Salmon are Creatures of the Forest

Land Justice and Land Protection on the Penobscot River

*The woods and waters of Wáhsehtəkʷ.* © Chris Bennett, courtesy of Trust for Public Land

The Penobscot River watershed has many histories, some beautiful and some ugly. The river’s first history is as a home to countless species of plants and animals since the last remnants of the glaciers carved its banks 15,000 years ago, with an estimated peak of nearly 100,000 Atlantic salmon and tens of millions of river herring, shad, and alewives returning annually to the waters of the Penobscot to feed and spawn.¹ The vibrant ecosystem and fertile habitat led to its deep and integrated history as home to the Penobscot Nation. The original human inhabitants of the river’s banks built a thriving civilization utilizing all the river had to offer for at least 8,000 years. The Penobscot people traveled the entire length of the river’s 150 miles of headwaters and streams — from the rocky Atlantic coast to what is now the Quebec border — organizing their society around the diverse and abundant resources found within the river’s reach. Only within the last 300 years has the history of the river turned to one of contamination, extinction, and colonization. Since the initial theft of the land from the Penobscot people in the early nineteenth century, the same natural resources that nurtured wild and human cultures alike drew prospective settlers and capitalists to the woods of central Maine. As the timber economy developed, the river took on three new roles in sequence. First, it functioned as a logging thoroughfare, guiding felled white pine and red spruce to waiting sawmills downstream, with nearly 3.5 billion board feet of white pine lumber shipping out of Bangor between 1830 and 1890.² Next, the river served as a power source and coolant as lumber mills gave way to paper production and hydropower generation in the twentieth century. And third, throughout the paper industry's tenure on the banks of the Penboscot, the river served as a dumping ground. The very mills that were built on the integrity of the Penobscot’s ecosystem leached or dumped carcinogenic dioxins, PCBs, mercury, and other poisons into its waters for decades, essentially eliminating the river’s identity as habitat, spawning grounds, and food source. Many of the river’s identities have shifted over time as markets and politics have shifted. Logs no longer float down the East Branch, and Bangor is a far cry from the lumber capital of North America, but the deep and inextricable connection between the Penobscot River and the Penobscot Nation, forged over millennia, persists.

The historical, cultural, and ecological significance of the Penobscot River has led to major investments in stewardship and restoration since the first official recognition of chemical contamination in 1987. From federal funding for fish ladders to broad coalitions of tribal and environmental organizations collaborating to remove obsolete dams up and down the river, over $50 million in public and philanthropic funding has been invested toward restoring the environmental vitality of the Penobscot’s waters. These efforts have brought together a “Who’s Who” of state, national, and global conservation and fishery-focused organizations. American Rivers, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the Environmental Protection Agency, Maine Audubon, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Natural Resources Council of Maine, The Nature Conservancy, Trout Unlimited, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and multiple State of Maine agencies and offices have all contributed to restoration efforts over the past 30 years — and these collaborations have yielded impressive results. Dan McCaw, the fisheries director for the Penobscot Nation Department of Natural Resources (DNR), shared this reflection in a recent NOAA report: “Most of my life you walked by the river and saw rocks, but now I’ve seen little kids with their hands in the water chasing alewives … thousands and thousands of them. It’s a mind blowing and wonderful thing.”³ The data is equally as promising for the recovery of the Atlantic salmon run, with a count of 1,705 fish returning to their historic spawning grounds in 2023, a record number over the past decade — though still woefully short of historical figures. These stories and their significance have been told beautifully elsewhere,⁴ and more successful efforts to reclaim and restore habitat will be needed for the wild inhabitants of our region to have the best possible chance of adapting to a changing climate. However, we are also living in a moment that calls for broader, more ambitious interventions to build on past successes and to maximize the value of future work — the impact of these habitat restoration efforts becomes much deeper when considering the river beyond its banks, situated within a web of cultural, spiritual, and political histories. [See this issue’s Read/Watch/Listen Section for a link to the Sunlight Media Collective documentary “This River Is our Relative” for a particularly beautiful exploration of the River’s overlapping identities.]

The Penobscot River is the second largest watershed in New England — nearly 30 percent of Maine drains into it. The Penobscot Nation considers the river to have five distinct sub-watersheds, depicted here:

Graphics and text courtesy of the Penobscot Nation Department of Natural Resources

As the impacts of our warming climate become more intense and more tangible here in New England, we have the opportunity to design our responses in any number of ways. In responding to the increasingly frequent flooding of farm fields, for example, we have the option to fund any number of solutions, including expanding crop insurance programs, subsidizing the installation of field drainage, and relocating farms to higher ground. As policymakers discuss options, what solutions would rise to the top if our analysis incorporated impact on other societal challenges? Which of these flooding-specific interventions has the strongest impact on rural community livelihood? Which option would sequester the most carbon or protect the most habitat? Bringing in other, ancillary, but essential goals to our analysis about how to respond to a particular facet of climate challenges allows for solutions with farther reach and broader impact. In the context of land conservation, rather than protecting land for protection’s sake, how do we support the emergence of a model that provides development protection while supporting biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and land justice? How can we do more with what we have?

On the Penobscot River, this integrated approach to the challenges at hand has taken root in the form of a recent $5 million grant to the Penobscot Nation through a relatively new conservation program, the America the Beautiful Challenge (AtBC). In its second year of operation, AtBC departs from many previous efforts in its recognition that the interwoven histories of our landscape (as essential habitat, as properties degraded by decades of resource extraction, as land inextricably linked to the identities of tribal nations, and as assets in the global effort to slow climate change) may require integrated solutions for their protection. AtBC was launched by the Biden Administration in 2022 as the vehicle to advance the Administration’s goal to preserve 30% of American land by 2030. AtBC was designed to serve as a “one-stop shop” that amalgamated funding from a number of federal agencies into a single, landscape-scale funding opportunity. Nearly $500 million in federal funding from the Department of Interior ($375 million for ecosystem restoration), the Forest Service ($35 million for water quality improvement and invasive species prevention), and the Department of Defense ($25 million to protect natural resources near military properties) is set to leverage another $500 million in private and philanthropic dollars to create a historic opportunity for conservation around the nation. There are two key components to AtBC’s innovation that deserve highlighting: the impressive magnitude of funding (nearly $1 billion in new conservation funding over five years), and a formal preference for projects that incorporate Indigenous knowledge and leadership. AtBC funds land acquisition, environmental restoration and habitat improvements, and tribal capacity building, allowing Tribal applicants to reclaim territory, to improve space for human and natural communities alike, and to lay the groundwork for future investments in Indigenous stewardship. This combination of support and structure is leading to projects that address climate resilience, biodiversity protection, and land justice, while allocating public investment toward communities that wrestle with the systemic impacts of exploitation, genocide, and displacement.

The AtBC award to the Penobscot Nation is, to put a spin on the old idiom, catching two fish with one hook. More than two fish, really. The $5 million in funding allows for a wide range of new activities for the Tribe, each contributing to goals shared both locally within the Nation, and more broadly at the societal level. $1 million of the award is dedicated to supporting a partnership with the Trust for Public Land (TPL) in a transaction that will result in nearly 30,000 acres of ancestral land, encompassing the Penobscot’s East Branch and nearly 53 miles of river and streams, being transferred in fee, unencumbered by a conservation easement or other restriction, to the Penobscot Nation. TPL purchased the property, known as Wáhsehtəkʷ (pronounced “WAH-seh-teg”), in December of 2022 from a timber management company and, when their fundraising goals are within reach, will transfer the property to the Tribe. The special nature of this project is hard to overstate. The ecological significance of transitioning 30,000 acres of land from extractive timber management to restorative strategies is meaningful, but there are also historical connections being re-formed, new generations reconnecting to the land of their ancestors, a new opportunity for the Tribe to develop an access point to the protected lands of Baxter State Park and the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument from the south, new pathways for the Penobscot Nation to build internal capacity through exemplary forest management, and a new precedent being set for public investment in Indigenous ownership. TPL Maine State Director Betsy Cook summarized the value of the AtBC program: “[This funding stream] ... came out of commitments the Biden Administration has made to ensure we are as climate ready as we can be and commitments to prioritize the leadership of Indigenous communities within that. The AtBC funding stream is part of a bigger push to bring funding toward work that will have real climate benefits, have real ecological benefits, and put Indigenous communities and tribal nations in leadership roles. It’s an amazing grant program that’s coming from a bigger place.”

*Chuck Loring Jr., Director of the Penobscot DNR, releases a hatchery-raised adult salmon into the Penobscot’s East Branch.* Photo © National Park Service / Grace Kirk

In addition to supporting the acquisition of Wáhsehtəkʷ, the AtBC award funds habitat assessments and improvements for the species most central to Native foodways like moose, deer, bear, beaver, alewives, salmon, and more. It also includes funding for an outreach staff position to support the Penobscot DNR in strengthening the narrative that the transfer of land to Indigenous peoples meets our shared climate, biodiversity, and equity goals: globally, lands owned and stewarded by Indigenous people both effectively protect 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity⁵ and have significantly lower rates of forest loss than lands managed by governments or corporations.⁶ Folding in support for habitat restoration, reclamation of cultural foodways, forest management for Tribal income and ecosystem integrity, and investments in the Tribe’s narrative strategy into one grant program, AtBC demonstrates how conservation funding might be designed to accomplish so much more than land protection alone.

*Lands to be transferred to Penobscot Nation are shown here as “Proposed Penobscot Nation Ownership.”* Map courtesy of Trust for Public Lands

The funding made available through AtBC is making similar awards toward a just transition of our shared landscape/seascape across the country: The “Crown of the Continent” bison range is being transferred to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana; the threatened Lahontan Cutthroat Trout will be reintroduced into Walker Lake in Nevada by the Walker River Paiute Tribe; and the relationship of reciprocity between the Catawba Indian Nation and their lands through stewardship of prairie and rivercane ecosystems will be restored through the protection and acquisition of nearly 500 acres along the Catawba River in South Carolina. In fact, nearly 50 percent of the $230 million awarded in AtBC’s first two years is going directly to Tribal Nations and Indigenous-led applicants. This is an unprecedented validation of the role that Indigenous knowledge and stewardship has to play in building a more resilient future.

“Folding in support for habitat restoration, reclamation of cultural foodways, forest management for Tribal income and ecosystem integrity, and investments in the Tribe’s narrative strategy into one grant program, AtBC demonstrates how conservation funding might be designed to accomplish so much more than land protection alone.”

This particular funding stream and the partnerships that enable it can be viewed in stark contrast to the primary vehicle for the State of Maine’s investment in conservation and protection of public land — the Land for Maine’s Future program (LMF). By the end of 2024, LMF will have invested over $100 million in conservation projects across the state, predominantly through acquisition of conservation easements on forest land. These projects are, undoubtedly, massive and meaningful contributions to a long list of important goals of climate change mitigation, habitat preservation, and building public access to wild and natural spaces. The economic return of that investment was calculated by the Trust for Public Lands in 2013 as generating $11 in revenue for every $1 invested in LMF conservation projects.⁷ If the ecosystem services or carbon storage capacity of protected lands were incorporated into the economic calculus, the tools in the LMF toolbox become even more clearly valuable contributions to the public good. But how much more valuable might these projects be if they were also advancing shared goals of investing in tribal economic development or rebuilding Indigenous sovereignty on ancestral lands? With a relatively straightforward statutory change, LMF funds could be leveraged to do more with public dollars instead of excluding Indigenous communities that have the longest standing in resilient stewardship of natural lands.⁸ Indeed, we would do well to think about expanding not only the design of new grant programs like AtBC, but also expanding our ambition and perspective to make the most out of every decision that lies ahead.

Tribal acquisition of the Wáhsehtəkʷ lands adds to a growing number of responsibly managed parcels in the area. The Wáhsehtəkʷ property is within 30 miles of Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, Baxter State Park, the Nahmakanta Public Lands, the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Katahdin Iron Works Tract, and over 30,000 acres of land the Penobscot Nation holds in trust. These properties account for over 400,000 acres of forests, lakes, and streams in central Maine.

Just as the Atlantic salmon once thrived in the waters of the Penobscot, human and wild cultures once thrived in harmony with our surroundings. As the salmon faced (and still face) an existential crisis in the contamination of their ecosystem, humanity faces similar threats as we pass each new threshold for global temperature or atmospheric carbon. And, just as we are beginning to see the salmon run rebound after decades of strategic and collaborative intervention — focused not just on cleaning any particular toxin from the water, but also on passage restoration, hatchery infrastructure, dam removal, and rural economy diversification — our current political paradigm has the opportunity to lay the foundation for a broader rebound by being strategic and collaborative in our approach to protecting our shared spaces. Penobscot Fisheries Director McCaw cited a former colleague and inspiration of his, the late Melissa Laser, in his articulation of this parallel: “Salmon are creatures of the forest. Just as much as the gray squirrel is. Alvewives too. The forest that these streams run through dictates the character of these streams: water chemistry, water temperature, flow regimes … all these things that, for 12,000 years, these fish have adapted to. Alewives are as much a part of Maine as the pine tree and the chickadee — and there are parts of alewives in every pine tree and chickadee and parts of pine trees and chickadees in every alewife.”

In this moment in time where we need swift, effective challenges to the status quo, we would do well to remember that we, too, are creatures of the forest. Our collective efforts to protect the lands and waters on which we all depend provide the opportunity to do more than simply to save land from development. When constructed carefully, these essential investments in conservation have the opportunity to advance a future of environmental and social justice. We should accept nothing less.

¹ NOAA Fisheries. 2023. Restoring Atlantic Salmon and Reviving Tribal Connections in the Penobscot River Watershed. News and Announcements.

² Wilson, J. 2005. Nineteenth Century Lumber Surveys for Bangor, Maine. Journal of Forestry.

³ NOAA Fisheries. 2023. Restoring Atlantic Salmon and Reviving Tribal Connections in the Penobscot River Watershed. News and Announcements.

⁴ Some of the excellent storytelling around the Penobscot restoration efforts include:

Penobscot Elder Butch Phillips speaks to the importance of fish return to the Penobscot people: The Nature Conservancy. 2010. Butch Phillips: Restoring the Penobscot River. YouTube.
Maine writer Kea Krause offers a visually stunning and intellectually inspiring summary of restoration efforts: Krause, K. 2023. “Take It Down and They’ll Return”: The Stunning Revival of the Penobscot River. Reasons To Be Cheerful.

⁵ Fleck, A. 2022. Indigenous Communities Protect 80% of All Biodiversity. Statista.

⁶ Ding, H., P.G. Veit, A. Blackman, E. Gray, K. Reytar, J. C. Altamirano, and B. Hodgdon. 2016. Climate Benefits, Tenure Costs: The Economic Case for Securing Indigenous Land Rights in the Amazon. World Resources Institute.

⁷ The Trust for Public Land. 2021. Executive Summary. Return on the Investment in Land for Maine’s Future.

⁸ Though significant effort has been invested by the Wabanaki Commission on Land and Stewardship and a number of non-tribal leaders in Maine’s legal and conservation communities to explore options to legally codify Tribal participation in conservation programs such as LMF, those efforts have largely been mothballed until the underlying issue of the State of Maine’s failure to recognize tribal sovereignty has been addressed. See this primer from the Maine Center for Economic Policy for more information: Maine Center for Economic Policy. 2023. Tribal Sovereignty — An Explainer.

Alex Redfield is the Co-Director of the Integrated Policy Program for Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities and Food Solutions New England. He previously managed the farm viability and farmland protection programs for the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry. Prior to his time in government, he was Director of Farmer Training for the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project at Cultivating Community. He lives in South Portland, Maine.

Salmon are Creatures of the Forest

Land Justice and Land Protection on the Penobscot River

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