The first time Karin Tilberg came to Maine’s North Woods, she felt like she was home. Following a childhood in Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey, Karin attended the University of Vermont, where she earned a degree in wildlife biology. After a stint in Washington, D.C., working to pass conservation-related legislation, Karin arrived in Maine in 1979. Since earning a law degree from the University of Maine School of Law, she has focused on protecting Maine’s working forests and now serves as the president and CEO of the Forest Society of Maine. In addition to her conservation work, she also writes outdoors-based poetry and is an avid Nordic skier, hiker, paddler, and angler.
I’ve always been an outdoor girl. I have vivid memories of being outside, even as a very young child. We had a big field behind our house that went into a woodlands with a little stream, and I was constantly outside in fields and woods and exploring. My friends and I would build little fortresses with logs, and we’d gather things that we found in the woods to decorate them. I did a lot of camping through Girl Scouts in more remote places. I spent my entire childhood outside. I don’t like being inside, even today.
I really took an interest in biology in high school. That’s what led eventually to wildlife biology and natural resources, forestry, botany – all of that. I went to UVM at a time when there really weren’t schools of natural resources and ecology. The focus at that time was training for work in various wildlife departments across New England. Also at that time, I was in the minority as a female. I just knew I wanted to study the ecosystem as a whole, so I pieced together my education.
Fairly early on I knew that somehow I was going to do work for woods – woodlands, forests, maybe oceans – because that was where my real interests were as a child. After my freshman year in college, I went on a National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) course in Lander, Wyoming, in the Absaroka mountain range. We were in the wild for five weeks, and I realized that my calling was to work with conservation and communities. To me, it’s not just conservation alone. It’s also about how to make it work in a way that people are healthy and prosperous. I really count myself lucky to have had now 40-plus years working in conservation.
After college, I got a scholarship to go to Washington, D.C., and work with the National Audubon Society toward the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act. The Act was under fire because of the Tellico Dam construction in Tennessee and a tiny fish called the snail darter, which was endangered. There was a huge effort to dismantle the Endangered Species Act, so I worked with National Audubon Society to reauthorize the Act. Then I stayed in Washington to work on Alaska Lands Act, which ultimately passed in the House of Representatives and led to the establishment of national parks and wildlife refuges and protected federal lands in Alaska. That planted the seed in me to go to law school a few years later.
Working in Washington, D.C., was a very formative, incredible experience. I was working on the passage of this major federal legislation (the Alaska Lands Act) under President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of Interior Cecil Andrus and Congressman Mo Udall, who was the bill’s sponsor. We were part of this effort, and it was quite inspirational. The bill passed in the House, and it was unclear how it was going to evolve procedurally, but obviously it was going to be some time before things heated up again. I really don’t like cities, and I’d been in Washington for a year and a half. So, I got a job out of Lincoln, Maine, leading backpacking trips down portions of the Appalachian Trail for the summer.
I think when I came to the North Woods, I imprinted on it. It just was home for me. After that summer, I lived in a yurt and worked with Maine Audubon and the Natural Resources Council of Maine and the League of Women Voters and some other groups to celebrate “1980: Year of the Coast.” For two years I was doing coastal policy work and working on a farm. Then I decided to go to law school at the University of Maine. The blend of law and wildlife biology/science is just amazingly powerful. It’s been a pillar for me throughout my life.
I was very fortunate after law school to get a job with a law firm where one of the partners was Bill Townsend, who is considered by many to be the father of conservation in Maine. I worked with him for a number of years, and he really mentored me, both as a lawyer and as a conservationist. Then I became staff attorney and director of advocacy at the Maine Audubon Society. That led to me eventually working for the Northern Forest Alliance, which led to me working for state government as deputy commissioner of Maine’s Department of Conservation, and then senior policy advisor for Governor Baldacci. When his second term ended, I was hired at the Forest Society, and I’ve been here 11 years. In each of these positions, I did conservation work. For me, it’s been a continuous river of work that has built on itself and grown.
I really like putting together the strategy behind a project. I like figuring out the pathway over the hurdles and around the obstacles and figuring out where the money comes from. I wouldn’t say there’s one project that I’m most proud of, necessarily. It’s the opportunity to figure out puzzles and put together conservation projects that are really important to nature and natural resources and people – and doing that in a way that it has meaning for people who live nearby. They will be there taking care of the area because it holds on to traditions or helps local economies or it’s their place where they go to get restoration. Having it really stick and work for a long, long time means a lot to me. When that happens, there’s no joy like it.
We just celebrated the closing of the Grafton Forest project this month. That was over three years the making. It was a massive effort, a $10.87 million project. I call it the people’s backyard. It gets snow early in the winter, and it holds snow. People from Bethel go up there to ski. Some local guides train their dogs for dogsledding there. The local ski team goes up there and trains. A lot of people snowmobile and ATV and go up there to hunt. It’s a big area, and a lot of people consider it an important place in their lives. It could have been developed if the landowner had chosen to sell. You could almost see McMansions being built because of the views of the Mahoosucs and the Whites. The knowledge that that area will always be a forest is so comforting to so many people.
Soon after I shook hands with the landowner’s representative, Tom Colgan, to do this Grafton project, my husband was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of ALS, and he passed away about a year ago. Doing the project during these two years of Covid and losing my husband and maintaining the strength to move forward was a really big effort. It was an honor. And having the focus, the chance to do the Grafton Forest project helped me keep going. It truly was the rope I could hold on to and give meaning to my days. I will never forget the last three years because of the emotional intensity of it. Every project has major highs and lows and challenges and moments of slight despair. You just keep going.
After my husband passed, a friend of mine invited me to do an event called 29029 Everesting in Utah. We climbed Snow Basin 13 times within 36 hours. You climb up and take the gondola down. The idea is you’re climbing 29,000 feet, equal to Everest’s elevation. Training for that really helped me, because it gave me something to get out of bed for in the morning. I do lots of hiking. And I enjoy paddling – canoeing on the St. John River and the Allagash and the St. Croix and Machias rivers and some of the coastal rivers. It’s just such a wonderful way to experience the North Woods.
I like to fly fish, so I do a lot of angling when I can. It really is deeply riveting. When I’m fishing, I’m thinking about the water, the hydraulics, the bugs, where the fish are and how they’re moving, their lifecycle, the sky, the wind, the temperature. It so tunes me into the place and what’s happening. Then, when I catch a fish, I feel connected to a world that is usually hidden from me. It feels like magic.
Years ago, I was fortunate to have a group of friends who loved long-distance Nordic skiing, and we embarked on about a decade of going to the Canadian Ski Marathon in Quebec every winter. The CSM requires skiing 100 miles in two days. We really had a wonderful phase of annual CSM experiences. Skiing the “Coureur de Bois” at the gold level in that event – where you carry a pack with everything you need to sleep out at night, and you have to finish within a time limit – was by far the most demanding physical thing I’ve ever tried to do. We also did the Birkebeiner in Norway and the Vasaloppet in Sweden and also skied across Finland. I mostly ski for fun now.
So often, I see people who are involved with the Forest Society or other groups who started their outdoor connections as children with their families. It is so important to find ways to be outside when you’re young. It’s a lifelong relationship, and it nourishes a conservation ethic and commitment to a place. We’re only on this earth once, let’s love the things we love as best we can.
What makes Maine’s forest so unique is how big it is and how unfragmented and undeveloped it is. That quality is what the Forest Society of Maine is focused on – keeping that intactness. We have the most intact forest east of the Mississippi. Twelve million acres. Three times the size of Connecticut. People do not grasp, I think, how big it is. We still have very large ownerships. Five owners each own close to a million acres or more than a million acres. That’s good in the sense that if they’re willing to hold on to their land, we still have this large expanse of forest. But over time the land can get divided, and the more divisions there are, the more likely that it will be developed and transition out of forests being forests and become fragmented with roads, houses, structures.
I hope that my generation can pass this intact, vast forest on to the next without it being diminished. The work isn’t done. Yes, there’s been a lot of conservation in Maine and across the Northern Forest, but there is a tendency for people to move on to the next sparkly topic. Maine’s forests sequester over 60 percent of Maine’s annual greenhouse gas emissions every year. If we’re reducing the emissions and we can keep our forests, we’re going to get to net zero. We really mustn’t lose our forests. They are our lungs. They’re sequestering carbon. They are producing so much for us – wildlife and clean water and jobs. They are the last dark skies east of the Mississippi. We have more forest conservation to do. We need to redouble our efforts. We need to keep going.
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