Our Story
The Coal Burned Spoon Sanctuary grew from a lifetime of one couple asking a simple question: could humans live better by working with nature instead of constantly fighting it?
Long before “sustainability” was part of the mainstream conversation, John was working in the Texas oil fields and learning the building trade – yet riding his bicycle everywhere, because something about our dependence on fossil fuels felt fundamentally unsustainable to him.
Karen spent years building landscaping, farming, and food businesses, restoring depleted soil, and trying to help people cook and eat good food, all while becoming increasingly frustrated by how much energy we expend trying to make the land produce what we want.
Together, they found 500 wild acres in the mountains of western Maine.
One of the first discoveries was a patch of wild chanterelles. For Karen, it was a profound validation of an idea she’d been circling for years: here was exquisite food she hadn’t planted, irrigated, fertilized, weeded, or cultivated. It was simply there, waiting to be enjoyed. The forest didn’t need us to bulldoze, amend, and cultivate it in order to make it productive. It was already producing food on its own – and hinting at how much more might be possible if we learned to recognize, encourage, and thoughtfully harvest what was naturally thriving there.
What began as Karen’s fascination with the food already growing around us soon became a much bigger shared experiment: what could we create by combining John’s lifetime of practical building experience with Karen’s work in food and land? How far could we take the idea of working with nature rather than against it?
The Coal Burned Spoon Sanctuary has become our life’s work: part wild-food laboratory, part demonstration landscape, and part extraordinary place to experience what happens when humans stop standing apart from nature – and begin learning how to belong to it again.
Karen Bolduc
Karen is a hardcore Mainer who likes to take her time and do things right. Once criticized for being too ‘cerebral,’ she is an odd blend of deep thinking and heavy lifting. She feels certain that she could de-escalate a surprise confrontation with a black bear in the forest by sending it powerful telepathic messages of peace and solidarity. Karen and her husband John are the proud parents of two unapologetically wholesome, loving, unschooled children, Elovie and Rhiordan, who learn life by living it in the Sanctuary’s peaceful mountains. She subsists primarily on a diet of weeds, tree bark, foraged mushrooms and berries, and local restaurant dine-in. Karen holds deep affection for her home state of Maine and will stop at nothing until every willing soul on the planet has synchronized themselves with its natural rhythms and flavors, and been enlightened by the experience.
John Bolduc
John is a visionary builder, also born and raised in Maine. Though normal-looking on the outside, John’s unconventional thoughts on the inside dart around like a pinball in an arcade game, and he isn’t afraid to let his mind haphazardly explore them. He is deeply moved by dynamic displays of the powerful human spirit, such as an Olympian landing a really hard jump, which cause him to immediately stop all talking and tear up just a little. One generation his wife’s senior, John is a closet thrill junkie who lusts after fast ski runs down double black diamonds, secretly believing that the purity of his love for skiing renders him divinely immune from harm while on the mountain. John sometimes finds innocent things suspicious, makes causal links where none exist, and asks all questions indirectly. Yet, he is an extraordinarily accessible and likeable fellow.
