Articles
What Are Our Oceans Telling Us?
George Noongwook, the lanky, bespectacled Yupik Alaskan, who is the chair of Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, was a recent guest of the Peary MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center at Bowdoin College, along with a half dozen other native Alaskan leaders. Collectively these visiting Yupik and Inupiat leaders have contributed invaluable local knowledge to
High Winds in the Gulf of Maine
One of the millions of videos you can watch on the Internet shows a 500-foot long steel tower being towed out of a harbor off of Stavanger, Norway in 2009. Then as seawater ballast begins to fill one end of the tower, it gently sinks in the water as the remaining 200 feet of tower
It Takes a Village
One of the most emotionally-charged issues during the secession battle between Portland and Long Island in Casco Bay during the 1990s revolved around how islanders would cope with emergency medical evacuations that had previously been the responsibility of the Portland fireboat. The issue was especially fraught because it goes to the heart of what level
Bear Island Design Assembly
Although most of us have trouble trying to define in the abstract what the term “sustainably” means, we also instinctively understand that islands are great places to experience what our lives become when we disconnect from elaborate, invisible and often incomprehensible systems that keep life humming along on the mainland. Island living confronts us with
An Island Picnic
To protect an otherwise innocent and untrammeled place, the name of the naturalist’s favorite Maine island—the one where he might someday wish to have his ashes scattered amid its heath and ledge and careening gulls—should perhaps not be revealed. But plenty of people know it well. Lobstermen fish its surrounding shoals and canyons, hauling up
I Think I Will Never See
Perhaps no one better knows the locations of an island’s chestnut trees than adolescent boys, although their spreading branches no longer shelter the village smithy, and if truth be told, these imitators are not actually the American chestnut of lore and lyric. Rather, they are horse chestnuts, a very distant relative of the American species,
Campobello Library Rededication
On August 4, officials from the United States and Canada gathered at the small island library on Campobello Island overlooking Welsh Pool to rededicate the first monument erected anywhere in the world to honor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt spent every summer of his life as a boy on Campobello, learning to sail and fish from
The Summer of Our Discontent
If you live in the Midwest, it is hard to avoid the talk this summer about corn and drought. If you live in the New York, Pennsylvania or Ohio, the talk is all about drilling for natural gas. If you are on the Maine coast, you cannot avoid hearing about lobsters. Everyone, especially lobstermen, want
The Contingent Nature of Island Life
The ties that bind islanders together are reinforced on a day-to-day basis in hundreds of small ways. An island newspaper does not publish a lot of news in any ordinary sense of the word, since the front page is always given over to the innumerable acts of kindness that islanders are constantly performing for one
When the Climate is Uncertain, Buy Insurance
Last week’s column described how “merchants of doubt” have perfected modern public relations strategies to delay action on the major issues of the day. When scientists seem to disagree on effects of pesticides on the environment, or the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer or the threat of climate change, the resulting uncertainty contributes