Today, as I write, is Earth Day-a name invented by a marketing genius who thought it memorable because it rhymed with birthday.
So let’s take a moment to reflect on how Island Earth looks on the 40th anniversary of America’s collective awakening.
A good place to start is with an inversion of Rene Dubos’ famous dictum, “Think Globally, Act Locally,” which suggested that big environmental problems can only be turned into successful action when viewed through the lens of local cultural and economic conditions. This phrase, though catchy, made very little sense to most islanders, who are islanders, after all, by virtue of their success in thinking locally. Environmentalism on islands has always meant something different-more like “Think locally, act locally.”
During the past 40 years in Maine’s island and working waterfront communities, the big environmental issues elsewhere-protecting clean water, clean air, wilderness and endangered species-were mostly non-events. We took clean air and water for granted; wilderness was what summer people wanted more of, but we seemed to have enough of, and although everyone agreed restoring bald eagles to islands was a fine thing, eagle restoration did not touch our day to day lives. As Dexter Lee, a Swan’s Island selectman said to me once long ago, “We’re all environmentalists here, we just don’t make a big deal about it.”
The first awakening of island communities to a serious environmental issue in our backyards concerned island dumps, which sat on top of island water supplies-sole source aquifers – meaning that if we polluted our groundwater, we polluted everyone’s groundwater and you don’t get a second chance to make bad water good again. The awakening happened rapidly, beginning in the late 1980s and by the early 1990s or so, most island communities had swung quickly into action, closed their dumps, built transfer stations – at significant cost — and developed effective local composting and recycling programs. So was Earth Day over?
Not really. Our big awakening was the “big water issue” -literally the ecological health of the ocean. I can remember when I first began to see lobstermen in the 1990s hauling empty quarts of oil and plastic Clorox bottles ashore-somewhat sheepishly-rather than throwing them overboard into a supposedly vast and empty ocean. Lobstermen who worked close to island shores were the first to notice the increasing proportions of plastic and oil containers just above the high tide line and began taking individual responsibility for reducing the load. Today few fishermen would knowingly foul their own nest.
But the biggest environmental issue for Maine’s island and working waterfront communities was much harder to see-the first serious local depletions of fish and shellfish in the Gulf of Maine that had subtle ecological implications. Twenty years ago, Georges Bank’s landings of cod and haddock had declined to something like 10 percent of their historical average. When fisheries managers closed portions of Georges, effort shifted into the Gulf of Maine with predictable results-like squeezing a soft balloon. But this depletion was hard for most people to see or grasp-it seemed to be going on far offshore-out of sight out of mind. It was a tragic, slow motion collapse that had stark effects on small island communities that were still setting trawls for groundfish as they came inshore to spawn, but then were caught before they had a chance to reproduce.
The causes of fisheries collapse were also complex and the fixes -like levying fines on big air and water polluters-which worked elsewhere made- no sense here. One of the culprits of local ocean depletion involved repackaging cold war military technology designed to hunt enemy submarines into new tools to hunt fish. Sophisticated chart plotters integrated with GPS and color sonar that in actuality allowed the last fish in many areas to be caught, led to local extinctions on local spawning grounds as Ted Ames’ work demonstrated in the late 1990s. But fisheries managers were not about to ban technology that increased “efficiency” (and safety), so that remedy was off the table.
After cod and haddock populations and harvests declined, scallops were next. Scallops have virtually disappeared as a commercial species for most island and mainland fishermen. Then came the urchin gold rush-a fishery that went from nothing to a $40 million harvest in half a decade and then collapsed before the state Department of Marine Resources could get it arms around any sensible regulations. Then the glass eel boom arrived where nets across local rivers and streams to catch elvers nearly choked another species to death.
Ironically, one of the ecological effects of these species depletions is that lobster populations appear to have benefitted. Although no one knows for sure, the increase in lobster populations probably has less to do with the elimination of cod (an opportunistic but inconsistent predator of lobster) and more to do with a shift in the bio-energetics of the marine system, where more of the food sifted out of the water column and onto the bottom-or benthos-where lobsters thrived.
The desire to clean up our oceans, restore our fisheries and protect endangered marine species like the right whale is now a national environmental priority. But we still do not know how to do it without killing the communities that depend on access to those “public commons.” So Earth Day in the oceans has not accomplished a great deal to date.
Most recently, the energy resources of the Gulf of Maine and islands have come sharply into focus-not because we are thinking globally and are acting locally, but because we are thinking locally. Maine’s is one of the most fossil-fuel dependent economies in the country. There are not a lot of alternatives currently for heating our homes or fueling our cars and boats than diesel or gas. But the islands and offshore areas are surrounded by wind -great gales of wind. And the winds may even be increasing as a result of the tempestuous exchange between hot air in the tropics and cold air at the poles.
The reason the governor and many of the state’s leaders have been focused on developing island wind and offshore wind has little to do with global warming and the size of our carbon footprint and everything to do with whether small Maine communities can afford to pay three to ten times the rate that average Americans pay for energy and still survive. It is not that we don’t care about polar bears, it’s that we care more about each other- which is a critical part of island living and an ethic islanders have to share with the world 40 years after the first Earth Day.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.