Traditional resource-based industries in Maine such as fishing are in trouble today because of global factors beyond their control, but also because technology has allowed them to deplete their resources.
“We were too good,” Craig Pendleton of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance told a Kennebunkport conference on sustainability on June 13, describing the depletion of groundfish stocks off New England. “We’re going to have to go back and find ways of catching fish sustainably.” Fishermen will succeed if they handle their catches carefully (“no more pitchforks”) and then market them locally, through entities such as the Portland Fish Exchange.
“I like going out and catching 5,000 pounds, brushing their teeth and putting them to bed,” he said. “Twenty years from now the gold standard will be ‘local.’ ”
Meanwhile the fishing industry suffers from bad press, it’s “losing jobs by the minute, and the science is incomplete.” Pendleton called for collaborative research to fill gaps in our knowledge, such as counting populations of inshore cod that now seem to have been missed: “rules that work best are the ones that come from industry.”
Maine’s decade-old effort to manage lobsters by zones, he said, is one new approach that has worked well.
Farmers face similar challenges, noted Stewart Smith, a former state agriculture commissioner who now teaches at the University of Maine. He noted that since 1910, the value in Maine’s agricultural system has shifted from farms to marketing and “inputs” such as energy and fertilizer. “With the present system, 20 years out, you will need 1,000 cows or 1,000 acres of potatoes to survive,” Smith said. “In Maine we have very few operations of that size.” The bright side, he said, is the growth of smaller operations in recent years: organic food producers, specialty growers, fresh-food suppliers. “The payoff is local foods for local folks,” Smith said. The Kennebunkport conference, “Sustainability: Working Toward Our Future,” was sponsored by the Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility. Jim Maxmin, the keynote speaker, argued that managerial capitalism (the creation of Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan 70 years ago) is “ossified” and is being replaced today by a system characterized by “federations” that cater to the needs of individuals, who enjoy far greater power because of new technologies.