At their recent town meeting, Islesboro residents left little doubt that access to the shore is important to them. Overwhelm-ingly, they voted down a landowner’s proposal to close an old public road that lets people reach the shore. “We’re not willing to give up [public] access, anywhere, any more!” declared one resident in a phrase that sounded a lot like a battle cry.
Everywhere on the Maine coast it’s the same: as land changes hands at higher and higher prices, those who pay the prices seem less and less committed to allowing traditional public access. Fishermen, local residents who don’t own shore property, visitors – anyone, in fact, who depends on access for their living or who’s entitled to use the intertidal zone for its allowed purposes of “fishing, fowling and navigation” – loses out. They can use Maine’s few public piers, some of its parks, a number of commercial piers or the state’s sprinkling of boat launching ramps, of course, but when they do they find themselves competing with growing crowds that have no other option. Face it: a great deal of the Maine coast is not open to the public.
Should more it be open? It’s not a simple question. These days “public access” means more than occasional pedestrians, and it raises questions of over-use, parking, noise, nuisance, the rights of abutting landowners. None of us wants to live next do a busy highway, particularly one that gets a lot of heavy use at certain times of the year.
That said, however, access is important to all of us, and towns, cities and the state have an obligation to heed the battle cry heard at Islesboro’s town meeting.
Oh, deer!
The undersized bucks, does and fawns that dance across island roads and munch their way through orchards and gardens aren’t “wild” or “natural” in any way. They are “wildlife” in the same sense as seagulls at a dump or pigeons in a city park: animals that have adapted themselves to life in close proximity to people. Blessed with an ample food supply (except when they exceed it) and no predators, the deer on Maine’s islands and in many of its mainland suburbs have thrived and multiplied until they are a nuisance of the first order.
Residents of several Maine island communities have acted responsibly in recent years, reducing or in some cases eliminating their herds of deer altogether. It hasn’t been easy for them: they’ve had to argue with their neighbors for deer reduction programs at every step of the way, pointing to depleted gardens, car accidents and Lyme disease. For the most part they haven’t used one very strong argument, forcefully made in a recent “Audubon” magazine essay, namely that deer overpopulation is responsible for environmental damage on a broad scale in many parts of the United States. Browsing deer can eliminate much of a forest’s understory, literally destroying the habitat for birds and other creatures that are truly “wild.”
There will always be a need to “manage” wildlife in and around human settlements. Over time, the results of not doing so will become obvious and disturbing.
Selective gear
The best solutions to New England’s current groundfish crisis won’t come from regulators, who seem focused on fishing effort, even if it means putting fishermen out of business.
They’ll come out of places like the flume tank at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where researchers and fishermen are testing designs for nets that will allow cod to escape while retaining other species.
A great deal of the current crisis was caused by technology – electronics have made fishermen much more efficient predators than they once were – and technology might just offer a way out. Escape vents and other design innovations have greatly helped the lobster industry, and investments in net design and other changes in the way groundfish are pursued and caught make a great deal of sense as well. In the long run, they will do far more than draconian regulations for this region’s beleaguered fishermen.