In the last 30 years they destroyed most of the dams in Maine, including exploiting the ploy of Atlantic Salmon as the excuse. They drove Georgia Pacific out of the state with constant harassment and litigation.

FERC requires periodic "relicensing" of hydo facilities, and the viros used that as a hook in the early 1990s under Clinton-Gore to delay and obstruct the continued use of the GP (previously Great Northern) privately owned hydro electric power production for the mills, which has been there since the late 1800s.

The viros couldn't destroy those dams but extorted land and "conservation easements" throughout the privately owned woods and ran up millions of dollars in "legal fees" contending with FERC and the pressure groups' abusive litigation and "compromise".

The lead pressure group in that particular assault was the Appalachian Mountain Club (a wealthy and politically connected pressure group lobby which, like the Sierra Club, poses as just a hiking club).

Much of the paper industry in Maine is now gone, a "conservationist" agenda dating back to the 1940s and earlier with the Rockefeller influence at Acadia. This is the same agenda for Federal control that resulted in Obama's National Monument decree in Maine last summer and they are after millions of acres more of private property across northern New England.

The Salmon surrogate, dams, and financial strangulation of industry and rural towns are just some of the tactics they use to extort the land.