We take it for granted, but if you think about it, it’s a very special thing,” the Maine guide said. He was describing with masterly understatement the lands between Grand Lake Stream (highest per capita number of registered guides in Maine) and the Machias River. His audience, a group of conservationists on the shores of Fourth Machias Lake, knew just what he was talking about.

To get to the meeting, we had canoed through white cedar thickets, over beaver dams, into bogs full of Labrador tea. From time to time, rapids broke the slick surface of the water into peat-tinged furrows. Always on our right, a granite dome, not quite flattened by the Ice Sheet, scarcely shifted its position: Washington Bald Mountain is the hub around which the Machias describes the best part of the circle before heading for the sea.

The guide was one of the founders of the Downeast Lakes Land Trust, a group of men and women whose families have made a living amid these forests and lakes for generations. Their goal is to save this “special” country – biologically one of the richest parts of Maine – by maintaining its heritage of guiding, hunting and fishing. Like much of Northern and Eastern Maine, the land has been owned by one paper-company after another over the years, and the forests have been hammered. “It’s heartbreaking,” said a laconic hunter pointing to a clear-cut sloping up Washington Bald Mountain.

Their concern started with game. Heavy logging had deprived the deer of the refuges they need to survive a Maine winter. Heavy machinery obliterated the animals’ traditional trails in search of browse. The deer population plummeted. Fewer deer meant fewer hunters; fewer hunters meant fewer guides. As one of them put it, “This has been our backbone going back a hundred years, and it’s falling apart if we don’t do something about it.” So the trust set out to buy some 27,000 acres. Behind the campaign lay a commitment to sustain the natural resource based, rural community economy and the way of life of rural Washington County.

That was three years ago. Now, together with an extraordinary group of public and private partners, the Downeast Lakes Land Trust is working to protect 342,000 acres of forestland, some of it – like the core around Grand Lake Stream – through outright purchase, but most of it through conservation easement. Strategically positioned between 600,000 acres of conservation lands in New Brunswick and 200,000 acres of state, federal and Native American lands in Maine, the project will link more than a million acres of essentially uninterrupted habitat across an international boundary. In so doing, the partnership has created a model for northern Maine: a forest conservation project that is community incubated, community supported, community led.

Rather than depend on the timber companies, the guides realized their future would be with the land itself. The sons and grandsons of the sportsmen first lured by these lakes and streams keep returning to the same campsites, sites chosen for their special qualities – a sand beach, shelter out of the wind, a particularly fine view of the sunset – by the forebears of today’s guides. “It’s the stories,” the hunter told me, summing up what they are striving to hold on to. The guide added, “If we disappear, who will be the stewards of this land?”

The fate of a unique tapestry of nature and tradition hinges on the answer. At stake is more than 445 miles of lakeshore, 1,500 miles of rivers and streams, 54,000 acres of productive wetlands. Ten percent of northern Maine’s loons and at least 185 bird species depend on the land for their habitats, as do bear, moose, deer, pine marten, beaver, otter and other mammals. The area is laced with historic Native American canoe routes and more than sixty lakes supporting some of the best fisheries in the country.

But time is of the essence. The window of opportunity is quite small. To complete the project, the partners must raise $19 million by Dec. 31, in addition to the $12 million they have already raised.

As a way of life, guiding is only as secure as the land itself. Its “stewards” deserve the help of anyone who sees in these woods and waters the stuff we treasure about Maine. “It takes every piece of the puzzle to make a living here,” the guide said. It wasn’t a complaint, just a statement of fact. This project offers us the opportunity to conserve not only important forestland and wildlife habitat but a way of life in Down East Maine; a way that still relies on the area’s rich natural resources just as it did more than 100 years ago.

Thomas Urquhart is a principal in Urquhart & Spritz, consultants on business and the environment. From 1988 to 2000, he was the executive director of the Maine Audubon Society.