Who Guards the Guardians of natural Maine?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is a phrase of the 1st century AD Roman poet Juvenal from his 6th Satire. "Who will guard the guards themselves?" he worried. 

 Below, listen to a January 26, 2015 Pen Bay Report interview  of one of those guardians of the guards: Kyla Bennet, New England director of  Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. (Five mp3s)
.When it comes to Nature, PEER  fights for the right of honest officials at all levels of environmental  & conservation governance to enforce the laws, rules and ordinances that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we walk upon and the myriad organisms that share our natural world with us
Part 1, Introduction to PEER 10 minutes
Part 2.  PEER on the Cape Wind project. 4 minutes
Part 3. PEER & Maine. Sears Island to DEP under Aho. 11 minutes 
Part 4. PEER, Municipal & Native American govts, to End. 5min sec.

Learn how Bennett and others protected Sears Island from Angus King and the Allagash Wilderness Waterway from then-legislatorJohn Martin's dirty politics in the 1990s,  How they braved the furious slings and arrows of well meaning green energy supporters, by standing up for government bird scientists whose warnings of very high density seasonal bird migrations through the area proposed for the Cape Wind  project off Cape Cod were being suppressed;  

PEER is presently hearing from  oppressed staff of Maine's Department of Environmental Protection,  that life under petroleum industry lobbyist turned Maine DEP commissioner Patricia Aho, is in the words of one of them  "A living hell".

We've got global warning enough without DEP rules going up in smoke adding to it. PEER fights for the right of honest officials at all levels of environmental governance to enforce the laws, rules and ordinances that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, the land we walk upon and the myriad organisms that make up our natural world.

PEER: No new port on Sears Island!

EAST COAST’S LARGEST UNDEVELOPED ISLAND SLATED FOR CARGO PORT — Development Scheme for Maine’s Sears Island Resurfaces Again after 12 Years

Washington, DC — The Maine Department of Transportation wants to turn Sears Island in Penobscot Bay into a cargo container port, according to an agency scenario released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Under the plan, more than a third of the largest uninhabited island on the Eastern Seaboard would be paved over. The rest of the island would be used as a “mitigation bank” to facilitate wetlands destruction in other parts of the state. See Maine DOT's 2008 sales prospectus for Sears Island! (20 page pdf)

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“Carving up Sears Island was a bad idea a decade ago and is even a worse idea now,” stated New England PEER Director Kyla Bennett, a biologist and lawyer who formerly worked for the EPA, noting that the DOT Prospectus brags that “protection of parts of Sears Island would add a significant jewel” to Maine’s conservation efforts. “If protecting ‘parts’ of Sears Island would add a jewel, saving all of Sears Island would be like appending the Hope Diamond.”

A mitigation credit bank allows developers to buy the right to fill in naturally functioning wetlands by purchasing the promise of the creation or restoration of wetlands elsewhere. In the case of Sears Island, DOT proposes that some lands be saved only in exchange for the destruction of wetlands elsewhere in the state. In addition, there are big questions about whether Sears Island could function as a mitigation bank.

“Offering Sears Island up for a wetland mitigation bank does not even pass the straight face test when the only restoration opportunities on the island consist of two sites, totaling three-eighths of an acre,” Bennett added. “The Governor of Maine should put an end to these ridiculous development scenarios and save Sears Island once and for all.”

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