Q: [0:00] OK.  We’ll start with your name and how you like to introduce yourself.

 

A: [0:06] My name’s Anna Drzewiecki, and I say they, she or no pronouns at all.  And I live in Newcastle.

 

Q: [0:15] OK.  Awesome.  And what year were you born?

 

A: [0:19] I was born 2000.

 

Q: [0:20] OK.  And tell me about where you grew up.

 

A: [0:25] I grew up on Peaks Island in Casco Bay and I lived there until I was like 10 or 11.  And at that point, my family moved to Portland.

 

Q: [0:39] And where are your parents from?  What do they do?

 

A: [0:42] My mom is not from Maine.  She’s from like Maryland area, and she has become white-collar, (inaudible) thing kind of career.  While we out in Peaks, like a lot of folks work in all sorts of different ways, on/off the water, although a lot less so now rather than historically.  So my parents both had like office jobs while I worked – while we lived on Peaks.  And my dad and my step-mom are both from Maine.  My dad is from central Maine actually, and he is now a business owner in Portland.  He’s a map maker by training.  So now he sells mapping software.  And my stepmother’s from Woolwich.  Yeah.  And she works in healthcare.  And they live in Portland.

 

Q: [1:36] Got you.  So does anyone in your family have a history in fishery?

 

A: [1:40] In my stepmother’s family, they’re all from Wiscasset, Dresden, Woolwich, that area.  And a lot of cousins who I don’t know very well.  I mean they all like clam digging, worms, some lobstering.  But I don’t know them well, so it’s not been a part of my history.  And my brother and I – besides that, my brother and I are the only ones who really worked on the water.  And to my knowledge, although my brother’s done a lot of things I don’t know about, to my knowledge, he has only worked on sea farms, oyster farming from a pretty young age, and also chucking and like in the restaurants type of things.

 

Q: [2:28] Got you.  Do you have any other siblings?

 

A: [2:33] No, just one brother.

 

Q: [2:34] OK.  And how did you guys get into that world?  Was it just where you were or interest?

 

A: [2:40] Definitely a combination of both.  At the time on Peaks Island – so my brother started working for our friend’s farm, Basket Island Oysters at the time, which I think is Peaks Island shell fish now.  And Mark Green is one of the cofounders.  And he was a good family friend.  And he was the only one at the time On Peak’s doing this kind of thing. And it was very experimental and like climate and ecology driven in the sense that he’s a marine biologist and got into oyster farming like his study and research on the bay.  So my brother started working for him when he was like a young teenager, and that was my first kind of exposure to aquaculture and working on the water.  At that time, I would clean bags occasionally, just very gritty job.  But I didn’t end up working in aquaculture at all until summers in college.  And I found a job at Dodge Cove Marine Farm.  And I have learned like I really wanted to be on the water.  I didn’t want to be in commercial fishing.  I didn’t want to lobster.  And I’ve – I had some experience in agriculture, but I was really passionate about being back out on the water, and about sea farming like theoretically, but I didn’t have any hands-on experience until – I guess it was like my second summer in college.  And that was really, really interesting when I got started just how things synthesized and how my own passion kind of grew.  But also how I felt, at that time, even though I hadn’t been working in that capacity while I was living on Peaks Island like a sense of reconnection to Maine, a sense of reconnection to place, and the viability of a life that would live that way.

 

Q: [4:45] Thank you.  Can you describe your educational background.

 

A: [4:53] Yeah.  We went to public school through high school, and then I moved to California for my first year of college, and I finished college during the pandemic in York at Sarah Lyons College.  And I am actually still in a graduate program in visual material at Museum Anthropology in the UK.  So I’m just finishing my dissertation back in Maine.

 

Q: [5:22] Wow.  (inaudible).  Welcome back (inaudible).

 

A: [5:26] Thanks.

 

Q: [5:28] Are you married?

 

A: [5:30] No, I’m not married.

 

Q: [5:31] Do you have any children?

 

A: [5:33] Just a dog.

 

F: [5:36] Can I just interrupt to ask you to describe your current work role?

 

A: [5:40] Yeah.  Do you mean my current employment or my current academic work?

 

F: [5:47] The academic work but also maybe the employment if it feels relevant.

 

A: [5:51] Yeah.  Well, it does feel relevant because before I went to grad school – so I graduated from college and I worked for two summers at that point in aquaculture, and I moved back to Maine from New York for personal reasons.  I started working at a newspaper, a local newspaper, which actually gave me like a deep sense of place here, and actually, that why I learned a lot more about Nina’s (sp?) full governing and got really interested in local politics, around the coast and climate, but just in general.  And I took a job – I started oyster farming again at that point. So I was working for a little over a year full time, both on and off the water for an oyster farm, like a medium-size farm on the Damariscotta River for – yeah, a little over a year before I went to graduate school. So I could have continued in that way.  I decided I really want to continue my momentum on my academic work, so that’s why I kind of decided to break at that point and go.  So currently, my academic work is in anthropologies of food and multisensory and multispecies anthropology.  And I’m doing a close, clear multi-species study with oysters.  So the way that I learned from oysters is less of a top-down analytical approach and more of like a close and bottom-up multitrophic approach.  And the way that I’m using that (inaudible) kind of access and think through questions around the coast, around aquaculture, in particular around industrialization through oysters as a lens, or with the organism as a kind of lens in the first (inaudible).

 

Q: [7:49] Wow.

 

A: [7:50] Yes.  That’s what I’m working on right now.  A lot of oyster eating and observational – observations on taste and display methods and materiality.  So.

 

Q: [8:04] That’s exciting.  We’ll definitely follow your work with that.

 

A: [8:07] Yeah.  (laughter).

 

Q: [8:10] How would you describe your role in the fishing and aquaculture industry in Maine.

 

A: [8:15] I was thinking a lot about this.  Because it’s kind of fraught in the sense that I consider myself a sea farmer, although right now I’m in this kind of dual capacity as a researcher.  And I’m also not on the water this summer.  And the reason I’m not is because I felt very committed to like an ethical separation between working in the commercial world while I was doing this research, and the research that I’m doing.  And so, well, that’s very important to me as potential conflict of interest.  I’m also in this position now where I’m not on the water every day, even though that’s become such an essential part of my identity, especially being back in Maine.  So I would say that right now I’m in – like my relationship is transitional and adapting, but it’s definitely where I situate myself.  Whether it’s my creative works, so like writing and photography, whether it’s research in an academic sense.  Even freelance journalism too, or my day to day.  And I am aspirational towards having my own operation.  But what I envision is something that’s very nontraditional.  And I’m not a landowner, and I don’t have a boat.  And I don’t have a truck.  And I don’t have any commercial licenses, so I don’t currently harvest anything unless I am working as an employee for someone.  So, yeah, my relationship, I would say, is like the center point of how I orient my work now and my future work.  And by work I just mean like the way I live.  But it’s also, definitely – there’s definitely tension around it too.

 

Q: [10:18] That makes sense.  What would you say hooked you in doing this kind of work?

 

A: [10:28] Just the embodied experience of it.  I think as much as I could have read about regenerative ocean farming, as much as I had a preconceived notion of aesthetics and the lifestyle of fishing and working on the water, really, ultimately, it was the embodied experience and the sensory experience of doing that type of work.  And relating to ecology in that way that ultimately hooked me.  It sunk its teeth into me.  Yeah.

 

Q: [11:12] You mentioned potentially having a non-traditional farm –

 

A: [11:16] Yeah.

 

Q: [11:17] – based on (inaudible; overlapping dialogue) was like, if you will.

 

A: [11:20] Yes, I can.  So it’s always changing.  My ideas are always changing.  But in essence, what I would strive for, or what I’m really interested in is different – integrating different species, and not just focusing on one species.  I’m really interested in plastic-free and reduced plastic use, which is incredibly challenging, actually, when it comes down to getting started.  If I had disposable income from the inter-generational wealth, a very different story, which I don’t mean that to like – it’s not a job anybody who’s doing that now, it’s just a reality of the type of resources that it takes and the time to start in a more experimental mode.  But that’s what I’m interested in.  So right now, what I’m trying to figure out is a creative way to get started and get a foothold, I’d say.  And what I envision as a multi-sided, hopefully algae in oysters because that’s where my passion and experience is.  Farm sites/studios/political education/cultural education space as I imagine.  I’m also really interested in wild (inaudible) collection.  And I say that because it’s a good entry also into the other kind of motivating factor behind this vision, besides encompassing my interests and creating a space with conditions for flourishing for myself and for organisms and for other people.  It’s also something that I see as like an interruption or intervention, especially on the Damariscotta River in patterns of industrialization and what’s becoming like a – actually, a likely more entrenched kind of patriarchy on the river, whereas that actually wasn’t historically the case here.  And throughout this process, I’m especially interested in how can we – like how can my process of going through – a lease application going through now – the LPA application going through all of these logistics and bureaucratic processes, plus the embodied work of it all in labor, how can I document and move through that in a way that’s also collaborate and – for example, when it comes to indigenous rights and Wabanaki sovereignty, there’s no way – I don’t – I’m not aware of anybody who’s thinking in a decolonial mode who’s running a farm right now.  So I’m really interested in how can I go through this process and work with folks to address how we might handle that in a different way, how we might create or provide – well, not create or provide access, but enable and honor access and –  Yeah, I mean, (inaudible).  You know?  I can – just you talking about it, but in essence, I think the idea is creating an experimental, multi-sided – multi-sided and multi-purpose and collaborative non-traditional economic model.  A farm site that’s also kind of a direct action intervention space that is growing really high-quality organisms in a really ethical way, but also thinking with all of these political and cultural questions.

 

Q: [15:13] Right.  Oh, thank you.

 

A: [15:14] Yeah.

 

Q: [15:17] You’re thinking at night, you’re not just (inaudible).  (laughter)

 

A: [15:19] Oh, I’m thinking all the time.  (laughter)

 

Q: [15:22] Yeah.  You have any experience in the industry beyond directly harvesting itself and give some examples, like bookkeeping, bait or gear preparation, post-harvesting, processing, marketing, trade and advocacy community-based organizations related fishery (inaudible)?  (inaudible).

 

A: [15:46] No, I mean, all this – a few things that come to mind, but then maybe doing it again, I’ll see if I missed anything, because I will say, not just for myself, it’s very common to – I think especially for young folks, like piecing together seasonal work and piecing together, I mean, a lot of folks who maybe have food experience.  Like a lot of restaurant work.  So I’ve done a lot of work in restaurants in addition to this.  And actually, a number of people come to mind who are working full time in sea farming or fishing, and to our – like working as bartenders in restaurants on weekends.  For me, that would look like working front of house in emerging places, but the most directly related would be like farm store equity points.  So that’s really working with people with oysters in kind of a hard space.  Yeah.  But actually, the other thing is that while I was at the farm that I was most recently at, which is Boxum (sp?) Fine Oysters, I was working on and off the water, so I wrote a handbook.  I was working on sustainability certifications, social media, marketing, etc.  Sometimes while you’re on the water too, that’s like lunchtime work, or we call it after-work work.  So, yeah, definitely a lot of that type of bookkeeping, marketing kind of stuff, but that would be coinciding with while I was also physically working as a farmhand.

 

Q: [17:29] (inaudible).  And going jumping back to your research, are you ever in the field or is it mainly – what would that look like to you?

 

A: [17:39] Yeah, I mean, it has looked like being in the field at raw bars, shadowing like oyster farm tours.  And then, I’ll probably get back out onto the farm like next week or something, and it also looks like trying to navigate a lot of really complicated relationships around aquaculture narratives and aquaculture trajectories in Maine, because it is so polarized and because as a researcher, I have a more – my interest as a researcher don’t always align with the interests of researchers at – working on – I mean, not you mean as a whole, but industry-related research is not where my focus is.  So at the moment, I’m trying not to create a tower for myself – like an artificial tower for myself, but I’m also trying to be very careful about like the ways that I’m engaging with the commercial side, especially, and then also actually with research going on at like UMaine, for example, that’s a sea grant from the university.  So that’s just because I have this – I’m trying to do my best to honor and make the most of the perspective that I have from the university, and I am somewhat critical of some of the blurriness between industry and academia in my research.  So it’s put me in that kind of position where I am in the field sometimes, but I’m also trying to be very careful about that, and it’s a very short window of research so I have the opportunity to do that.

 

F: [19:34] Yeah, (inaudible; overlapping dialogue) decide.  I don’t know.  I was really struck with the way you described conceptionally the work you’re doing right now with your dissertation, and I’m curious if you could describe, I don’t know, the places, like the methodological places that comes from, or like what you’re drawing from, because I’m very interested in your point of view with it, and the way you’re approaching it which is really different, I think.

 

A: [20:01] I think – so, in terms of anthropology, it comes from visual anthropologies and practices in – that have been developed in material anthropology, things like object biographies, multispecies ethnographies.  And in particular, work on craft and skill.  Yeah.  So that’s kind of coming from that perspective, and also blending anthropologies of art.  So different forms of performance ethnography and more experimental ethnography practices, like sketching or walking, etc.  But used – like activated in this other way.  Like for me, I’m swimming instead of walking, but I’m drawing on a lot of ethnographies of walking.  Or with an object biography – part of what I’m working towards is if I’m tracing the kind of “commographication (sp?) process” of this organism to food object or food commodity, how can I do a different kind of object biography, kind of tracing material processes that allow this organism to become a commodity, but doing so in a way that rejects or resists or plays with some of those conventional ideas that are in supply chains and objecthood for foods.  But theoretically, it’s coming from a lot of places.  The one that I like to, I guess, highlight is blending my experience as a grower, and that being a very complex experience, and also being a very sensory experience with this position as a researcher.  So I’m really interested in the relationship between those forms of knowledge, so the type of knowledge that comes from being a grower or a harvester, and that particular form of embodied knowledge, and seasonal knowledge, and understanding of a perception of time, perception of care, etc., as a grower-harvester, and then how that – intersects with, can contradict some times, and also synchronizes with like the research and theoretical perspectives.  So, did I answer your question.  OK.  (laughter)

 

Q: [22:26] Yeah.  You kind of already touched upon this, but what is an average day of work look like for you?

 

A: [22:35] Can I answer in two ways?

 

Q: [22:38] Of course.

 

A: [22:40] OK.  While I’m doing my research, an average day of work is mostly by myself reading, and I might communicate with lots of people, and I might drive to a nearby restaurant or raw bar, or meet up with farmers after work, so like that’s two or 3 PM.  But my partner also works in sea farming, so he’s up at 4:15-ish.  So I’m not up that early, but I do try to maintain that schedule, in part, as part of my research, and part because that’s like (inaudible) my day to day.  So I’m up early doing a lot of reading and writing and trying to incorporate – I pay attention to the rhythm of aquaculture as it exists here.  Several famous medical – oyster mariculture – well, also just trying to write my dissertation.  But while I was on the sea farm, when I was out on the water, your day to day always look different, but the rough scaffolding is a 6 AM meeting at Schooner’s which is the marina in town, which is where the farm I worked at would go out for the day, and then heading out to the raft, so our raft was just off of Pod Island, and we would spend most of the day, if not all the day, on the lease either on the raft or in boats with a mix of top culture, bottom culture, and intertidal gear.  And then, of course, there’s errands, there’s unexpected events, there’s weather (laughter), there’s emergencies, there’s bathroom trips, all sorts of things.  But with that type of work, I would be on the water from 6 to 2 or 7 to 3.  And then, while I was also doing this more of the office work, I would come off the water and do that for an hour or two, sometimes longer.  So that was really exhausting kind of pace, and really – not very sustainable, but unfortunately super common, actually – especially for women, or at least in my experience, just because things like the type of labor that goes in – like the type of creative and intellectual labor that goes into marketing, for example, or social media, is very easy in this industry, in particular, I think, to underestimate, or to erase, or to say, oh, it’s just – it’s easy, you’ll just make a post.  And that’s just an example, but in reality, obviously that’s its own kind of animal and its own kind of labor.  And I know a number of young women or gender queer people who also do that type of labor.  And have gone to similar experiences. Yeah.

 

Q: [25:42] How do you feel your background, your identity shaped your work in the fishing sector, including how others perceive or treat you?

 

A: [25:52] It’s huge.  I – it’s completely shapes my experience.  I feel like a bit of a shape-shifter,, in terms of my background and identity, and also in terms of the work that I’m doing, as I’ve described, like moving between being a researcher, and a writer, and then being an employee, and then also representing the farms.  So going from being both simply a farm crew member to being the farm’s representative.  And then also working outside of aquaculture.  So I often feel like I’m shape-shifting in that capacity.  But then in terms of my identity, for example, my relationships with folks who I’ve met while I was working on the water, is completely shaped by, I think, how I was perceived and how I felt pretty much daily working with – working with men only for a lot of the time, actually, that I was on the water, that I needed to constantly prove myself, constantly mitigate my behavior, like alter my behavior.  Of course, being more concerned about what I’m wearing, how I’m talking, whether I’m perceived as capable, wanting to be seen as confident but also not being overbearing.  All of those classic kind of experiences.  But those were really heightened for me, especially because I didn’t have experience like driving boats.  So that was new for me, although at the same time I’ve been on – in and around the water my whole life.  And so when it comes to my background, even the fact that I don’t know how to drive a boat, there was all this baggage around that for me because I grew up on an island.  It’s very weird to for me to not know how to drive a boat and part of that is from my experience in my childhood where we didn’t have a boat.  The part that is also gendered in the sense that like a lot of boys and men who grow up my age, whose families didn’t have boats, know how to drive boats.  They know how to drive all different sorts of machinery and that’s because those opportunities were presented to them.  And yeah, and I also meet men and was working with men who have been driving boats since they were like two.  So obviously things are weighted in a different direction.  And I think that’s just a good – the boat is such a good kind of example of how weighted those experiences are, because it’s like if I make a mistake, which I do and I did, if I make a mistake, my credibility was questionable or my capacities were questioned or my like leadership skills would be in question, is how it felt.  Whereas when other people made mistakes, like we’d laugh about it.  And those stories are, they become stories on the river.  Yeah, I mean, I could keep talking about it.  I got off on a bit of a tangent about the boat.  But one other thing I’ll say about the boats is that often we’re coming in and out of the public landing, and so whether or not I am being perceived differently because of the way I present or because of my gender, and my age actually, coming in and out of the landing in Damariscotta, I don’t know if you saw it, but the launch is – so there’s the public parking lot and there’s the public landing. And then there’s the restaurant and then there’s apartment buildings and other restaurants.  So essentially you’re in this like fish bowl and there’s a sense of being completely on display.  And not only that, but other farmers are coming in and out from that location like throughout the day.  So when you’re docking the boat, for example, you have the sense that there’s eyes on you in all directions.  And honestly sometimes at the end of the day you get a text from somebody who had no idea they were watching you and they make a comment about how you dock the boat.  But that sense of being constantly scrutinized really shaped my experience.  And it’s something that I’m really wary of kind of going back into work on the water.  And it’s something that I like.  It’s so – it’s so malleable like it changes so much depending on the current makeup of the community.  But there are these like just deeply seated ideas for me in terms of how I was perceived and how I was treated based on my gender and also being queer presenting.  But that’s also a shape-shifting thing where I’m not always queer presenting and so that also shaped my experience.  Those realities are still just as present even if there’s – even if there’s a majority women and gender queer people on a raft, chances are the person who owns a business is still a middle-aged white man.  That’s statistically true on the river and chances are the managers are too.

 

So yeah, it is adaptable.  It does change.  But that was such a massive part of my experience coming into this field that it’s taking a lot of unlearning, and I think it’ll take a long time to not have that sense of someone looking over my shoulder.  To not be thinking about like simple, logistical things like where to go to the bathroom, and to not be wary of being sexualized all the time, which honestly wasn’t a huge part of my experience, but it is there.  And so – and the threat of it just in the world, of course, is there.  So like the threat and the feeling of – the combination of being scrutinized and being in a position where our bodies are kind of constantly on display and having enough encounters that are threatening enough that that’s always there, even if the folks I was working with for example, even if that wasn’t a problem with the people that I was directly working with.  I’ll let you ask another question before I just keep rambling.

 

Q: [32:48] Thank you for sharing.  How does your role in the fishing sector work with your family or caregiving responsibilities?

 

A: [32:59] Well, now it’s more balanced because, like I said, my partner works in on an oyster farm.  He’s a manager and he’s usually working – now it’s a little bit better but usually working nine to 10 hour days.  Like last summer 50 hour weeks.  And I mention that because when I’m not working on the water. and it’s just one of us, it’s easier to balance.  And I don’t have caregiving responsibilities for him, but just the shared caregiving of like living a life together is really challenging because being overworked essentially and exhausted all the time.  And combination of that – and also I have long term illness.  And so when I was working on the water it was really challenging to balance my own needs and – my own caregiving needs for myself.  It’s hard now.  It’s a little bit better, but that’s an interesting one because I actually think that the work itself is quite accommodating in terms of disability and abilities.  I think that working on the water in many different capacities can actually be a really accommodating space and a really adaptable space.  But the reality of working for, not necessarily corporate, but corporatizing businesses is different.  It’s constantly confronting – yeah, a contradiction between what one needs to do to care for oneself and like efficiency and productivity and business.

 

Q: [34:57] And things are always changing.

 

A: [34:59] Yeah and I will say also I don’t have any children at home and that’s not something that I’m – that’s currently a huge concern for me, but it’s something that I talk to my peers and friends about.  And it’s just interesting as a topic that comes up quite a bit in terms of trying to figure out like whether people want to do that, want to have children, and also how, and also these weirdly kind of valorized stories of like women who were pregnant and kept working while they’re pregnant and to what point they were still pregnant and still harvesting, or still pregnant and still sorting.  And that’s their choice of course, but it’s just interesting as like a narrative that occurs that valorizes – always valorizing more work at all costs. and treating those women as especially strong and capable, whereas honestly I don’t know if anyone has good family leave, or if it’s feasible for people to not be working at that phase.  The person that I’m thinking of who the story revolves around may disagree, but for me it’s something that has echoed while I think about that for my own future, and it’s something that I notice when I’m talking to my friends and peers.

 

Q: [36:29] Very interesting.  (inaudible).  I’m going to switch a little bit to questions of the open-ban (sp?) environmental changes.  Can you describe any changes in the marine environment you’ve noticed.

 

A: [36:42] Definitely.  The first thing that comes to mind is blue crabs because it’s the most obvious one and they’re so iconic.  In my time on the river we now see blue crabs, which is a very short amount of time.  That’s over the course of three-and-a-half years.  And it’s not that they weren’t there in the past, but not at all in the way that they are now.  And I say that as if it’s an exception, but honestly there have been a lot of changes. And then there’s the kind of – I think there’s a tendency to focus on specific species.  So for example, ones that concern if you’re working for a commercial farm like ones that concern the farm’s productivity or efficiency like green crabs and oyster drills, which green crabs have been an issue for folks for a long time.  But they’re always – the sense is that they’re kind of always getting worse especially as water has gotten warmer.  Oyster drills similarly, it’s not necessarily that we see or noticed more, it’s also about the range and new locations where they might be appearing.  At the same time tunicate sets which we would call biofouling.  I don’t have first-hand experience of this changing, but it’s something that we’re always talking about.  So for example running into someone who’s been on the river for decades, we might say, hey, we’ve noticed a set that seems a lot later than last year.  What do you think?  And more often than not people would say yeah this is the latest that it’s ever set, we’ve never seen this before.  Or they shared their experience of how it’s been in the past.  Water temperatures.  The water’s warmer, and that means that algae is blooming and crashing at different rates.  And I mean – I guess that I was going to say is there’s a tendency to focus on a specific species or a specific element like water temperature, or acidification, or green crabs.  But in reality it’s also just the holistic changes and the holistic kind of morphing of what was once a river or an estuary – sorry a river.  What was once an estuary that operated and lived in a certain way, breathed in a certain way and now doesn’t or not does so, you know, differently.  I think in particular of fishing.  So like lobstering doesn’t really happen the way that it used to on the Damariscotta.  I’m not super-knowledgeable about its history here, but every year it’s kind of pushing further and further back.  And that’s not – people have different opinions about that, but my understanding is it’s because there are no longer lobster that come up the Damariscotta the way they used to.  And then you could look at all sorts of different fish species.  Yeah, like stripers and sturgeon, and then there’s alewife run.  And then you could talk about eel grass.  So it’s kind of all of these different layers, but at least from my perspective and my – the way that I think about it, it is like holistically – it’s the holistic change that’s really fascinating to have observed in only three years.  And then it’s even more jarring for me when I go back to Casco Bay and to Peaks Island where I actually kind of usefully have this gap in time.            And I’m there thinking like where are the muscles?  Where are the crabs I used to find as a kid?  Where is the eel grass because there’s virtually no eel grass left.  That’s not statistically accurate but you know what I mean.  Yeah and so that also like those early experiences of what the bay or what the coast in Maine is like from my childhood.  Also inform my understanding of like what the norm should be in a place like this.  And so that’s been interesting for me because it definitely tunes my eye differently.  Like I remember a time where even in the mid-coast where we’d find Jonah crabs or rock crabs and fewer green crabs, or we were still kind of talking about green crabs as a new entity.  And that’s just no longer the case.  And it’s very rare to see a rock crab here for example, and oftentimes, I would say I would find one, and no it’s a rock crab, and people haven’t seen one before.  So that was something that they maybe didn’t even know what to – like how to recognize those species that I was so familiar with from my childhood in Maine.  Oh.  And I just wanted to mention the anomalies like the shark being in the river two summers ago and a whale. I’m just mentioning that because like there’s also this sense of unease I think like – even for folks who feel like they know this estuary with their eyes closed and they could tell you where they are from being underwater, these kinds of anomalies are really throwing that sense of knowing and that sense of place, just throwing it off and disrupting that.  And creating a sense of unpredictability and dis-ease, and by that I guess I mean unease.  Maybe there’s been a shark in the river in the past, but that was a really strange occurrence and it’s also likely not actually a strange occurrence or it won’t be in the future.

 

Q: [42:56] Wow.  The whale too.

 

A: [43:00] I know.

 

Q: [43:01] How –

 

A: [43:02] That was on –

 

Q: [43:03] – how they get whale out?

 

A: [43:04] I think it was a baby and it just kind of wandered.  And then I got so – when the whale appeared, like working up from down the river, Ryan, who was the farm manager I was working with, and I kept getting text messages from different people.  So the people who’s furthest down the river would send us a picture, and like, the whale’s here.  And then we get one from the next person who’s further up the river until it got up to us.  But I don’t know actually what happened with that.

 

Q: [43:32] Wow.  How do all those changes impact your work in the sector?

 

A: [43:37] I think the thing that – well because I’m not a commercial harvester of something like soft shell clams where that would completely reorient my lifestyle and completely reorient my relationship probably to the coast, it kind of like jump starts or adds momentum in some ways to my trajectory just because the way that I enter this work is through regenerative cultivation or through mariculture.  So it definitely adds like a political and social kind of motivation to the work.  But it also just affects developing a relationship and a sensibility around and with a place.  It’s a lot less stable when these types of changes are happening at this rate, and in many ways it’s like, that’s the way that I know how to relate to the sea and to the coast in general is with that sense of unpredictability, or also with the sense of – I don’t want to say decline because it’s not, but like that type of dynamic.  And that type of that type of dynamic I just mean like that rate and unpredictability of change, and then also just the reality of acidification for example.  That’s like all that I know – and so in my lifetime.  And so it definitely adds an element of – I don’t like a lot of the language around resilience actually, but it adds an element of constant adaptability, or an acceptance of the need for like constant adaptability.  And I would say it also probably aligns me with a lot of the kind of community development and coastal development work, and a lot of the attention around sea farming comes from this perspective, or comes from like the climate savior kind of narrative, which is just interesting to observe as it plays out.  Whereas the same is not true for our for lobstering or for other fisheries where they’re often placed on the other end of that debate – if it’s a spectrum, they’re kind of placed on the other end of the spectrum.

 

Q: [46:30] Is there anything you’ve done – you try in response to cope with or adapt to the changes?

 

A: [46:45] Well, thinking of the farm in particular, I know I didn’t talk about winters and ice, but that’s a huge – huge change.  So for example planning to harvest later into the year and planning to store equipment in different ways because the ice is changing.  That’s something that is kind of different every year and definitely impacts how I think about this coming year, because I’ll probably be back on the water in the fall, and there’s a lot of attention towards creating like year-round work in – in aquaculture.  And in an interesting way it’s almost like being facilitated by the fact that winters are lighter than they used to be and ice is different than it used to be, so there’s the possibility to harvest later into the year.  But that’s also causing some tension, and it’s not as simple as there’s no ice and therefore we can go out and harvest, because like the – it hasn’t changed the whole seasonality of farming practices.  I wonder if it will in the future, and definitely for the largest farms like Mook Sea Farm or Miss Gunga’s Bay/Dodge Cove.  They use a lot of indoor facilities which mean that they are harvesting year round and they are selling year round regardless of conditions or climate conditions.  But also just thinking about heat because I didn’t talk about heat. I don’t know what there is to say necessarily about adapting, but it just seems to be worse and worse every year.  And as far as like creating an environment that’s safe for people to be in – I mean, when you’re on a raft you’re standing in direct sun for eight or nine hours on and off of the boat with water reflection of course.  So people have different like personal strategies for it, but it was something that was really challenging for me last summer more so than in the past.  And it seems kind of minor, but I think it will also likely really change the way that we think about being on the water.  The same way that cold temperatures require pretty serious attention to how we’re dressing, and how much time you’re spending on the water, and the type of – the way that you’re moving in and out of – or on and around the water and in and out of boats.  I think the same will likely become true for heat and I also kind of experienced that.  Yeah.

 

Q: [49:43] When you say on a hotter day, does that change what you guys set up for work or are you just  –

 

A: [49:51] The issue is that it doesn’t or it didn’t in my experience.  And that means that people are in more risky environments or put in more risky scenarios.  And – while that isn’t necessarily about people’s identities, of course that also – the idea of being perceived as capable impacts when people like – I’ll just speak for myself because I should just do that.  On a really hot day I need to drink water and rest as most people do, but because I had this sense that I had to be kind of constantly proving my ability and strength, I was a lot less likely to take the rest that I needed, and to eat and drink what I needed, and also like use the bathroom which is actually a huge issue.  I don’t know if this has come up or other interviews, but huge issue in sea farming like on the Damariscotta in particular.  It’s perennially something that’s way more of a conversation topic than you think it would be.  But I just bring it up because like all of those basic care like tasks or that basic kind of relationship to care for one’s body.  When you’re in a position, or when I was in a position where I felt like I had to be proving my capacity all the time, and then you add an element of like extreme heat or extreme humidity or extreme cold, I put myself in risky scenarios and I strained my body a lot more than I needed to because of that.

 

Q: [51:47] Jumping back to the adaptations that you make to deal with the changes.  What does it mean it’s possible for you to make those adaptations?  For example, are there any resources, relationships, knowledge, training or organizations that drew on to respond?

 

A: [52:10] Yeah, I didn’t talk a lot about this so far, but the depth and variety of knowledge of this place of the estuary within or from a mariculture perspective, but also outside of that, just local knowledge of this place, is completely critical in trying to adapt.  And also in just understanding how things are changing.  Like I know I mentioned it with tunicates, but it’s also – ice is another good example.  There isn’t a resource to – available to figure out like what’s normal.  And so the sense of understanding local – a local perception of what’s normal, or what was normal to certain people at a certain time is incredibly important.  Same thing with blue crabs, same thing with green crabs.  Same thing actually with just the presence of aquaculture in general.  Same thing with wild harvesting, whether it’s oysters or clams especially, because that’s a really hot topic.  And then also just personally in the sense that you just can’t get very far here without relationships to other folks on the river.  So even the raft that I was working on I used to call it the Franken-raft, because there were probably at least five farms represented in the collage of gear that we had repurposed to create that raft.  And it wasn’t necessarily because the farm couldn’t afford to buy a new gear.  Part of it is like, it holds this history of how this particular farm came into being, and all of the different relationships that made it possible for that farm to exist as it does now.  The scale that it does now.  And a lot of that is unwritten and kind of underrepresented or kind of under appreciated and doesn’t really– it’s – a lot of it’s invisible.  And that’s also something that is challenging for folks who are new but also for women.  In fact, the two women on the river who I don’t want to s – I’m not sure.  So I’m not going to name them probably, but they are two of the folks who’ve been working in an aquaculture on the river for the longest as business owners.  Neither of them own the businesses anymore.  And neither of them have good relationships or good rapport with the current business owners.  Not necessarily of their businesses or their foreign businesses but on the river in general.  Like they don’t come to the bar after work.  They’re not – barely mentioned in local stories or in oyster farm tours.  Their names don’t really appear in contemporary articles on women in aquaculture and women on the Damariscotta River and things like that.    That’s a really interesting absence to me.  And I bring it up because they are these vast resources of knowledge, and I think – and also incredibly intelligent in what they’ve – in their relationship.  Like they each have a unique relationship to oysters and to the river itself.  And I want to know what they have to say.  I want to know what they think, for example, about seeing blue crabs, or about ice, or about predation in general, or changes in seasons and climate.  But there’s no route. They’re not they’re not accessible.  And there’s a lot of reasons why even for me as someone who knows a lot of people on the river.  And they’re not a part of the climate narratives like the Shellfish Growers Climate Coalition and other kind of groups of folks – groups of people organizing.  There are lots of women organizing across different types of mariculture and different fisheries.  But when it comes to the Damariscotta River and this local history, they’re pretty much completely absent from – from those conversations in a visible way.

 

Q: [57:25] Is that a choice they made or is that a reaction from the community?  Or maybe both?

 

A: [57:36] Yeah, it’s hard for me to assess because honestly, people speak highly of their knowledge but don’t speak highly of them personally.  And I can only imagine kind of their – why that might be.  So like what their experiences were like trying to do what they were doing in a really male-dominated industry.  Well, either as scientists or – and/or as scientists and as working in aquaculture.  And so they have reputations personally, which is really distressing to me I think, just because like – there’s so much bad behavior.  Like so many of the men in this industry, I’m sure, have been like just as unpleasant or have been like just as rude, and have also been just as kind or just as insightful or just as caring.  But what stuck for them has been this kind of narrative.  And I do feel it’s important to state because they are truly so absent from contemporary understandings of this river in particular.  And this river is – when people talk about the history of the mariculture in Maine, this is always used as a starting point without them, or with their names kind of barely mentioned, which completely throws off the course of what you think the history or trajectory of how oyster farming in particular has developed in Maine.  So I don’t know if that answered.

 

Q: [59:24] What is your biggest concern about the marine environment for the future of Maine’s coastal fisheries and aquaculture industries?

 

A: [59:32] Yeah, that’s a light question.  My biggest concern is that we won’t make the drastic changes that we need to make soon enough.  So my biggest concern is that as people in the state of Maine, that we will continue trying to appease and compromise – and whereas I think we need to be making drastic changes now.  That’s my first response. I guess my biggest worry is also like a loss of knowledge and loss of relationship as things change at such a rapid pace.  And without like a critical eye to that, to documenting.  Once an organism is gone, what do we do?  And I don’t think we’re having enough conversations.  It’s not just about extinction or about extirpation, but I just don’t think we’re having enough conversations about the kind of intangible or invisible forms of knowledge and relationship that shape people’s understanding of this place.  And then of course also shape people’s livelihoods, however they imagine that.  And I think we really need to have those conversations too.  And I just want to add the last thing, which is not – it’s not the least important, but equity is huge.  I mean, yeah.  I’m really concerned by a trend, like I mentioned on the Damariscotta River where you once had women, your own some of the most impactful or powerful businesses on the river, and those have been sold to men.  And it’s not just about their gender, it’s also about a trend towards more patriarchal forms of power, and a trend towards consolidating interests, and a trend towards commercialization.  Whereas what I would want and would hope to see is the opposite or how could we learn from that in the past and the way that that has happened, for example in like terrestrial agriculture, and do something different, not use that as a model.  And then continue to like intensify and extensify and further industrialize and corporatize the work that we’re doing.  And I just want to be careful there because I’m not suggesting that right now we’re at this phase of mass industrialization.  It’s more about the logic and structures and trajectory, and in particular what I’m concerned about is power in the way that patriarchy is operating within that trend.

 

Q: [1:02:34] If you could tell policymakers in Maine what the biggest priorities should be to help people adapt to this, what would you tell them?

 

A: [1:02:41] Access?  Access.  Yeah.  Physical access to coastal spaces, but it’s also access to historic knowledge, access to economic resources, access to land, of course.  And I say that, but knowing that I just – I can’t not think about indigenous sovereignty too.  So I’m not suggesting that like settler access would be the answer, but I think that means across the board.  So addressing access holistically.  So from indigenous rights and indigenous sovereignty first to also the fact that today there’s maybe two public access points on the Damariscotta River or three.  And the reality is when you go up and down the river, most of those houses for most of the year are empty, which means – and not the public access points, but that means like most of this river, which is not an exception at all, is owned by people who are only here for a few months of the year.  And I don’t I don’t think that – I’m not suggesting that creating a working water front on the whole river is the answer – conserving the whole river is the answer, but just allowing people our right to like access land and water – public land and water – is a huge, huge necessity here and across the whole state.  Yeah.

 

Q: [1:04:49] I’m going to switch to climate resilience strategies, focus questions.  Any purpose for (inaudible), any climate resilience or adaptation training or programs for the fishing industry or harvesting?

 

A: [1:05:03] I don’t know. I’m saying that because I really don’t know.  I participated in programs like aquaculture and shared waters, and programs that are collaborations between all the various different industry groups.  And I would actually consider those climate resilience and adaptation trainings, but not explicitly.

 

F2: [1:05:28] (inaudible) cut it really short, though.

 

Q: [1:05:30] Thank you.

 

F: [1:05:31] Thank you.

 

F2: [1:05:32] (inaudible) shortly.

 

A: [1:05:34] So sorry if I’ve talked too much.

 

Q: [1:05:35] Oh, no.

 

F: [1:05:36] It was so great.

 

Q: [1:05:37] Just enough.

 

F: [1:05:38] (inaudible) in 10 few minutes.  Maybe just move to hopeful vision after that.

 

Q: [1:05:44] OK.  OK.

 

F: [1:05:49] Thank you.  We’re just sorry, not to interrupt.  You are saying about your different experiences.

 

A: [1:05:53] No, just that I think – there are a lot of trainings and programs going on that aren’t explicitly about climate resilience, but they are about climate resilience.  So I think that’s important.

 

Q: [1:06:08] What is your hopeful vision for the future of Maine’s coastal fisheries?

 

A: [1:06:12] Oh, my hopeful vision.  It’s beautiful. I mean, it’s like diversified, diverse people and also our way of being with the ecology and space.  And it’s not – we’re not adhering to policies that create structures that promote industrialization or that promote like consolidation of interest and power.  My hopeful vision is also one where there is indigenous sovereignty.  Wabanaki sovereignty.  And participation also therefore in how we’re managing all public waters all across the state.  And in my hopeful vision, there’s collaboration and cooperation and adaptability.

 

Q: [1:07:15] Is there anything else you wanted to share with us?

 

A: [1:07:20] There’s probably so much I wanted to share.  I didn’t talk a lot about being in like a differently able and disabled body.  And I won’t go on now about it, but it is also something that shaped my experience.  And something that is inextricable from a lot of my beliefs about the type of work that I’m doing and also why I’m still drawn to working in sea farming.  It’s people I’ve – when I decided to go to grad school and to leave, people saw that as me saying that I didn’t want to like “make a career” out of aquaculture and there’s so much emphasis on this idea of like training folks for career in a traditional style of employment in this weird in between of like fishing and agricultural kind of law and traditions.  And in some ways they’re right because I don’t want a traditional “career” in aquaculture, but it is the way that I want to live my life.  And it is how I think about my livelihood.  And as much as I spoke more about the negatives or the like difficult impact of being in like a gendered body and sexualized body in the space and a disabled body.  At the same time that’s like why I love doing it because when – there’s also the possibility that it’s an incredibly empowering and accommodating and just like ecstatic kind of way of working.

 

Q: [1:08:59] Do you have any questions, Camden?

 

F: [1:09:02] No, so many but not now.  (laughter)

 

Q: [1:09:05] (laughter).  Well, thank you, Anna.

 

A: [1:09:06] Oh, thank you.  Thank you.

---