Category newspaper articles
An Interview with Paul Greenberg
Paul Greenberg is the author of American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood and Four Fish: The Future of Our Last Wild Food. A lifelong fisherman, Greenberg has written for The New York Times, National Geographic and GQ, among other publications. Greenberg received both a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and the […]
Holtrachem mercury – It’s still here.
The Department of Marine Resources has closed upper Penobscot Bay to fishing after a court-ordered study found elevated concentrations of mercury in crab and lobster. Mercury pollution comes from lots of places, but this particular part of the Penobscot is a hotspot of contamination thanks to Holtrachem, a now-closed plant that made chlorine and other […]
Penobscot River Restoration Continues with Removal of Veazie Dam
Restoration of the mighty Penobscot River became one step closer to reality on July 22, when hundreds of people gathered on the river banks to watch as demolition crews began dismantling the Veazie Dam. I was there, too, and I wrote about it for Fishermen’s Voice newspaper and made a short video:
Review: The Mortal Sea
The stories are well-known: European seafarers and explorers encountered a western Atlantic Ocean filled with numerous, large, and robust fish, unlike anything they had seen before. According to W. Jeffrey Bolster, who begins his book, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail, on the other side of the Atlantic, these early […]
Bringing the Ocean’s Power Home
For the inaugural “Life on the Coast” issue of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors, I covered the launch of Ocean Renewable Power Company’s first grid-connected tidal energy device in Cobscook Bay. I’ve been following the issue of tidal power in the Gulf of Maine since the emergence of new data and updated federal regulations opened […]
Sturgeon Moon Rising
In June 2006 I was in the boat with University of Maine researchers when they caught the second and third shortnose sturgeon in the Penobscot River estuary. It was the first sign of the persistence–or re-appearance–of a species thought to be extinct. My article about the science and history of sturgeon, Sturgeon Moon Rising (PDF), […]
Spring Tradition: Anglers Vied to Catch Penobscot’s Presidental Salmon
This article appeared in the Bangor Daily News on March 30, 2012.One hundred years ago, a local fly-fisherman decided to send an Atlantic salmon, the first one caught in the Penobscot River, to the president of the United States. This is the story of that fisherman, and the tradition he began, compiled from newspaper archives […]
Redemption for the sea lamprey
Sea lamprey have a bad reputation as a flesh-eating monsters, but the sea-run fish are are native to the Maine coast. University of Maine esearchers are finding that when it comes inland to spawn in late spring, this primitive, resilient fish actually does some good in Maine rivers, from cleaning out streambeds to playing architect […]
Welcome back, Alewives!
In May 2011, I rode a cargo ferry across Penobscot Bay to the island of North Haven with two Maine Department of Marine Resources tanker trucks filled with 2,500 fish. The fish were alewives, and they were a long time coming. A grassroots effort of year-round and seasonal residents was responsible for bringing the native […]
