Markot

Matt Markot, executive director of the Loon Echo Land Trust, reflected on the “golden age of land trusts” during a presentation at the Bridgton-Lakes Region Rotary Club on Thursday, Dec. 12.

According to Markot, land trusts exist throughout the country, and have a wide variety of goals. In Maine, the primary goal is conserving land and ensuring that everyone has access to it. Maine, Markot noted, has more land trusts per capita than any other state except his native Connecticut, many of which were formed during the 1980s, which he called the “golden age of land trusts.” Overall, 600,000 acres are owned in deed by the trusts, with 2 million acres protected by fee, and more than 85% of those are working forest lands. Roughly 2,500 of these acres are held in conservation easements, which protect the land by limiting how it can be used.

Loon Echo is a nonprofit private organization with properties throughout the northern Lakes Region. Loon Echo was formed in Casco in 1987, and still has two of its founding directors, Connie Cross and Eric Dibner, serving on the board of directors. According to its website, they have six current staff members, and preserve 9,000 acres of land and 35 miles of trail. The six permanent staff members are backed up by a network of over 100 volunteers.

Sites under Loon Echo’s purview include Pleasant Mountain, Bald Pate Mountain, Hacker’s Hill, Pondicherry Park and Peabody-Fitch Woods. According to infrared trail counters, 30,000 people used Loon Echo-owned trails in 2023, down from the pandemic-era peak of 50,000.

Regarding hunting regulations, Markot mentioned that hunting is allowed on all Loon Echo-owned lands. In properties with conservation easements, the landowner is allowed to set hunting rules, but on lands owned directly by Loon Echo, it is permitted by default.

He then gave an acknowledgment to the people of the Wabanaki Confederacy, particularly the Abenaki, who once lived in what is now Maine. While they were forced out of what is now the Lakes Region centuries ago by European expansion, Markot recalled visiting their descendants in the St. Lawrence Valley, and noted that they still cared deeply about their lost homeland.

Markot has strong family ties to Maine, despite having been born in Connecticut, where he got his bachelor’s degree from Trinity College. Before Loon Echo, Markot, who has been living in Maine for more than a decade, worked as the Northern Maine Land Steward for the Nature Conservancy in Maine, as well as serving as an AmeriCorps Environmental Steward with the Maine Natural Areas Program. He has been working with Loon Echo since 2017, and as executive director since 2019.

Contrasting a picture of his former “commute” over the remote North Maine Woods with one of downtown Portland, Markot said that Maine is famous for being the most forested state in the country. This is not just because of natural factors, he said, but also due to a long history of sustainable land preservation within the state.

He then talked about how, despite the U.S. Department of Agriculture expecting a significant loss of forested land in Cumberland County in the late 1990s, its worst-case predictions have not come to pass, as much of Maine’s privately owned wilderness has been transferred to land trusts. Markot said that this was significant because, unlike large western states such as Nevada, Maine does not have a long history of publicly owned land, having the lowest of all the New England states. This is important, Markot said, because despite having some of the toughest mining laws in the country, Maine is rich in rare earth deposits, which will be increasingly hard for regulators to ignore.

Markot then talked a bit more about the economics of running an organization such as Loon Echo. Notably, despite being eligible for a tax exemption as a 501(c)(3), Loon Echo pays property taxes on all of its land, amounting to about $30,000 a year. Markot said that this is because they never want its activities to negatively impact public services that rely on community taxes. Regarding income, he said that the vast majority of funding for land purchases came from public and private grants, while most of its money for operations is from local donations, with a total operating budget of around half a million per year.

Speaking to the Lakes Region Weekly, Markot said Loon Echo offers dozens of outreach programs each year, as a way of not only connecting community members with one another, but also with the natural world around them. These include the Hacker’s Hill Summer Concert Series, Maine Outdoor Film Fest, the Pleasant Mountain half marathon, and its Wednesday Wanders series.

“We see ourselves as a community organization first, a land conservation organization second,” said Markot to the Rotary Club.

The final portion of the presentation focused around the immediate local issues Loon Echo looks at. The land trust is part of the wider Sebago Clean Waters organization, a coalition of local and natural conservation organizations protecting the drinking water in Sebago Lake, the main source of water for around 250,000 people.

Other challenges included making sure that snowmobile clubs maintained access to trails during the winter, and what Markot described as its biggest concern: suburban sprawl, which he was concerned is creeping further and further into rural Maine. As more people move into the Lakes Region, land becomes more valuable, and thus, so too do the costs of both purchasing land for conservation and maintaining it in perpetuity, he said.

The community can help with land preservation efforts in a wide variety of ways, he said, such as getting involved with and supporting local planning efforts, as well as maintaining connections with their local communities.