LURC locked down by earth First! over Plum Creek

Four Maine Earth First!ers are locked down in the office of the Land Use Regulatory Commission, demanding the Land Use Reggers come out and explain how they decided to coddle Plum Creek and blow off the nearly two thousand Mainers opposed to the plumcreeking of Lily Bay and beyond.

Penobscot Bay Blog reached two people on the scene and recorded interviews with them and documented the voices of the locked down and those of the security agencies trying to control the thoroughly muckled situation.

Stay tuned...

GOM and Pen Bay weather buoys in funding trouble

"Due to a $450,000 shortfall, the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GOMOOS) may have to remove five of the eleven buoys they have currently in Maine and Canadian waters."

Such sad news and wholly indicative of the misguided priorities of the present administration that it is willing to risk the safety and reduce the prosperity of Maine's commercial fishing fleets.
One of those at risk is the West Penobscot Bay buoy

As GOMOOS 's web editor tersely noted "..buoy F will likely be removed during the Fall 2008 deployment. " More details from GOMOOS HERE

Good and Evil clash on Sears Island

The drama: "Travesty Island," took place Sunday afternoon near the gate at the north end of our publicly owned island. Listen to 'Travesty Island'. Read the script.

A theatrical event in protest of plans to open Sears Island to development and in support of the island's wild nature, Travesty Island takes issue with the decision by Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Islesboro Island Land Trust and Sierra Club's Maine chapter, to support the Baldacci administration plan to designate more than a third of Sears Island as a 'marine transportation area', called by some the Wasumkeag ecological sacrifice zone.

In the pageant, giant "Grim Reaper" figures personifying the forces of industrial sprawl and ecological destruction faced off against a thin line of defenders barring them from the island, led by a Green Knight. Representatives of the island's wild animals and its marine life, its old forests and its fertile ferns and eelgrass beds defended their island home in a green wall.
They triumphed! Nature, in the guise of the goddess Diana, rose from the coffin of Sears Island port plan, resplendent. The porties were vanquished.

Sears Island Sunday: after the barbecue, join the dramatic theater on the causeway.

After chewing the fat at the FOSI barbecue on Sunday at the corner of Rte 1 and Sears Island road, (located a few miles north of downtown Searsport) Then follow the drums and giant puppets down Sears Island road to the Sears Island causeway.

There, a dramatic play featuring the forces of natural land and sea life defying the forces of Industry, which loom up in the form of giant walking Grim Reaper puppets, while drums throb warning across the bay and harbors.

There on the island grab a mask or costume or drum, or bring your own! Musicans, singers, speechifiers: a PA system will be set up. Bring your mando, your guitar or bagpipes or ...whatever! Sing a paean to wild Wassumkeag!

After the drama ends, join a somber yet energizing walk though the 300 acre island forest sacrifice zone that the aforementioned "Friends" of Sears Island proposes to abandon to deforestation and paving over by incoming port wannabes and a colkdhearted MDOT. Go figure!

Sears Island - JUPC rides again - Sept 5th noon.

Once again the Searsport Congregational Church's public meeting hall will resound with false assurances and ringing indignation as the Sears Island Joint Use Committee (JUPC) goes through its final throes of exuding an agreement for perusal by the Maine legislature's Transportation and (we hope) Marine Resources Committees.
All welcome and urged to attend. Listen to eight port opponents earlier this year at a JUPC meeting

Clever state negotiators have bamboozled Maine's Sierra Club Chapter, three land trusts and even an Earth First! leader into signing an agreement with Maine DOT that declares the western face of the island - adjacent to the bay nursery - industrial port-appropriate.
Listen to a debate earlier this summer between Sierra Club and Fair Play for Sears Island

See maps and aerial photos of Sears Island

Come add your voices to the discussion - public can speak at start and end of the meeting. tell them yo're concerned with the poor review of offsite impacts - direct and indirect- that would comje with a new industrial port containers or otherwise) would have on Penobscot Bay. Or just listen and be amazed by the dogged - if delusory - discussion as the Joint Users slouch toward Jerusalem-on-the-Kennebec aka the State Capitol.

Asticou's Island Domain: Wabanaki Peoples from Castine to Gouldsboro 1500–2000

The Wabanaki have lived in the Penobscot Bay area and elsewhere along the New England coast for about twelve thousand years. A recent free e-book: Asticou's Island Domain: Wabanaki Peoples at Mount Desert Island 1500–2000, offers a look back into their lives.

Much has been lost The European invasions of the 16th and 17th centuries brought smallpox, cholera and influenza, diseases against which the Wabanaki had no natural immunities. The e-book notes that

"These scourges, added to the lethal combination of firewater and firearms, almost wiped Maine’s indigenous coastal peoples from the face of the earth. Within a few decades, up to 90 percent of the Wabanaki perished in this American Indian holocaust."

Ninety percent!

Asticou's Island Domain only treats upon those later years of the Wabanaki's stewardship of our area from East Penobscot Bay to Frenchman's Bay.

An important read. The book is available as two pdf files Click Here

'Travesty Island' pageant on Sears Island August 31

"Travesty Island," a free theatrical event to protest plans to develop Sears Island, will be held Sunday, August 31, at 1 p.m. near the gate at the north end of the publicly owned island. 

 The event is intended to draw attention to the Baldacci Administration's second effort to build an unneeded industrial port on what is now the largest remaining totally wild island in public hands on the East Coast, and to chide several conservation groups for supporting the plan. 

 In the pageant, giant "Grim Reaper" figures personifying the forces of industrial sprawl and ecological destruction will face off against a thin line of defenders barring them from the island, led by the Green Knight and Diana, goddess of all things wild. 

Representatives of the island's wild animals and its marine life, its old forests and its fertile eelgrass beds will also be there defending their island home. Who will triumph? Come cheer on the forces of creation and nature against those of destruction. 

Want to be part of this family-friendly pageant? There's still time! Call 548-2950 or 323-2757.

 Or just show up at the island at Sunday at 1pm. Bring a mask, a drum or other instrument, or just you and your friends. 

 In addition to the Governor, the pageant will criticize the Maine chapter of the Sierra Club, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Coastal Mountains Land Trust, Islesboro Island Land Trust and several other groups for signing onto an agreement that terms a Sears Island industrial port "appropriate" - even though it will mean the outright paving over of some 40 percent of the 941-acre island, and would badly fragment the eelgrass-laden nursery shoal edging the island. 

 In return the Baldacci Administration will hand over control of the island's remaining 600 acres to those groups, and allow them to  conserve the island  but also to build a "information center  and meeting area " (including a parking lot)  involving up to 10,000 square feet of roofed structures and a complex of access roads and parking lots. 

 "The Maine Sierra Club and the land trusts are providing green cover for a port project that ought to be setting off alarms in anyone who values our fast-dwindling natural resources," says Peter Taber of Searsport, one of those taking part in the "Travesty Island" pageant. Directions: Take the Sears Island Road located on Route 1, two miles north of downtown Searsport on Route 1. The road ends on the causeway to the island. Look for the banners.

For more information: Ron at 691-7485 Suzanne at 548-2950 or Peter at 323-2757. MORE ABOUT SEARS ISLAND

Looters strike Penobscot Bay archaeology site.

A long ignored thickly forested ravine on the west side of Penobscot Bay that may have hosted native American encampments stretching well before colonial times has been partly looted by person or persons unknown. The once slumping edge of the forested ravine, where old clamshells and other artifacts peeped out from the accumulated soils has been dug into and pulled down. clamshells and broken pottery and glass lie scattered. The looters seek only unbroken things that they can move quickly at a fleamarket or on EBAY

Across the western bay, the current owners of the Turner Farm on the North Haven side of the Fox Island Thoroughfare continue allowing the excavation of the remains of coastal native american communities that occupied the turner farm site for more than 8,000 years. Recent findings from the archeologists is of alternating eras during that time when nearshore or offshore fish species were their staple food. As the community prospered, near island fishes were fished out; they then moved to offshore fishing for swordfish, tuna and other large oceanic species that spend their lives near or on the surface. Once, however the nearshore species recovered by being left unfished for a lengthy period of time, the native american community would shift back to nearshore and inshore species.

This determined by painstaking digging of the trash middens where these peoples left their broken stone, clay and bone tools, and their fish, fowl & mammal bone, and shell garbage, shells down the centuries. With eight millenia worth of middens to excavate at the Turner Farm site, paleoecologists can learn

Army Corps of Engineers: No public hearing on MDOT Umbrella Mitigation Bank plan.

No Wild Place in Maine is Safe. The US Army Corps of Engineers has decided not to hold a public hearing on MDOT's Umbrella Mitigation Bank Plan. (rich text file)

This despite the Corps receiving:
"...10 letters in opposition, 7 of which contained public hearing requests, 0 letters in support of the project, and 4 letters which either requested more information or simply raised points about the banks or its potential candidate projects."

Those ten letters, according to the Lt Colonel who initialed the decision, were pretty specific on a variety of topics:

"a. The UMB lacks any specific site or sites and/or standards for those sites.

"b. The bank review process has not addressed various key points or raises concerns about short-cutting the permit process such as:

"c. The UMB proposes to use biophysical region service areas within the entire State of Maine rather than watershed service areas which are referenced throughout the Mitigation Rule.

"d. The UMB prospectus lacks sufficient clarity and detail.

"e. There will be specific sites proposed which themselves are of concern for a variety of issues: Sears Island and Sherman Marsh

"f. MaineDOT should not be both permit applicant and bank sponsor because that causes a conflict of interest.

"g. MaineDOT is not qualified to be a bank sponsor due to the unknown quality of their past mitigation efforts.

"h. The establishment of a bank in Maine is precedent- setting.

"i. Mitigation generally has a poor track record."

In essence ACOE's response to these was 'Don't worry, trust MDOT, and even if you don't, relax because: " furthermore, each proposal will be fully vetted by an interagency review team."

How reassuring! As if 7 & 1/2 years of Bush administration reorganizing of those very agencies hasn't made such review teams mere rubberstampers for industry getting its way!

Read for yourself Cover Letter and Army Corps Decision

Sears Island isn't safe, now.







http://www.penbay.org/searsisland/2008/documents/acoe_umb_mit_decision8508.html

Sears Island planning - before it went off track

The good old days...

Sears Island preservationists prevail at meeting

Monday, June 26, 2006 - Bangor Daily News by Tom Groening

BELFAST - Those wanting to preserve Sears Island in a mostly natural state were out in force on Saturday at a daylong information gathering session, and their vision for the state-owned island dominated discussions.

The facilitated meeting at the University of Maine Hutchinson Center drew more than 60 participants. It is the first of two sessions in which public input is being gathered by a steering committee to guide a planning process for the 941-acre island, linked to the mainland in Searsport by a causeway. ... The Saturday session used a process that allowed participants to brainstorm ideas for an agenda and then meet in small groups to flesh them out.

...

"Sue Inches of the State Planning Office and Jonathan Reitman read the summaries of the small group sessions and created a list of the dominant topics:

• Gathering more information on Mack Point's capacity, shipping trends, and the value of nonport development.
• Restoring the natural habitat on the island and returning a tidal flow through the causeway.
• Finding a balance between conservation and compatible economic development and fisheries.
• Creating a people- and nature-friendly ecotourism experience on the island.
• The need for coordinated management of current and future island uses.
• Drawing up principles to guide development.
• Keeping the steering committee process open and transparent."

end excerpt Full Article

How did things get so far off track?

Ron

Sears Island! Full circle fair panel says: Don't sink natural Noah's Ark

Blue Hill hosts the Full Circle Fair once again, and this time defenders of wild Sears Island will hold forth on one of the stages. Their message is clear:

1. GET THE FACTS
* A natural Noah's Ark. Sears Island hosts nearly every coastal Maine plant and animal and marine species, in an irreplaceable mix of upland, wetland, intertidal and marine habitats.

* MDOT plan will torpedo this ark! Will fragment and outright destroy 100s of acres of these habitats. Juvenile cod and salmon will lose the Sears Island shoal

* Noise and stench of port operations will permanently reduce upper bay air quality. Will drive wildlife away from remaining “protected” areas outside port boundaries. Ship traffic will drive fish away from nursery grounds.

* Container ports never stop growing - will consume whole island over time.

* So-called ‘Joint Use Plan’, will fast-track port sprawl on Sears Island. Compromiser Sierra Club leaders support MDOT plan; won’t poll membership!

2. GET ON THE ISLAND Take the Sears Island Road, north of downtown Searsport, straight to the island. Park on the causeway. Forests and meadows straight ahead, Beaches and tidepools to left and right. Take your pick!

3. GET THE MESSAGE. No splitting Sears Island into industrial port zone and remainder natural zone. The island ecology and the adjacent fish nursery shoal are too small not to be harmed by constructing and operating a 300 acre container port.

4. GET CONNECTED Call or email these groups. Save the island & save the bay
Fair Play for Sears Island 548-9962 pearlsb4swine1@verizon.net
www.fairplayforsearsisland.org
Penobscot Bay Watch 691-7485 coastwatch@gmail.com www.penbay.org

5. GET MOVING! Time is running out! Help save the island and bay today.
Help plan and take part in creative, educational and scientific activities to bring the risks to Sears Island to the attention of Maine’s greater public. Join the on-island fun. Show wild Maine you care about her.

It's as simple as that.

Sears Island - JUPC to wrap up in September. Then...?

The current dealmaking over the island the Joint Use Committee appears to be finally sputtering to its conclusion. According to Tanya Mitchell's July 24 article at the Republican Journal, the committee, which is expected to finish its draft conservation easement in September, has once again revised its plan. this time adding a third party environmental watchdog, possibly MDEP. Possible someone else.

Mitchell wrote:
"The [Joint Use Planning Committee] easement draft also includes new language regarding a "third-party enforcer," which in the case of Sears Island would be the state Department of Environmental Protection. "

"Adding DEP, said Ulbrich, [MCHT] serves as a back-up plan to ensure the easement remains a strong document into the future. "It gives them the right to enforce restrictions of the easement if we [MCHT] fall down on the job," she said."

Okay... MDEP can be reasonably responsive given enough pressure from the public. How about DMR? The biggest 'fall down on the job' is going to be the savaging and ravaging of the seagrass areas and the nursery shoal edging the island, by dredging and operation of vessels at the port - if it were ever built. Is MDEP up to that? Where's the Department of Marine Resources? Its the eelgrass, people.

Taming the Island. Wasumkeag mowed.

From: Soulful Sea:
Well, I know I’m kind of a sentimental sort. Maybe a bit of a kook, but tonight when I arrived on the island I was shocked and saddened to see that the mowing tractor had been on the island. I can’t tell you how bugged I was to see my grasses and flowers and ferns and berries all taken down by a mowing tractor that had been on the island.

I know some poor sap prolly thought he was doing a good thing…. Protecting the innocents from the encroaching forest….

I can’t tell you how bugged I was to see my grasses and flowers and ferns and berries all taken down.I’m sure he probably had extra gasoline in his tractor or maybe he just needed to work a few more hours in his day……

But god damit…. It really pisses me off. I mean, why was there a need to cut down the wild plants today? Why the hell are they busy pushing aside barricades to run a tractor up on the island to cut down the plants?

It’s just that I have a relationship with so many of them. I love the tall grasses and the soft ferns and the flowers……

Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature.. –Tolle


If only they knew how sweet the scent of milk weed is at dawn….

Sears Island JUPC meets July 18 noon-3pm, Searsport

Friday, July 18, from Noon-3pm, join the Joint Use Planning Committee at the First Congregational Church, 8 Church Street, Searsport. This will be their first get together since getting a hostile reception at their Belfast Public Info Event Everyone is welcome. Bring your recorders
At that event, the MDOT -sponsored group got an earful over its 'product' after all this time, years into the MDOT NGO Committee concensus process.

Still far short of what would needed to successfully protect the bay and the wild island itself from the negatives associated with an industrial port.

MDOT has not made its draft agendas available yet.

Sears Island "deal" opposition swells; JUPC-ites confronted at 6/25/08 public meeting

A glum row of Joint users Wednesday night felt the wrath of island and bay huggers ....The audience, the public who attended the presentation and question and answer session overwhelmingly oppose ANY development on Sears Island. Listen to all audio recordings from meetings.

Following the introductory remarks ,

MDOT and Maine Coast heritage Trust tried the argument that Sears Island faces total development should the state not get what it wants this instant. They tried to raise spectres of residential sprawl covering the entire island. But the people Wednesday night weren't buying it

A series of public speakers followed the dog and pony show. A local resident whose loved ones ashes were scattered on Sears Island spoke with sorrow at the thought of the deceased being under thundering container port. She was followed by members of port opponent group Fair Play for Sears Island A resident of South Thomaston spoke of the contradictions between the state's process and the reality of the island.

As Harlan McLaughlin noted, Sears Island is managed pursuant to passed into law LD 277. The bill requires legislative approval for any new uses to the present natural areas with transmission towers. Not to mention the existing MOU between Searsport and MDOT that gives already gives control of the 600 acres to Searsport....and Searsport has land use ordinances.

No, the real danger, Mclaughlin warned, the real danger of development comes from the port wannabes and the eco-world people.

Others spoke; some passionately, some with disdain for the secrecy and political maneuvering of the MDOT process that had brought the island and bay to this situation.

Maine state senator Dennis Damon attended. Chair of both the legislature's transportation committee and its marine resources committee, Damon has made MDOT's Sears Island port plan a priority in the Transportation Committee. Yet, despite the well understood serious impacts to Penobscot Bay's marine fisheries that would stem from a port being built athwart the bay's most important groundfish and wild salmon nursery area, Damon has not broached the subject of the port plan at all with the marine resources committee.

Asked by Penobscot Bay Watch executive director Ron Huber during the Q&A session that closed the event if he would schedule a Sears Island review at the Marine Resources Committee, the senator first suggested that the legislature's conservation committee might be a better venue. But pressed on the marine fishery impacts being worthy of the marine resources committee's attention, Senator Damon agreed to bring the topic up with that committee. Huber met later with Damon and discussed the kinds of materials that the committee should receive.

Scot Dickerson of Maine Coast Heritage Trust seemed peeved at the growth in opposition to the port plan and delivered a closing statement dismissive of the natural resources of the island and warning of terrible consequesnces fo the island if the port plan was not adopted.

Sears Island containerport foes to grill JUPC tonight

Friends and foes of a state proposal to divide Sears Island into an industrial port zone and a conservation buffer area will square off at the UMaine Hutchison Center in Belfast at 7pm tonight (Wednesday June 25th).

Groups Fair Play for Sears Island and Penobscot Bay Watch will warn that the state's proposal would harm Penobscot Bay's most important fish nursery area as well as the island's unique and irreplaceable combination of forests, wetlands, meadows and ferns, and the wildlife that inhabit them.

They will also challenge the logic of environmental groups supporting the MDOT plan. On the one hand Sierra Club, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, and astroturf grassrooters "Friends of Sears Island" have signed an agreement that an industrial port on the island would be compatible with nature and is hence an "appropriate use" .

On the other hand; Sierra Club et al says, an industrial port will never happen because it would not be appropriate.

The reason the Sierra Club and land trusts are willing to play this charade is that the Maine DOT is poised to give them management authority over 2/3 of the island provided they approve of the potential portification of the rest of Sears Island.

The word "quisling" wil very likely be heard tonight at the Hutchinson Center

Umbrella Mitigation won't shield natural Maine

Coming up fast! Army Corps of Engineers and MDOT's June 19th "public meeting" on MDOTs Umbrella Mitigation Plan For Maine 3pm, MDOT Headquarters, 24 Child Street, Augusta, Maine.
Read Army Corps Public Notice

Come speak or write a letter asking for a formal public hearing. Tell them: a 'Public Meeting' is not good enough. Hold a public hearing!

Write to: Ruth Ladd, Army Corps of Engineers, Regulatory Division, 696 Virginia Road, Concord, MA 01742-275. Or email her at ruth.m.ladd@usace.army.mil Deadline July 3rd. Note: Ms. Ladd prefers emails.

The Umbrella Mitigation plan is one of the foul discharges of the outgoing Bush Administration, as it seeks to let sprawl developers and polluters get away with simply paying a fee to destroy as much habitat as they like and pollute as much water as they like. Because someday, somewhere, an equivalent amount of habitat will be protected.

If enough people ask, the Corp of Engineers will hold one. Its up to you and to all of us! Read Army Corps of Engineers' Public Notice about the meeting

Stockton Harbor - GAC spill intentional?

News: "An aqua ammonia spill at GAC Chemical Corp over the holiday weekend was due to either human error or intentional tampering, a company official said Tuesday morning." Read media story here.

General Alum, formerly Delta Chemical, has a long history of pollution problems; under pressure from Penobscot Bay Watch and Conservation Law Foundation , the company has cleaned up some of its waste clogged outfall pipes and reduced acid spillage into the bay.

Kudos to the Searsport Fire Department's 11 responders, Searsport Police Officer Jessica Danielson and Maine DOT for their quick and effective response to the spill, stopping the aqua ammonia from reaching the harbor. Government at its best.

Sears Island - The letters( to the editor) pour in.

Today's Bangor Daily news offers three Sears Island letters to the editor. In them:
Marietta Ramsdell, of the Sears Island Joint Use Committee, chides Ron Huber for not attending SIPI and JUPC meetings; Sally Jones of Stockton Springs notes that the port will disrupt the island’s ecology as well as the island’s peace, fatally; and Islesboro Islander Steve Miller, another member of the Joint Use Committee, calls Harlan McLaughlin's Jue 2 op-ed about the Sierra Club and others working with the governor’s office on Sears Island planning "false, damaging and malicious." Temper, temper, Steve & Marietta!
Read them all right here

Sears Island - Proud to be a NIMBY.

Not In My BaY

No Port.


No Way.