[00:00:00.0]

 

GK: The only thing you need to know is just don’t touch the table if you are so tempted. (RA: Ok) like if you are explaining something and go like this. I’ll be able to hear it. (RA: Got it) And, rolling. (laughter) If you could just say your name.

 

RA: My name is Robin Alden.

 

GK: Great and Robin I am curious what your history is when you came to the island for the first time.

 

RA: So I probably came where first, the summer of ‘67 as a child. Our family rented a house in Sunset for a month in August and so I spent a lot of time rowing around. We rented the house [John and Peggy Hughes?] owned, if that makes any sense down where the boat house is. When you drive straight down by the Sunset church and the garden that is there. I can’t think of what that road is.

 

[0:01:11.5]

 

GK: Yea, down to the beach.

 

RA: Right exactly. (GK: Yea) The boat house is the first thing you come to and then there is the farm house there. That’s where we rented. My father taught school in Boston. He always took jobs along the coast in Maine in the summer so that he could afford to bring his family to have a vacation, which we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do so. He had been working on Hurricane Island, which he was part of founding for June and July. In August, we rented this fellow teacher’s house. We were there and I spent a whole lot of time rowing. I was a 15 year old and it was really good to be out on my own between [Sheepshead and Mill] all that area. Then, we went back and had that school year and my father died the March after that so it was a kind of a touchstone place. (GK: wow) Last time, we spent a lot of time together.

 

[00:02:30.2]

 

RA: Then I came here on a year off from college. I had done two years at Yale in the first class of women at Yale. It was intense. I felt as if I didn’t really know why I was there. I decided to move to Maine for a year and air myself out and figure out what I really wanted to use this education for. Another fellow teacher from the same school had just recently moved up. [Lori Adams] who you may have known. She was a potter. She was married to an architect and they had just moved here full time. I was going to be her potter’s apprentice, but her husband, [Bob Adams] who was notoriously late on everything as an architect and contractor had not built her kiln yet. So she didn’t need any kind of helper. I needed some kind of work and ended up working at [Island Manages?] as a freelancer because that’s really what I knew how to do was write.

 

[00:03:50.9]

 

GK: What year was that?

 

RA: That would have been the fall of ‘71. I had been on Hurricane from late August through November closing the island up and working there. I moved to South Brooksville with two guys and one of their wives working on rebuilding the Nathaniel Bowditch, the schooner, which was just rebuilt last year. Re-rebuilt and renamed back to her original name, which I can’t think of. It’s something like Lucinda, anyway. I lived in the South Brooksville community down here which launched my interest in fisheries and whatever. The next year I lived in the Sand Beach farm house that everybody who has ever moved to this island has lived in.

 

GK: The main house?

 

[00:05:00.6]

 

RA: No, not the main house, the little addition.

 

GK: Oh. The little addition.

 

RA: Yep.

 

GK: That’s great.

 

RA: Froze my tail off. (laugh)

 

GK: What about fisheries attracted you? What brought you to that?

 

RA: So, as I started to do freelance articles for the paper, what really struck me was the paper covered shore based things. The chamber of commerce, selectmen’s meeting, school board but this was a fishing town. For me who had been brought up as, I mean, I was a child of the 60’s. I believed in right and good and environment and working people. This was like the perfect business because you have to have a clean environment and you have to treat the environment well if you are going to continue to have a fishing industry. All kinds of incredible people that I was talking with were using the natural world and using their brains to make a living. Something clicked for me. The other thing that happened, that was essential in that equation was the need for justice. Fishermen would talk to me about their perceptions of what should happen. Nobody was listening and nobody was respecting what they knew. That became my life’s work.

 

[00:06:53.6]

 

GK: What did you see from those early conversations? What was relationship with fishermen to the environment that you were encountering?

 

RA: What I was encountering was that I was overwhelmed with how much they knew. I probably wouldn’t say that today because technology has overwhelmed a lot of what was formally called local ecological knowledge or whatever. Back then when you didn’t have electronics to tell you where you were, when you couldn’t get back to the same place in the ocean unless you had your senses on high alert, knowing not just triangulating by sight but smell and the way the currents worked and listening and all those senses. That was how people found fish or found product. The other thing about fishing that really struck me early on that different fishermen make their living in really different ways. Some people make it because they can think like the critter they are chasing and figure out and they are good observers. Some people make it because they make really smart investments. They don’t buy a boat when they don’t need it or they do buy the right boat that’s going to make something possible. The same thing is true not just boats, it’s engine technology, when to stop fixing something and get something new or when not to get something new and keep fixing it. Some people were really good at managing their money and they may not have been the best fishermen in the world but they ended up handling what money they got well. Then of course it’s a family affair so the nature of your relationship with your wife, back then it was all wives, how that wife’s relationship was to business decisions, taking care of money, how solid that relationship was, how engaged wives and children were. That was all part of the fabric of how people succeeded. It was really different. You could have somebody in a bad marriage who goes fishing all the time who does very well or you could have somebody in a good marriage who has a lot of support and makes great decisions and do really well.

 

[00:09:47.4]

 

GK: Yea, there was no real pattern to this is how you succeed.

 

RA: There’s no cookie cutter. Yea (GK: yea) yea.

 

GK: The term local ecological knowledge wasn’t really a thing at the time.

 

RA: No it wasn’t. My father had a big effect on me. I grew up with him. He was a history teacher but was an amateur naturalist. We spent a lot of time walking. He taught me all the birds and the plants in Northern New England and was an observer. Birding is like hunting. You are calming yourself and you are listening and observing. That’s why fishermen’s knowledge resonated with me so much because here is somebody who is using that kind of process to make a living. It’s magic. I mean it’s creating wealth and if you take care of the environment you can do it forever.

 

[00:11:12.9]

 

GK: Did you have conversations with people that reflected a need to take care of the environment? Was that sort of something people were saying in the ‘70s?

 

RA: Yes, what they were saying was that the fishery managers were wrong (laugh). But sometimes they were saying the fishery managers were wrong because, not because they were telling them not to do something and they wanted to it. Sometimes they [the fishermen] were saying they shouldn’t take clams that are smaller than 2 inches. It was the fishermen who were on the side of conservation or observing that something was important. I recognize it wasn’t all like that but there was a bunch of that. That has been true throughout my career. There are always people who sit in the coffee shop and say, “Well they ought to do this” and often that is very sensible advice. Not always. (laughter)

 

[00:12:25.2]

 

GK: But sometimes. Yea, the fisheries management. When did you start to become knowledgeable or interested in what was happening?

 

RA: It was a really interesting time. I came here in the fall of ‘71 and by May of ‘72 I had gotten the idea of starting [Commercial Fisheries News], which was then [Maine Commercial Fisheries] and by September of ‘73 launched the first issue in partnership with [Mat Barrows?]. That was the time when things had been flattened by the foreign fleets. The Gulf of Maine was just devastated by what had happened with the foreign fleets coming over and so there was a huge push to pass a 200 mile limit, which has brought us all the federal management. There was very little federal management at the time. There was state management but again not particularly pervasive or heavy handed and certainly not for all species. There were, one of the interesting things is, there weren’t very many types of fishing licenses and one of the things we have been talking about at Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries for the last few years is as more management-

 

(sound/boat revving)

 

[00:13:57.9]

 

GK: That’s a loud one! It’s the sounds of Stonington. (laughter)

 

RA: It’s the sounds of Stonington. Try it at 4:00, 3:00 in the morning when you are sleeping upstairs. (GK: Oh my gosh) It’s not just going down. It’s also the sternmen’s wives going back up.

 

GK: It’s amazing. I know. Yes.

 

RA: Sorry. As management has gotten more intensive they have created more licenses. There is now all these different scallop licenses and shrimp licenses. Back then when I started, there was a commercial fishing license and a lobster and crab license. There may have been a shellfish license for clams but people are much more pigeon-holed into things. There was no limited entry back then so there was a huge push to get the 200 mile limit passed at the federal level. Once I started the paper I started following that issue and then got to know of the people of the fishermen who were lobbying, the fishermen’s advocates lobbying that. I got into the congressional process really pretty quickly. That was passed in ‘76 and implemented ‘77.

 

[00:15:24.4]

 

RA: Then, that was like a whole new world. Suddenly, there were federal fisheries management councils and a very complex relationship between the National Marine Fisheries Service and the fishery councils. My career had taken some jags. In ‘75 I left to work at the University of Maine. First doing a year of interviewing people around the state in an iterative process saying, “How can Maine take advantage of the 200 mile limit?” and that was what started the Maine Fishermen’s Forum.

 

GK: Wow. How did that go? What was the trajectory there?

 

[00:16:24.9]

 

RA: Jim Wilson. I was working for Jim Wilson doing the interviewing. Do you know him?

 

GK: I don’t think so. Have I met him? I don’t think so.

 

RA: Oh my gosh. Oh boy. He’s a quiet sleeper of brain power behind a lot of this community-based management and stuff. (GK: Wow) He’s an economist but a very unusual economist at the University of Maine. I had met him by interviewing him and would say we started talking then and we never stopped talking. (laugh) He’s a good friend. He has a house on Isle au Haut. He’s retired now and they live there about 10 months, 8 months. A long time. He’s right in Head harbor. They live in Old town in the winter. Anyway, I was working with Jim. We were doing these interviews and getting ideas for things that should happen. Then as part of that Grant we decided to bring everyone we had been talking to together to see what happened. It was Jim’s concept that it should be a social event as well as a meeting. So we started the first forum. For me, the way I got the idea for the paper was that I was sitting at a meeting that I was covering for [Island Advantages] in Castine. It was about marine resources. A fisherman from South Bristol was talking to the new commissioner of marine resources. They were talking about shrimp and they could not hear each other. The new commissioner was a shrimp biologist, a very hands-on guy. The shrimp fishermen had been catching shrimp for ages. They were absolutely just missing each other. Finally, the fisherman said, “I’ve got paint on my T-shirt I bet you’ve never had paint on your T-shirt” and I said, “What’s needed is a newspaper that brings this each of their worlds into the other person’s world in a non-threatening way.” So it arrives on the kitchen table and it arrives on the desk. That was the initial concept for what is now Commercial Fisheries News.

 

[00:19:09.5]

 

RA: The forum, since I had to step away from the paper, was kind of my next expression of the same thing. Trying to bridge this gap and having people trying to hear each other and to have better science and better policy come out of it. After we started the forum it was such an amazing success, we needed to have another one. I went back to school at University of Maine part time and did part time working for Sea Grant and ran the forum for years. Then, the way things worked out, the paper was about to fold in ‘78 and I came back to try to rescue it and brought the forum back with me and ran the forum for a number of years through the paper and spun it off to an industry-based group.

 

[00:20:10.4]

 

GK: Spun the paper off?

 

RA: No, spun the forum off (GK: Oh, the forum) Yep. They have kept it going since.

 

GK: Oh wow and in that time had you met Ted in that time?

 

[00:20:30.3]

 

RA: I met Ted first. When I was working for Sea Grant and running the forum in ‘77 to ‘78 kind of in there. I was also working with a group of fishermen called the Stonington Fishermen’s Association here. Obviously, here. It was a group of ground fishermen who I was trying to help figure out how to interface with this new federal management system. We would meet on Sunday afternoons and Ted would show up with his wife. I was married too. I could never figure out if he was biologist or a fisherman. He just came at problems slightly differently. He was fishing out of Bass Harbor at that point. The answer was he was both. We didn’t actually- I mean its ridiculous how we got together (laugh). Two fishermen friends and one of them [ (name) and Susan Jones], Susan was working for me at that point at the paper. She was the managing editor of the paper. They decided that when we both got divorced in the mid-eighties that we were made for each other. It took a whole spring of work (laugh). It just made our lives. It’s just the best thing that ever ever ever ever happened to either one of us.

 

[00:22:13.4]

 

GK: It really was sort of a mind match in a way.

 

RA: Totally. I mean we come at problems completely differently and we enjoy it so much. We have contributed both of our work. We wouldn’t have done what we have done since the ‘80’s without each other.

 

GK: Yea, when you were doing that Stonington Fishermen’s Association, that’s what it was called when you were- (RA: Yea)- Did you ever encounter the “out of place” (feeling) as like a young woman in this work?

 

[00:23:04.2]

 

RA: So what I always say is that, first of all working for the paper both Advantages and Commercial Fisheries News, it was the perfect acceptable role for a young woman and an outsider because what I was asking people was to tell me what they knew. That’s a totally acceptable role. (laugh). I always felt out of place, because I am. That’s what I chose. Then the much tougher thing that happened and I’ve never recovered from it and was asked to be commissioner and became the person making the decisions. Then, that’s not an acceptable role.

 

GK: Yea, it almost seems like it’s an out of place thing in your timeline. Obviously, it happened but it was surprising in some ways.

 

[00:24:28.0]

 

RA: It was stunning. It first came up when [McCurren?] was governor. That would have been eight years before. I was amazed that somebody would think of me because I was just some person running a newspaper. What the newspaper provided for me was the opportunity to learn really fast and just ask questions and ask questions. Because we were covering all of Maine fisheries and eventually all of New England fisheries- this is a little jumbled but when I went back to the paper in ‘78 by ‘80 we had changes from Maine Commercial Fisheries to Commercial Fisheries News in order to have the New England wide market. That was when there was a huge building boom for boats for this big Scallop fleet in New Bedford. Everybody was building boats because it was the recovery of the fishery, so called, after the foreign fleets had decimated it. There was a little pulse of real building so we were trying to take advantage of that opportunity for advertising.

 

GK: Right. Yea

 

[0:26:01.6]

 

RA: So, I am just trying to remember where I was headed.

 

GK: You were learning a lot by doing that.

 

RA: Okay yes so what I ended up doing was being not siloed. I really knew a lot of people. I knew the business. I knew the shoreside business. I didn’t know everything about it but I spent a lot of time hanging out with cigar smoking fisher dealers in Portland. I recognize when [McCurren?] considered me that that was not crazy but I wasn’t even thinking about doing it. Then when [Angus King] asked me, that was shocking. I had not been involved in his campaign at all and his transition team approached me basically I was the first candidate after an interview. I realized that I had been writing editorials for 20 to 25 years saying ‘what ought to happen is this’ so I was kind of the fisherman getting out of the cafe. So it was like, “If that’s what you think, put your body on the line here and make some things happen” Change is always hard and people in authority are often resisted. The other thing is there is a very unrealistic understanding of how much power those positions have. So you get blamed for everything.

 

GK: When really you are just another cog in the wheel in a way.

 

[0:28:02.5]

 

RA: Right. You make decisions at a given time. One example is, I am very proud of it but it is also very imperfect, we put a trap limit and limited entry into the lobster fishery in a way that I felt would turn this into a corporate fishery. We used an apprenticeship approach and we put zones which limits the mobility of fishermen and was meant to mimic the territorial nature that had kept lobstering a community scale fishery. A lot of complex things that happened all at once as a big mosaic. Amazing to get through the legislature. Just amazing. A lot of fishermen support for different from different parts of the coast. A lot of support from here. A lot of people who went up and lobbied for it. Since then, a number of things have happened. If you look at the fluctuation in the lobster landings, I got done in ‘96 or 7 and that’s right when the lobster landings start to go right up. That has changed the fishery dramatically. Fishermen decided that they wanted to have the right to control entry, the in-out ratio in each zone. I would have opposed that tooth and nail, but I was out. They did that, which created a situation where the waiting lists in zones which I never wanted. I just wanted to slow down the pace of how fast people can get in but I wanted there to be a pathway for everybody to get in.

 

[00:30:16.0]

 

GK: How did that end up happening that there were the wait lists?

 

RA: The original legislation you had to put two years of your life into an apprenticeship and you had to know something about fishing in that area and it was zone specific. The idea there is if you have a change in lobster population and it goes up and everybody starts rushing in you still have a two year damper. If there’s more lobsters it probably means that there is more room for more people but not on a gold rush basis, so that would dampen that. It would ensure that people knew how to fish and would respect the rules. Knew how to fish meanings, knew how to fish with the tide the right way, which way people set their gear, not setting across people, all that kind of thing that had become a problem in the southern part of the state. Particularly, in the deep river areas around Booth bay and the midcoast area, where there is not a lot of space. You really have to behave on how you set your gear in order for other people to fish. We fended off the feds, we fended off the other states from coming in and imposing stuff on us and we limited traps which were escalating in some parts of the coast between two and three thousand traps per person. We did it in a way that cut across so everyone had to have the same. You could fish less but there’s a maximum cap to everybody.

 

[00:32:08.1]

 

RA: Fishermen who felt entitled because they had been fishing two or three thousand traps wanted to have people who had been fishing more get more, which is the traditional way fishery managers make allocation decisions. It’s the reason we don’t have any groundfish access in part of the coast because we hadn’t been catching groundfish. It had already collapsed when they gave out the rights so they said you don’t get any. They people who fished double crews out of Portland and New Bedford in order to build up their catch records got the most. I opposed that. Fundamentally opposed to privatizing and making money be the entry access point for fisheries. I’ve opposed that right from the 70’s on. Opposed limited entry when you can and figure out how you handle entry in a way that doesn’t result in a scarce good that turns into a market because when you do that the shoreside processors will end up owning the access rights. Even if they can’t legally, they will end up controlling it like a company-store type thing. You’ll lose your community fishery. There was a lot to that lobster law. One of the key decisions was that there was going to be the same number of traps for everybody. The fishermen in the Maine Lobstermen’s Association and the Downeast Lobstermen’s Association went along with that. That has been a fundamental piece of lobstering ever since.

 

[00:34:00.7]

 

RA: You asked how did we get to an in-out ratio for the zones. There were a lot of people who felt hurt by the legislation because they had been fishing more than 1200, we are now down to 800, but they had been fishing more and they watched people who had been fishing less building up to the cap. Human nature being what it is I had fishermen friend in town who had been fishing 400 said, “Robin you know I am going to fish up to 1200 now because everyone else going to be and there’s going to be more traps in the water.” That is exactly what happened. Fishermen could have controlled that if they had been willing to bring the trap limit down which is one of the [] they created in that act. They could never make that governance decision. As more traps went into the water, there was a feeling that there were more people in the business. Fishermen were saying, “We have to control this” so they went to the legislature to say we’ve got to limit how many apprentices get through the apprenticeship program and we’ll put an in-out ratio and each zone had the right to create their own. In zone B next to us they have a 1:8 ratio which means it’s almost impossible for somebody to ever get in.

 

GK: Is that right next to us towards?

 

RA: The East.

 

GK: Yup yup.

 

[00:36:01.4]

 

RA: So what that did-

 

GK: Just hold on I am going to pause you

 

[00:36:02.4]

 

[Pause]

 

GK: Alright

 

RA: The other thing about having the in-out ratio (is that) it made the zone lines fishing line. There never had been fishing lines before and I had said to people “These are voting lines but not fishing lines” after I left the legislature that passed this additional law that allowed the in-out ratio, which the de facto result is that they became fishing lines. People are still mad at me because they weren’t fishing lines and they became fishing lines. That was such a lesson for me that in a democracy you have never promise anything in the future because you don’t know what is going to happen. The time would come.

 

GK: Right. Yea.

 

[00:37:03.2]

 

RA: But you can say what you intend.

 

GK: It can all change. Yea.

 

RA: Yea.

 

GK: Yea. Was a lot this coming from a fear that the lobster industry would become privatized and commercial and that you would see corporatization ?

 

[00:37:33.5]

 

RA: There you have a lot. Part of the disconnect between managers and fishermen and biologists and whatever is that when you have been involved in other fisheries and seen what has happened, you know what is possible. When you are fishing out of your own town, it never occurs to you that this could happen. I started to have a broader background and understanding of how fisheries have gone historically. Human beings have ruined fisheries for a millenia. There is really good evidence of overfishing in the pre-european days. It’s a big problem. It is sort of an existential problem of, how do human beings live within the bounds of an ecosystem? Which is why I have loved it so much.

 

[00:38:43.7]

 

RA: The impetus for all those lobster laws was that technology allowed this trap escalation and Maine had 7,000 lobstermen and we were in collaborative management with both federal government outside three and other states to make similar lobster laws in state so that the market would function. So we didn’t have different size limits for example, which makes everything unenforceable. The professional fishery managers in other states and at the federal level were saying, “This is nuts, you’ve got 7,000 people fishing lobster that can fish any number of traps they want. They are fishing 3,000 traps in Casco bay per person. You have got to do something. You are not taking care of the public trust.” Then there were different parts of the coast that were really upset about this. That was the impetus for doing something. My fear was that anything we did was going to put a price on a license. Let’s say you just cut it and say there is only going to be 7,000 lobstermen in Maine then it becomes a limited good and people say, “ Well I can’t get in. I want to buy Joe’s license.” and that sounds very reasonable. A market is a good way to allow things to equilibrate but if and we were being told by the Canadian lobstermen, “If you do that, Joe Blow with capital is going to start buying up licenses and pretty sure you’re going to be a sharecrop fisherman.” You don’t think of that because that’s not part of your life but it is going to happen. It’s happened all around the world. There is a huge body of counter economics and political science being written that was counter to the mainstream idea that privatization is good.

 

[00:41:04.0]

 

GK: Right, I was even at that, on Monday, what was that?

 

RA: The seaweed? (GK: Yea) I didn’t go. What was it like?

 

GK: It was very surprisingly awful in the sense that [name] was – do you know her? She is part of the [Tenet’s harbor] lobster co-op kind of silvery hair maybe in her fifties, head of the aquaculture co-op and outreach director for Canadian company, which is wholly problematic. I don’t think she should be doing this job. She’s going to get in trouble with everybody she is working with for sure. It was her and then they had this biologist who was from Acadian Sea Plant Company. Acadian Sea Plants sent their own biologist to the meeting to explain why this rockweed harvesting, specifically the mechanical, was good. It was all over the map. The scientists presented and then just stopped talking, didn’t answer any of the scientific questions fielded to them, [Mera?] was the one saying to a question, “Well, I don’t know. We don’t have enough data on these mechanical harvesters to know that yet.” There was a lot of that. Then you had this woman Robin.

 

[00:43:07.3]

 

RA: [Hadlock Sealy?]

 

GK: Amazing. She’s amazing. She’s intense.

 

RA: She’s intense. She is not always real.

 

GK: No, she was definitely on this side. (laughter)

 

RA: Way out there!

 

GK: Way out but it was good because…

 

RA: It raised those issues.

 

GK: It raised those issues and they had no answer. She didn’t talk very much but they would say something about the regrowth of rockweed and she would just pipe up and be like, “Actually, that’s not true. It’s actually this growth rate that we found.” In [Penobscot bay] or wherever she is. It was wild. The thing I kept thinking about and everyone at the meeting brought up a lot, one guy was like, “Listen” I don’t know who he was, he said, “We are not trying to drive you out of town but we live in a place where we have seen resources be collapsed. You are sitting here saying you don’t know what the effect is going to be, then you need to figure it out.”

 

[00:44:25.0]

 

RA: Was this a fisherman?

 

GK: It was a fisherman. (RA: Good) I don’t know who it was.

 

RA: Good.

 

GK: It was good. Then another fisherman was saying that he has seen baby lobsters in rockweed. They said, “No way, definitely no baby lobsters in rockweed” and he was like, “I’ve seen adult lobsters in rockweed.” (laugh) So everything they said was countered and then also a lot of people brought up that you can’t expect to come to this town and you are taking this resource and selling it and bringing it to Canada. You are not allowed to harvest rockweed in Canada. It was wild. It was really wild. I was like “Oh my god”

 

RA: I thought about going but then I said, “You got to stay out of it Robin. You got to stay out of it.”

 

(laughter)

 

GK: Yea. I think, unfortunately, some folks didn’t understand MCCF’s role as a (RA: as a moderator) host and moderator.

 

[00:45:40.4]

 

RA: Oh dear.

 

GK: I think that for some reason that was a little unclear.

 

RA: Oh dear.

 

GK: Not for me, but for me but for people who don’t know. It’s [Polly’s?] brand new.

 

RA: It’s [Polly’s?] brand new. Yup

 

GK: There was just a lot of confusion.

 

RA: If it had been me, it still would have been trouble because I lost my local contact, every contact I have here, almost, except the older people that I worked with.

 

GK: Because of the DMR stuff?

 

RA: Yea, It’s really the price of leadership is not a small thing.

 

GK: Yea, with [Perk?] and MCCF, were you a quieter leader in that role? Or how was that?

 

[00:46:28.9]

 

RA: I became quieter because I was just trying to build an organization that could carry this work on and I tried to build other people like [Pat and Carla?] into being the face of things. For a lot of people I am still mistrusted. Ted had the same thing with the [McCarther’s?].

 

GK: Once that happened. Yea. Yea. It’s rough. I don’t want to use the word ‘judgemental’, but it’s a one and done type of thing. (RA: Yea) Is that just here in Stonington or is it all over?

 

RA: It’s just here in Stonington. There are a lot of fishermen what I did as commissioner but most of them are aging out now. It’s very interesting with age you just become irrelevant. People feel that I lost the connection to the industry and all that stuff. It was real. Who did [Stevie Robins?] call when hauled in by the Canadians? He had one phone call and he called me.

 

[00:48:04.7]

 

GK: Yea.

 

RA:I know what I doing and what I know I am confident in. What my sadness is that I couldn’t continue to do it. It is so time consuming to do the relationship maintenance.

 

GK: Yea and also I think there is a big, having talked to people, of course Andrew [Goff?] and just that feeling of the sentiment of respect and gentlemen. It’s very different.

 

RA: It is very different than the entitlement exists right now.

 

GK: Yea. (RA: Yea) I think people look at the industry now and think ‘why do we have limits at all?” or a couple years ago (RA: Right. right) they might have said that.

 

[00:49:09.6]

 

RA: Human beings. Traditionally some of the trickiest time in the industry is during abundance. We had a big bloom of haddock and all of a sudden we had the foreign fleets here and we had this big bloom of lobsters and we can do no wrong. There were just more lobsters every year. There is no feedback loop happening.

 

[00:49:42.8]

 

[Pause]

 

GK: What was the intention with [PERC and MCCF]? What is that legacy for you?

 

RA: For me, MCCF is an institution that is going to exist to be the facilitator of fishermen taking charge of the future of their industry. You only get to work on things when there is an opening of reason. The seaweed thing could be a great thing to work to be able to start to think through ‘Okay what is important to us? Oh. Ecology is important to us. What does seaweed do anyway? Oh, How do we find out about that? Oh well what do we want do we want jobs here? What kind of jobs do we want? And what knowledge do we need to continue to do this or persuade so and so to do what we want? How does the system work? Who regulates this? Oh its not the feds. Oh. What does the town have to say? What does the state have to say about it?” So that is what MCCF exists to do because I was on federal council twice. Once as a public member form ‘79-82 and once as commissioner as the designated state director. I think federal management has been a near-close to total disaster. I completely agree with fishermen who say federal management has been the death of us.

 

[00:51:30.6]

 

GK: This is moving a little bit. Not sure what happened.

 

RA: I might have bumped it. (laugh) Sorry.

 

GK: It’s okay. Yea.

 

RA: The mistrust and the anger is, if anything, deeper than when I started. What I recognize is that I have made a big difference. The paper existed for many years as a management, sort of, bible keeping people up to date daily. It has changed its role recently. The forum is still a very constructive thing. MCCF and the other groups they work with have the whole idea of local ecological knowledge. Just tons that has happened that is constructive but fishermen are still angry, alienated and many times for good reason. Many times the education system doesn’t give us critical thinking, doesn’t give us exposure to wrestling with these problems. It’s like “I have an answer. I know what it should be and you do it and if you don’t I hate you.” Instead of “God this is a thorny problem and yea, that would hurt the old people. This would hurt the young people and we need fishermen to come in this town but how can we?” The complexity is boggling and most fishermen don’t want to grapple with that or don’t have the experience of grappling with things that way. They are incharge of their boat and they make decisions and they have outcomes that come very quickly that are tangible. This requires people and knowledge and the knowledge takes years to develop.

 

[00:53:26.4]

 

GK: Yea

 

RA: What I realized is that this vision of a sustainable community-based fishery is really important. It’s more important in climate change than it is before climate change was as fast as it is because the changes are going to be observed locally. The frontline observers are going to be much more important. We needed an institution to carry that idea on. The last, basically, half of the 14 years that MCCF has been going on I have just been trying to build an institution that would carry that work on without me.

 

[00:54:16.8]

 

GK: The folks who are on the ground and that are sort of the face like [Pat?] you are giving those folks sort of the role of that. It seems like those people who are willing to deal with all of that, talking to people and dealing with interfacing (RA: Yea yea) trying to be representatives but not part of a government organization

 

RA: No not at all. It’s really facilitating fishermen getting involved in science and governance. If I had had my way the lobstermen councils would have much more effective local government entities. I had a major disagreement with one of my employees who was a former fisherman at DMR. I wanted to have training, have 15-20 minutes at every lobster zone council meeting, because you always have turnover. What’s an agenda, why do we have an agenda, how do take notes, what’s important to take notes about, how do we vote, how do we resolve things, how do you deal with people? Just to start becoming like a selectman’s board. DMR never engaged in that kind of work. I have often said MCCF is like the civil society infrastructure. Its starting at the most basic, how does government work? How do we get along with each other? How do we move our disagreements? We know how to do disagreements on the water, how do disagreements in person? It’s just grassroots work and you never do it in a linear way, you have to do it when a leader bubbles up or when an issue bubbles up when people are suddenly needing to solve a problem. You learn by doing you don’t learn by teaching.

 

[00:56:35.5]

 

GK: Do you think there are any communities along the coast that have a really strong leader within the fishing community?

 

RA: Yea. The communities really differ in character. Yea

 

GK: So some of them have that.

 

RA: Yea.

 

GK: People who are willing to work

 

RA: Step up and be the MLA. It’s always hardest to work locally.

 

[00:57:09.3]

 

GK: I think, at least my impression of Stonington, which I love, but the impression that I have now is it’s a lot of keeping to yourself at this point. People are making so much money. Its become so much of, it’s seems to me, to have become nervous or something.

 

RA: That’s a great description. I agree with you. I think people are more and more and more nervous. Yup. Yup.

 

GK: When you talk to the older generation it’s just so different. Andrew was telling me he was having trouble finding someone to go (RA: stern people). Yea.

 

[00:58:04.2]

 

RA: Well and that’s the older fisherman’s dilemma because you aren’t going as often and you aren’t making as much money. You can’t take a sternman. Ted loves going by himself and it was great when he decided he wasn’t going to find anybody anymore. He just started going by himself. Then recently there were too many lobsters to do that. Banding was killing him. I have been going with him on the weekends. He took a 76 year old woman for last two seasons and its been wonderful. She’s not looking to get rich and if you are in your 20’s and strong. You get on one of those boats that’s going to get you a lot of money. Andrew is left out.

 

GK: Yea. Yea. I was very surprised by that.

 

[00:59:00.2]

 

RA: We have been through this cycle. Then you end up trying to work for your sternman and you push yourself to go when you shouldn’t be going because you have to give them day’s pay to the sternman. Its a real dilemma.

 

GK: You say you’ve been through that? You feel like you’ve seen this happen?

 

RA: For Ted. (GK: Yea). We have definitely been through it. Yea. Yea.

 

GK: Yea. Are you feelings on the industry that those limits and what happened has really protected it?

 

[00:59:40.3]

 

RA: So you had this lobster spike and it is not overfishing. It’s just more lobsters. You’ve had this huge jump in abundance. If there wasn’t owner-operator, which I didn’t mention before, which is a pivotal piece of this, plenty of guys here would have said, “I can make twice as much if I get two boats and hire a captain.” “Oh I can make three times as much if I get three boats.” We would have had lobster fleets. If the access was limited and for sale, that access would have been bought up by people who thought that that was a good idea. Everyone on the boat would have been a journeyman or skipper instead of a owner or operator. We would have lost what we have left of the obeying the laws. All that kind of thing. When you are a hired captain you are told how much to bring in, and you bring it in. Otherwise you don’t have a site. There’s always another person who is willing to do whatever it takes. That’s the difference between a corporate fishery and an owner-operator fishery. There’s no consequence for breaking the law for the owner. There’s only consequence for the person on the boat.

 

[01:01:17.0]

 

GK: Right.

 

RA: If you are the owner or operator and you get caught, you lose your right to go fishing. You lose your livelihood. It’s a very big deal. If we hadn’t had an owner operator and we had buying and selling of licenses, we would have had a corporatized lobster fleet in a heartbeat. We might have still had lobstering on the coast but it wouldn’t have been putting money into the economy the way it does.

 

GK: It could have even going out of state, possibly?

 

RA: Or out of the country. (GK: Yea) Absolutely. Yup.

 

GK: Do you think that that has created an environment that is helpful for the future?

 

[01:02:07.8]

 

RA: Well, Maine is one of the few places in North America that still has a really vital vibrant small scale fishery. I think the lobster fishery is incredibly vulnerable. I think these towns are unbelievably vulnerable because we have over invested. One of the interesting things to me from a policy point of view, is when you have owner or operator and you have this big opportunity that god gave us with this lobster abundance, or climate change gave us or whatever, outside investors can’t come in and invest. What you have is that the capital flows through the banks and so you get a hugely leveraged situation.

 

[01:02:59.1]

 

GK: Hi!

 

[Ted Ames]: Hi! How’s it going?

 

GK: Good.

 

RA: Probably wrapping up?

 

GK: Well that’s great. We could probably talk forever.

 

RA: I wouldn’t mind doing it again too.

 

GK: Yea

 

TA: Did you cut up all those fish yet? (laugh)

 

RA: That’s for you to do with her.

 

TA: Oh no, () that’s why I made sure of making myself a cup of tea. (laugh)

 

GK: Oh. Yea.

 

UNKNOWN: I didn’t mean to interrupt.

 

GK: Oh no that’s okay.

 

UNKNOWN: Oh good.

 

GK: We could probably..

 

RA: How long have we been talking?

 

GK: An hour. Ted was right on the dot. (laugh) Yup. Right on the dot. It’s 2:30. I am thinking I have to go. I should’ve given myself more time for this.

 

RA: When do you have to leave?

 

GK: Well I have to be in Penobscot at 4 so,

 

RA: Ok, well we are around some more.

 

GK: What’s your day tomorrow?

 

RA: Until late afternoon I am gone.

 

GK: Until late afternoon tomorrow.

 

RA: Yup. Ted is around all day.

 

GK: Ok.

 

RA: I think. Are you around all day tomorrow?

 

TA: Tomorrow is Friday. I think so.

 

RA: I am going to Ellsworth early.

 

[00:64:35]