I did not expect my heart would ever break this way. December’s snowfall created a winter wonderland for my 5-year-old and 9-year-old, and nothing gives me more pleasure this time of year than to be out playing in the snow with them.

While rolling around in a few feet of fresh powder I picked up a glove full of snow and tasted the water as it melted. My daughter yelled, “Stop!”

I looked up surprised at her conviction. “Why?” I asked. “It’s fun.”

She told me in no uncertain terms that the snow was not to be eaten and that all her friends at school knew this!

“Because, Dad, the snow is sifting pollution out of the air.”

I could feel my chest tighten in disbelief, but also in complete comprehension.

I know something about pollution and its consequences, having grown up in Cleveland. I lived with the vivid knowledge, fear and humiliation when the Cuyahoga River caught fire near the Republic Steel mill. I feel like I’ve lived with it and yet it happened three years before I was born. I recall telling my mom and dad that I wouldn’t go to Lake Erie one weekend because I had heard on the radio that there were needles washing up on its shores. And there were.

We used to be able to see it, the drain pipes spewing, the smoke stacks belching. Invisible threats entered my consciousness when our lakes began to be closed to fishing because of the nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide were being dumped on us as acid rain, when I was told not to eat too much tuna, and I guess this is when it started to become harder for me to imagine doing anything about fixing the problem.

Decades have passed since my early awakening to these issues, and it seems that we learn the environment is only getting more polluted. Old industrial spills are cemented over by new ones. Each week we learn the name of a new chemical that we know little about; MCHM spilling into the Elk River in West Virginia. I don’t know the area, but I know what it’s like to grow up embarrassed and frustrated that others view your part of the world as a dumping ground.

But I’ve lived in Maine now for 13 years and consider myself extremely fortunate to be a part of such a real and remarkable place. I learned soon after arriving that the pollution I thought I left behind in my youth had in fact followed me to Maine. It turns out that we live in “the nation’s tail pipe,” where I should count myself fortunate that my children are not among the 10.7 percent here who have asthma.

Maine’s working waterfronts are truly at the end of the tailpipe, and our fisheries are feeling the effects.

One impact that we need to understand much better is ocean acidification. Our cold ocean water more easily absorbs carbon emissions arriving here from elsewhere. The outcome of this process, paired with nutrient run off from our rivers, is that the ocean is becoming more acidic. This acidity causes a decrease in carbonate ions in the water, an essential element in the calcium carbonate shells of our marine organisms—urchins, oysters, soft shell clams, scallops, lobsters and more.

Scientists teach us that the pH—a measure of hydrogen ions—of the ocean has held stable at 8.2 for over 600,000 years, but in the last 200 years its has dropped to 8.1, representing a 30 percent increase in acidity. The rate of this increase is happening 100 times faster than anytime in the last 65 million years. Marine life may not be able to adapt at this rate of change.

To add context, an equal drop in pH of human blood, 0.1 units, can cause seizures, heart arrhythmia or even coma. Conservative estimates anticipate that our ocean will become 100 percent to 150 percent more acidic in the next 100 years, raising questions about whether or not marine organisms will be able to adapt fast enough.

Rep. Mick Devin, D-Newcastle, is taking on this issue. He is a biologist turned legislator whose district includes the area around the shellfish-rich Damariscotta River and lobster-rich Monhegan Plantation. Devin’s LD 1602 calls for a study commission on ocean acidification so that we can understand the challenges our working waterfront communities could face as a result of an increasingly acidic ocean.

Devin’s proposal is critical for what it can teach us about adapting our businesses to survive in increasingly uncertain times. And it underscores the new reality that environmental pollutants are more likely to be invisible than visible. We need to understand why a place as beautiful as Maine could end up as a heartbreaking tailpipe where kids are afraid to eat the snow.

Rob Snyder is president of the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THOMAS MATHIS. TO SEE MORE, CLICK HERE.