Working Waterfront

Maine islands are the frontier

For those of you who track island life, you’ll likely know there are 15 year-round, unbridged islands along the Maine coast. Distinguished by their differences more than their commonalities, these islands span the coast from Cliff Island, the smallest of the Casco Bay islands, to Matinicus, the most distant island… SEE MORE

Aaron Bourassa, project manager overseeing the stabilization project at Fort Preble on the Southern Maine Community College campus. PHOTO: CLARKE CANFIELD

Working Waterfront

Fortifying Portland Harbor’s sentinel

[caption id="attachment_38490" align="alignnone" width="700"] An aerial view of the Southern Maine Community College campus, built within the confines of Fort Preble. PHOTO: COURTESY SMCC[/caption] Workers have moved three-ton granite blocks and taken measures to mitigate erosion and improve drainage in an effort to stabilize Fort Preble, a historic fortress… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Power play: To Pine Tree or not

QUESTION 3: An Act to Create the Pine Tree Power Company, a Nonprofit, Customer-owned Utility. Do you want to create a new power company governed by an elected board to acquire and operate existing for-profit electricity transmission and distribution facilities in Maine? There wasn’t much the proponents and opponents agreed… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Getting serious about the heat

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet By Jeff Goodell, Little, Brown and Company (2023) Spare me, you're thinking. Please, not another book on climate change. Greenland’s last iceberg hasn't even calved, and already we're awash in Doomsday books about climate. Not one more.… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

The fate of frogs on Oxbow Island

Oxbow Island Gang: Leap Frog By Rae Chalmers, Maine Author Publishing (2023) It’s April break from school and Berend Houtman—known to his family and friends as Bear—can’t wait to visit his grandmother, Sally Parker, on Peaks Island. He has to jump onto the ferry at the last minute—the first of… SEE MORE

Island Institute Fellows, including those returning for a second year and those beginning their fellowship this fall, pose for a photo during an orientation in St. George. Back row, from left: Katie Liberman, Lavinia Clarke, Olivia Jolley, Kaylin Wu, and Morgan Karns. Front row, from left: Alice Cockerham, Brianna Cunliffe, Grace Carrier, and Claire Oxford. PHOTO: JACK SULLIVAN

Working Waterfront

Island Institute announces new Fellows

Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront, has announced its new cohort of Island Institute Fellows who join a group returning for their second year. The Fellows program places recent college graduates in island and remote coastal communities to do service work. New Fellows include: [caption id="attachment_38241" align="alignnone" width="300"] Alice… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Why am I painting the living room?

As summer wanes, the urgency to squeeze out the last of projects and fun grows to a fever pitch, especially so in Maine, where the season is so fleeting. That urgency comes with a conundrum—how to balance projects with fun? Lyrics from an old folk song by the husband and… SEE MORE

This image of the changing ocean colors was made by NASA and Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS data from LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response.

Working Waterfront

Ocean color changes illuminate climate change

Our blue planet is becoming greener, which may indicate that climate change is reshaping surface ocean ecosystems, says a global study co-authored by a University of Maine oceanographer that was published in Nature recently. The research team, led by scientists from the United Kingdom-based National Oceanography Centre and including UMaine… SEE MORE

Otter Cliffs in winter. PHOTO: COURTESY FRIENDS OF ACADIA

Working Waterfront

Mapping MDI’s climate future

Reflections is written by Island Institute Fellows, recent college grads who do community service work on Maine islands and in coastal communities through the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront. In the library, Tremont residents gather around flood maps. Disoriented at first, we find key landmarks—the school, Hansen’s Outpost,… SEE MORE

A stage CV Calanus finmarchicus from the Gulf of Maine, showing its lipid oil sac.

Working Waterfront

Tiny copepod plays outsized role

The world’s oceans are teeming with plankton, microscopic life that move where the currents take them. Among the plankton are algal cells called phytoplankton and single-celled and multicellular animals called zooplankton. A vertical tow with a fine-mesh net deployed just about anywhere in the ocean will yield animal plankton. While… SEE MORE