Where: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York, United States

What's at stake: Largest unprotected wild forest in the eastern United States

Threatened by: Logging and development

Animals include: Loon, moose, Canada lynx, American pine marten, black bear

• The Great North Woods is the native land of the Iroquois and Algonquin peoples.
• All of the major rivers in the Northeast -- the Hudson, Mohawk, Connecticut, Merrimack, Androscoggin, Kennebec, Penobscot and St. John -- spring from headwaters in the Great North Woods.
• This rugged landscape is home to more than 100 peaks higher than 4,000 feet -- including all of the tallest mountains in the northeastern United States. It also hosts more than 250 species of wildlife.
• Follensby Pond in Adirondack State Park, adjacent to a proposed development site, was the meeting place of the legendary 1858 "Philospher's Camp," a gathering of America's most prominent thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet James Russell and scientist Louis Agassiz. The American philosophy of transcendentalism, which emphasizes the importance of nature, emerged from this meeting of minds in the Great North Woods.
• Over the last decade more than six million acres of the Great North Woods have been sold, mainly to conglomerates and land speculators from other states and countries.
• Seventy million Americans live within a day's drive of the Great North Woods.