PROFILE-June 2009

by Stephen Abbott
Photography Irvin Serrano

Despite all our engineering, all our planning and scheming, we all end up somewhere, doing something, we never could have predicted. Such is life that, if the serendipities of fate were written as fiction, we might have trouble believing our own reality.

Roxanne Quimby’s life seems tinged with the aura of folklore, but her story is so improbable, so profoundly inspiring, that it couldn’t be anything other than the unembellished truth.

In late 2007, Burt’s Bees, the all-natural, personal-care business that Quimby founded with Burt Shavitz, the curmudgeonly beekeeper whose thick-bearded visage still adorns the company’s products, was sold for close to a billion dollars. It would have been the quintessential rags-to-riches success story, except that Quimby, who began with nothing more than a pot of bubbling beeswax on an old wood-burning stove, didn’t buy a fleet of luxury cars or start flying around in a private jet. She kept her old pickup truck, flew commercial, and set about the monumental task of giving away the money she spent two decades tirelessly earning.

As Quimby can affirm, spending money can sometimes be just as difficult as making it. Today, Quimby is still in constant motion, still working tirelessly. In addition to a new business, Happy Green Bee, she pours a huge amount of energy into two philanthropic ventures: the Quimby Family Foundation, which is committed to promoting the arts in Maine communities and preserving the wilderness character of the state, and Elliotsville Plantation, an operational foundation that is buying and conserving large tracts of land in Maine’s North Woods, as well as small private parcels in Acadia National Park. To date, Quimby has invested $50 million in the conservation of 90,000 acres of land, in addition to giving away nearly a million dollars a year to nonprofits across the state. If everything falls into place, she will donate her holdings to the National Park Service upon its centennial anniversary in 2016—a gift she hopes will rival the neighboring 200,000-acre Baxter State Park in size.

Inspired by Helen Nearing and the homesteading movement, the 24-year-old Quimby moved to Maine in 1975 and purchased thirty acres of land northwest of Bangor for $3,000—her and her soon-to-be husband’s entire life savings at the time. The young couple built a rustic cabin with no electricity or plumbing. They cleared land for a garden, got married, had two children—twins—and lived a simple, hardscrabble life on the small income they cobbled together each year. But her husband left, and Quimby suddenly became a single mother with few prospects scrambling to provide for her children.

Then one day she met Burt Shavitz on the side of the road. He was selling honey out of his pickup truck, and they struck up a conversation, which led to a partnership. “When I met Burt, he was selling honey as a commodity,” Quimby says. “He would get pickle jars and white five-gallon buckets from Dunkin’ Donuts, and he would sell his honey for a dollar a pound. What I did was package the honey in little bears and fancy jars. I turned the beeswax into candles. What I did was add value.”

A quarter century has passed since that fateful day, and Quimby—with nothing but determination, exertion, and guts—turned a chance roadside encounter in the backwoods of Maine into a thriving global enterprise that today generates more than $250 million in annual sales. Though she is no longer at the helm of Burt’s Bees, she is still the industrious provider looking for new ways to add value.

“What paper companies do is cut down thousands of acres of trees and shred them in huge machines and turn them into pulp. This is not a way to add value to your natural resources,” says Quimby. “But what if one tree could create four jobs, instead of 4,000 trees creating one job? The folks up there need to make a living, so I’m working to create a new vision for the future of northern Maine. People are starting to realize that the paper companies aren’t coming back, and that if we don’t work together on this, we may miss our chance.”

For generations, the pulp and paper companies that owned most of the North Woods—roughly ten million acres of dense forest teeming with wildlife—allowed public use of their private land. When Quimby made her first acquisitions, she announced her intention of closing the property to hunting, snowmobiling, and all-terrain vehicles. To many, she was taking away something that they had come to feel was theirs. A lot of feathers were ruffled, and Quimby’s very name became a flashpoint of controversy, and her cause an emblem of the clash between two seemingly irreconcilable camps: those who felt the North Woods would endure unchanged forever, and those who feared it might be lost all too soon.

“Some of the work I do is unpopular,” Quimby says, “but I look back at the people who have done it in the past and I draw strength from them. Governor Baxter’s idea—to create a park that would be ‘forever wild’—certainly had its critics back then, too. There were some very loud voices at the time that didn’t want that park. I get criticized for the same things, but I just think of the people who came before me who remained committed to what they believed in.”

As Americans, we consider property an inalienable right. Yet Quimby knew that what is owned can be sold, that the institution of private property offers no guarantees. “Something like 25 percent of Maine has changed ownership over the past few years,” she says. “People think there was some extraordinary effort on my part to acquire this land, but all it takes is money. The people who are selling don’t care what I want do with the land—they have their price and I’m just a willing buyer.”

As the controversy built toward crescendo, Quimby did what all great diplomats do: she listened. She made calls, she reached out, she set up meetings. Relations improved. The tensions that were once so inflamed gradually subsided. And today many of her most vociferous critics are starting to look more and more like allies.

“I’m now working to create an economic engine for the areas around the land I’m buying. I lived in northern Maine for twenty years and I know how hard it can be to get a job up there. This work—creating new economic opportunities—is just as important as environmentalism. You can’t do preservation work without addressing the needs of the people living in the area you’re trying to preserve. It just won’t work.”

Quimby is a rare blend of hard-nosed business acumen and enlightened idealism. She will make sacrifices to build a successful company, but she won’t let business compromise the values that drive her to succeed. Quimby is in the process of creating a new nonprofit foundation that will determine how her land will be used and maintained in the future. She is brainstorming solutions and laying the groundwork for low-impact, high-yield business models for the region: eco-tourism, wind farms, next-generation wood products. What Quimby is looking for is high ROI—return on investment. “I’m a businessperson. I earned this money and I don’t want to throw it away,” she says. She would like to see entirely new industries blossom and flourish alongside the wild forests and natural habitats she is striving to preserve. She wants to create something that is a far more sustainable, far more valuable to the residents of the North Woods than the paper-based economy of the past.

As the first-generation child of an immigrant family that fled Shanghai in the purge of foreigners following the Boxer Rebellion, one of Quimby’s deep-rooted values is freedom. The freedom to live amidst the bounty of nature, to breathe untainted air and walk beneath wide open skies. The freedom of entrepreneurship to determine one’s destiny. The freedom to speak her mind without filter or falsity. And the freedom of boundless generosity, of giving in the service of a cause far greater than herself.

Quimby is nearly 60 years old, and she may not be around to see all of her ambitions fully realized. But if even a fraction of what she is planning comes to fruition, the grandchildren of her grandchildren will be able to swim in the ponds and summit the mountains of her legacy—and not only hers, but everyone’s.

“People who have more money than they need for themselves and their family should be giving it away. What the heck are you going to do with it, anyway? There’s nothing to do with it, really, other than to put it back into making the world a better place.”