O’Hara expands bait business

Necessary renovations inside the building have been completed and the freezer is full in anticipation of the coming lobster season. Come spring, weather permitting, the O’Haras will do some paving and landscaping and pour concrete landing pads for trucks outside. O’Hara Corporation purchases frozen bait from all over the world, including frozen red fish racks,

Continue reading...


From starfish to chocolates

“Wonderful,” is how David Quinby describes BDC’s home ownership and business development. House #1’s first tenants, David and Marcia Quinby, established the adjacent structure to make a work space to secure a livelihood in 1993. Recalls David, “It was the first thing we did. Otherwise we’d have no place to work. We saw our savings

Continue reading...


Familiar Traffic

Vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians share a vocabulary for traffic direction, based on proximity to the shoreline. It doesn’t matter where you are going on the island. If you are moving away from the water you are coming “up the road.” If you are going toward the water you are going “down the road.” On an

Continue reading...


Timber, Coal, Oil and Wind

But a generation of innovation, and road building throughout New England opened up a new energy source for the expanding urban population. Remote hillsides throughout western Massachusetts, southern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine were stripped of timber, which was then buried in shallow pits and set afire. The charcoal produced from New England’s woodlands produced

Continue reading...


Chebeague family flees Libya

Rob and Sarah Prescott were working at an international school and living with their two children in Tripoli when many Libyans rose up against longtime dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.  When the unrest turned violent, the family had to flee the country on a journey that took them through four countries on six different modes of

Continue reading...


Island Institute(s)?

This is the first of a series of columns that will discuss an inflection point in our organization’s history: what is the proper scale of the/an Island Institute? I begin this discussion in Portland, Oregon at an organization called Ecotrust. I draw on Ecotrust’s experience as a way to introduce some of the ways that

Continue reading...