Lucas St. Clair: Honey, Humility, and the Making of a National Monument

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

There was a Facebook page called Ban Rock Sand and people would post crazy stuff about me and I'd just find out where they lived and I'd go to their house and knock on their door and be like, "Hey, I saw this thing you posted online. Doesn't feel like it's accurate. Can we sit down and have a conversation?" And it was just retail politics door to door to door and it took five years of that.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guest today is Lucas St. Clair. Lucas's story begins deep in the woods of Northern Maine, where he grew up off the grid in a family shaped by independence, wilderness, and a certain main stubbornness. His mother, Roxanne Quimby, would go on to co-found Burt's Bees, turning a backwoods experiment into a household name. But the story that brings Lucas here is about something different. Land, community, patience, and the hard work of turning a private dream into a public inheritance. Lucas took a winding path before returning to Maine. He earned a degree in culinary arts from Le Cordon Bleu in London, built a career in food and wine and traveled widely as a climber, paddler, hiker, fisherman, and outdoorsman. Eventually, he came home to help lead his family foundation and take on an ambitious and highly controversial conservation effort, protecting a vast stretch of Maine's north woods near Katahdin. What followed was years of meetings, oppositions, compromise, and listening. Lucas helped shepherd the gift of more than 87,000 acres of private timberland to the American people, land designated by President Obama in 2016 as Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. Lucas is also a good friend. He is generous with his time, generous in spirit, and quietly persistent in the way that the best conservationists often are. Perhaps his greatest gift is that he understands land only endures when people see themselves in its future. I'm going to drop you into Lucas's story now at the moment a chance encounter changed the course of his family's life.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

So when my parents got divorced, they sold their land in their cabin and my mom started working as a waitress at a local restaurant, didn't have a car at the time so she'd hitchhike from home from work. The restaurant was in Dexter and she was hitchhiking one night and this guy named Burt Shavitz picked her up and he was kind of notoriously known around town as being a beekeeper. And he would sit out in front of the Dexter Shoe factory and sell honey out of the side of his pickup truck. And so that was the first time they sort of struck up a conversation and started to get to know one another.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

And it sounds like they must have really hit it off. There must have been kind of an immediate connection.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

They recognized a lot of similarities in one another and I think my mom saw an opportunity because Burt had this real connection to bees and raising honeybees. And he was selling honey out of pickle jars. And my mom started to think, "If you put those in prettier jars that were smaller, you probably could make a little bit more profit." And he was like, "Hey, well, whatever. If you want to do that, go ahead, but I'm fine doing it the way I'm doing it." I think it happened relatively quickly that they were like, "Let's partner up." And Burt started to teach her how to take care of beehives and my mom started using the wax and honey to make various different products. She was dipping candles and putting honey in little jars, selling them at craft fairs in our middle school gymnasium during Christmastime. I think the first year that the business was incorporated was 1984. She probably made about $10,000 that year.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

So let's go back for a second to your mom's situation at that time and your childhood in Maine at this point.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

My parents were back-to-the-landers. They were living in San Francisco and my mom went to art school out there. My dad had finished college. They went out there in a Volkswagen van in the '60s and they wanted to buy some land. They had read Helen and Scott Nearing's books about living the good life and kind of subsistence lifestyle. And the only place they could afford land with money they had was in Northern Maine. So they moved to Piscataquis County in 1972 and built a cabin back in the woods without any running water or electricity in a very rural county. I think it's one of the most rural counties in the country. They planted a garden and had some beehives, lived off about $4,000 a year. I had my twin sister, Hannah, and when it got light out, we went outside and when it got dark out, we came inside and we didn't have a lot of the creature comforts, but if you didn't know those creature comforts existed, it really was pretty nice.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Did it feel like an idyllic childhood to you? I mean, it didn't feel like you were wanting for anything.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

There were a lot of back-to-the-landers that had done that similar thing that my parents did. And so we were in a community of people that were living a similar way. So we really didn't come into mainstream education until we were in late elementary, middle school. And that was when we started to realize, oh wait, people have refrigerators and televisions. And it became pretty clear that we were living a lifestyle that was a little bit different. And then of course you start to realize that you're being judged by your peers and there's this whole different thing that comes into play in middle school. But my parents got divorced not too long after I started school and our way of living began to change in the sort of early to mid '80s.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Was your mom always like that? Because I think a lot of people might've been like, "Oh, you have a lot of beeswax. Great, good for you." And not think that that's an opportunity to start a business.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

I think my mom just looked at, she's like, "Okay, what can we make out of beeswax? Burt's got a lot of it. He seems like a nice guy. He seems like willing to let me use it. I need to get something going. I'm not going to wait tables for the rest of my life." She also was the daughter of a serial entrepreneur. And my grandfather, he went to Harvard Business School and then when he graduated, he just had business after business. None of them really did well, but it was that idea of let's just start a business. She didn't have any fear in doing that.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

So this becomes obviously Burt's Bees, which is a national product. When does it sort of get that head of steam?

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

The lip balm came along probably in the late '80s and started making soaps and then starting to see this direction of like, oh, this health beauty aid market is emerging and kind of started to focus more on that. She made this jump to start selling wholesale and through the wholesale market started to sell get to gift stores. So we would go down to the Javits Center in New York for the New York gift show and set up a booth and people would come in and we'd write orders. And I was like 10, 12 sitting in the booth from Guilford, Maine, talking to various gift stores around the country. By the time I started high school, she had enough money to pay for my sister and I to go to boarding school. So it was a pretty quick transition from 1984 to 1992 or three when I started high school. In that short period of time, the business started to really grow.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

What was that experience like? And now all of a sudden you're going to a prestigious boarding school and your mother's seeing some material success. It's like, oh, there's this other thing happening. I know things are changing, but everything changes in your life at that age. Or did it feel like there was a momentous watershed moment?

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

I do remember a kind of distinct moment in eighth grade where Piscataquis Observer, which was the local paper in the town that I lived in, wrote an article about Burt's Bees that said the headline was From Rags to Riches. And it was in the article said Burt's Bees had done $3 million in sales that year. And I remember distinctly feeling like the treatment changed. My peers in eighth grade were like, wait, what? You drive that beat up van that you guys live in in the summer, what the heck? $3 million. Or no one in Piscataquis County is $3 million. So that was a distinct change.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Okay. So this business is growing and it does not slow down.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

Yeah, exactly. So in 1994, my mom needed an accountant, an engineer. They were pouring lip balm out of tea kettles into little tins and there was just no opportunity for that skill in Northern Maine. So she moved the company to North Carolina. When Whole Foods started making all the acquisitions of small grocery store chains around the country, Burt's Bees just flooded into that market. And then it became the health and beauty aid company that it did. And ultimately in 2005, she sold the company to Clorox.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

And at this point she pivots, right? She sort of steps back from Burt's Bees and she starts buying land in Maine.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

My sister and I both though — hiked the Appalachian Trail in the late '90s. And when we did, we were like, it's funny, they call the last hundred miles of the AT, the 100 mile wilderness, and it doesn't feel like a wilderness. And she was like, some of that land is for sale. And if we bought it, we could protect the treadway of the trail and it would make it feel like more of a remote experience. So she started using Burt's Bees profit to buy land along the Appalachian Trail in the 100 mile wilderness and wound up buying about 130,000 acres of timberland in the Northern Maine and Piscataquis and Penobscot County.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

The vision for that land changes because it ends up becoming a national monument. That's a bold idea for anybody. "I think I'm going to buy enough land to create a national monument." I mean, other than the Rockefellers, is there another family that's done that?

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

I mean, there have been other families that have participated in the creation and the expansion of national parks. There are not a lot of people that have done it on this scale. And so I think her motivation evolved when she learned about this proposed national park in Northern Maine in the '90s. She always had this affinity for the communities in Northern Maine because it was their hard work that helped Burt's Bees get to where it was. But she's also an immigrant or from an immigrant family. She was the first person born in the United States and there were Russian Jews that fled the Bolshevik Revolution. And she was really motivated by the fact that this incredible country had the foresight to protect land and make it available. And so she was like, "If I could do anything to give back to the country that gave to me so much, it'd be in the form of public land."

TED ROOSEVELT V:

But it gets off on the wrong foot in terms of getting community buy-in to create a national monument up in Northern Maine. Can you describe a little bit of how off track this project gets?

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

Yeah, it was through this experience that I learned that there are many different types of leadership. The leadership that my mom possessed so strongly and was that tolerance for risk and laser focus and being able to make people do what she thought needed to be done. She went to these communities and said, "This is what I want to do so let's get going. Let's make the park." Without fully considering or realizing that there'd be people that would say, "We don't want that. We don't want the federal government in our backyard. We're worried that snowmobiling and hunting wouldn't be allowed on this park and that's what we like to do up here." My mom doesn't ride snowmobiles and doesn't hunt. And so she's like, "What?" And it was just so awful and so polarizing and to the point where she's like, "I want to give this land away. I want to create a park, but if this resistance is going to be so extreme, then I'll just go start another business." And that was kind of where she was focused at the time where I started to get involved.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Well, so enter Lucas St. Clair into this story. You step into this moment and take a basically polar opposite approach to how are we going to get this thing approved. I want to hear about that experience, but I also want to know what it was in you that said, "Hey, my family's trying to do something that's sort of inherently good and we're getting a lot of negative blowback. Let me step into that and reframe this narrative." That's a hard thing to do.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

I think that if I knew what I know now, I would be probably a little more reluctant to step into it. But I was a naive 30-something and my thought was I'm from this place. I live there for the first half of my life. I know how things are going there. I hunt, I fish, I do ride snowmobiles, I do ride ATVs. I won't be treated as an interloper in the same way my mom would be. There was a Facebook page called Ban Roxanne and people would post crazy stuff about me and I'd just find out where they lived and I'd go to their house and knock on their door and just be like, "Hey, I saw this thing you posted online. It doesn't feel like it's accurate. Can we sit down and have a conversation?" And it was just retail politics door to door to door and it took five years of that. But ultimately we were able to play this game of whack-a-mole and push down all of the things that moved into the vacuum that was created. The vacuum just was filled with misinformation. And so my thought was just I've got to come in as this sort of happy warrior and bring the right information with me. It was really an effort to try to help people see themselves in a future where there is a national park and where there are other businesses and there's a more diversified economy. That was really the thing that we started to lean into. How can we all have everything that we want as opposed to blaming each other for wanting the thing they want? Well, it ultimately worked, but certainly I have some battlescars to show for it.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

So when you succeed in this, you make a very intentional decision, which is to carve out the land that the visitor center is going to be on. Can you talk about why you made that decision as opposed to just sort of handing it over to the federal government and saying, build out the infrastructure that's required for this to be a national monument?

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

So I was speaking with a woman named Molly Ross who was working for Director Jarvis who ran the National Park Service in the Obama administration. And she said, "Since this is private land, you could put encumbrances on the deed before you transfer it that would allow you to do things like build trails and build a visitor center and build boat launches." And she and I started speaking with the Department of Justice and said, "Would you still accept this land if there were encumbrances on them?" DOJ was like, "No, that seems —"

TED ROOSEVELT V:

It's not how we've done it before. We're not going to do it now.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

Not going to do it now. That seems far too risky. Open up the federal government to the liability of you building trails or whatever. No, thank you. And we're like, "Well, what if we agree on what it is beforehand and then have those reserve rights expire at some point in the not too distance future?" And so they said, okay, the big project for us initially was to build some camping areas and it worked. And we started to be able to build this development that was enhancing the visitor experience. And so we thought, okay, let's take one really big swing here before the reserved rights run out and build what the Park Service calls a visitor contact station. And that essentially is a building that would serve to educate and orient visitors to the park. And so in 2018, we set to work on designing and building a visitor contact station.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

And you've got five years at this point.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

Yeah, that's right. So in 2016, when the park was created at the celebration, a Wabanaki tribal member came up to me and said, very little mention of the tribal communities, what's up with that? We've been here for 12,000 years. I don't think you stole the land, but it was stolen from us at one point, so maybe you should kind of educate yourself. And I mean, it felt like I was hit by a truck. I was like, oh my gosh. And so I thought, okay, if we were to build this visitor center, how could we do it to really incorporate tribal perspectives and an indigenous worldview? And so I started working with tribal communities to hire a group of consultants from tribal nations, the Wabanaki nations to counsel us, to consult with us and really orient this to an indigenous worldview. So when visitors were oriented and educated about this place, that's what they were learning about.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

And so you go out and you find this amazing architect to help you with this project. You build this council of Wabanaki leaders and he comes back with this, what looked like a beautiful contact station, but not so simple.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

Not so simple. Right. He was really attracted to the architectural vernacular of Northern Maine and presented this kind of riff on that, the architect, Todd Saunders, he's from Bergen, Norway, and showed it to the Wabanaki Advisory Board and they looked at it and didn't say anything where I was like —

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Always a bad sign.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

Yeah, always a bad sign. Right. And so we were like, okay. We sat and they said, "That's an interesting thing." And the meeting ended and a few of the folks in the advisory board took me aside and said, "Look, that design is reminiscent of the architectural vernacular where our hair was cut and our language was taken away and it represents the colonial settler genocide that our people experienced in Maine. No thank you." And we were like, "Oh." So another one of those blind spot moments that were always like, "Uh-oh, we've got to do some more work." And so to Todd Saunders credit, he was like, "Well, let's just do another design. I need obviously to understand more about Wabanaki culture," which he spent some time doing. And he came up with another design that was much more appropriate for representing Wabanaki culture, Wabanaki ideas." It was just like I had this core belief that if we were able to do this right, we could set a precedent within the National Park Service. We could educate the American public and international visitors to understand what indigenous worldviews are like in Maine. And that was really just the first stumbling block. As we got farther into it, we had to start thinking about landscape design. We had to start thinking about what languages are used in the exhibits, the designing of the exhibits. The National Park Service has appropriated a lot of tribal culture over the 110 years that it's been an agency, including the very iconography of the park service itself in Arrowhead with a buffalo on it. There are so many examples of cultural appropriation that tribal communities are like, "No, thank you. We're not going to give you our stories and our ideas and our language for you to do whatever you wanted with them."

TED ROOSEVELT V:

And this is highly innovative. This is sort of being invented as you go.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

Yeah, very much so. In 2022, a lot changed for us the fact that the pandemic started to wind down and then the Biden administration came into office and the Biden administration appointed Indigenous woman to be the Secretary of Interior and an Indigenous man to be the director of the National Park Service. And we were now presenting them with this legal framework, which became much more appealing to them. Obviously, they were thinking, "Oh my gosh, there's a group of people that are working with the National Park Service thinking about these ideas. Well, yeah, we're going to support them." Ultimately, they signed these contracts and allowed for Wabanaki community members to feel confident that all of their indigenous cultural intellectual property would be protected. We created these massive databases to identify all of that IP and protect it into perpetuity. So it really is a very unique thing. And so now there's a precedent about how to work with tribal communities based on this project.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

And maybe for listeners who are understanding this conceptually, let's just jump into the practical because it's one of the most rigid environments to build anything and you're asking them to one, build something differently and protect those differences for in this case, the Wabanaki community.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

Yeah. It's an example of a couple things. First, from an exclusion standpoint, the National Park Service says we have five fonts that we allow for to be used that are accessible fonts, right? They're easy to read, they can be expanded and contracted, but nowhere is there any iconography from tribal communities. It's just A through Z, one through zero. And so we were saying, "Well, we'd like to use these glyphs in the Penobscot alphabet." And they're like, "Well, you can't because it's not in our accessibility agreements." And we're like, "Well, we're going to use them." There were those conversations like, "This is perfect examples of cultural erasure. If you can't write an indigenous word in the park, then it disappears." And so that's an example of that. But then the tiles is a great example. This woman worked with Wabanaki community to press tiles and each tile has a specific image of something that's culturally important to their communities, whether it was a fiddlehead or the Mount Katahdin. Those have IP in them. They were mounted on the wall. And if one of those tiles were to fall off or break for any reason, the National Park Service can't just put up another tile in its place. It has to look in this database and say, "Okay, who made this tile and what community are they from? Is that person still alive?" Contact them if they are still alive and say, "Can you make another one? What do you want to do with the one that's broken?" Because it's theirs, it's the tribal communities, it's not the park services. And there has to be this contract forces this relationship. So all the decision making throughout the park has been done in consultation with the THPOs because of what we've done here, which is a really unique aspect of it.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

This isn't simply about writing a wrong because the visitor center itself is spectacular. It could not have happened in the way that it did happen without the Wabanaki community's influence. It is totally different from other national park visitor centers. It is much more connected to the land. It is much more of the place. Can you do a better job than I just did of describing what this visitor center is and how it contrasts with what you initially started with?

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

So I first have to give a huge amount of credit to my mom who was like, when we build a building there, let's make sure it's a building that no one has ever seen before. It's got to be wild. Let's just make it wild. While the first concept was not compatible with the Wabanaki influence and goals there, the second building is shaped like it goes from an abstract moose horn and the antlers of the horn point to the cardinal directions, which are really important. Wabanaki means people of the dawnland. They're the farthest in the east and are the first to greet the rising sun. The entryway of the building is oriented to the east and that's the way you walk into the building. And as you walk across the building, when you get to the western side, you're looking to the west at Katahdin, which is the most spiritual place for Wabanaki people. And exhibits are really all around you. They hang from the ceiling. They're in the alcoves of the walls. The entire floor has a carved watershed of the Penobscot River. It's 9,000 square feet and you can follow the entire watershed of the Penobscot River from the very small tributaries all the way to the ocean. The goal throughout the whole building is to leave people more curious than they came in to inspire people to think more deeply about what a relationship to a landscape really means and what it really is.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Lucas, you've actually answered this question I think in a number of ways, but we do ask it at the end of every podcast, which is what makes a good citizen?

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

I think it's a really important question for everyone to consider because once you're able to answer it, then you're able to live it. And I think curiosity is a tremendously important thing to be a good citizen. If you're not curious about people that aren't like you, then it's hard to be in community with them. When I think about citizens, I think about people that are part of a collective of some sort. So curiosity is extremely important. Empathy is extremely important. The idea of justice and building a community where no one struggles. If we all are working toward creating a community where no one struggles, then we're all able to be good citizens. It's easy to say and I think it's harder to practice because I think there is some fundamental bug in the system with humans that create demand and it can be challenging. But there are million wonderful examples of how we all have shared belief and things in common that lead to really strong communities and really good citizens. So I think those are the things that I feel most important about.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Thank you very much. That was awesome.

LUCAS ST. CLAIR:

Oh, it's great to be here. It's really fun to have these conversations with you.

TED ROOSEVELT V:

Thank you, Lucas, for this conversation. It's by far the most serious sustained conversation we've ever had. So thank you for taking the time to do it with me today. I've really always admired the thoughtfulness that you bring to everything you do, particularly around this national monument. I am really excited to share the story with my listeners. And to those listeners, please make your way to Maine. Check out the incredible contact station that Lucas just described and spend some time exploring Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. It's an extraordinary place. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.