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November 8, 2004

The conservation game | Mike Tetreault takes the reins of the Maine chapter of The Nature Conservancy

By Taylor Smith
As the new Maine chapter director of The Nature Conservancy, Mike Tetreault plans to build on the success of his predecessor, Kent Wommack. Tetreault credits Wommack's nonconfrontational negotiating style for the completion of a handful of high-profile conservation deals such as the Katahdin Forest Project, an initiative that used federal tax credits and other financing to protect more than 240,000 acres of land near Baxter State Park. Tetreault also praises Wommack's harried ˆ— and ultimately successful ˆ— six-week effort in 1998 to raise more than $35 million to purchase 185,000 acres of forest land on the upper St. John River. "Bold strokes was something that [Wommack] did very well," says Tetreault. "He recognized a good opportunity when he saw it."

But Tetreault faces a number of challenges in taking the reins from Wommack. For one, the conservation game in Maine has changed dramatically in recent years, as large tracts of land ˆ— especially in northern Maine ˆ— have been parceled off to a range of different owners, making the conservation process more time-consuming and expensive. Timberland investment management organizations like Plum Creek and John Hancock increasingly are purchasing land from paper companies as investment buffers to the stock market. But Tetreault is optimistic that there are enough deals to keep the organization busy. "It's still big enough to be exciting," he says. "Instead of hundreds of thousands of acres, it's mostly tens of thousands of acres."

One of Tetreault's first conservation projects is a 12,000-acre tract of land around Mt. Agamenticus in York County that is controlled by roughly 50 different landowners. "That's truly a Humpty Dumpty deal," he says, referring to the fragmented ownership. "We're trying to figure out the best strategy to keep up with the pace of development in southern Maine."

As executive director of The Nature Conservancy's Brunswick-based Maine chapter, a post he took over in early September, Tetreault will be spearheading conservation efforts in a state whose economy is very dependent on its natural resources. His experience was similar in his previous position as The Nature Conservancy's northwest Colorado program manager; Tetreault said he understood that the organization's mission ˆ— to protect the diversity of life on earth by protecting natural habitats ˆ— couldn't be separated from the social and economic realities of the area where he worked.

A big portion of Tetreault's work there involved collaborating with cattle ranchers, coal miners and oil companies, helping to drive economic development as well as conservation in the area. He worked with ranchers in the affluent Steamboat Springs area, where rising property costs outstripped the going price for cattle, to develop a more profitable market niche for locally produced beef.

He looks forward to forging the same kinds of relationships here in Maine, and expects to work closely with The Nature Conservancy's corporate conservation council, a group made up of representatives from nearly 70 different businesses in Maine. Tetreault hopes the council can help drum up renewed support for the Land for Maine's Future Program, which in recent months has slipped into bankruptcy after the state Legislature failed to set aside additional funding for the program. "Mainers agreed to tax themselves to buy land, which was very far-sighted," he says. "That's a big source of conservation capital."

Tetreault was excited to take the position of Maine chapter director, in part because he's a native New Englander, having grown up in Norwich, Vt. He also cites the Maine chapter's board of directors, which includes people such as Jim Dowe, president of Bangor Savings Bank, and Chris McCormick, CEO of L.L. Bean, as creative drivers of the organization's mission. "We've got world-class natural systems and a very strong board of smart people who have a history of innovation, success and taking risk," he says. "And those ingredients have a lot of potential to incubate strategies that could be applied in other places."

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