Articles
I Dreaded That First Robin
“I dreaded that first robin,” Emily Dickinson wrote in her exquisite poem, anticipating how quickly each season’s arrival simultaneously forecasts its painful departure. But when a huge flock of hungry robins appeared at the beginning of March in the holly bushes in front of the house, their arrival brought a shock of pleasure, mixed with
A Tale of Two Towers
For the last eight years, a group of students at Camden Hills Regional High School has been raising funds to install a major alternative energy facility on school property. Their purposes have been to teach themselves something about renewable energy, to reduce their school’s reliance on fossil fuels and contribute a bit to the reduction
Never Say No To an Island
Islanders, no matter how competitive they may be in their fishing territories on the water, love hearing stories from other islanders. No one but another islander can fully appreciate the ways unforgiving edges of an island’s shore carve an offshore identity. Which is how we got an invitation to visit the islands of the Outer
Lobsters on Holiday
Like most of us, I suspect, I used to think of this as the time of year when we eagerly open the mailbox to get Christmas cards with family pictures from college classmates and far-flung relatives to remind us of the ineluctable Passage of Time. But now our December mailboxes have primarily become conduits for
The Year in Review
2011 was notable, among other reasons, for the release of reams of data from the 22nd U.S. Census. For purposes of understanding how we are doing as a nation, or as a state or as a group of communities, such as the Maine islands, there is nothing that even comes close to this authoritative compilation.
Is There An Island Culture?
When Hurricane Irene was off the North Carolina coast pin-wheeling her way toward the islands of the Outer Banks, a number of Maine islanders emailed island friends on Harkers and Okracoke Islands to send their hopes and prayers that the islanders might be spared the worst of her fury. One Harkers islander wrote back a
Lobster Trends: Spurts, Rangoons and Tuna Heads
Each spring, when lobstermen set out traps at the beginning of a new season, the chatter is what the year will bring when all is said and done in December. Few expect that this year could be as good as last year. In case you forgot or were not paying attention, the total volume of
The State of the Islands
A number of years ago, a great friend of the Maine islands whose wife had once worked at Forbes magazine—which regularly compiles lists of things capitalist and commercial—suggested the Island Institute compile a list of island attributes that could serve as an objective yardstick to detect trends from which policy and collective attention might flow.
Green Fish Entrepreneurs
The first, and sometimes the only, thing people think they know about Maine fishermen, and especially island fishermen, is how fiercely they resist change. Like all truisms, this view vastly oversimplifies a more complicated reality. Of course, those whose lives are closest to the edge—whether that edge is geographical, economic or political—are more vulnerable to
What the World Could Be
Recently, I had two different and thoughtful individuals ask me the same question about Maine’s islands, which essentially was: In the great scheme of things, do Maine island communities really matter? Or phrased slightly differently, with so many communities in Maine, in America and around the world in such desperate shape, why direct so much