As summer arrives, there’s worry in the tourism industry—not about seeing enough customers, but about having enough staff. At a May 31 breakfast forum hosted by the Portland Press Herald, coastal business owners and managers described the challenges they face this year, which range from a local workforce unable to find housing in the area or transportation to coastal jobs,…

It is a familiar dilemma across the country—making roadways safer vs. protecting an area’s aesthetics, which residents are particularly vigilant about in scenic, coastal Maine. The Department of Transportation is…

Ten years ago, Joe McBrine was visiting a sportsmen’s show in Orono. As someone who’s always liked to draw, paint, and make things, he enjoyed viewing the carved birds and…

Our government’s decisions project a story to the world about who we are as people. When we step off a plane in another country, we encounter these stories, as the people we…

  The American lobster is the single most valuable species of fish landed in the United States. Over 80 percent of the catch comes from Maine (source: NOAA fisheries reports…

Despite an abundance of egg-bearing adult lobsters and record-breaking harvests, the number of young lobsters continues to fall in the Gulf of Maine. That’s the 2016 update from the American…

The Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront, is working to understand the opioid epidemic on the coast of Maine, and to learn more about the issue, we recently hosted…

Because I go back and forth between Matinicus and Rockland a lot, and because our island doesn’t have a daily ferry or mail boat, and because the pilots who fly…

On an island with a more-or-less fixed population of fewer that 400 people, burn-out is an all-too-common phenomenon. After so many years on a board or in a volunteer position,…

When Ryan Woolsey and Kealii Mano moved from the year-round tropical warmth of Hawaii to Stonington, where they’d experience their first cold winter and snow, they had no regrets. They…