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Crystal Canney is executive director and spokesperson for Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage Foundation.
Making a living on Maine’s ocean is indeed a tough job. Just ask anyone in the traditional fisheries — lobstermen and women, clammers, and marine harvesters of all sorts. It’s dirty, physical work.
The ocean is the next battleground for so many projects including large-scale industrial aquaculture, offshore wind, and climate change. Embedded in all these conversations is what we want to produce and how we want to do it in our oceans. What are the impacts from any and all of these proposed projects? Maine likes to create task forces, but rarely does it let science or long-term data reviewed by marine industry experts – meaning those people who make their living on the water, lead its decision making.
Take for example the membership of the Blue Economy Task Force, appointees established in statute to, “Establish the Blue Economy Task Force to Support Maine’s Emergency as a Blue Economy Innovation and Opportunity the 21st Century.” This group doesn’t operate out of the Department of Marine Resources but rather, the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD). That should tell everyone this is a business group, really a cheerleading group for what I and many others concerned about industrial aquaculture view as Gov. Janet Mills’ “aquaculture at any cost” approach.
Many of the appointees to the committee make money from industrial-scale aquaculture, whether its building, shipping or equity investment. DECD is doing what it is mandated to do. Protect Maine, however, supports looking at the longer-term consequences or the interactions of all kinds of projects on the ocean. Protect Maine is a cheerleader for science.
Four of the appointees to this committee are foreign companies. One harvests rockweed on Maine’s shores until its recent announcement that it was pulling its operation. The other major player is the industrial-scale aquaculture giant from Canada, Cooke Aquaculture.
Cooke raises net pen salmon and is being sued for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act in Maine. Cooke may or may not be ruining the bottom of the ocean but at least one national environmental group has taken it seriously enough to bring a lawsuit. Why is Cooke doing business in Maine after being kicked out of Washington state following its net pen failure?
This begs the question of whose blue economy we are talking about. It doesn’t look like the blue economy of the lobstermen. Or the blue economy to restore wild Atlantic salmon. It’s not the blue economy of the wild marine harvesters who are concerned about whether large aquaculture leases are impacting their product. It looks like the blue economy of foreign corporations and extraction of our natural resources at the potential expense of our small owner operator harvesters and farmers.
If Maine really wants to be a leader and not just an apologist for industrial-scale aquaculture, Protect Maine believes the state needs more science and unbiased participation in mapping the Maine ocean. We should be asking what the inputs from every vantage point are and what the impacts are. We don’t think Maine can answer that question, nor does it appear to want to.
Maine is quick to be a cheerleader for industrial scale aquaculture, with the governor speaking glowingly about Cooke Aquaculture while it has been shut out of Washington state and has had serious fines imposed around the world. A new coalition has been formed supporting industrial aquaculture in part due to the conversations that Protect Maine has pushed forward and in our work with communities that know exactly what is happening to their waters.
Still the question that needs to be answered around the blue economy is: Do we know enough about the present state of our oceans and the potential impacts to make good decisions about the livelihoods of all the people who make a living on the ocean. Protect Maine believes the answer is “No.”
