Recently, I had two different and thoughtful individuals ask me the same question about Maine’s islands, which essentially was: In the great scheme of things, do Maine island communities really matter? Or phrased slightly differently, with so many communities in Maine, in America and around the world in such desperate shape, why direct so much attention to a mere handful (15) of small island communities?
If you hang out with islanders and share their worldview, this question does not come up very often—actually never. So I wish I had written out a coherent answer before trying to respond quickly off the top of my head.
But it is a fair question, so here goes.
We’ve all seen haunting images of those little towns, mostly boarded up with a handful of older people keeping a few lights on after all the young people and businesses have departed. So you ask yourself, “What is the difference between Maine’s islands and the hundreds of small towns across the Midwest or far west or in pockets of Appalachia that are essentially dying before our eyes?”
I have only driven through such places, so it is presumptuous to speculate, but certainly one difference is that Maine islands produce leaders who are thrust into the role of defending their communities against the relentless onslaughts of time and tide and the indifference of mainlanders, who sometimes have a large impact on the future of island life. Islanders are always ready to defend themselves, both at sea and on land—it is part of their way of life.
I think of David Lunt on Frenchboro, who two decades ago rallied his small island community behind a big, bold vision of a homesteading project to build affordable houses for new settlers when the school was reduced to a single student. I think of Sonny Sprague who rallied Swan’s Island and its fishermen into supporting Maine’s first official lobster trap limit before conservation was an acceptable term and got it through the legislature against big odds. I think of Eva Murray, who came to Matinicus as a young school teacher, stayed, married, raised children, survived a plane crash and has become a strong voice for this “Well Out to Sea” community seemingly too often riven by tragedy. And I think of Mark Greene of Long Island and Donna Damon of Chebeague who helped rally their communities to pursue independence to create two new island towns that changed the course of history. And there are others. How can you not be inspired by their commitment to these obdurate but fragile places that such people will never leave? So, on some level, friends and admirers cannot not help.
But beyond this fundamentally moral argument is a more practical one. Islands are where innovations happen. A good friend who runs an island mailboat company and is an amateur pilot recently observed that innovations in aviation do not come from 747 pilots, who are trained to do the same thing over and over expertly and safely—even landing in a river. You don’t want pilots of big planes to be experimenting when they fly. Test pilots, on the other hand, come out of a whole different culture. The first plane to fly around the world solo was based on a radical new design from a pair of brothers who experimented with extremely different—and innovative—plane designs by themselves in the desert far from commercial aviation centers. Maybe it is stretching a point to suggest that Charles Lindberg married into a summer island family on North Haven because he admired his intended’s deep island roots. But islands depend on and accept, if not embrace, those who think differently.
Think of the new vertically integrated lobster company from Chebeague Island—Calendar Islands Maine Lobster. Lobstermen up and down the coast have complained for at least half a century about the prices they receive from dealers for the lobsters they land. But they have always depended on the dealers for bait and for quick cash for the lobsters they land. As a result, virtually nothing has changed in the lobster business model for decades.
The lobster co-op on Chebeague took a different approach. First, they bought a bait company so they would not be dependent on a single dealer to sell their lobsters. Then they decided to develop their own live-lobster markets to keep more of the profits and saw how skimpy the margins in that business actually are. So then they decided to develop value-added products for the wholesale market and became the first vertically integrated lobster company in the country in which fishermen have an ownership stake. Of course, the risks they have taken may not produce success, but these innovations happened on an island because island life requires you to adapt, adapt, adapt to the changing environment that is always around you.
From a broader perspective—for example, the perspective of the National Science Foundation (NSF)—island communities are valuable because island schools and communities enable them to measure in more precise terms the effects of certain kinds of investments, including the nation’s need to produce more young people interested in careers in science, technology engineering and math. During the past six years, the NSF has invested several million dollars in education innovations in island schools, not because they care about “saving” island life, but because they can more accurately measure what works—and what does not—in how to introduce science and technology careers to young people in order to produce models that can be applied to rural areas across the country.
These are some practical reasons for valuing island communities, if that is your bent.
And finally there is what the old lion in winter, Louis Cabot, has said about island life. “Island communities,” he said, “are part of a vision of what the world could be.” By which he meant that islands are where disparate people are cast together in embounded communities and have to make accommodations, one to another, to move their lives forward. We depend on each other, in other words. Not everyone has a child who will benefit from an island school, but islanders rally around their schools and pay their taxes to keep these critical community institutions going.
It is the expression of a community interest among highly individualistic individuals that is so striking on islands. You learn to get along with people with whom you disagree—even completely disagree—because someday you are going to need their help and because keeping the community going is bigger and more important than the sum of its rugged individualistic parts. That is pretty rare these days in the national discourse.
Maine island life in the best of times is lean, sparse, edgy and inconvenient. There is not a pervasive sense on islands that life was once better, or might be better elsewhere—especially if sometime along in your 20s you’ve experienced life elsewhere. You get inured to the privations of island life and don’t spend a lot of time yearning for some mythical past or future where life was better or will be easier. You keep going. You adapt. You don’t give up. And you don’t leave. That is why island communities will survive.
These are not bad lessons for the rest of us to contemplate.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.