Roxanne Quimby for Governor!

Roxanne Quimby just wants to go home.

The cofounder and CEO of Burt's Bees lives in Maine but works in North Carolina, and she is weary of the 1,000-mile commute. Home is, after all, home. Specifically, home is a humble 1,200-square-foot house in Winter Harbor, three hours northeast of Portland up the Atlantic coast, known locally as "the mushroom" for its peculiar shape.

When you are at home in a place you love, powerful things can happen. Last January, Quimby was relaxing in Winter Harbor, taking in Governor John Baldacci's first postinaugural radio interview. Baldacci was asked about a long-standing plan to create a new national park in Maine's scenic North Woods. His reply was so stark, so blunt, it left Quimby breathless. The park, he said, was "a nonstarter."

Baldacci might as well have been standing in Quimby's living room, addressing her by name. For three years, she has been the single most energetic backer of the controversial park proposal. "I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt until 24 hours into his administration," Quimby says, her green eyes flashing, "but after that, I turned him off and said, 'Okay, he's in trouble now!' "

He may well be. Quimby, 53, who favors Crayola-bright cotton blouses and schoolgirl-style hair clips, doesn't look the part of a fiery agent of social change. But for three decades, she has quietly built a career and a life on what amounts to fearless radicalism. In the name of simplicity, she chose to live in incredible austerity in the woods. Then she founded Burt's Bees, a company dedicated to selling natural, environment-friendly personal-care products, which in the past 14 years has grown from a pot on her wood-burning kitchen stove to a nearly $50 million-per-year business.

Now she is steering a new course--one that would take her from politically minded commerce into the mainstream of politics itself. Since 2001, she has spent $8 million of her own fortune to buy huge parcels of undeveloped land in northern Maine--nearly 16,000 acres in all--toward what she and other park backers hope will total 3.2 million acres. She has just inked a deal to sell a controlling stake in Burt's Bees to buyout firm AEA Investors to help finance the park effort and perhaps fund a nascent political career. The upshot: Come 2006, Roxanne Quimby could be running for governor.

In a way, she is following a well-worn path. For centuries, businesspeople have lent their influence and wealth to political causes, satisfying both ego and conscience. With Quimby, though, it's something more personal. She is selling a company to which she has dedicated every waking hour for more than a decade, a company that reflects her philosophy both of living and of how business should be done. More than just a professional sacrifice, selling Burt's Bees is tantamount to stepping out of her own skin. She knows, too, that relinquishing control puts the future of the company at risk.

But so it must be. Roxanne Quimby is determined to leave a greater legacy than just a fabulous recipe for milk-and-honey lotion. Land is power, and a new national park represents something powerful. As Quimby sees it, the entire state of Maine is on the cusp of a do-or-die moment. Its paper-and-pulp mills are struggling, and some 5 million acres of forestland have been sold in the past five years. Land ownership is splintering and thousands of Mainers have lost their jobs. A national park, she believes, "would solve three big problems in Maine: conservation, recreation, and the economy." And it would bring her home, in any number of ways.

A Life Without Compromise

Quimby was 25 when she first came to Maine in the early 1970s, shortly after graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute. She used her life's savings of $3,000 to buy 30 acres just outside the town of Guilford and, with her then boyfriend, George St. Clair, she built a cabin in the woods. At the time, her intent was simple enough: to live in self-sufficient harmony with the land, like a pioneer, without running water or electricity.

For a young woman born into middle-class comfort in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised in the leafy suburbs of Connecticut, it was a radical break. Her father was an engineer and a Harvard MBA; her mother, a homemaker. But Quimby, the eldest of four children, was the artistically talented star of the family, a free spirit who made trinkets and then sold them to neighbors for pocket money.

She blossomed in San Francisco--and then rebelled. Burning with desire to live her ideals to the fullest, she spurned the status quo as soon as she graduated. "I didn't want a career," she says. "I didn't want a job. I didn't want to employ any skills--I was just rejecting it all!" Except the call to experience the sublime. Deeply inspired by the essays of naturalist Henry David Thoreau, she took her own vow of simplicity, put aside the trappings of materialism, and drove all the way to Maine. "I truly believed," she says, "that the only way I could live a life that didn't compromise the things I didn't want to compromise was [to live] in a very rural setting."