F R O M   T H E   C R O W E ’ S   N E S T

Define Habitat Focus



It’s confusing.

In 2014, NOAA designated the Penobscot River watershed – covering one-third of the state and including countless brooks, wetlands, streams, ponds, lakes and rivers that run into the Penobscot River and Bay – to be a “Habitat Focus Area.”

Then in 2017, a group of investment bankers and a marina consortium announced that the same federal government that funds NOAA will be giving them a $1 Million grant to help build a mega yacht marina in Rockland Harbor – displacing fishermen among its impacts.

In January 2018, a Norwegian company announced it will be getting billions of gallons of drinking water, practically free, to raise salmon on land in Belfast. Half the fish waste will be sent down a pipe into that same Penobscot Bay. The politicians upta Blaine House were all fist-pumping this “amazing deal.”

In February 2018, a near-riot broke out in Rockland when the city announced a large ship mooring would be put in place to allow more and larger floating casinos to call at Rockland. Cruise ships without gambling would otherwise be ferries to nowhere. These 1,000-foot-long, and getting bigger, reclining hi-rise housing projects spew mega tons of bunker fuel particulate, drag up fishing gear and displace fishing boats. Landlubbers – trapped on a barge, stuffing themselves with food and drinks, sitting at slot machines for days on end – are not holding it ‘til the next port of call. It all goes out the ship’s pipe at the 12-mile limit or so. That’s 12 miles south of Vinalhaven, the same part of the same bay opened to oil drilling in 2018.

So define “Habitat Focus Area.”

Fortunately, a program now in its fifth year at eight coastal Maine high schools is indicating that the adults in this room are the children. Students in the Eastern Maine Skippers Program are doing in-depth research and writing up results on the larger marine, fishing, environmental, economic, whale-entanglement picture and more.

The program is helping to develop generations of informed, interested, and empowered coastal citizens with a more comprehensive understanding of the marine world where they live. The expectation is that more informed and responsible citizenry will engage in a systematic marine stewardship and have a role in furthering Maine’s owner operated coastal economies and communities.