It was two hours before dawn in the village of Friendship, but for a Maine lobster crew, it was already getting late. Captain Dustin Delano, his sternman, Chris, and his bait guy, Tim, moved in coordinated loops around the deck of theKnotty Lady, stacking traps, thawing redfish heads and coiling lines to the gentle bass notes of engines rumbling below decks. In its own way, it had the feel of a chamber orchestra tuning up. Last cigarettes were lit, smoked and flicked away. And with that, we were off to the grounds.
Daniel Alexander Orr
An early October chill and a near total blackness cloaked us as we cleared the rocky shore, though for Captain Delano, it didn’t feel in the slightest bit unclear where we were headed. He has worked the waters just inside Monhegan Island since he was a child. Ditto for Tim and Chris, who are raising their own crews of school-age kids on the money—good money—they earn during peak season. To say that these men love lobstering makes it seem a little too pat. Lobstering is the clock around which they organize their lives. Even on days off, they still wake before dawn, read the news and drink coffee with their wives.
Yet some in the business—like Marianne LaCroix, executive director of theMaine Lobster Marketing Collaborative— believe that right whales have already moved away from this area (“they’re rarely sighted here now,” she says) and that it’s difficult to assess whether closing a large portion of Maine’s lobster grounds would truly result in 98% fewer right whale entanglements.
But the impact for Dustin Delano and the crew of theKnotty Ladyis crystal clear. “We won’t survive a 98% reduction,” Delano told me as he caught sight of the first “high flyer,” the 10-foot-high buoy that marks the endpoint of his first line of traps.
Dustin delano"There’s no way we can meet that reduction and still have a job."
Dustin delano
“There’s no way we can meet that reduction and still have a job.”
An Economy in Jeopardy
When you sit down to write fisheries conservation stories, as I’ve been doing now for the better part of two decades, the trick is to listen for a signal from the ocean that you can hear over the drone of complaint that is endemic to fishing communities. Push-and-pull is inevitable when trying to manage a wild food source, but sometimes the sea lets you know what’s needed. When American populations of the magnificent North Atlantic swordfish plummeted to their lowest levels in the ’80s and ’90s the signal was that, of course, a better fishery management plan was needed, including enforcing size limits and catch methods. Similarly, when New England haddock stocks nosedived, the answer, of course, was to stop factory trawlers from dragging Georges Bank where a core population had a chance of regrouping. Both measures have worked spectacularly. Now big swords swim the Gulf Stream from Florida to Nova Scotia and haddock populations have rebounded to above target levels.
But the Maine lobster paradox defies the usual paradigm of environmentalists versus fishermen because, over the course of two highly fraught centuries, Maine lobstermen have had to become environmentalists of a sort to stay in business. In the early 1800s, Boston and New York traders began using vessels called “smacks” that allowed seawater to refresh a tank below decks—so seafood could be kept alive during transport, as lobsters must be. And it seemed like lobsters would dwindle inLorax-like fashion until the coast would be picked clean of every single crustacean. Impoverished Maine communities rushed at the opportunity to make cash money from the smacks, selling lobsters of any size to the big-city traders who hopped from town to town brokering deals. Soon millions of lobsters were being whisked away every year.
Nico Schinco
Then something unexpected happened. Mainers realized they risked losing everything before they actually lost it. In 1872, a law was passed that forbade lobstermen from keeping egg-bearing females. Two years later, a second law prevented fishermen from keeping lobsters smaller than 101⁄2 inches. And when the Great Depression hit and paused New York’s and Boston’s live lobster craze, Mainers took their own pause to reset. In 1933, Maine fisheries commissioner Horatio D. Crie pushed through a new “double-gauge” law, prohibiting the taking of both very smallandvery large lobsters—for a crucial principle that governs all fisheries appeared particularly relevant to lobster: If you protect the big breeders and the young-of-the-year, you stabilize the population. Just prior to the law’s enactment, Crie promised, “If a double gauge measure is passed … you will see the lobsters continue to increase from year to year. No one will ever have to feel disturbed about the depletion of the lobsters on the Maine coast.”
This pledge has come true. Over the last two decades, area lobstermen have typically set records for catches one year, only to outpace that record the next year. With that explosive success, Americans have embraced Maine’s lobster with ever-greater frequency in their kitchens and restaurants.
As theKnotty Ladyworked her line, a half-dozen other lobstermen chamber orchestras performed the same theme with variations of vessel size around us. But all of them, unlike industrial fleets in other fisheries, were owner-operated. Maine’s unique compromise with the sea forbids absentee ownership of a lobster boat. This has created a diverse flotilla comprised of 3,670 captains and 5,570 crew members. Also unlike other fisheries, where the average age of fishermen just gets older and older, the state issues 1,095 student licenses annually—the equivalent of a lobstering learner’s permit—allowing young people to gradually work their way into the fishery rather than cough up an insurmountable upfront cost. Over time, many of these student lobstermen ascend to captainship, a career well worth pursuing. In all, the Maine lobster boats bring in $500 million a year in gross sales. When you count up the money lobsters earn for Maine processors, boat yards, restaurants and other associated businesses you hit a $2 billion valuation—about 5% of the state’s gross domestic product. In the context of the state’s coastal economy, the crustacean looms even larger. Sure, there are other fish in Maine’s seas, but 79% of its fishing income comes from lobsters.
“I don’t know,” he answered curtly. “Do you?”
A Whale of a Problem
Mayo and his team have done it all with regards to right whales. They have come to memorize each animal’s “callosity pattern,” roughened skin patches that sprout on a right’s snout. Using these spots, census takers can tell a whale named Cassiopeia from another called Infinity. They also can tell which ones are in trouble. “Right now, we know that a female whale named Snow Cone is entangled,” Mayo said.
Stormy mayo, Ph.D.“The numbers on survival aren’t good. And if we lose a female, that’s doubly bad.”
Stormy mayo, Ph.D.
“The numbers on survival aren’t good. And if we lose a female, that’s doubly bad.”
But yet again, Mayo points out that right whales are now so few in number that the population cannot afford even a single lost whale. Scientists have calculated that, for the population to be stable, human- caused right whale deaths must average less than one per year. “We haven’t been below one in 20 years,” he lamented. With such a narrow margin for error, theoretically speaking, not even potential risk can be tolerated. “If there are 100 whales in an area with one lobster pot,” Mayo explained, “or one whale in an area with 100 pots—the risk is the same.”
“Eventually you’ve got to do the change,” Martin said. “Years ago, we fished with wooden traps. Everyone thought metal traps were crazy. Back in the day, we called a fiberglass boat a Clorox bottle. Now that’s all standard stuff. It’s just progression. It’s the future.”
Enter Green Energy
I’ve known Safina for years and am a writer-in-residence with theSafina Center. Our many conversations about fossil fuels, combined with the fact that he had writtenA Sea in Flames, a scathing book about the BP Gulf oil disaster, made me think he would be firmly pro offshore wind. But when I asked him if he supported the planned expansion of Deepwater Wind’s project, he shook his head bitterly. “It used to be the wide horizon and the wild ocean,” he told me. “Now it’s becoming another industrial site. The windmills are visible from 20 miles down the beach.
Carl safina"It’ll be a sea of red blinking lights at night, as though you’re at the airport instead of in the mystery of the dark eternal ocean.”
Carl safina
“It’ll be a sea of red blinking lights at night, as though you’re at the airport instead of in the mystery of the dark eternal ocean.”
Bonnie Brady, head of theLong Island Commercial Fishing Association, who has locked horns with Safina several times over the years on commercial fishing issues, finds herself, remarkably, on the same page. “The Ørsted Sunrise wind farm they want to put in right south of Cox’s Ledge near Montauk will have up to 122 turbines, 186 miles of interarray cables as well as a 106-mile cable to plug in at pristine Smith Point and a water intake station to cool the turbines that brings in 8.1 million gallons of water per day and releases 90-degree effluent right onto our fishing grounds. The gloves are off,” she said. This has very much been the pattern in Europe, where large-scale wind developers have outmaneuvered fishing communities to put in mega farms. Chris Attenborough of Whitstable, England, who fishes off the Kent coast and is active in a local fishermen’s collective, told me that large portions of his grounds are now unfishable, that the herring that once roamed freely there don’t venture into the wind farm footprints, and that sea birds form a large empty circle around the turbines.
Aside from these immediate, acute disruptions, there are very real fears about what wind development on the scale proposed could do to oceanographic conditions long-term.Daphne Munroe, Ph.D., a clam researcher on a wind farm task force at Rutgers University,has particular concerns about an area of frigid deep water off the mid-Atlantic Coast, known as the Cold Pool. During hot summer months, fish use this area as a thermal refuge. But because wind farms remove energy from the ocean-level atmosphere, they could potentially disrupt the stratification of temperature layers in the seas around them, perhaps even causing the Cold Pool to disintegrate, rendering masses of commercial species vulnerable to summer heat spikes. Yes, this is all a bit theoretical, but Munroe points out that the underlying research on the potential effects of wind farms is “most definitely data poor.” There’s not even really good evidence of the potential impacts of increased shipping traffic to bring in materials or underwater construction noise on Maine’s North Atlantic right whales that everyone is so concerned about.
This kind of reasoning doesn’t necessarily hold water with Maine fishermen. “It does feel like the world is knocking itself out to make lobstering difficult,” Patrice McCarron of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association lamented. “It’s hard to have a conservation community say no to lobster ropes in the water and have those same groups endorse wind farms.”
A Murky Future
Lobstering in Maine generally comes to its close around mid-day. On the particular autumn afternoon I visited, the high sun brought with it 80-degree weather. With the day’s work done, theKnotty Lady’ssternman Chris rolled off his hoodie revealing a T-shirt that said, “Friday is my Second Favorite ‘F’ Word,” and everyone basked in the warmth of the July-like afternoon. The autumn heat was a reminder that the Gulf of Maine is getting hot, fast—warming 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit per year over the last 15 years, seven times the global average, according to NASA. Already, the normally mid-Atlantic- dwelling black sea bass, the same fish I caught hundreds of miles to the south off the Block Island wind farm, are starting to turn up in Maine lobster traps. Just as Long Island Sound lost its lobsters in the 1990s from heat-driven die-offs and northward migrations, Maine’s keystone crustacean could very well pack up and head north to Atlantic Canada.
But for Dustin, Tim and Chris, it’s unlikely they’ll see a direct effect from green energy initiatives soon enough to reverse the trend. Rising temperatures in the Gulf of Maine may already be inexorable. And as the crew turned theKnotty Ladyback to port, past the other lobstermen pulling the ropes whale conservationists hate, they asked out loud why other communities weren’t stepping up to bear some of the burden of green energy development. This crew of hardworking fishermen were most definitely not climate change deniers. They could feel the shift in temperature in the only air and water they’ve ever known, and they shook their heads at it all as they coiled rope and stacked traps and stored the leftover bait for tomorrow’s trip.
Paul Greenbergis the author ofFour Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food,and host of the podcast “Fish Talk.”
Evan Malletis the chef and co-owner ofBlack Trumpetin Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
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