CAMDEN — The 1980s were a turning point for Maine. Fifty years after the Great Depression, an influx of people and money began to bring change. And most of it was good.
Philip Conkling, founder and president of the Rockland-based Island Institute notes that in 1980, Maine’s population hit 1 million, recovering from a century long decline from that peak. It’s the sort of fact that Conkling often drops into conversation about the challenges and opportunities that surround Maine’s islands and coastal communities.
Those who have known him for years describe him as thoughtful and insightful. His views on those challenges and opportunities tend to be grounded in historical, scientific and experiential context. In short, he knows what he’s talking about.
Thirty years ago, Conkling, then a forester who moved from surveying timber in northern Maine for similar work on islands, founded, along with photojournalist Peter Ralston, the Island Institute, an organization that works on education, marine, energy and publishing fronts to help support island communities. It is the publisher of The Working Waterfront.
Conkling, 64, is a 1970 graduate of Harvard where he studied government, and a 1976 graduate of Yale’s masters degree program in forestry and environmental studies. A native of New York state, he moved to Maine in 1973 where he first worked as staff naturalist at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound program.
Conkling is retiring as president of the organization he founded at the end of June, and Rob Snyder will take over.
Conkling sat down for an interview with The Working Waterfront on the deck of his Camden home.
WW: Where and when was the idea for the Island Institute born?
Conkling: I was trained as a forest ecologist and wanted to work in the north Maine woods. I saw a little note on the forestry school bulletin board, “Collect baseline ecological data on 12 Maine islands.” And I thought, well, that should be fun, but it couldn’t be hard. And I got the job, not because I knew anything about the islands but because I could handle the logistics. You had to figure out a way to get on and off these islands. A bunch of them were down in Washington County where I had been living so I knew lobstermen that could get me around.
The first island that I went to, absolutely was a transformative experience in that the more I thought about it, I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. What happened was that I was there three days on the island and I had all my field guides and a plant press and was making species lists. And what happened was the lobsterman who was supposed to pick me up on the third day didn’t come.
As they say Down East, it was just a “dungeon thickness of fog.” This was before radar was routine on lobster boats.
I had eaten all my food, and packed my kit and I was there on the beach. And I realized after several hours, “He’s not coming.” I went back and I pitched my tent, I went over my field notes and went to bed early so I wasn’t thinking about eating so much.
The next day—this was June, so the days were very long—I got up about 4 a.m., and everything was completely still. I remember it just like it was yesterday. There was nothing but the thickness of the fog. Everything was still and close. It was like having heightened senses in a way. Partly, I was light-headed, I’m sure, for not having eaten for about 24 hours.
I figured I’d walk around the island, and as I was doing that, out of the fog—when I was up on the cliff—out of the fog, literally at eye height, a pair of bald eagles just burst out of the fog and they were flying wing-tip to wing-tip, using the edge of the island to navigate. And they saw me just as soon as I saw them. They were only 20 or 30 feet away.
And as they swooped away when they saw me, I felt the wind off of their wing tips. The hair on the back of my neck just stood up. It was really just a remarkable experience.
Later on that day, it started to clear up, and I figured I’d go one more time across the center of the island. And in the middle of this thicket, I found a foundation.
Those two experiences sort of encapsulated what was so remarkable to me about the islands—that they were both wild yet they had this inhabited past.
And when I went back ashore and asked around town and the town office, “Who had lived out there? Who were those people?” Nobody knew. It was as if history had just disappeared before our eyes.
It took years and years to find out who had lived out there. But I kept asking questions. And in fact, the rest of that summer everywhere I went, there were signs of some kind of human occupation or use of the islands.
It was just a revelatory experience.
Hurricane Island Outward Bound had hired me to do ecological surveys of the 200 [Maine] islands they had permission to use. And again, everywhere I went, there were human stories. And they were just fascinating to try to uncover.
No one [was] talking about how humans use, and can continue to derive economic uses, in a sustainable fashion from the islands. And that, basically, was the essential idea behind starting the Institute.
WW: Where and when did you first meet [co-founder] Peter Ralston?
Conkling: So in the middle of those island surveys, one of the islands I surveyed was Allen Island, a 450-acre island that was off Port Clyde, roughly halfway between Port Clyde and Monhegan.
As I was putting that information together for Betsy Wyeth [the wife of Andrew Wyeth], Peter Ralston had been hired by Betsy. She was interested in this idea of trying to put the island back into some kind of productive, year-round use. She wanted to have a sheep pasture on the north end. Peter and I supervised that. We worked together on that project for four years before deciding to start the Island Institute.
Allen Island became the anvil on which we beat the ideas about using ecological information to manage the islands’ resources and the resources around the islands in the word in a sustainable way.
WW: Over the 30 years, you’ve created a lot of programs that help sustain island communities. Programs like the Island Fellows, Island Scholars, the ILSE entrepreneur training, the Institute worked to create the Maine Island Trail, you created The Working Waterfront newspaper and the Island Journal. Which of these are you most proud of? Which have had the greatest impact?
Conkling: Probably the publications have had the greatest impact. When we started, the very first legislative hearing that I went to that involved an island issue, it was called the “geographical isolation” bill, and it was about how the state awarded funding to geographically isolated parts of the state.
And the chair of the committee leaned across his desk during the hearing, and he said, “You mean to tell me that there are people who live on the islands during the winter?” A lot of Mainers had no idea of the culture and the history and the fact that there were these year-round communities there.
WW: Wow”¦ Why?
Conkling: Well, partly because there had been this century long decline. Islanders, a little bit, were in a defensive crouch, often, because they’d lost so much. So that the idea of celebrating the strengths and connections of island life was what Island Journal was all about. So over the years, it was successful.
And The Working Waterfront as a newspaper”¦ We said to islanders, “There are only 5,000 of you in 14 different communities. That doesn’t about to much in Augusta. You need friends on the mainland who share your values and this way of life.” That’s what Maine’s working waterfront communities are.
And so the newspaper was a way of making that sort of commonality of interest more obvious to people. Eventually it led to a constitutional referendum in 2005 that gave a property tax break to commercial fishery properties along the coast of Maine.
By striking that alliance, if you will, it changed the Maine state constitution.
WW: What’s next for you?
What’s next for me is more of the same. I’ll be writing, I’ll be doing consulting, strategic planning. I’ve started Philip Conking & Associates.
WW: And lastly—everyone knows that your signature piece of apparel is the vest. Is there a story there?
Conkling: (Laughs.) I don’t know when I started wearing vests. I do remember when I was in college, a wonderful girlfriend made me a leather vest. She sewed it herself. So that’s the first one I can remember.
I like having my arms free, I guess, and I always need extra pockets. I still have my timber cruiser’s vest. It’s got pockets for pens, it’s got a pocket a compass, it’s got a pocket in the back for your lunch. I’m always collecting things when I’m walking in the woods or walking on an island.
WW: You had me at “leather vest made by your girlfriend.”