Burt's Bees founder freaks out hunters and ATV fans

I like this lady!

TOWNSHIP 3, RANGE 8, Maine (AP) — Maine sportsmen were outraged when Roxanne Quimby, the conservation-minded founder of Burt's Bees cosmetics, bought up tens of thousands of acres of Maine's fabled North Woods — and had the audacity to forbid hunters, loggers, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles on the expanses.

Quimby confronted the hornet's nest she'd stirred up head-on — calling one of her sharpest critics, George Smith, then-executive director of the Sportsman's Alliance of Maine. Smith couldn't believe his ears. The back-to-the-earth advocate who made millions with her eco-friendly line of personal care products was calling him at home, on a Saturday morning?

"I thought someone was playing a joke on me when she called," Smith recalls. "She said, 'Hi, this is Roxanne Quimby. I said, 'Oh yeah, sure.'"

That call in 2006 opened a face-to-face dialogue with some of her biggest critics over the land she's bought — more than 120,000 acres of woodlands.

Quimby wants to give more than 70,000 wild acres next to Maine's cherished Baxter State Park to the federal government, hoping to create a Maine Woods National Park. She envisions a visitor center dedicated to Henry David Thoreau, the naturalist who made three trips to Maine in the 1800s.

The park would be nearly twice the size of Maine's Acadia National Park.