The Working Waterfront - September 2023

Keeping the dogfish away

Bycatch repellent would help fishermen

BY CLARKE CANFIELD

“Dog!” whoops Ben Gowell as he reels in his line 12 miles offshore, pulling up a spiny dogfish from nearly 300 feet down. The dogfish, well-known among recreational and commercial fishermen, is one of many that have been landed this mid-July day aboard a University of New England research boat.

Gowell is among the students taking part in a research project to collect data and determine if a device attached to the lines is effective in repelling dogfish—thereby reducing the shark bycatch for fishermen from Maine to Florida.

The contraption, called a bycatch reduction device or BRD, emits weak electrical stimuli that keep sharks away. They operate under the same concept as electrical dog controls, commonly called “invisible fences” and give off electrical fields to keep dogs in their yards.

If the data show that the BRDs are effective—and preliminary findings suggest they are—the goal is to commercialize them for widespread use, said John Mohan, an assistant professor of marine science at UNE who is overseeing the student-led project.

BREEZING UP—

“Industry adoption is the ultimate goal,” Mohan said as he manned the wheel of the Sharkology, a 34-foot boat with twin 250-horsepower engines. Spiny dogfish are abundant throughout New England waters and along the Eastern Seaboard. They have little commercial value and are generally viewed

as a nuisance, reducing fishermen’s harvestable catches and sometimes damaging gear.

The UNE project is testing the devices at sea and in some large tanks in UNE’s Marine Science Center. The research focuses on recreational fishing,

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Downeast farms happily singing the blues

Wild blueberry growers diversifying, tout healthy product

BY SARAH CRAIGHEAD DEDMON

When Lisa Hanscom leads tours of Welch Farm, she showcases a working wild blueberry farm, and a slice of her family history, too. Hanscom’s

grandparents purchased the Roque Bluffs farm in 1912, moved in after their wedding on Christmas Day, and over time, her grandfather converted the fields to wild blueberries.

Today, four generations of the family still bring in the harvest

CAR-RT SORT POSTAL CUSTOMER

from seaside barrens overlooking Englishman’s Bay.

Hanscom’s lengthy family relationship with the blueberry is overshadowed only by the incredible 10,000-year story of the wild blueberry itself, and that, she says, is what captures visitors’ imaginations. After their tour, Welch Farm visitors filter in and out of a red barn, leaving with jams, jellies, and a better idea of what those iconic little berries mean to Maine.

They also add about $250 million to Maine’s economy each year.

“Part of our mission here at Welch Farm is to educate people about the wild blueberry,” Hanscom says. “If I have to do it one person at a time, I will.”

“ Wild blueberries are native to North America, and in any given field, there are going to be 1,000 different varieties.”

“Wild blueberries are native to North America, and in any given field, there are going to be 1,000 different varieties. They all look different, and they all taste different, and they’re all planted by Mother Nature, not us,” says Hanscom.

Hanscom isn’t alone in her mission to educate people about the wild blueberry. In fact, it’s a songbook the entire industry is singing from, spreading the word that wild blueberries are different from their farmed counterparts— containing twice the antioxidants, 70% more fiber, and higher concentrations of anthocyanins that can support eye, heart, and brain health.

Then there’s the undeniably romantic appeal of a plant that followed receding

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Crew aboard the schooner Ladona, under the direction of Capt. J.R. Braugh, modify sail and set the course during the Great Schooner Race on July 6. The schooner J&E Riggin is off the Ladona’s stern, and Mark Island is visible in the fog. PHOTO: JIM DUGAN

Electric outboards show their stuff

Island Institute, Pendleton Yacht Yard partner on project

IN AN EFFORT to “electrify the working waterfront” in Maine, staff from Island Institute (publisher of The Working Waterfront) along with Gabe Pendleton, owner of Pendleton Yacht Yard on Islesboro, put new electric outboards through their paces on Rockland Harbor on July 27.

Pendleton Yacht Yard’s new fully electric boat, named Take Charge, will be used to demonstrate electric marine propulsion in a partnership with Island Institute.

“We’re thrilled to be using an electric boat for our business,” Pendleton said. “We’re just beginning to appreciate the benefits of electric propulsion and look forward to sharing what we learn from

this demonstration project with other businesses in the Midcoast.”

The business will use the boat— powered by a 40-horsepower Flux Marine electric outboard, charged with solar power—for service calls, moving marine equipment and materials, and other working waterfront needs. While the boat is in use, data will be gathered using a “baseline usage device” to help inform improvements in future electric boat hull design. As part of the partnership, Pendleton will host a number of sea trials for other businesses and individuals interested in electric propulsion, offering firsthand experience with this emerging technology.

“We have a vision for a fully electric working waterfront in Maine,” said Kim Hamilton, Island Institute president. “It’s right for the environment and right for business resilience. This partnership with Pendleton Yacht Yard, and others in the works, are important steps in moving our state towards its climate goals—seeing is believing.”

Electric outboard motors offer many benefits including significantly reduced Co2 emissions (even when charged with non-renewable energy sources), less water pollution, more predictable operating costs, and quiet operation.

In addition to funding the partnership with Pendleton, Island

Institute’s Center for the Marine Economy is working in a number of areas to advance the electrification of Maine’s working coast including creation of an introductory course on electric boats (with Maine Community College System and Mid-Coast School of Technology— and a follow-on course planned for electric outboard maintenance), solar energy installations at wharfs and docks, and seeking to improve the charging infrastructure on Maine’s coast.

The boat’s name—Take Charge—was the winning entry in a contest that drew almost 300 entries. The winner was Judy Long of Orrington.

Charming 3-bedroom cape on a beautifully landscaped acre with fruit trees, perennials, and veggie gardens and includes a ROW to the shore. With a 3-car garage, there is plenty of space for cars and a boat. The interior is lovely with wood floors, two full baths, wood stove in the living room to supplement HWBB heat, and a southwest face composite deck with retractable awning from which to enjoy the gardens. Twenty minutes to MDI for restaurants, galleries, and museums, and Acadia National Park for hiking and biking or just walking. Six miles from Ellsworth. $510,000.

We’ve

John Martin, Bud Staples, and Elsie Gillespie chat around the woodstove at the annual town meeting.

Gerald “Punkin” Lemoine

Levi Moulden

Bud Staples

BLUEBERRIES

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glaciers onto the sandy soils of eastern Maine, creating millennia-old barrens that glimmer purple in August, then flaming red in autumn.

These are just a few of many things, say Maine blueberry farmers, that make the wild blueberry far from ordinary.

“From an industry perspective we need to continue to decouple the wild blueberry from the cultivated blueberry. Consumers often don’t understand the differences between them,” says Colleen Craig of Wyman’s, another Downeast business with deep roots in blueberries— the Milbridge-based grower and processor is preparing to celebrate its 150th anniversary next year.

Wyman’s is the largest branded supplier of wild blueberries in America, selling its distinctive blue bags into grocery store freezers across all 50 states. Recently, Wyman’s added a line of frozen fruit cups, and shelf-stable products like wild blueberry juice and dried blueberry powder.

“Our mission is to help people eat more fruit. According to the USDA Dietary Guidelines from 2020-2025, eight out of ten Americans are not getting the recommended daily amount,” says Craig. “We’re committed to innovation within the industry and developing fruit-forward products.”

VALUE ADDED

In business speak, converting a basic product like a wild blueberry into something like blueberry juice is known as “adding value.” Some farms are taking other paths to increase their profitability. One of Maine’s largest growers, Passamaquoddy Berries, which manages 2,000 acres of wild blueberry barrens, cushions volatile field prices by selling some berries under its own brand. Hanscom has diversified her farm’s business with the addition of two rental cabins, and plans to begin hosting weddings next year.

Eric Venturini, executive director of the Maine Wild Blueberry Commission, says there is growing excitement for value-added wild blueberries, both in the industry and among consumers.

“There are a lot of opportunities for producers to diversify their offerings, increase the cash flow to their business, and have a more consistent income and stability,” Venturini says.

Consistent income and stability can be hard to come by in agriculture, and wild blueberries are no exception. Significant price drops over the last decade hit a low in 2017, when the average price to growers was 26 cents per pound. Since then that number has rebounded and last year hit 72 cents per pound, and there are other positive indicators.

Over the last five years, frozen wild blueberry sales at retail have increased 88%. But as in the rest of the U.S. economy, wild blueberry farmers are facing rising costs and labor shortages.

The industry is keeping its eye on other challenges too, like the potential impacts of climate change, including droughts like the ones that impacted Maine growers for several years before this year’s plentiful rainfall turned that tide.

“We are working very hard to free up financial and technical support to help people become more resilient to climate change through sustainable water resource development and irrigation,” says Venturini.

Blueberry research is one of three major focus areas for the Wild Blueberry Commission, alongside promotion and policy work, and they are not alone. In her work as wild blueberry specialist with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension and School of Food and Agriculture, Dr. Lily Calderwood connects farmers with research conducted by UMaine and vice versa. Recently, Calderwood’s group completed a two-year study on the use of mulch to help retain moisture on the fast-draining, sandy soils where wild blueberries grow. The good news is it helps.

“These drought years have been so severe that mulch alone will not solve the problem most likely, but it can buffer the problem. Some fields will still need irrigation,” says Calderwood.

Abbie Sennett and husband Jacob Lennon relied on their irrigation system during the drought in 2022. Now in their 20s, the pair met as young teenagers working on Abbie’s family farm in Albion, perhaps even more well-known for bees than for blueberries. Abbie’s father, Lincoln Sennet, is the founder of Swan’s honey, a famous Maine brand.

After harvesting their berries from barrens in Machias, each day Abbie and Jacob transport them back to Albion, where they have easy access to labor for processing.

“The biggest challenge we face is labor shortages,” says Abbie. “A monthlong job isn’t enticing to most people.”

At their young age, and with their willingness to assume leadership roles in the industry, Venturini says Abbie and Jacob represent a positive direction for Maine’s wild blueberry industry.

As of two years ago, the average age of a Maine wild blueberry farmer was 64.5 years old.

“I’m very hopeful that will continue,” says Venturini of the younger folks, “and we can help prepare a new cohort of wild blueberry farmers to step into the industry and continue this tremendous tradition that’s really part of the cultural underpinning and part of Maine’s heritage.”

Like many Mainers, Abbie has fond childhood memories of blueberry

season, and says she misses the days of hand raking. But she’s also fond of wild blueberry farming, today.

“There’s something about the Downeast area when everyone goes for the harvest, the tourists want to see the fields and buy blueberries, I think it’s special,” she says. “What’s more Maine than wild blueberries? There’s not much.”

Raking blueberries is a traditional way to harvest.

Sunset over a wild blueberry field in Washington County.

DOGFISH

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but is being done in collaboration with a separate project to determine if the BRDs are effective on commercial longline fishing vessels that are targeting swordfish and tuna off the coast of North Carolina. Both projects are receiving funding from a NOAA Saltonstall-Kennedy grant.

The North Carolina study previously captured 141 sharks (covering nine species) in 15 days of commercial longline fishing, but only 34 of those were on hooks with BRDs that emitted an electrical field. That represents a shark catch reduction of more than 50% with BRD-equipped hooks.

For the Maine project, students this day are fishing four fishing rods with 60-pound test line. Two are equipped with active BRDs emitting electrical fields, and two have BRDs that are not activated and serve as a control group. The cylindrical devices are 8.5-inches-long, made of PVC, and equipped with microprocessors and lithium batteries.

Sharks are repelled by the BRDs because they have the uncanny ability to sense tiny electrical fields, which allows them to home in on their prey. Fish, however, are not repelled because they don’t have the same sense.

Out at sea off Biddeford, students are pulling in pollock, red hake, and white hake in addition to dogfish. Of the 21 dogfish hooked during the day, only a handful of them go after the chum on lines with active BRDs. The results suggest the devices are effective, but not 100%.

Clayton Nyiri, a marine science major at UNE, is leading the field testing portion of the project. When the dogfish are brought aboard, he measures them and takes blood samples to determine their stress levels. Some of them are put into a water-filled cooler to be brought back to land to be used for laboratory tests.

Collecting the data is vital to determine the viability of the devices, said Nyiri, who plans to make a career studying sharks. He hopes to write an academic paper on the project this fall and have it published in a scientific journal next year.

Bycatch reduction devices would help fishermen financially, while also helping shark populations remain healthy, he said.

“It’s a win-win,” he said. “Reducing bycatch is good for the fishery, and it’s good for the environment.”

UNE graduate student Michael Nguyen is leading the laboratory testing trials, with Mohan—who has a doctorate in marine science—serving as the adviser to both Nguyen and Nyiri.

Nyguen said the battery life and the device housing need to be revamped to make them durable, so it could take time before they are in widespread use.

“As of now, [the testing] serves as a proof of concept and it's exciting to see that in the lab and field it works well deterring the most common shark in the western North Atlantic,” he said.

Whether the BRDs become must-have equipment for fishermen remains to be seen. But the interest was high among recreational fishermen at an informational table that UNE set up at a recent fishing seminar hosted by Saco Bay Tackle at Dunegrass Country Club in Old Orchard Beach.

“They were like ‘Can we buy this from you now, because we need something like this,’” Mohan said.

Atlantic Spiny Dogfish (Squalus acanthias)

APPEARANCE:

Dogfish are slim with a narrow pointed snouts, two dorsal fins and ungrooved large spines. They are gray above and white below with characteristic white spots. Males grow up to 3.3 feet, and females grow up to 4 feet.

RANGE:

Along the Eastern Seaboard, dogfish live from Labrador to Florida, and are most abundant from Nova Scotia to North Carolina.

MARKET:

There is little consumer demand for dogfish in the U.S., but it is commonly used in Europe as the fish in “fish and chips.”

John Mohan, an assistant professor of marine science who is overseeing the research, says the ultimate goal of the study is to have the bycatch reduction devices in widespread use among recreational and commercial fishermen. PHOTO: Clarke Canfield

Source: NOAA Fisheries

University of New England student Clayton Nyiri unhooks a dogfish caught by fellow marine science student Jamison Saunders.

PHOTO: Clarke Canfield

University of New England student Ben Gowell holds a dogfish in one hand and a bycatch reduction device in the other.

PHOTO: Clarke Canfield

A delicate dance between sea and land

BY CATHERINE SCHMITT

Behind the forested dunes of Popham Beach, where the Kennebec River finally meets the sea, is an extensive salt marsh. Great blue herons hunt for eels amid blooms of sea lavender and milkwort; saltmarsh sparrows search for spiders in the grass.

As in all marshes, the grasses and rushes each have their own unique tolerance for salt and flood, and their growth reflects tidal patterns, with fine smooth salt hay and black rush in the upper zones that only flood occasionally, and wider cordgrass along edges, creek banks, and low areas.

With each high tide, plant stems slow the rush of water, allowing sand and silt to settle to the marsh surface before the ebb. With each season, organic matter accumulates as plants grow and die, and their roots and stems build peat in the saturated soil.

In this way, above and below the surface, salt marshes flourished with the gradually rising sea for thousands of years.

It’s a delicate relationship, however. Any changes, like more frequent flooding, less sediment being delivered, or plants growing faster, can disrupt the equilibrium. Marshes are also

a

running out of room, as waves erode their edges, storms tear them apart, and people convert their grass and mud into lawn, concrete, and pavement. Such conversion has already consumed one-third of the region’s salt marshes.

The acceleration of sea level rise over the last century prompted many

coastal ecologists to worry, and this worry only intensified as they started focusing on “blue carbon.” Would the remaining salt marshes be able to keep up, or would they drown? Would salt marshes continue to play an outsized role in sequestering carbon?

In answer, scientists have been measuring rates of marsh growth, deploying filters to capture settling sediment, installing frames of suspended pins that move up and down with the marsh surface, coring into the peat to date the layers and correlate them with historical pollution.

Recently, in Long Island Sound and around Cape Cod, researchers found that marshes were indeed growing at increased rates.

A new coastwide study, led by Nathaniel Weston of Villanova University and funded by the National Science Foundation, confirms these findings. Analysis of 31 soil cores at nine sites from Georgia to Maine showed that marsh growth has actually accelerated.

In many places, including the Kennebec River, marshes are growing vertically two or three times faster than they were 100 years ago. The change in the growth of the marsh appears to closely mirror the change in rates of global sea level rise.

Weston was surprised. His previous research documented declines in the amount of sediment washing down rivers to marshes as a result of reforestation, erosion control, and dam construction.

“We wondered if we could see this signal of changing sediment supply in the marshes, if accretion rates had slowed,” he said. “We didn’t find that. Instead, we found acceleration everywhere.”

Sediment is necessary, but more important for building marsh is the below-ground accumulation of organic matter. In order for the marsh to sequester carbon, it has to escape

decomposition by bacteria and fungi which produce carbon dioxide or methane as they break down plants. Microbial activity is higher in warmer temperatures, and Weston thinks this helps explain slower rates of marsh growth in some of the more southern marshes (the York River in Virginia, Cape Fear River in North Carolina, and Edisto River in South Carolina).

These new findings suggest that rather than being passively “resilient” to rising sea levels, salt marsh ecosystems have the capacity to respond to accelerating rates of change. The response is dynamic, but patchy. And however well salt marshes have kept up in the past—however well-documented by well-meaning researchers— that response is less and less relevant for predicting the future.

Whether or not salt marshes continue to keep up depends on how fast the sea continues to rise, how much temperatures continue to warm, and whether or not there is a continued source of sediment.

“We are losing marsh in some places, gaining in others,” said Weston. “Overall, we’re going to continue to lose in most systems, some more quickly than others.” A separate study in southern New England found that salt marsh vegetation loss is both widespread and accelerating.

“Marshes are keeping up, until they don’t,” said Weston, who plans on continuing to monitor marshes to identify signals of tipping points. He acknowledged that our information is biased because it is based on data from salt marshes that are surviving, rather than ones that have already disappeared.

“We can’t core a marsh that isn’t there.”

At Popham, the rising sea and shifting sands reshape the beach with each high tide and every storm. The river delivers fine sediment, the marsh grass grows toward the sky, and roots hold everything in its place. For now.

Salt marshes absorb sea level rise—until they don’t

Scarborough Marsh in May 2021. PHOTO: JACK SULLIVAN

Legislature, governor pass offshore wind bill

Proponents say ‘guardrails in place’ to protect Gulf of Maine

In what proponents describe as a way to jumpstart a new offshore wind industry for Maine, the legislature passed and Gov. Janet Mills signed into law LD 1895, “An Act Regarding the Procurement of Energy from Offshore Wind” on July 27.

The coalition of groups that support the bill say it will generate not only a historic investment in affordable and reliable clean energy to power Maine’s homes, businesses, and transportation, but also an investment in the working Mainers needed to make it a reality.

Bill sponsor Sen. Mark Lawrence said offshore wind energy must be part of the state’s future.

“To combat climate change and invest in Maine’s energy independence, our state has set ambitious goals for renewable energy. It’s clear that this effort will involve offshore wind energy projects. We need to have guardrails in place to make sure this is done right and truly benefits Mainers,” he said.

“This bill will mean jobs, lower and more stable energy prices while combating climate change at the same time,” Lawrence continued. “LD 1895 represents a detailed path to smart offshore wind development.”

The legislation combines two critical initiatives to advance a new clean energy industry for Maine by setting a procurement schedule and constructing a port. It will:

• Set a procurement schedule for a goal of 3 GW of installed offshore wind power in the Gulf of Maine by 2040, supplying affordable, reliable offshore wind to power homes, businesses, and transportation.

• Incentivize responsibly developed wind projects that protect wildlife and avoid Lobster Management Area 1, one of Maine’s key fishing grounds.

• Set strong and comprehensive labor and workforce development standards for good-paying jobs

and ensure inclusive benefits for Maine’s most vulnerable communities.

• Support the creation of a world-class, Maine-built offshore wind port that will bring in billions of dollars in economic development.

• Help meet Maine’s bipartisan emissions reduction targets and put the state on a path to meeting Gov. Janet Mills’ proposed goal of 100% renewable energy by 2040.

“Maine is well positioned to be a leader in renewable energy and offshore wind,” said Sen. Chip Curry. “This bill will make sure that Maine’s workers, ratepayers, and economy get the best benefit possible.”

Three prominent environmental groups support the law.

Kelt Wilska, energy justice manager at Maine Conservation Voters, said the law “sets a national example for how to responsibly develop a new, affordable energy source, grow good-paying jobs for our workers, and do so without compromising Maine values.”

Jack Shapiro, climate and clean energy director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said the governor and legislature “are moving us decisively towards a clean energy future that will bring thousands of family-supporting jobs, protect the rich array of wildlife in the Gulf of Maine, avoid conflicts with important fishing grounds, and put us on a path to meet a goal of 100% renewable energy by 2040.”

And Eliza Donoghue, Maine Audubon’s director of advocacy, said the law represents “a serious and measurable step toward accelerating our clean energy transition and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. This legislation is necessary to help ensure that appropriately sited and operated offshore wind development safely co-exists with Gulf of Maine wildlife and the marine habitats they rely on.”

Howard Seaver sent us this photo of Great Spruce Head islanders reading the The Working Waterfront. Shown are Charles Porter, Scott Fuller, and Christina Fuller. PHOTO: ANINA P. FULLER

from the sea up

A history worth celebrating

Island Institute’s 40th prompts look ahead

BY KIM F. HAMILTON

WHEN I JOINED Island Institute as president a little over three months ago, we were preparing for our 40th birthday as an organization serving Maine’s islands and coastal communities.

We were founded in 1983—the year the English rock band, The Police, topped Billboard’s year-end “hot singles” with “Every Breath You Take” and the year that 10-year-old Samantha Smith from Manchester began a Cold War peace mission through her correspondence with Soviet leader Yuri Andropov.

Richard Attenborough’s Ghandi took best picture at the Academy Awards, Michael Jackson’s international sensation Thriller was released, and the grip of a global recession was finally loosening around the U.S.

It was a curious time for an organization focused on Maine’s islands to come into this world. The challenges and cultural references of the early 1980s seem so very global.

From today’s perspective, the founding of Island Institute was prescient. Had we known then that the Gulf of Maine would become one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the world, that access to affordable housing

stood to become one of the defining challenges facing coastal communities and islands across the country, and that a simple demographic truism (more deaths than births over time can lead to severe labor shortages) would threaten our economic growth, we would have wondered what took us so long.

As a relative newcomer to Island Institute, my read of its history suggests that we have always been ahead of major trends.

Already in 1985, the Institute had launched our island schools program to ensure that even the smallest schools remained at the heart of community. We partnered with the state in 1988 to turn uninhabited islands into destinations for recreational use, eventually incubating the Maine Island Trail Association as its own organization.

Our advocacy in the mid-1990s led the U.S. postal service to reverse its decision to close post offices on several islands, thus guaranteeing access to this service that is even more critical today.

This foreshadowed our pioneering work to bring world class broadband to rural communities, including those at the end of the most distant peninsulas or on islands. We’re proud to have worked alongside more than 85 municipalities

rock

bound

My happy Maine anniversary

Forty years after arriving, the love remains

BY TOM GROENING

AS I WRITE this in early August, it’s a couple of days away from the 40th anniversary of our moving to Maine. I’m not expecting the governor to make the day a state holiday or that friends and neighbors fete us with food and drink, but I believe this 40-year love affair is worth reflection.

I grew up in New York, and my prior experience in Maine was confined to three visits. As an eight-year-old, I traveled with my parents through the state to Quebec. My father shot home movies of a log drive on the Kennebec, a practice that would end in ten years. The other two visits were to my now-wife’s family camp on a lake east of Lincoln while I was 21 and 22.

When I was hired as a teacher at a boarding school near Augusta, we figured on staying for five years then trying to buy land in rural Massachusetts. But having to stay on campus every other weekend meant on the off weekends we’d hit the road—Popham Beach, Portland, Rockport, MDI, Deer Isle, Rangeley, Moosehead Lake.

It was a courtship that led us, just a year later, to want to buy land on the coast, which we did, in Belfast, in 1984.

I later learned we were part of a second wave of migrants, coming a decade after the back-to-the-landers. We had no illusions of living selfsufficiently as many of them did, but the opportunity to build own house, cut firewood to heat it, and live closer to the land than we did in surburbia was appealing.

The back-to-the-landers had changed the landscape, making previously insular communities less so. And when they left the woods for towns, they added food coops, boutiques, fine dining, and more art galleries, which we also found appealing.

What did we and our cohorts in this second wave bring? Well, some brought significant capital (we sure didn’t). Most of us brought education and skills. The rap on we newcomers has been that we try to usher in amenities we miss from our homes, but I think we also brought lessons about failing to protect from poorly planned commercial and residential development.

What has Maine done for and to me? Our former columnist Colin

and helped them access yet another crucial economic development tool.

Our early island energy efficiency work in the 2000s ushered in clean energy, climate mitigation and adaptation, and marine economy programs. This work puts those who make their living on the ocean and the businesses that make coastal communities strong at the center of our work. It means that our commitment to protecting Maine’s working waterfront, first detailed in 2005, has not waned.

At a recent dinner, I shared that while I was deeply honored to be at Island Institute to celebrate this important 40-year milestone, the more interesting question to me is what will we celebrate at our 50th? A very smart guest challenged me to answer my own question: what, in fact, will we celebrate?

While I cannot fully anticipate the next decade, I do know that our history must guide us. First, as a community development organization, we will only be as strong as the number of communities we listen to. The way we work is as important as what we do because it grows the most important currency: trust.

Second, the Gulf of Maine is our Rosetta Stone. Understanding

changes in the Gulf of Maine will help us decipher the future of our coast, our economy, and our living environment—whether from the potential for shellfish and seaweed aquaculture, the changes in the lobstering industry, or infrastructure and innovations we can’t yet envision.  Finally, we will inspire communities to build a smarter, climate-friendly, inclusive future without sacrificing their heritage. For us, heritage and community resilience have always gone hand-in-hand.

Ten years is not that far away, yet the Maine coast is changing in ways once unimaginable. Community development is not understood as a nimble, adaptive field. Our historically unique position, however, bridging decades of change among diverse, coastal communities, will strengthen our ability to anticipate rather than to react to change.

That is a history worth celebrating.

Kim Hamilton is president of Island Institute. She may be contacted at khamilton@islandinstitute.org.

Woodard’s American Nations comes to mind. In it, he argues—persuasively— that the U.S. is made up of 11 distinct regions, each with deeply embedded social and political values that hold sway. As Woodward defines them, Maine is “Yankeedom.”

I have embraced far more libertarian, “live and let live” values in these 40 years, developed a healthy cynicism about policy that is removed from practical application, and have come to respect the validity of that catch-all phrase “common sense.”

Back in the late 1980s while covering a Belfast City Council meeting on a summer night and hearing a consultant describe what seemed to me a lovely addition to the downtown streets, I was brought up short when a councilor observed that this amenity wouldn’t stand up well to the business end of a snowplow. That’s common sense.

Maine—existing at “human scale,” as someone I recently met put it—has allowed me to see impact in my work. Yes, some transplants might be said to come for the chance to be big fish in

a small pond. But that is a cynicism I have not embraced. That impact may be short-lived, but it’s real.

And Maine has given our children— now adults with their own families in Maine—a stellar environment in which to grow and spread their wings.

In our early years, I was awed at Maine’s beauty—Camden’s High Street in autumn, a wind-whipped early spring day climbing Blue Hill, a hot summer morning at Roque Bluffs, the glowing dusk of a December day in Stonington.

Soon, I realized that what I loved most was the power of community it provides. I walk down Main Street in Belfast and say hello to someone, and if I stop to think how we first met and come up empty, well… that’s community.

Tom Groening is editor of The Working Waterfront and Island Journal. He may be reached at tgroening@ islandinstitute.org.

I have embraced far more libertarian values in these 40 years.

A BAILEY SUMMER DAY—

This photo, believed to have been shot around 1900, shows the steamboat landing at Bailey Island in Harpswell. The sign on the building reads “Mackerel Cove,” and the advertising sign at right reads “Stanley Marine Motors, Low in Price, High in Quality.” Despite the ankle-to-head attire the women are wearing, it appears that the image was shot in summer. Aren’t we all lucky to live in a less formal age?

Let’s return to a native view of resources

Wabanaki

BY SARA FRESHLEY

THE WABANAKI NATIONS have an excellent history of sustainable resource management. Before colonizers dominated the resources of this area in the 1600s, the Wabanakis had lived here for 12,000 years, self-regulating their consumption and relationships to the land and one another.

In a fraction of that time, the society that colonizers brought to these shores manifested a tragedy of the commons in mere generations. It’s a tragedy we live in today.

We live in an economy that relies on people consuming goods for survival instead of relying on one another. Society has drastically changed from one of community living to one of individualism. This has caused resource depletion, poverty, and climate change.

Instead of embracing and sharing the Wabanaki people’s way of life, we dismissed it as wrong and shunned them. Despite this, the Wabanaki people are rooted firmly on this land and it is time that living descendants of colonizers listen to them.

Island Institute Board of Trustees

Kristin Howard, Chair

Douglas Henderson, Vice Chair

Charles Owen Verrill, Jr. Secretary

Kate Vogt, Treasurer, Finance Chair

Carol White, Programs Chair

Megan McGinnis Dayton, Philanthropy & Communications Chair

Shey Conover, Governance Chair

Michael P. Boyd, Clerk

Sebastian Belle

David Cousens

Michael Felton

Nathan Johnson

Emily Lane

Bryan Lewis

Michael Sant

Barbara Kinney Sweet

Donna Wiegle

John Bird (honorary)

Kimberly A. Hamilton, PhD (ex officio)

Government regulation and oversight have been our answer to preventing resource depletion. In this individualistic society which we have built, we cannot trust one another to take only what we need, therefore regulation is necessary.

The Wabanaki people have resided on this land for so long in part due to a community mindset—community that extends to the surrounding ecosystem.

Instead of seeing nature as a commodity, the Wabanaki recognize that we are a part of nature. Instead of learning from the original stewards of this land, colonizers have continuously silenced the Wabanaki people, believing that our way of life is the only way; as if it has to be one or the other.

Despite this, there are examples outside of the Wabanaki where people have embraced successful resource regulation without government oversight. The Maine lobster industry

began marking egg-bearing females with a V-notch in their tails in the early 1900s. This mark lasts several molts, allowing the female to hatch and raise potentially thousands of lobsters.

Conservationists applaud this method and many credit it as a reason the lobster industry remains a critical economic driver for Maine. This system puts the power in the hands of the people.

While I cannot speak for the Wabanaki people and do not know the depth and details of their way of life, I do know that they have survived with the land for so long, in part because they prioritize the community over the individual, they consider future generations in their decisions, and they understand that to survive, the ecosystem needs to thrive.

Imagine the wealth of success stories if we respected the Wabanaki nations as partners instead of subjects. Suppose

THE WORKING WATERFRONT

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we embraced instead of dismissed their way of life.

The Wabanaki nations have lived on the banks of what we now call Moosehead Lake, the shores of what we now call Casco Bay, and in the forests of what we now call Baxter State Park for 12,000 years.

They have survived off the lobster, the trout, and the deer long before scientists created quotas and the government’s required permits. The Wabanaki Nation takes care of the land, and the land takes care of them.

It is well past time that the descendants of colonizers, who live here as a result of Wabanaki genocide, recognize the Wabanaki people for what they are, a sovereign nation that knows how to not only survive but thrive. The first step is to listen.

Sara Freshley grew up in Maine, has a bachelor’s degree in marine science, and  a law degree in environmental law and policy. She works as community organizer for Friends of Casco Bay and serves on the Maine Conservation Alliance and Voters Boards.

Editor: Tom Groening tgroening@islandinstitute.org

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model worked for 12,000 years

In this individualistic society which we have built, we cannot trust one another to take only what we need.

Rockland gallery featuring Ralston images

Limited-edition print show opens Aug. 18

Blue Raven Gallery at 374 Main Street in Rockland announces its first collaborative exhibition on Aug. 18 with an opening reception 5-7 p.m. featuring the pre-eminent Maine photographer Peter Ralston and his release of a new, limited-edition suite of large prints, The Raven Edition. The exhibition will include over 50 images, many never before exhibited, as well as his “Pentecost,” voted by Down East magazine the “most iconic Maine photograph of all time.” This one-man show celebrates Ralston’s 45 years of photographically documenting the coast and islands of Maine, his experiences as co-founder of Island Institute, as well as his lifelong connection with the Wyeth family.

Ralston grew up in Chadd’s Ford, Penn., worked for a decade as a freelance photojournalist and then photographing the coast of Maine beginning in 1978, drawn especially to the working communities that define the coast’s enduring character. His work has been seen in many books and magazines, featured repeatedly on network television, and has been exhibited in galleries, collections, and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad.

“My photographs are my statement,” Ralston says. “I don’t pretend or aspire to be cleverly intellectual about what I do. I just poke around the nooks and crannies

“The Harbor, Sea Smoke,” by Peter Ralston.

of this coast, always with my camera. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just storytelling, albeit straight from the heart. These are the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met, and sometimes there’s metaphor not far beneath the surface.”

Jodie Willard, founder of Blue Raven Gallery, is the new owner of the historic

bank building located between the Farnsworth Art Museum and Island Institute. As a graduate of Brooks Institute of Photography, Willard has a special interest in photography and collectable fine art photography.

The gallery will also exhibit contemporary art in a variety of

fields, including paintings, bronze sculptures in the roof top garden, mixed media, and one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces.

To learn more visit www. BlueRavenGallery.com and subscribe by email, or on Instagram @ BlueRavenGallery.

Douglas Erickson, CCIM SVN The Maseillo Group erickson@soundvest.com

Community Authenticity Remains Our Focus

The details have changed, but supporting community is the common thread

BY TOM GROENING

Reprinted from the 2023 edition of the Island Journal, Volume 39

You’ve probably heard the term “elevator pitch,” right? It’s mostly used in business circles, capturing the idea that an entrepreneur needs to be able to explain a business concept in a timeframe equal to the average elevator ride. That journey provides the ultimate captive audience, and so a clever pitch in that short time might land an investor.

Well, here at Island Institute, we sometimes crave an elevator trip up Burj Khalifa in Dubai, with its 163 floors, to give us time to explain where the organization has been and where it is going.

This year marks the Institute’s 40th year. Maine’s islands and coast were very different places in 1983, yet as we reflect on those four decades, it’s satisfying to see consistent themes threading through the years.

These days, we often describe ourselves as a community development organization. What

does that mean? It means we recognize how essential those units of human congregation are; community coalesces around shared economic and cultural activity, and over time, it grows its own values and learns to identify threats. Yet at the same time, community cannot thrive without change, without innovation, and the courage to pursue new opportunity, new ways of doing things.

And at the heart of it all is an idea that’s best captured in the phrase “a sense of place.” It’s a vague phrase, yes, but I think it embodies something of the shared identity people have with a community, a sentiment that joins people in loyalty and affection and even love for that place. And that love must be fierce in the face of winds from storms that sweep across the globe.

When Philip Conkling and Peter Ralston launched Island Institute 40 years ago, they recognized that island communities, especially those not connected

1983

by bridges to the mainland, risked becoming ghost towns. This wasn’t a hypothetical risk. Conkling notes that in the year 1900, there were some 300 year-round island communities off the Maine coast. Their geographical setting made practical sense, of course. Until the 20th century, goods and people in our corner of the world were most efficiently moved by ship. New York and Boston were more accessible from Vinalhaven and Bass Harbor than from Augusta and Lewiston.

Conkling, who had trained as a forester, tells the story of being hired to do a timber survey on an uninhabited island Downeast. When fog prevented the lobsterman from picking him up, he was left island-bound for another day. He wandered around and discovered foundations from a settlement, which piqued his curiosity: Who were the people who had lived here, and what had happened to them?

Philip Conkling, a forester and writer, founded the Institute in 1983 and led the organization through 2013, along with cofounder Peter Ralston, a photojournalist.

1984

Conkling and Ralston, supported by funding from Betsy Wyeth, published Island Journal in 1984, featuring the nowiconic cover image of sheep being towed to an island.

1985

1987

The Institute, in part reflecting the strength of Conkling’s writing and Ralston’s photography, added more publications, launching The Island News (1987), Inter-Island News, and The Working Waterfront (1994), the latter now circulating 45,000 copies ten times a year from Kittery to Eastport.

Early on, the Institute recognized the crucial role island schools— often, one-room schools—played in these offshore communities. Education conferences, linking island schools through video and inperson meetings, and scholarships helped sustain these schools.

1988

The Institute teamed with the state to study uninhabited state-owned islands and concluded recreational use was possible, leading to the formation of the nowindependently operated Maine Island Trail Association, or MITA, in 1988.

Back on the mainland, Conkling asked questions at the town office, looked into records, and soon discovered that the island community had been abandoned. So, with fewer than 20 year-round island towns remaining in Maine at that time, a mission was born—helping sustain these communities.

Conkling met Ralston on Allen Island off Port Clyde. The island had been purchased by renowned artist Andrew Wyeth and his wife, Betsy. Betsy had hired Conkling to do a timber survey and Ralston, who had grown up next door to the Wyeths in Pennsylvania, was visiting the family. Ralston had been working as a photojournalist, often traveling the world for magazine assignments.

1994

In the early 1990s, the federal government began automating and abandoning lighthouses and even demolished one in Maine. In response, the Institute intervened and by an act of Congress helped transfer remaining lighthouses to municipalities and nonprofits.

The nonprofit was formed on Hurricane Island, itself a vivid reminder of what was at stake. In the 19th century, the island essentially had been a labor camp, with families living there to work the granite quarry, and paying the company for housing and food and other staples. As the market for granite began to disappear, the owners demanded the resident workers and their families make a quick choice—be transported to nearby Vinalhaven or to the railroad station in Rockland. It was a sad end to an unsuccessful island community.

Conkling was a writer, and given Ralston’s photography experience, the two thought they’d launch their organization with a publication. Betsy Wyeth agreed to support the effort, but with a caveat—do it well, she said, rather than produce one of those mimeographed newsletters so many nonprofits published.

One of the Institute’s universally praised programs is the work its Island Institute Fellows do in island and coastal communities. The program, launched in 2000, places recent college graduates in communities, where their focus ranges from community gardens and afterschool activities for children, to digitizing historical collections and helping draft municipal ordinances. To date, some 350,000 hours of assistance have been provided.

2000

And so, with Wyeth’s generous support, the first Island Journal was published in 1984 with Ralston’s now-iconic cover image of sheep being towed in a boat. Island Journal, like the organization that produced it, has evolved, but at its heart the publication still aims to reflect the richness of island culture—and that’s “culture” in the anthropological sense, not the arts (though that, too, is featured).

Several years ago, some of us decided to empty and organize file cabinets at the office, and perusing the materials within was like a trip back in time. We found several forestry plans Conkling had completed for small, privately owned islands—a way to bring revenue into the fledgling nonprofit. Early newsletters outlined the Institute’s work over the previous year; one memorable stand the organization took was to oppose a large-scale residential development on an island off Portland. “Responsible development” of the islands was what was needed, the Institute asserted.

Other publications were launched: the Island News, Inter-Island News, and finally, The Working Waterfront. The latter, Conkling has explained, was established in 1994 because the 4,500 year-round islanders needed more political clout. They needed friends on the mainland, he said, and so the newspaper covered concerns shared by island and coastal communities.

2000

In 2000, the Institute opened Archipelago in its new Main Street office in Rockland, which serves as a retail store and art gallery featuring work of island and other Maine artists and artisans.

Another moment in the organization’s evolution can be seen in the archives of these publications. At one point, the Institute’s leadership wondered if accepting advertising for island real estate was undermining that “responsible development” principle. Of course not, they concluded. After all, it was islanders who began and ran those real estate agencies.

Back to the idea of community: What are its essential elements, especially in the finite world of an island? One concept is the “three-legged stool,” whereby an island town needs a school, a store, and a post office to remain vital. Other components might be substituted, and certainly economic opportunity is critical.

2005

In 2005, recognizing the growing threat to working waterfronts, the Institute published The Last 20 Miles report, identifying the shrinking access for those working on the water. The Institute helped support passage of a constitutional amendment that reduced tax assessments on these properties.

So Island Institute created education programs to assist the several one-room island schools. It established the Teaching and Learning Collaborative—TLC—to foster communication between those schools. Before Zoom became a way of life for many, children in those schools developed friendships through screens, often facilitated by an Institute staffer.

Island leadership and governance also have been challenges. So the Institute formed the Maine Islands Coalition, made up of representatives of each island who meet quarterly to discuss issues they confront.

The marine economy has always been a focus for the Institute, and remains so today. Staff work to see over the horizon to help fisheries-dependent communities

prepare for downturns in certain harvests. In recent years, the Institute helped many start small-scale aquaculture businesses as a hedge against declining fishing revenue.

More than a decade ago, the Institute broadened its mission scope to include serving “remote coastal communities.” That soon evolved to include the entire Maine coast, and beyond.

One of the organization’s best strategies has been to bring groups facing similar challenges together, even if those groups don’t share a geography. Fishermen from the United Kingdom once gathered with their Maine counterparts in Rockland to share their experience with wind turbines in the North Sea. Residents of Block Island did the same as wind turbines were becoming a reality off Rhode Island. Islanders from the Great Lakes traveled to Maine to see how our islands addressed challenges.

These convenings, as we like to call them, share the lessons our communities have learned with the wider world.

And in fact, despite the broadening scope of the mission, islands remain—as former Institute President Rob Snyder used to say—our North Star, informing and guiding our work. Islands can be understood as living laboratories, or even crucibles where solutions for difficult problems are tested. How does Matinicus get rid of its old washing machines, refrigerators, and hot water heaters? How does Monhegan move away from a diesel generator for its electricity? And how do Frenchboro and Isle au Haut find enough housing for lobster crews during the summer?

In 1983, could Conkling and Ralston have imagined today’s threats of a shrinking workforce and a rising sea? In a sense, yes. Stemming the falling tide of islanders moving to the mainland was a concern back then, and fragile island environments were always on the Institute’s radar.

Could they have foreseen the Institute’s need to help island and rural coastal communities secure reliable internet? Again, in a sense, yes. Connecting communities to the wider world has always been the mission.

Another part of the Institute’s story is its board of trustees. Today, the organization is guided and grounded by a board that includes a range of thoughtful people, including a veteran lobsterman, a boat yard owner, a seafood marketer, an environmental scientist, a school administrator, and more. Their roles, often behind the scenes, are essential as we plot a course forward in this century.

And so is the leadership emerging from Kim Hamilton, the Institute’s fourth president, named in April, and the first woman to hold the post. With an impressive nonprofit background that includes work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and FocusMaine, she agreed to take on oversight of our programs work on a temporary basis and, she says, fell in love with the organization.

Hamilton, a native Mainer, has generational ties to Chebeague Island, where she now resides.

If you boarded that elevator for the long ride with me and asked about the Institute’s mission, I would tell you an imagined story about a summer resident of, say, North Haven, driving a visitor from California into the island village. He might point out the caretaker who checks his house during the cold Maine winter months and he might wave to the postmistress who activates the family’s box for the summer. He also might nod to the lobsterman who provides his catch for family feasts, the town administrator who keeps the streets paved, and the school principal who ensures island children are well educated. And as he takes his visitor to his boat, he might introduce him to the crew that rebuilt its engine.

My imagined North Haven resident wants his island community to remain authentic, I would say, and avoid becoming a sort of gated community. And that’s what Island Institute works at, year after year. Oh, and by the way—our imagined summer resident probably has a few copies of Island Journal on the family’s coffee table.

Islands face some of the highest energy costs in the country, and so the Institute began helping communities find efficiency, from organizing weatherization of homes, to replacing lightbulbs with LEDs, and assisting in analyzing the costs and benefits of wind power, photovoltaics, and microgrids.

Doing business in island and coastal communities brings challenges tied to geography, transportation, and technology, and the Institute, with the Tom Glenn Community Impact Fund, has provided grants and loans for entrepreneurs to help with energy efficiency, infrastructure, and other business support.

High-speed internet—known as broadband—has become as essential as ferries and roads to island and remote coastal communities, and so in 2015 the Institute began helping them establish this service.

With the lobster fishery facing uncertainty, the Institute in 2016 began offering training for starting small-scale aquaculture businesses to raise kelp, oysters, and mussels.

The greatest threat to our way of life on the coast and islands in the 21st century is climate change, disrupting the lobster fishery, bringing higher sea levels, and making the ocean more acidic. The Institute has worked with Luke’s Lobster to create new markets for fishermen, helped lobsterdependent communities prepare for changes, and worked to help the working waterfront embrace electric power instead of fossil fuels.

To view a more comprehensive timeline of Island Institute’s work, visit: islandinstitute.org/40-years

Tom Groening is editor of Island Journal and The Working Waterfront.

Photos by Peter Ralston, Jack Sullivan, and Island Institute staff.

2012

2015

2016

2017-PRESENT

Congratulations to the Island Institute on 40 years of helping to sustain Maine’s island and coastal communities.

A trusted friend along the Maine coast since 1905. (207) 288-5097 seacoastmission.org

Portland to sell building to island group

Affordable Peaks Island apartment plan moves forward

BY CLARKE CANFIELD

An affordable housing advocacy group has unveiled renderings of a building with three apartments that it plans to have constructed and occupied by next June on Peaks Island.

Home Start, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding the pool of affordable housing on Peaks, has entered into a purchase-and-sales agreement with the city of Portland for a former parish hall once owned by St. Christopher’s Church on Central Avenue, said Betsey Remage-Healey, president of Home Start. The organization still has to take steps to secure funding, but has received detailed plans on what the building will look like.

Remage-Healey said it’s vital for Peaks to have affordable housing

to ensure it remains a year-round community where people who grew up or work on the island can afford to stay, raise families, and keep the school alive and well.

“If we don’t have affordable housing, it just becomes an enclave of wealthy folks who can afford the ever-rising costs of housing on the island,” she said.

Home Start was founded in 2008 with the goal of expanding the affordable housing stock on Peaks, where home prices have soared in recent years. It purchased a house on Luther Street more than a decade ago and worked with another nonprofit organization, Volunteers of America, to build and manage two homes on an adjacent lot. Home Start sold the Luther Street home last year and is using the proceeds from that sale toward the purchase of the

former parish hall and construction of the new apartments.

Home Start has been working with Backyard ADUs, a modular housing company in Brunswick, on a design for a one-story structure with solar panels on the roof and apartments that will rent for below-market prices.

After looking at different options, the Home Start board voted in May to demolish the existing building, rather than renovate it, and have Backyard ADUs construct the new building with three apartments, each with a separate entrance. Two of the apartments will have two bedrooms that will rent for $2,012 a month, and one will have three bedrooms that rents for $2,324. The rental rates are no more than 80% of the average rent in the Greater Portland area based on a formula from the U.S.

Vinalhaven takes action on housing

Nonprofit forms to investigate solutions

The Vinalhaven Housing Initiative (VHI) has been established to create year-round, sustainable housing options for decent and safe housing that is affordable to lowerand middle-income individuals and families, senior citizens, and physically challenged people who would otherwise be unable to afford rental or homes due to rapidly escalating prices.

The housing organization is an IRS approved, 501c (3) non-profit organization which is eligible to receive tax deductible contributions. It is working in partnership with Vinalhaven’s town government and community organizations to obtain funding, building sites, and the rehabilitation of selected housing.

In late 2020, the town’s board of selectmen established a housing

committee in response to the need for an increased supply of year-round and updated existing housing. VHI was created as a direct result of the housing committee’s work.

Housing committee members communicated directly with the staff and board members of several other Maine island housing non-profit organizations and became convinced that a not-for-profit housing initiative was the most expedient way to address the housing crisis on Vinalhaven.

Like similar non-profits, VHI will be funded predominantly through private donations from individuals, foundations, corporations, and government grants.

There are many typical situations that illustrate the challenges faced by those who need decent, affordable year-round housing on Vinalhaven.

Linkel Construction, Inc.

For example:

• People wish to come to Vinalhaven for jobs critical to the island—police, medical, teachers. With no housing available the community cannot benefit from their much needed skills and talents.

• Rentals with no hot water or heating.

• Several generations of islanders living in the same home because there are no other housing options.

• Elders on limited incomes in older housing that is hard to heat, maintain, and is not adapted to their physical needs.

• Young islanders are moving away because of the lack of housing. VHI is assessing a variety of housing types that could meet the need: single family and duplex modular homes, tiny houses, multi-units in new apartment

Department of Housing and Urban Development, Remage-Healey said.

Home Start planned to apply for a zero-interest forgivable loan by the end of June through the Affordable Housing Initiative for Maine Islands, a program administered by Maine Housing. It also plans to seek smaller amounts of funding for the project from the city of Portland’s Jill Duson Housing Trust Fund and the Peaks Island Fund, which is administered by the Maine Community Foundation.

Remage-Healey said Home Start has agreed to pay the city what’s due in back taxes—probably around $35,000 or so—on the building when the purchase is finalized after it secures funding. A family bought the parish hall from the church years ago, she said, but it was taken over by the city for back taxes.

structures or renovated buildings with both rental and ownership options.

It is reviewing possible building sites that could be acquired through donation or purchase. Sites with town water and sewer are the most desirable for accessibility and to keep construction costs down.

Affordable housing is critically needed to sustain Vinalhaven as a functioning year-round island community. Island economies are like a delicate fabric. If one thread is pulled out the fabric begins to unravel.

Currently, the VHI board of directors is in formation and seeking additional members and advisors. For inquiries or more information, please contact Elin Elisofon at eelisofon@gmail.com (207) 450-1937 or (207) 867-4866.

book reviews

Weeding needed in gardening book

Compilation of columns provides ‘cheerleading’

and children’s stories and is a retired nurse. She emphasizes growing healthy food, organic and pesticide-free. She also provides lots of encouragement to novice gardeners in a cheerleader role she seems to relish.

A Maine Garden Almanac: Seasonal Wisdom for Making the Most of Your Garden Space

By Martha Fenn King, Down East Books (2023)

REVIEW BY TINA COHEN

THERE ARE A LOT of books I end up reading because they have “Maine” in the title. Even if not for review purposes, I’d probably grab them anyway, be they fiction or nonfiction, familiar author or new name.

Martha Fenn King is someone I hadn’t heard of, although she has written a gardening column for her local newspaper, The York Weekly. A Maine Garden Almanac compiles those columns.

Besides having a vegetable and flower CSA, she has written poetry

This book might appeal to those looking for that enthusiastic support, some advice on growing techniques and varieties of veggies, and a better understanding of the bugs and weather which can wreak havoc in a home garden.

This is a kind of folksy “down home” book that isn’t intended to be great literature. And it isn’t an authoritative book on growing food like those of another Mainer, Eliot Coleman.

King thanks her editor but the book has some flaws an editor should have caught—her punctuation is frustrating, for example. I noticed a Bangor Daily News article excerpting a chapter of hers that included an editorial note: “This has been lightly edited for clarity.” The whole book would have benefited from that kind of help.

An island’s hold on family

Memoir finds Vinalhaven was home base

families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Because it is a compilation, topics end up being covered multiple times. Garlic is an example, with repetitious advice. No time frame is provided with dates of articles, so references to “this summer” or “that season” are somewhat meaningless.

I think when these were columns, one or two platitudes per column could have been bearable. But to read the collection in its entirety, the book starts to feel saccharine, sappy, and cliche-ridden.

The pictures are great, and there are many. And I do feel inspired to start growing ginger and sweet potatoes, for which she provides ample directions. This book could be a step towards what I suspect King would do brilliantly— combine her gardening advice and health concerns with her hearty can-do attitude and generous enthusiasm in a book aimed at a younger audience. I think she’d make a great “coach” who could get more kids growing food.

Another Mainer, Roger Doiron of Scarborough, founder of Kitchen

Gardens International, was successful in convincing First Lady Michelle Obama, in her early months in the White House, to start a vegetable garden on the grounds. Not only did she do that, but she brought children from Washington D.C. elementary schools in to help and learn.

There is evidence to support that when children work in gardens, it has a positive impact on many areas of their lives, including school performance. They practice skills like planning and patience.

And as King writes, “We have so much to learn about life, just from the humus under our feet.” She continues, “If we can care for our organic matter, perhaps we will have more nutritious foods to eat, microbes for health, and a sponge to soak up the rain. Let us care for our humus... our ecosystem and microbiome—the Earth depends on our help.”

Who more importantly needs to hear this concern than children growing up today?

REVIEW BY TOM GROENING

As the state ferry approaches North Haven in the Fox Island Thorofare, my eye goes to the large, sprawling cottagestyle mansions that line neighboring Vinalhaven’s cliffs to the south.

The buildings, which in the offseason are shuttered, or at least without signs of life, date to the late 19th or early 20th century. I often muse to myself about the people who built these grand escapes, and what role they served in their lives and the lives of their families, even now, generations later.

Is their appreciation of Maine island life less or more than the rest of us who live here year-round, and maybe get to visit an island once in a while? The grandeur of the homes suggests wealth, which reminds me of the line from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy

Well, no need for me to muse any further. Abigail Trafford’s memoir High Time opens the shutters on at least one of those mansions, and though Trafford has found peace and yes, even happiness in her 80s, there is also some of Tolstoy’s unique unhappiness in what appeared to be an otherwise charmed family life.

Reading and speaking about the book at the Vinalhaven Public Library in late July, she said it represented an accounting, a making sense of a family and a personal life marked not by privilege and good times under sunny skies on a Maine island, but by broken lives and broken relationships.

in Europe during World War II, and it marked him—as it did most—so that she understands him in Before The War and After The War terms.

She worked as a reporter and editor for The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report, covering such envied beats as the U.S. space program…

“It was high time to come clean,” she said at the event, invoking the title of the book. “Time” is a refrain in her writing, with earlier books titled My Time, As Time Goes By, and Crazy Time.

Yes, Trafford’s mother and father were well educated and hailed from old money, but that tells only part of the story. Her father saw prolonged action

Correspondence she quotes between her father fighting in Europe and her grandfather back home reveal a quiet fatalism in the soldier. Though he was a sensitive soul who lived to play music—photos in the memoir bear witness to the family’s habit of gathering around a piano at the Big House in Maine— he stuffed his feelings away. Her mother suffered several miscarriages before bearing Abigail and a sister and brother. Her brother was diagnosed with autism. The trauma of the miscarriages seems to have triggered mental illness, Trafford writes, and her mother tried to treat it with drugs and alcohol.

Trafford’s adult life was far from charmed, though it brought opportunity. She worked as a reporter and editor for The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report, covering such envied beats as the U.S. space program in the 1960s, but after her first divorce, trying to raise two daughters alone, she had to take in boarders to pay the bills.

Rather than write a chronology, the narrative bounces from vignettes to biographical sketches of the extended family, the latter of which seemed at times a lot to ask of a reader. Which uncle, and whose second wife are we talking about here?

But Trafford’s perceptive and affectionate takes on this colorful cast of characters are rich and they further render the nuances of a happy, unhappy family. And those characters provided caretaking and wisdom, crucial to the girl and woman she became, so valuable given that her mother was missing in action.

COVID presents a coda to the life that orbited far around the globe but centered on Vinalhaven. Like other COVID refugees from urban areas, Trafford and her daughters and grandchildren drank deeply of the island, hunkering down in the house she and a husband had built near the Big House.

Like the seasoned journalist Trafford is, she is well equipped to examine her life and carry a reader along its twists and turns, its ups and downs. And though she repeatedly asserts that Vinalhaven is what kept her grounded, I think she would have found her life’s calm mooring without it.

Tom Groening is editor of The Working Waterfront. He may contacted at tgroening@islandinstitute.org.

Tina Cohen is a therapist who lives part of the year on Vinalhaven.

I think she’d make a great “coach” who could get more kids growing food.

High Time TidePool Press (2023)

Stonington launches resilience strategy

Workforce, housing, blue economy among issues

THE HANCOCK COUNTY town of Stonington is launching an economic resiliency strategy to complement its 2018 comprehensive plan and to proactively respond to current and future challenges and changes impacting the town’s ability to thrive as a year-round community.

Town meeting, painting lines, eating doughnuts, and throwing rocks

By Barbara Fernald

The analysis and action plan was commissioned in the spring of 2022 by Town Manager Kathleen Billings and the board of selectmen from nationallyrecognized Camoin Associates. The process included multiple sessions, beginning in August 2022 and continuing through early 2023, with diverse groups of residents and business owners.

ACTIVITY on the islands, at the end of February and into March, is like a mirror image of the action at the end of August into September. Just as the summer residents of the Cranberry Isles end their vacations right before fall, many year-round residents end their winter breaks just before the spring equinox.

“With the changes and threats to our $55 million dollar a year fishing industry, I know we have to be better prepared than we are now to face what’s next,” said Billings, herself a seventh generation islander.

It’s time to get back to work and reconnect.

Our annual town meeting takes place on the second Saturday in March. For selectmen and town employees, winter has been anything but a vacation. They have been working steadily, gathering information to write the warrant for town meeting. It’s the time of year we come together as a town to decide on projects and spending and how much money is to be raised by property taxes.

“Stonington has always been resilient and able to roll with the punches. But our fishery and with it our year-round community are now facing some of the biggest challenges I’ve seen, and so are Maine’s other coastal communities,” she said. “We think Stonington can and should be a model for how to proceed differently.”

The town’s economic resiliency strategy is built on a clear-eyed

Discussion of the school budget alone can take well over an hour. The islands take turns hosting the meeting and the luncheon. This year, town

meeting will take place on Islesford. What’s for lunch? Homemade pizzas, salads, and desserts. Life gets busier as we volunteer to help prepare the first community meal of the season.

understanding of Stonington’s many assets and strengths, and is prioritized by those things over which a municipal government has direct control (infrastructure, land use policies, governance) and significant influence (housing, local education), while also identifying areas where the municipality’s support can make a difference, such as business, workforce, and entrepreneurship.

• Build community capacity through governance and civic structures

• Develop more sustainable, longerterm visitation through arts, recreation, cultural heritage, and natural resource-based approaches

bright red with a black stripe) and, like every other lobster fisherman in Maine this winter, he read about, talked about, and experimented with purple paint.

The report identifies three core and six supporting strategies for building a more resilient community.

Core Strategies:

• Retain, attract, and educate a yearround population and workforce

• Support the “blue economy” (lobstering, fishing, clamming, smallscale aquaculture, marine trades)

Town meeting is a great opportunity to hear about winter from friends and neighbors. “How was your trip to ...?” “Who knew grand-parenting was so exhausting or that there were so many cold germs involved?” “You did all that painting?” These same questions could be asked in September at a school board meeting in a large suburb. (Preferably not during the meeting while someone else has the floor!)

• Continue to develop Stonington’s communications and marketing ability, giving visibility to the town as Maine’s No. 1 port, uniquely branding its products and attracting funding/people/ resources

“In the multiple sessions we held with residents, it became easy to identify an imperative for action,” said Linda Nelson, the town’s economic and community development director.

piece of purple rope to the end of the buoy line or toggle, but all attachments must be made with a splice or a tuck.

• Maintain and invest in infrastructure and land use policies that support a resilient economy

Supporting strategies:

• Support workforce and education via housing strategies and recruitment

• Support entrepreneurship and identify opportunities for small businesses

In January and February, Bruce and I got to spend a lot of time with our grandchildren in Southern Maine. Visiting them was the main goal of most of our winter travel. We considered trying to paint our kitchen, but we kept catching odd coughing viruses and experienced more down time than we wanted, so we never got to it. Maybe I’ll paint it in May, when I can have the windows open.

The latest whale regulations require all Maine lobster fishermen to use new markings on the ropes they attach to lobster traps. Depending on how close to shore they fish, they will have to add 2-4 purple marks on each buoy line. On warps that are 100-feet or less there must be one 12-inch purple mark within a few fathoms of the trap and a 36inch purple mark within 2 fathoms of the buoy. If the warp is longer that 100 feet, the requirement is for a 12-inch purple mark near the trap, a second 12inch purple mark halfway to the buoy, and a 36-inch mark near the buoy.

“Our increasing lack of capacity to support a local workforce and schools is turning Stonington into the seasonal community none of us ever wanted it to be, and that in turn is gutting services and opportunities for year round residents. It is a vicious cycle.”

as well as a 2019 sea-level rise adaptation report created for the town by GEI Engineering. It includes five high priority actions in areas including increased access to Stonington’s working waterfront; the development of low-to-moderate income housing; increasing water company capacity and storage; transportation infrastructure remediations for climate resilience; and the prioritization and planning for new commercial areas and activity.

I know it’s a stretch to compare following Maine whale rope requirements with a plein air workshop, but a person could return home from either and say that they’d been painting in their spare time. If Bruce were writing an essay on how he spent his winter vacation, painting would be a part of it. Another part would be the description I heard him tell his brother Mark about walking to get doughnuts, in February, with our son Robin, and our grandchildren Henry and Cora. I was away with friends in Portland, and Stephanie was away with friends in Florida. Father and son were in charge.

“Stonington is a remarkable Maine place,” noted Jim Damicis, founding partner of Camoin Associates and the lead consultant on the project. “Facing issues impacting communities everywhere as well as those unique to coastal communities including climate change, sea-level rise, housing, and workforce, this small island community is taking action to be future ready and resilient. Stonington is critical to Maine’s future in the blue economy.”

“Yeah, we got doughnuts at The Cookie Jar and then walked to the beach for a picnic and to throw rocks.”

• Develop the financial/fiscal capacity to support funding priorities, including a capital plan

Bruce saw more than enough paint, anyway, this winter. During his “time off” he painted 600 buoys (white and

Stonington’s economic resiliency strategy includes the framework for a capital budget plan and priorities to be used for the town to aggressively pursue funding resources.

The budget framework is aligned with the town’s comprehensive plan

Bruce figures he will be putting 1,500 to 1,800 markings on his rope in all; two to three weeks of extra work if he does it without hiring help. A number of fishermen are applying paint to their ropes by resting them in 3-foot long gutters made from lengthwise-halved PVC pipe. Bruce’s first attempt was with spray paint but he soon moved on to the more efficient brush and latex paint.

Some fishermen will add a 3-foot

Eating homemade donuts and throwing rocks at the beach—if that isn’t a mirror image of many childhood summers on Islesford, I don’t know what is. q

More than 50% of the 80-page strategy document contains the data analyses on demographics, jobs, incomes, and more on which the strategy recommendations are based and which can be used by the town in future funding requests.

The full report is available at www.stoningtonmaine.org.

Barbara Fernald lives on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island) with her husband Bruce.

Acadia Marine

As winter winds down, islanders mix prep work and gatherings

saltwater cure

In praise of pruning

Cutting and shaping a deep-rooted pleasure

BY COURTNEY NALIBOFF

IN THE SUMMER, with my days suddenly unstructured, I become an inveterate putterer. No shelf is left unorganized, no drawer unpurged.

The yard gets the most attention. At some point every day, I find myself wandering from plant to plant, flowers and vegetables alike, touching leaves, saying hello (out loud!), and fussing. Weeds are evicted, garden goods harvested, and inevitably, puttering leads to pruning.

Pruning is by far the most satisfying garden task. This opinion seems to be a heritable trait—I recall my mother fussing at my father after he overenthusiastically pruned our evening primrose bush.

It always starts innocently enough, just clearing out dead branches or twigs, cutting back growth that encroaches on the shed door or vegetable garden fence, or dead-heading flowers that have gone by. Once I start snipping and trimming, though, it can be difficult to

stop. Soon I’m reshaping, cutting water sprouts and clearing out undergrowth. A new trail might appear in the wild edge of the yard. Who knows?

As I puttered and pruned my way through the second half of July, extra aimless because Penrose was in California with her grandparents, Bill was at work, and I was on call, I started pondering just what it is about pruning that makes it so irresistible.

A pruned plant certainly looks tidier and more aesthetically pleasing. I imagine that a pruned plant feels lighter, the way I do after a haircut.

Pruning has an art to it—which I don’t claim to possess— especially when it comes to fruit trees.

focus its energy into wherever might be most beneficial.

I thought about the hydrangea we moved to a new corner of the house this spring in anticipation of our home office addition being built. When we first transplanted it, we were worried it might keel over any second. The leaves, which had recently emerged, turned limp and black. After a few warm days, they became crispy and I feared the worst.

It always starts innocently enough, just clearing out dead branches or twigs…

Strategically pruning living growth out of a plant can have another benefit too: it allows the plant to

In desperation, I pulled out the pruners. I cut it back hard, clearing away anything that looked like it wouldn’t make it, soaked it with the hose, and thought good thoughts.

After about a week, some new growth began to emerge close to the ground, and the leaves I hadn’t cut off perked

journal of an island kitchen

The pursuit of perfection

Superlative-seeking warps our world

BY SANDY OLIVER

HOW HAS CIVILIZATION ever coped without lists of “the best” of everything and detailed explanations of “the perfect way” to do anything?

I recently read a headline declaring something like, “You are packing your cooler all wrong,” followed by copious advice from professionals on how to place each food item in just its right place with all the cold packs carefully and perfectly distributed.

It didn’t scare me. Really, how have we picnicked for the past 200 or 300 years without perfectly packed coolers?

The question is, who benefits from adoration of the perfect and how?

One sees this a lot among recipes: the perfect chicken pot pie, or the best brownie recipe. I remember reading a recipe in Cooks Illustrated for “the best” brownie. It called for nuts. I hate nuts in brownies, and I wasn’t about to add them to make the perfect brownie only to be obliged spit them out before enjoying the chocolate part.

Not just recipes. Think about the perfect being the enemy of the good, period. Every year, our island historical society has a talent show. Community members ranging in age from about five or six up to the

90s perform songs, read poetry, play instruments, do skits. Always wonderful in spirit, it’s seldom professional and everyone’s an artist. Home grown amusement gave us the joyful capacity for producing fun in our kitchens, living rooms and on porches before TV, streaming movies, and down-loadable musical performances turned us into on-demand entertainment consumers.

A friend of mine organized a vocal group which ended up never performing because she clung to an idealized perfection which they could never achieve. Another friend claimed she didn’t cook because she wasn’t turning out meals like she saw in glossy food magazines. She’d roast a chicken, bake potatoes, make salad, and was surprised when I said, “What you are doing is cooking.”

diminished by our falling short of the unreal ideal.

up. I had written off the possibility of it blooming this year, but against the odds it sprouted tight, pale green flower buds which opened up into pure white clusters. Pruning gave it a new lease on life.

Maybe pruning’s appeal is in its usefulness as a metaphor for human growth. We flourish when we cut away the things that don’t serve us anymore so we can focus our energies on healing and expansion. We can reshape ourselves using the best we have to offer and make room for new opportunities to blossom.

We can take the time to be our own gardeners, turning that puttering impulse inwards, touching each leaf, and saying hello out loud.

Courtney Naliboff lives in North Haven where she teaches drama, music, and writing. She may be reached at Courtney.Naliboff@gmail.com.

The question is, who benefits from adoration of the perfect and how?

Lots of us cringe at the idea of mediocrity. The etymology of the word points to “half way up the mountain,” neither good nor bad. If what we do isn’t bad, and we are half way there, it seems the point is to keep going as best we can, working one step at a time towards the good, and, one hopes, helping each other on the way.

sweet effort of using food as a loving expression of care and connection.

Not many are willing to risk trying something new, pitching in, going out on a limb if they think someone might saw it off under them. Earlier in my career an old timer pointed out to me that the only people who don’t make mistakes are people who don’t do anything.

You don’t cook? Get a package of ramen, follow the instructions, only add a hefty handful or two of canned or frozen peas halfway through the process.

This perfectionism is toxic and illusory. A social media salad is carefully curated; there are no holes in the lettuce, aphids on the kale, worms in the apple, no images of the dirty fingernails and sweaty humans behind the gorgeousness. Fantasy is displayed as reality and we all risk feeling

Let’s not tolerate the idea of a “wrong way” of making these steps. I read a touching story about a household welcoming home a family member recently released from jail. Someone decided that making cupcakes was the right celebratory thing to do. Lacking a mixing bowl, she reused a plastic food container, emptied the contents of a package mix into it, and decorated each cupcake with canned icing and sprinkles.

I can see some eyerolling out there perhaps, or worse and especially toxic, condescending praise for this

You don’t play an instrument? Grab a friend, get yourselves kazoos and accompany each other.

Mainly ditch “the best” lists, view skeptically—extremely skeptically— anything that seems too perfect. Are you going to love someone more, will they love you more, if you pack your cooler right? Will you create a stronger sense of community with your perfectly packed cooler? Just whose life will be improved anyway?

Sandy Oliver is a food historian who gardens, cooks, and writes on Islesboro. She may be contacted at: SandyOliver47@gmail.com.

cranberry

Take it or leave it

Don’t call it trash just yet

BY BARBARA FERNALD

ON AUG. 2 on Great Cranberry Island, the Ladies Aid Society held its 122nd annual fair. It featured, among other things, lunch, crafts, clothing, cookbooks, a garden table, face painting, and a silent auction.

For many years the Church Club on Islesford hosted the same kind of fair, making sure it was on an alternate week from Great Cranberry’s fair. When the Church Club disbanded, several summer residents continued the responsibility of organizing an Islesford fair to benefit the island’s non-profit groups. For a variety of reasons we have not had a summer fair in the last few years on Little Cranberry Island. I miss the white elephant table!

The white elephant table at an island fair is a once a year opportunity to take stock of our surroundings and remove things that still work but we no longer need or want. We drop them off at the fair and peruse the newly excluded items from other households. Recycling, shopping, and entertainment rolled into one! Even when I don’t buy anything, it’s still fun to look.

report

In the past few years clever residents of both Little and Great Cranberry islands haven’t had to wait 12 months to experience that white elephant sensation. Twice a week we have a chance to see what someone has left out at the transfer station. If we’re lucky it just might be something we need. Appliances, beds, and household goods are just a few of the articles that have found a second home without leaving the islands. Why lug something on or off the ferry if you don’t have to?

At the transfer station on Islesford there is a “Take it or Leave it” spot. Items that still have good use can be placed near the trash compacter for a two week period.

“If it’s not gone after four scheduled trash days, it gets pitched out,” says Cari Alley, who runs the transfer station for BCM Construction on Mondays and Thursdays. Her boss, Ben Moore, doesn’t have a problem with it as long as the pile of items stays manageable.

observer

My chat with God

In which ‘they’ clarify gender matters

BY PHIL CROSSMAN

I ACKNOWLEDGE comfortably, eagerly in fact, that I’m very close to a couple who have a transgender child. There was no question, at birth, of course, about whether the child was born a boy or girl and, until a certain point, the parents—long among most of us who, in our time, have not thought much about what might be novel about gender—reasonably regarded her as their daughter. That is, until years later, when as, presumably a young woman, she (they) informed them differently.

GOD CAME BY RECENTLY. They hadn’t announced themselves, but neither was their arrival startling; a mystery, given what would certainly seem the startling significance of the moment.

Neither can I explain how I knew it was God other than to say it couldn’t have been clearer. It was God, and I wasn’t awed then or now and am as comfortable acknowledging that reality—that I spent some time with God—as I am in oddly assuming my readers, some anyway, will as well.

The circumstances of that visit were so utterly unremarkable that I’ve only now and then shared the experience. I’ve

thought since, often, about why, although I try to acknowledge it, the event hasn’t registered with what would certainly seem the requisite enormity, but it hasn’t.

I’ve remained as comfortable and settled after having a visit from, and a chat with God, as if a seasonal acquaintance had returned for the summer.

I was at my desk that morning, alone, writing, and then, in a moment, God was here with me in the vicinity of the guest chair next to my desk. It wasn’t apparent they were seated, rather, they occupied the space that was the chair. At the moment,

I was writing some congress folk and several editors to register the anguish that was consuming me as so many in our nation railed—understandably, given the narrow confines that had been their sheltered existence—mindlessly and wrongly against the profound realities that contradict those they’d been taught to hold as “gospel.”

“How’s that going?” God asked, and while I was certainly aware of

It is not meant as an opportunity to leave something to avoid the demolition fee. For instance, fabric is not allowed in the trash compacter. If you leave clothing and no one else takes it, be prepared to bag it up after two weeks and pay $7.50 for a grocery sized bag to be thrown in the demolition dumpster.

The best part about the Take it or Leave it area is that you really never know what you’re going to find there. It turns out a lot of us shop there. One friend found two rugs she needed for her house. Another took white curtains that had a small stain and dyed them, acquiring “new” curtains for her kitchen. Books in good shape don’t stay around long. Lil Alley’s tea pot collection has been distributed all over the island through this drop off and pick up method.

When my sister-in-law was repurposing a workshop into a guest cottage she picked up just the four plates and bowls she needed. She also got a nice little electric heater.

As I was chatting with Cari about the particulars of the space, our friend Jackie dropped off her trash and reported she had picked up a beautiful wooden vase that didn’t leak and a good copy of Art of the Maine Islands. Cari told me that one week there were five boxes of paper clips that left the area one box at a time. (Who needs more than one box?)

Three pairs of shoes were on their last day of residence when Cari came back from her house across the street to find them gone. She had been ready to throw them out that afternoon.

I’m beginning to think that most of us have a story about Take it or Leave it. Before I could ask, Cari told me that the absolute weirdest thing she had seen come and go from the spot was an expired but still sealed box of condoms. There one day, gone the next. Another example of recycling, shopping and entertainment rolled into one!

Barbara Fernald lives on Islesford (Little Cranberry Island). She may be contacted at Fernald244@gmail.com.

the inquiry, I can’t say for sure it was voiced. Nonetheless it was certainly communicated and understood and just as certainly directed toward my composition with which they were, clearly, familiar.

“It’s a struggle,” I acknowledged.

God looked thoughtful, and a few very comfortable moments passed.

Then, “There are not many instances, if any, where an individual chooses to assume a different sexual identity for the sake of novelty, or to simply call attention to themselves.” They paused for a few minutes.

“The truth is, Mathew 5:48 notwithstanding, my presumed perfection, is just that—presumed. It was certainly my intention that there be boys and girls in my own image but only because I simply hadn’t thought about the possibility that those weren’t the only options.

“On the other hand, when it became clear that other possibilities were inherent within the family of humans I’d created, I comfortably acknowledged that realities other than those I’d contemplated were manifest but, no matter, they were no less welcome. I was learning.

“One’s perception is their own, intrinsic to their identity and comfort and entirely paramount to their unfettered enjoyment of the life they’ve been given. My intention in creation was entirely to create a family of humans who could simply love and enjoy one another. Clearly, I might have given greater thought to that as well and regret not having done so.

“I embrace inclusion. Every human to whom I’ve given life is embraced by me. This is not to say forgiveness is not called for. It is, and often, but it’s not a pre-requisite to receiving my love. I say welcome, my arms are open.”

They said they’d come because they’d sensed my distress and I impulsively observed that it certainly wouldn’t take God to come to that conclusion. They were not troubled by that thoughtless remark and, rather, embraced me; I sensed it.

Phil Crossman lives on Vinalhaven and owns the Tidewater Motel. He may be reached at philcrossman.vh@gmail.com.

The best part about the Take it or Leave it area is that you really never know what you’re going to find…

I was at my desk that morning, and then, in a moment, God was here with me…

Mapping MDI’s climate future

Island remaking itself, hopefully for the better

Reflections is written by Island Institute Fellows, recent college grads who do community service work on Maine islands and in coastal communities through the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront.

BY BRIANNA CUNLIFFE

IN THE LIBRARY, Tremont residents gather around flood maps. Disoriented at first, we find key landmarks—the school, Hansen’s Outpost, the harbor— and then begin.

In these gatherings, residents create their community resilience plan. It’s a different kind of map—a roadmap to fulfilling the visions we’ve cultivated in conversations in library corners, scribbled on sticky-notes, and fed with fiddle tunes and potluck food.

Community values, fears, and hopes for the future guide my daily work with the town and A Climate to Thrive as an Island Institute Fellow. Jotted down on paper, they become real at pancake breakfasts and lobster boat races, while yanking weeds in community gardens, or reading the cards kids made for the town’s 175th birthday.

Slowly, at the speed of trust, alchemy occurs. A path to a thriving future, amidst tangible challenges, emerges. “Climate work,” once controversial,

becomes about the things we value; it ceases to be a struggle against and becomes a struggle amidst. By refusing to let our paths forward diverge and leave some in the dust, we braid our different ideologies and priorities and come together at the crossroads.

What does that look like in practice?

It’s applying for federal funds to equip the town’s public safety facility with solar and battery storage, transforming it into a resilience hub that maintains power and supplies critical services during outages and crises.

Blackouts can last for days in the bitter cold on Mount Desert Island’s “quiet side,” where residents have voiced the need for resources so they can stay warm and safe. We have the chance to meet this need with renewable energy because of an outpouring of federal resources.

Accessing that funding is daunting, to say the least. But behind the pages of litigiously-worded guidance and technical scoping is a key opportunity: an engine that can drive forward projects once out of reach. These projects multisolve, protecting the most vulnerable among us while

fathoming

saving the town’s hard-earned money, providing grid services, driving renewables forward, and cutting emissions, all at once.

My team and I hit submit on the final form, breathed out, and walked to the pond. We dove in, the water beneath Beech Mountain almost warm, the tension of bureaucracy melted into a kind of peace. A reminder that it’s worthwhile. We go back to this landscape to remember why we do this work, with all the tools at our disposal, for the places we call home. The scale of our problems and the necessary fixes feel massive. But every so often, we have a win we can get our hands, heads, and hearts around.

We got the news days later that another of our prize applications had succeeded. That $100,000 in federal funds were on their way to shepherding a solar cooperative into being, vastly expanding possibilities for communities to own the energy they rely on. If we are confident that our community is behind us, we can seize these opportunities when they arrive, making strides on a road ahead that we’ve laid out together.

Tiny copepod plays outsized role

Fatty make-up makes it food for right whale

BY JEFFREY RUNGE

THE WORLD’S oceans are teeming with plankton, microscopic life that move where the currents take them. Among the plankton are algal cells called phytoplankton and singlecelled and multicellular animals called zooplankton. A vertical tow with a fine-mesh net deployed just about anywhere in the ocean will yield animal plankton. While there are many forms of zooplankton, the numerically dominant animals are planktonic copepods, a class of small crustaceans related to lobster and shrimp.

So numerous are the planktonic copepods that they are estimated to be 1,000 times more abundant than insects, making them arguably the most numerous multicellular animals in the world.

In our North Atlantic waters, about 15 species of copepods constitute 60-90% of the catch of a plankton net. In the deep waters of the Gulf of Maine and across the North Atlantic, one copepod species, calanus finmarchicus, is predominant.

Relatively large for a copepod, it is supremely adapted to the seasonality

of the subarctic ocean. This success is reflected in its dominance in net-captured plankton in the deeper (more than 250 feet) areas of the Gulf of Maine.

Feeding on phytoplankton and single-celled zooplankton, one female calanus can release daily up to 70 eggs in a 15-minute spawning when food is abundant in spring and early summer. The eggs are microscopic, but over the course of 1-3 months, they proceed through successive molts to a preadult copepod, about the size of a grain of rice.

At this point they either molt into reproductive adults or, in summer through fall, pause to overwinter at depth until sometime the following JanuaryMarch. To prepare for the suspension of growth, the copepod accumulates phytoplankton-manufactured fats, which it stores in an oil sac. In a well-fed copepod, the oil sac takes up to 70% of the animal’s volume. It uses this highenergy store to survive the late fall and winter period, after which it molts to adult, mates, and the females feed to again start the cycle of egg production.

Across the subarctic ecosystem, zooplankton consumers such as herring, sandlance, and krill have themselves

adapted to the seasonality of calanus life cycle and availability of its lipid stores. These forage fish and invertebrates in turn support piscivores such as cod, tuna, and humpback whales.

One whale species, the North Atlantic right whale, has figured out how to locate and feed on high concentrations of the lipid rich calanus directly, and it is capable of feeding on millions each day.

Before they were harvested by humans, there were thousands of right whales feeding on calanus across the North Atlantic. Now the whale’s summer distribution has contracted to the coastal northwest Atlantic where it feeds on calanus finmarchicus and also, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on calanus hyperboreus, an Arctic species.

Since about 2010, the North Atlantic right whale has shifted its summer foraging habitat from the Bay of Fundy area to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, due to lower abundances of its calanus prey. The lower abundance of calanus in the eastern Gulf of Maine is associated with a shift in supply of water into the Gulf, from cooler calanus-rich water coming from Canada to warmer, calanus-impoverished water adjacent to the Gulf Stream.

I think of the words of Ruth Moore, the Tremont-born writer whose work transported many “from aways” to this island: “the place you were homesick for, even when you were there.”

This longing abides in the conversations I’ve been dwelling in, the push and pull between love and precarity of place, between constancy and the constancy of change. We are living in a world remaking itself— for worse and, if we succeed, for better. When it’s grounded in community, acting on climate creates abundance. It keeps our lights on, keeps money in our pockets, keeps out the cold. On this island where the sea draws nearer, we have the chance to not merely cope with loss but to lead towards a future where that abundance includes us all. We dwell in that possibility together—that’s the complication and the hope of it all.

Brianna Cunliffe works with A Climate to Thrive on Mount Desert Island focusing on education and community-based climate action. She recently graduated from Bowdoin College with a degree in environmental studies and government.

Shifting external supply of water masses into the Gulf of Maine combined with surface water temperatures, both linked to increases in atmospheric warming due to CO2 increase, suggest lower calanus abundances in the Gulf of Maine in the future.

Several observing programs are tracking calanus and other plankton biodiversity measures in the Gulf of Maine. It is important that these observing programs be sustained to inform us about the status of the Gulf of Maine copepods. Not only the fate of the North Atlantic right whale, but also the subarctic character of the Gulf of Maine food web as we know it, hangs in the balance.

Jeffrey Runge is a professor of oceanography in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine, based at the Darling Marine Center. He has been studying the ecology of zooplankton in waters off the U.S. and Canada for over forty years.

Every so often, we have a win we can get our hands, heads, and hearts around.

When a Life photographer captured a herring harvest

Seining off Vinalhaven in 1957

BY KEVIN JOHNSON

SEINING FOR HERRING—known in the seafood market as sardines—was a common sight on the Maine coast in 1957, but there is nothing common about the accompanying photograph. It is the work of a photographic master as evidenced in its composition and timing.

Looking at this image, you’re met with the gaze of a fisherman holding onto a seine net. This leads the eye across the lines of the netting and floats to the lines of a sardine carrier and then up the right side of the frame to the outstretched arm of someone outside of the frame.

The arm is guiding a bailing net full of fish while seawater streams out, giving the appearance of a rocket taking off. A few well placed seagulls fill a couple of key spots in an empty sky and the angled horizon brings the eye back down to the fisherman.

A photo like this can hold many stories. These fishermen were working a purse seine in Long Cove on Vinalhaven in 1957. The man on the left is 25-year-old Ralph Alley of Beals Island. Third from the left is Burleigh Chandler, 19, and the man on the end with a little gray in his hair is his 44-year-old father, George, of Jonesport.

They all have since passed.

The sardine carrier they are filling is the Henry O. Underwood, one in the fleet of the world’s largest sardine factory, the William Underwood Company of Jonesport. The Henry O. Underwood was seven years old at the time of the photo, built by the General Seafoods Shipyard in Rockland in 1948-9, and it was state of the art for sardine carriers for her time.

She was 79 feet in length and could hold 1,260 bushels of herring. She was renamed the Jasper Wyman in 1985 and was last reported hauled out in South Portland in 1992.

The fishermen probably had no idea that the man in a dory making their photograph was world renowned Life magazine photographer Eliot Elisofon.

Elisofon had acquired a farmhouse on Crocket Cove on Vinalhaven in 1942 which became a summer retreat for him and his family. He cherished his time on the island and was very involved in island life.

He made photographs when he was there, not for assignments but for himself and his passion for the medium. This image was on a 35mm slide and is part of a group of nearly 2,000 slides and negatives shot between 1940-1970 that were donated to the

Penobscot Marine Museum in 2020 by his daughter Elin.

While the bulk of his work is in major museums, it was important to Elin that this collection remain close to where the images were made and could be shared with the people that would appreciate them most.

The Penobscot Marine Museum has begun a campaign to raise the funds needed to digitize and catalog the collection and make it available online. Anyone who can help with this

Ocean color changes illuminate climate change

Greener waters indicate greater plankton growth

OUR BLUE PLANET is becoming greener, which may indicate that climate change is reshaping surface ocean ecosystems, says a global study co-authored by a University of Maine oceanographer that was published in Nature recently.

The research team, led by scientists from the United Kingdom-based National Oceanography Centre and including UMaine oceanography professor Emannuel Boss, used 20 years of global MODIS-Aqua satellite data to track how the amount of green plankton at the ocean’s surface changed over time.  Ocean research powered by colorsensing satellites traditionally use a single data parameter derived from phytoplankton’s green color. Other factors, like decaying matter and mineral particles, can also affect the light emanating from the ocean, diluting the data. This approach is thought to require more than 30 years of continuous monitoring to detect climate-driven change.

The NASA-funded study is the first to harness data from seven bands of color reflected by the sunlit ocean. This reduced the time required to discern changes that can only be attributed to climate change by one-third, to 20 years.

The team observed that, in general, oceans are greener worldwide, especially in tropical regions, which

they reported is likely reflective of changes to plankton communities.

Plankton is the bedrock of the marine food webs and carbon storage. Understanding current and future changes to this bastion of marine life at a global scale can inform ocean conservation programs, the authors concluded.

“It’s the first evidence that ecosystems on the surface of the open ocean are changing on a large scale,” the researchers wrote.

“Fundamentally, we’re developing methods to be able to better observe the planet, to understand how the global ecosystem is changing. This is the only tool with which we can observe the whole ocean ecosystem on a quasidaily basis, to see something about how it is changing,” says Boss, who led the interpretation of color data for the study.

The international collaboration behind the study grew, in part, from a NASA-funded ocean optics course that Boss and colleagues teach every other summer in Maine.

“The ocean optics course changed my career trajectory. This paper, as with others I have published with colleagues I met there, would not have ever come about if not for that summer course,” said the study’s lead author, B. B. Cael of the National Oceanography Centre.

Cael, as well as co-author Kelsey Bisson of Oregon State University, completed the course in 2015. The NASA-funded course, which UMaine faculty and colleagues have coordinated and taught in Maine since 2001, is hosted up and down Maine’s coast, including at UMaine’s Darling Marine Center.

In the Gulf of Maine, Boss and other UMaine oceanography faculty including Damian Brady, hone this global, space-based approach to help identify site locations for aquaculture.

“We can see the coast — the whole coast. Instead of putting resources in

effort is encouraged to contact photo archivist Kevin Johnson at kjohnson@ pmm-maine.org.

The museum, open through Oct. 15, is featuring several new exhibits including “Working the Sea,” photographs from the museum’s National Fisherman and Atlantic Fishermen collections. Also featured is “Sam Murfitt And Maine’s Working Waterfronts,” the work of photographer Sam Murfitt, who for decades photographed fishermen, their work, and their boats.

the water in every nook and cranny, we use remote sensing technologies and develop algorithms to tell us what is happening in the water. By using these space-based assets, we’re able, in a costeffective fashion, to tell people where to put oyster farms,” Boss says.

Co-author Stephanie Henson was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UMaine professor Andy Thomas prior to her current role at the National Oceanography Centre. Stephanie Dutkiewiczof the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also contributed to the study.

An image of herring seining off Vinalhaven in 1957, photographed by Life magazine’s Eliot Elisofon. PHOTO: PENOBSCOT MARINE MUSEUM

This image of the changing ocean colors was made by NASA and Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS data from LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response.

of the waterfront

Stow Wengenroth: On the Eastport waterfront

New York artists find Downeasterly inspiration

BY CARL LITTLE

IN 1927, the Grand Central Art School started offering summer classes in Eastport. Founded in 1923 by painters John Singer Sargent, Walter Leighton Clark, and Edmund Greacan, the esteemed school located in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal decided to establish a chapter way Downeast.

Artist George Pearse Ennis (18841936), who taught at the Grand Central Art School and knew Eastport from a previous visit, took the lead. On the cover of the 1928 brochure for the Eastport Summer Art School, Ennis offered an inventory of the town’s subject matter.

“There are bold headlands, rugged coves, scores of islands—wooded, rocky; there is the odd charm of the lobster fisherman—the picturesque life of the sardine fleet; there are wharves and sheds and harbor-life—a varied waterfront of intensely appealing material, and an old rambling town of interesting streets and homes.”

The description of this picturesque setting worked. By the time Stow Wengenroth (1906-1978) joined the faculty in 1932, the school was

flourishing. Classes took place in the former Boynton High School building, which the town renovated.

At age 26, the Brooklyn, New York-born Wengenroth was already an accomplished lithographer. He took full advantage of the motifs Ennis identified, creating his first major series of prints. His headlands were bold, his coves rugged, and his waterfronts worked.

“Low Tide” exemplifies Wengenroth’s extraordinary ability to render light and dark, not to mention the curve of boat hulls and the lean of a wharf. The unusual setting—beneath a dock— adds to the distinct waterfront mood. There is so much to admire here, from the framed view of distant hills to the architecture of the pilings.

“‘Low Tide’ is Eastport,” notes Hugh French, director of the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Eastport, “but it’s hard to tell exactly where.” French suggests it might be along the harbor with one of the nearby New Brunswick islands, such as Campobello, in the background.

“Wengenroth often exaggerated the height of island landscapes in his work of this time,” he writes.

Speaking of exaggeration, the 1932 brochure for the summer school featured Wengenroth’s wonderful map of Eastport in which he makes the city the star of the Northeast—not unlike Saul Steinberg’s famous  New Yorker  cover “View of the World from

9th Avenue” (1976). Among other details, look for the arcing line of the Maine Central Railroad. From student testimonials, Wengenroth was a terrific teacher and mentor (see “Gregory Dunham paints Eaton’s Boatyard,” The Working

A

Doc Martin meets All Creatures

Great and Small in these uniquely American true tales about an island physician off the coast of Maine.

Stow Wengenroth, “Low Tide,” August 1931, lithograph, edition of 51, 9 1/16 by 12 9/16 inches Edition of 51. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE TIDES INSTITUTE AND MUSEUM OF ART.

Waterfront, November 2022). Boston artist Elizabeth Saltonstall (19001990) described him as “great fun,” remembering how he’d put on a poker face before he pulled the print. Thanks to his encouragement, she became a master lithographer in her own right.

The Eastport series led to further explorations of landscapes, primarily in Maine and Massachusetts, but also, notably, New York City (his nocturnes can compete with Hopper’s). Wengenroth’s images of Monhegan and various coastal subjects remain classics,

as do his brilliant portrayals of owls, terns, and other birds. It’s no wonder Andrew Wyeth famously designated him “America’s greatest living artist working in black and white.”

The Eastport Summer School of Art eventually cut ties with the Grand Central School and became a separate entity, but it closed in 1936 when Ennis died in a car accident. Wengenroth would go on to write books and articles on printmaking and create many more luminous lithographs. And he never stopped frequenting waterfronts.

Carl

thanks the Tides Institute and Museum of Art for providing invaluable background, including Whalen’s essay on the Eastport Summer School of Art. Find these resources at www.tidesinstitute.org.

Stow Wengenroth’s “Eastport Summer School of Art,” ca. 1932. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE TIDES INSTITUTE AND MUSEUM OF ART.

Keith Shaw Williams’s “Stow Wengenroth,” ca. 1940, etching, 7 7/8 by 11 7/8 inches.

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE TIDES INSTITUTE AND MUSEUM OF ART.

Little

Carl Little curated “Avian Artistry: Treasures from Maine Collections” at the Wendell Gilley Museum (through August 17). The exhibition features a watercolor of a Baltimore oriole by Wengenroth.