with a proposal for possible land acquisitions.

Some are crucial because of their visibility from the river. But in other cases, land owned by J.D. Irving Ltd. is actually for sale, and Caverly believes that the state should strike while the opportunity exists, he said.

Caverly has been one of the leading critics of state efforts to domesticate the Allagash, often facing off against the former King administration. Yet he gave McGowan the benefit of the doubt Tuesday night, praising the Baldacci administration-brokered compromise between sportsmen and environmentalists known as the River Drivers Agreement.

“There are good things coming,” he said.

However, Caverly expressed his disappointment that the Henry Taylor camps, two 1930s-era sporting camps on the riverbank, could be rebuilt. Reconstructing the camps as a historic site was included in the River Drivers Agreement.

But historic sporting camps, like those named for the Nugent and Jalbert families, already give river-goers that cultural experience, Caverly said, pointing out that the National Historic Register has declined to list the Taylor camps.

Volunteers in northern Aroostook County have already begun work on the Taylor camps, however. A handful of people have spent recent weekends cleaning up garbage, covering the two camps slated for reconstruction next summer, and tearing down a third camp deemed too far gone for salvation. Maine’s Land Use Regulation Commission is expected to consider a permit this winter so that, if approved, construction can begin in the spring, Gary Pelletier of Fort Kent said Tuesday afternoon.

Carefully tearing down the camps, then reconstructing them at an alternate location – perhaps just outside the waterway in Allagash village – would be a better solution, Pelletier said.

“While we appreciate and respect the cultural accomplishments, … we can also see the power of the forest to heal, if it’s allowed to,” Caverly said.