Articles
Carbon emission cutting made easy
A group of Mount Desert residents are making the world’s leaders look like environmental lightweights. While leaders from the world’s leading industrialized nations are hoping to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, the members of the Mt. Desert group ROOTS plans to achieve the same goal in just five years. Don’t laugh; most
Commission urges Maine to open St. Croix River to sea-run alewife
After more than 14 years of contentious debate, momentum is building to allow the sea-run alewife back into Maine’s St. Croix River. On July 10, an international commission with jurisdiction over shared U.S. and Canadian waterways wrote Gov. John Baldacci to urge the removal of structures on dams that block alewives from the river. Canadian
Housing blocked, group charges discrimination
Anais Tomezsko, executive director of Mano en Mano, looked stunned as she stood near the Milbridge town office. Just moments before, Milbridge residents voted 68 to 49 to impose a 180-day moratorium on multifamily housing construction. The moratorium vote halted a Mano en Mano project to build six affordable housing units for farm and aquaculture
Surry author promotes ethical living
Shortly after Zoe Weil moved to Surry and opened the Institute for Humane Education (then called the Center for Compassionate Living) in 1996, a neighbor tentatively asked her about her line of work. “She had heard that we were a cult,” Weil recalled with a laugh. In fact, the institute co-founded by Weil, an award-wining
Lobstermen line up for last chance at rope exchange
It is a bitterly cold March morning. Pick-up trucks are clustered on a patch of frozen dirt behind the Marden’s store in Ellsworth. The bed of each truck is loaded with brightly-colored rope; the cab of each truck is loaded with disgruntled lobstermen. They’re awaiting the start of a rope-exchange program sponsored by the Gulf
On food, the most important label is local
Like many Mainers along the coast, Maegan Harvey of Ellsworth thinks a lot about the food she buys for her family. And like many Mainers, her food choices don’t fall into easy categories. She buys organic produce, pasta, and milk, but she buys non-organic naturally-raised meat because of the high cost of organic meat. She’s
Maine coast loses two independent bookstores
For the past 16 years, Port In A Storm bookstore was a literary fixture in the Mount Desert Island village of Sommesville. Housed in a building once used to re-supply Atlantic sailing cargo ships, it sat across the dam from the Sommesville Library; the two buildings served as literary bookends in the heart of the
Islesford artist receives lifetime achievement award
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a picture doesn’t tell the whole story. Photos from the 2008 New York Public Library Lions Benefit show Islesford author and illustrator Ashley Bryan, one of the night’s honorees, standing alongside literary heavyweights Salman Rushdie, Edward Albee and Nora Ephron, all with gold medals
Coastal Mainers get on the bus
Tom Walsh starts work before he gets to work. Walsh works as a science writer at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor and commutes 80 miles round-trip every day from his home in Gouldsboro. But like a growing number of Jackson Laboratory employees, he takes advantage of a bus service subsidized by the laboratory, leaving
Peaks Island photographer explores connections between dancers and dead fish
Arthur Fink’s pending book of photography might epitomize the two contrasting spheres of Maine’s coastline, the artistic and the utilitarian, more sharply than any other book of Maine photography. The book’s title, Dancers and Dead Fish, says it all. That title doesn’t mean the book by the Peaks Island resident is about choreography involving seafood,