Articles
Isle au Haut gets a fire truck; island boy writes a book about it
Last spring the full-time students at the Isle au Haut school took a trip to Florida to visit Disney World — all but Caleb Mao, who at 8 years old was too young. It was a disappointment for him, of course, but he made up for it. “He got something pretty special,” says his mom,
The Political Season
The stories and pictures tell the story: we’re in the midst of the lawmaking season. Congress may go year-round in Washington, but in a rural state like Maine where so many of the decisions are made at the local level, we do most our decision-making in the late winter and early spring. Most town meetings
Fresh Water
Fresh water has always seemed inexhaustible in Maine, a state with thousands of lakes, hundreds of miles of rivers and groundwater good enough to market in bottles all over the world. There’s plenty of evidence, however, that even in this water-rich region we’re facing some limits. This month we report on the frustrations of homeowners
Setbacks
Developers of new energy projects in the region have had a bad month. First it was the Redington Mountain wind project in western Maine, which got the thumbs-down treatment from the state Land Use Regulation Commission. Opponents convinced all but one of the commissioners that a pristine ridge shouldn’t be defaced with a string of
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Election Day: Islands follow Maine’s trend
Maine’s year-round island communities followed the state’s pattern on Election Day, voting down TABOR, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, while re-electing both of Maine’s Democratic congressmen, Gov. John Baldacci and U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe. TABOR fared particularly poorly in island communities, perhaps reflecting widespread fear that the proposed spending cap would cripple local services such
The Fish, the Fishermen, and the Government
For decades, the federal government and its regional councils have “managed” stocks of fish by limiting effort, telling fishermen they may only go out so many days each year. The results, everyone knows by now, have been catastrophic all around: fishermen have been driven out of the business, fishing communities have suffered, the stocks of
News and the Season
There is a seasonality to the news in Maine…not surprising when we remember how intimately connected we all are to the land, the sea and the weather. Many of the stories in this month’s Working Waterfront (our winter double issue) reflect these ties between events and the calendar: how the right whales that visit the
New Technology, Lost Bounty
Two photographs –one old, one new — in this issue of Working Waterfront tell different stories about Maine and its varied fisheries. On page 21 we have a huge halibut flanked by two Phippsburg fishermen. The fish is longer than either man is tall; the picture documents a time (the 1970s) when people who lived