During the Island Institute’s recent 20th anniversary celebration, we opened a new 20-year retrospective exhibit that I hope many of you will come to our Main Street headquarters to see. At the same time the Trustees of the Island Institute also unveiled a major capital campaign, “Sustaining A Way of Life,” to meet a $25 million need to endow the Institute’s core programs: Island Fellows, the Working Waterfront Fund and the Sustainable Communities Fund. We believe this campaign and these programs will make an immeasurable difference on the future of the Maine coast and islands.
Although the initial response to the “Sustaining A Way of Life” campaign has been very encouraging – over $10 million in contributions and pledges – there has been another reaction from a few individuals questioning whether it is worth supporting Maine’s island and working waterfront communities, which in their opinion do not have a realistic hope of surviving as viable working communities in the long run. This is a real question worth asking, and even more worth answering, because thousands of lives are riding on this very concern.
According to the most recently updated census figures, there are some 4,437 year-round residents of Maine’s 15 year-round island communities. Of Maine’s 7,000-plus miles of saltwater coastline, less than 25 miles remains as viable working waterfront. These are truly the Maine coast’s most endangered resources. Will they go the way of the dodo?
I think not. Yes, it is true that places like Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, along with most of the working waterfronts on the remainder of New England’s coastline, have been transformed into summer playgrounds. The fishing communities along the rest of the Atlantic Coast have, with a few important exceptions, essentially disappeared. Masts outnumber diesel exhaust stacks in every anchorage. Restaurant smells have overtaken bait shacks and clam flat aromas. Boat shops service seasonal vessels of every description rather than building or maintaining draggers, seiners or lobster boats. The transformation of these waterfront communities to our south into seasonal service centers, while not altogether a terrible fate, has been completed. How can Maine’s working coast and island communities (and the Island Institute) be so naïve to think that this coast will avoid a similar fate?
I would argue that past history and present circumstance are on the side of island and working waterfront survival in spite of the economic and demographic forces arrayed against them. First, history: as the Island Institute prepared plans to celebrate its 20th anniversary, it struck us how much more impressive it is that hundreds and hundreds of island and working coastal families have celebrated their 100th, 200th or 250th anniversaries. Over the decades and centuries of these Maine families’ lives, the economy of this coast has shifted from dependence on winter cod and summer hake, to cordwood and kiln wood, to lime and granite – and now to lobster and summer people. Through all these travails, these families have persisted. They continue to harvest the abundant gifts of Maine’s coastal waters and to build a variety of the best commercial vessels needed to carry these products and people along the coast or around the world.
The second reason we have hope for the future lies in the water. While it is true that many of Maine’s coastal fisheries have been eclipsed by overfishing or subtle shifts in marine ecology, the basic productivity of our waters remains undiminished. For the time being, an immense area of the Gulf of Maine operates as a kind of lobster monoculture producing an abundance of one of the most valuable seafood products in the world. The landings of Maine lobster have tripled during the past 15 years to 60 million pounds, worth something between $150 and $160 million depending on world exchange rates. The abundance of lobsters as a leading entrant into the global economy has bought us time to plan for a future when lobster landings may trend lower, toward a more historically “normal” level of 20-30 million pounds. We can use this time to rebuild other economically important species like scallops, shrimp, cod and other groundfish as hedges against the inevitable decline of lobsters from their Olympian harvest levels Even the threat of global warming, which elsewhere may be the most serious long term threat coastal communities face, will likely be kind to the Maine coast – unless a catastrophic realignment of currents shuts off the nutrient-rich northern waters and brings instead the Gulf Stream to our doorsteps.
The final reason there is hope that Maine’s island and working communities can avoid the worst fates of working coastlines to the south is almost so obvious we sometimes discount its enormous influence: our weather. Let’s face it, Maine’s weather cannot and does not compete with Florida, North Carolina, the Jersey Coast, nor for that matter, Cape Cod, and thank goodness for all that. Persistent fog, squalls, fronts and regular easterly gales pepper us through the summer, and that’s our best time. Let’s not even talk about the privations of winter. Maine weeds out its faithless lovers and tests the rest of us to the maximum limit of patience and endurance. Count the number of for sale signs in every coastal and island town every summer. There’s always a big supply, annually refreshed, from among these faithless and fallen. So if the numbers of would-be seasonal residents who might otherwise drive up all property values beyond reason, there is also a countervailing and large number of sellers headed to warmer coastlines.
For those who stay behind, the devotion to sustaining a way of life that is not for the fickle or weak-willed only gets stronger. For as many eighth-generation islanders and Mainers there is a nearly equal number of fourth-generation summer people. If we marshal our resources, human and financial, into a common vision for sustaining Maine’s working and island communities, Maine can remain Maine for another four to eight generations. So let’s stay focused and get to work.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.