Photo by Mark Wellman
Environmentalist #1
Horace “Hoddy” Hildreth Jr. has given considerable time and money to environmental causes over the years. But the laws he wrote in the 1960s remain his most powerful contributions
In the classic book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Ries and Jack Trout teach that “it’s better to be first than it is to be better.” In his work championing Maine’s environment, Hoddy Hildreth has managed to be both.
An attorney who hated every minute of law school, Hildreth practiced during Maine’s environmental Wild West, when paper companies were polluting rivers and developers were wrecking wetlands and marring landscapes. Hildreth responded by running for the state legislature, won in 1966, and introduced laws that would become, and remain, the pillars of environmental protection in Maine. They include the law that established the Land Use Regulation Commission and controls development on 10 million acres in the unorganized territories; he also wrote the Site Location and Development Act and the Wetlands Control Act. While Ed Muskie is recognized as a national pioneer in codifying protection of the environment, on a statewide level, that pioneer is Hoddy Hildreth.
After serving one term, Hildreth continued marshalling change through nonprofits, some of which he helped found. These include the Conservation Law Foundation, Maine Audubon Society, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Maine League of Conservation Voters, and the Island Institute, which he shepherded for 17 years as chairman of the board. In all those years of transformational leadership, says Island Institute cofounder Philip Conkling, years when “even a small leak could have sunk our boat,” he never heard Hildreth raise his voice in a board meeting.
As the son of Maine’s 59th governor, Hoddy Hildreth is as close to aristocracy as it comes in this state, yet he can connect with anyone. He does it, Conkling says, with humor, gentleness, and the quintessential attribute of a lifelong Mainer: common sense.
Where and when were you born?
I was born in 1931 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I’m not a native.
What was your early childhood like? What sort of youngster were you?
Oh, golly, I don’t know. I was sort of the middle of the road. I wasn’t particularly studious; I wasn’t particularly athletic; I wasn’t particularly enterprising. But it was a happy childhood.
When you were a teenager, your father, Horace Hildreth Sr., became governor of Maine. How did that change your life?
I don’t know if it really changed my life at all, except that I was able to see things and do things that I wouldn’t have been able to see and do if I had not been the governor’s son. But I was very normal. I went to two years of public school in Augusta while he was in the Blaine House, and then I went away to Deerfield Academy. I don’t remember being particularly different from anybody else. It was quite a lot of fun, actually.
You went on to Bowdoin. What did you study? What were your college years like?
I majored in English. I really liked courses in English and reading, and I had some very interesting, intellectual friends that put up with me. Bowdoin was all male at the time. It had a very supportive atmosphere and it was challenging. You had to study pretty hard, but it wasn’t a grind, like law school. I took a semester of my last year at Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan. My father was ambassador to Pakistan at that time. All of the classes were taught in English, which was the second language for the Pakistanis, so it was easier than Bowdoin.
Why did you decide to go on to law school at Columbia?
I didn’t know what else to do. My father was a lawyer. I can remember him saying, “Look, why don’t you go to law school? It’s good training, it teaches you a whole other area that you haven’t been involved in, and it’s a great place to start from if you’re looking for some sort of career.”
So I did.
You married your wife, Alison, while you were at Columbia University. Is that where you met her?
I’d met her years before that; she was a good friend of one of my sisters, but I really didn’t see much of her until I got to Columbia. She was at Vassar and my cousin Charlie dated her, and I was dating this other lady. As it happened, I ended up marrying Charlie’s girlfriend and he ended up marrying mine.
What about Alison got your attention?
She had—and has—a wonderful sense of humor. She was very much a free spirit, obviously talented. She was just fun to be with.
After you graduated from law school, you worked at Pierce Atwood, and became a partner during a time the firm lobbied for some big paper companies. Some of what went on back then, pollution-wise, was unimaginable now. Can you talk about what made you decide to run for the state legislature?
While I was very loyal to my firm, I really didn’t like what the paper companies were doing in terms of the environment, so I made a deal with Pierce Atwood when they first hired me. I said, “I’ll lobby the labor laws and the economic issues, but I don’t want anything to do with the environmental stuff.” After I got elected, though, I resigned from the firm because it would have created a conflict of interest.
As far as politics is concerned, because my father had been in politics and I grew up with the smell of cigar smoke, I was a political junkie in the sense that I was interested in it and in running for the legislature. I ran in ’64, which was the year that Barry Goldwater ran, and you know what happened to Republicans in that election.
I ran again in ’66 and got elected easily, and wrote a lot of environmental laws on things I had seen during my lobbying years that were going on, or weren’t going on. The whole north woods for instance, unorganized territories as they were called, were open to any kind of exploitation. There were no rules. We were so close to huge populations of people within a couple hours’ drive who wanted to come to the north woods and fish and camp and have camps and so forth, and none of this was being overseen, either by the counties or by the state. So that was one of the areas that I got very interested in and wrote some legislation that finally passed.
There were other laws. I can remember when Central Maine Power Company built a power plant on the very fringe of Yarmouth, on a point that stuck out into the bay. Hardly anybody from the town of Yarmouth was able to see the power plant, which was absolutely dominating the landscape for three or four other towns who were looking right at it, and there was no way to say, “Hey, wait a minute, is this a good place to put it?”
So I wrote a law that said, in effect, that if you’re going to build something big, if it’s going to have an impact, you’ve got to go to a hearing before a board and demonstrate that you’re not screwing things up, aesthetically, as well as it being feasible for this development to occur. That got passed and it’s still in the books, as is the wildlands zoning laws.
Can you give us any other anecdotes while you were a member of the Maine State Senate?
One thing that was interesting: The Augusta House was still standing, and many of the legislators would stay there during the course of the legislative session, and as a result the legislators really got to know one another. They’d socialize in the evening, gab about things, they’d go out to dinner and so forth, and the atmosphere was totally different from the way it is today. There was none of this really mean, partisan bickering. It was just wonderful.
But when the Augusta House closed, there was no place for them to get together and partisanship started to build. The legislature became, and still is, highly partisan and competitive. It’s sort of like Congress now, but it didn’t used to be.
Were the environmental laws you introduced accepted by both parties?
By the time I was in the legislature, environmental consciousness was just starting to crop up here and there. After I got out of the legislature and ran for Congress—unsuccessfully, thank God—I formed an environmental lobby in Augusta and spent a lot of time talking to legislators about environmental things.
Nationally, as well as in Maine, there was a great increase of consciousness, and it was bipartisan. I happened to be at the right place at the right time and was very successful as a lobbyist for this organization at getting some of these laws passed—two of which I had written and introduced when I was in the legislature but they didn’t pass. Those defeats came at the hands of a group of Republicans and a group of labor-oriented Democrats. But because the atmosphere was changing, most of the Republicans really got on board.
What was the name of the lobbying group?
It started out as Coastal Resources Action Committee. For several years, I would go out and raise the money for a lobbyist. We hired three or four different lobbyists from year to year, one of whom was Angus King, who was a very effective lobbyist and did a great job.
We also had a really good board of directors. I was able to recruit a lot of people who agreed to give their names on the basis that they did not have to come to board meetings, so I ended up with extraordinary people on the board like Douglas Dillon and Buckminster Fuller. We put up a masthead that had those names in really large letters, and it was easy for me to raise the kind of money we needed to pay the lobbyists.
Did you go back to practicing law, too?
When I got through with politics, Pierce Atwood wouldn’t let me come back to the firm. I had alienated some of their clients, so they didn’t want anything to do with me. So I started my own firm, with Harry Richardson.
You became president of Diversified Communications in 1979. How did that come about?
It is a family-owned company; I was their outside legal counsel. We parted company with the president we had, and I was put in charge of the search committee to find a replacement. I looked and I looked and couldn’t find anybody as good as myself. [Laughs.] I really did interview a number of people, but I just kept coming away with, “Oh, no, we need somebody better than that.”
Diversified Communications has changed a great deal and grown a great deal since then.
Yes, at that time we had just one television station in Bangor, and we had one little trade show in Boston, and we published the National Fisherman. We had already started into cable, because I can remember helping get some of the franchises in some of the towns when I was still of counsel.
The company also bought TV stations and got into cable service, correct?
I think I was just counsel when we bought the Gainesville station; after that, we bought stations in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and South Carolina, which we later sold.
We expanded greatly in cable in the early ’80s. We were 50th nationally in terms of subscribers, and had cable systems in southern Maine and New Hampshire and Massachusetts. But it became very clear that if you were going to be in cable, you had to be huge. HBO and other services would give quantity discounts, which is understandable, so you had to be really, really big or you just couldn’t compete. So we finally got out of the cable business and decided to concentrate on trade shows.
You started out with one show, in the fishing industry. What other kinds of trade shows did Diversified develop?
We created some and we bought some. We didn’t start the Fish Expo, but it was just a tiny little thing; it was practically in one room. Now it’s huge; in fact, it’s the biggest show that Boston has. Our next biggest show is the Work Boat Show in New Orleans, which is also huge, and we started the European Seafood Exposition. We now have 13 different events in Australia; we have a lot of shows in Canada; we have shows in Europe; we have a couple shows in Hong Kong and India . . . .
You’re global now.
Without a doubt.
Over the years, you’ve also remained active in environmental efforts. Are there any projects or initiatives you are particularly proud of?
Ever since I became president and then chairman of Diversified, my involvement in environmental things has largely been on boards or contributing cash, and I think the things that I’m most proud of are things I was able to do while I was in the legislature. What I’ve been doing since then is sort of indirect. I occasionally go to Augusta and sound off at a hearing.
Your dad died in 1988 at age 85. What was he like and in what ways are you like him?
He was more politically conservative, much more conservative than I am. Economically, I’d say, for his time, he was very liberal, much more liberal than a lot of his fellow Republicans. He had a great sense of humor, he was very athletic. He had a twin brother, identical twin. It was eerie how much alike they were, really. Both he and his brother, Charles, were both very big on keeping the family together and doing things as a family. So the two families were very close and still are.
You are a Republican and an environmentalist. Today, those two philosophies aren’t often in the same camp. You’ve talked about the false dichotomy between robust economy and robust environmental laws. Where does this come from?
In the first place, the environment, in my view, should have absolutely nothing to do with Republican or Democrat or liberal or conservative. I’m a Republican probably out of stubbornness; many times I’ve voted Democratic. But I think that it’s very possible to be conservative economically and still have a great environment.
In my view, the environment is something that Maine, in particular, has that is hugely attractive, more than most other states. It’s just a wonderful place to be. I think a great environment is a wonderfully powerful selling tool to somebody who wants to be in business to hire people and be here for the long haul.
What environmental issues do you see as the top priority right now in Maine?
Top priority right now is to keep the governor and the Republican legislature from screwing up the stuff we already have. I think it was a shock to many people when LePage got elected, and I think during the campaign he certainly projected an attitude that was very unfriendly to the environment. So right after the election there was a feeling of, “My God, what are we going to do?” We knew these bills were coming in LD1, dismantling one thing after another. I think the environmental organizations, for the first time, really, got together in one room and said, “Listen, we can’t be competitive with one another and try to take all the credit. We’ve got to work together.”
They did, and they were able to get across a very powerful message, that this is not what people of Maine really want.
Governor LePage has focused on the “red tape” end of environmental regs. Do you think that is a good thing?
Absolutely. I think some of the state employees in the DEP just aren’t realistic, they’re not practical. They’re not because they’re safe from being fired unless they do something pretty awful; they have no incentive to be nice to some person who’s trying to get something done, to help him out rather than saying, “You can’t do that.” All I’ve been saying in these things is: Listen, fix the bureaucrats; don’t mess around with the law. Fix the regulations, but leave the law the way it is. These laws do make sense and they are important.
You have worked tirelessly to help protect Maine’s environment. What inspires you? What do you hope your legacy is?
I think what inspires me is the possibility of smallness: small cities, small companies, and small appetites. I don’t travel all that much around the United States, but I do travel to places like New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and I say to myself, “God, I would really hate to live here.” Think of having to commute an hour and 30 minutes to get to work. I can get to work in 15 minutes; I can go home for lunch and get back within an hour. That’s what inspires me about Maine, the ability to do that sort of thing.
I hope to leave for a legacy a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, what we have. I think there are anawful lot of people in Maine who don’t realize how great it is.
