Ep. 1: Road to Disaster (ft. Voices of Maine Lobstermen)

[Music] my identity is i'm a lobsterman that's that's what makes me tick that's how i feel good when i wake up in the morning knowing i'm going to be able to do what i like to do [Music] i always like to think that fishermen are sort of on the front lines of protecting the gulf of maine [Music] i've heard the expression and i don't know who used it first but fishermen were environmentalists before environmentalism was cool whether it's the size of our lobsters the female protection if they have eggs almost every bit of that came from industry even the trap limit was brought forward by members of industry the industry buys into these rules you grow up in a community with it especially you understand how important the conservation roles we have in the fishery are because this is the long-term outlook with whatever mother nature throws at us in the environment i'm confident that the resource will stay strong as a multi-generational fisherman with family that's been here in the industry over you know for over 200 years my goal as a fisherman is the same goal my father had and my grandfather and the ones before them is to make sure that this doesn't end with my generation as long as we do what we can do in being good stewards we have little impact on the resource and its ability to stay strong [Music] whether my family continues or not there are the new people that get into the fishery we want to make sure that there's a healthy fishery that's handed on for forever as far as i'm concerned although there's always the outlier fishermen aren't looking at this week's paycheck on next week's paycheck they're looking at how do we sustain this fishery how do we make sure that the kid down the street my son my grandson my my niece you know how do they get into this fishery and survive and and they can and they have for generations because of what the people before us did they set this stuff in place for us and we preserved this industry through a lot of declines and a lot of other fisheries although i'm primarily a lobster fisherman now i'm part of the oldest industry in north america you know the basques were fishing for cod fish in north america before there was any other industry here the fishing industry in north america particularly new england uh and the canadian maritimes has been around for a long time and it's been sustainable different species may be more abundant but there's been fishermen been able to make a living you know for close to 600 years so fishermen have been essentially sharing the ocean with every other use since then and my experience is a lot of the other uses don't share as well lobster industry is facing a couple of major challenges right now one is a big push for development of offshore wind and it's coupled with a second one which is to protect endangered right whales so it's kind of a double whammy for the fishing industry in the past five ten years these two existential threats have sort of loomed even more so and that is offshore wind development and the concerns from engios around right oil entanglements and those things seem to be operating in a space that doesn't allow or take into consideration the experiences and perspectives of commercial fishermen in a way that is meaningful and impactful we do know that climate change affects our resource what we can do about it may be beyond us you know but climate change has been helpful to an awful lot of the state of maine's lobster fishery it brought water temperatures in line with where the species was more productive survival rates were higher as our water temperature warmed in southern maine back in the late 70s and early 80s and that there have been cyclical patterns of that in the past we had a boom in the casco bay region we landed almost half the lobsters in the state of maine came out of this region for a long time now the fishery down here has started to taper a little bit while the fishery in eastern maine has has increased we're certainly witnessing the impacts of climate change we're seeing other species show up that we rarely see and they're much more common we're seeing the range of some of the species around here getting greater uh we're getting some southern species showing up seasonally or more seasons than they are not in large quantity we're not enough for a fishery but we're seeing species we didn't see environmental impacts can go both ways there's been a huge move by state government federal government to set very aggressive renewable energy goals where they're trying to reduce greenhouse emissions and the vehicle to do that is to sort of electrify the energy supply and to provide that electricity in large part through offshore wind the goal of developing that sort of technology is to reduce the effects of climate change and certainly there's a lot of information that will say yes if we can convert some of our carbon-based energy resources to offshore wind we will achieve that goal what the fishing industry is asking is at what cost and what we fear is that we may save the climate we may save the planet in one way but then go and risk our entire marine ecosystems you know damage protected species such as right whales displace our fishing heritage and what the fishing industry's been struggling with is is offshore wind the right vehicle to achieve maine's renewable energy goals and we feel that it's not we feel like the ocean's best use is for fisheries for marine harvesting for protecting you know species such as the right whale but the state's gone ahead and made a unilateral decision that offshore wind will be a centerpiece of its renewable energy portfolio so we've really been struggling to communicate what our concerns are what we feel is at risk for our fishing communities our coastal economy for the people of maine at large and it's been a really really challenging conversation so the usda both regulates and advocates for farms and farmers the commercial fishing industry the united states is regulated by noaa but there's not the same arm they do have social scientists but there's not the same arm that advocates for fishermen specifically which is why organizations like the maine lobstermen's association and maine coast fisherman's association are so important to fishermen because we try to build some of those programs to elevate the role of fishermen in the food system but if we're not thinking about the fishermen themselves as human beings in this process i think that that just you know just really sucks because the fishermen themselves as human beings are actually the most important part of the process a lot of times we like think about boats on the water but they don't necessarily put pictures of the fishermen on the boats and that's because it's much easier to attack a boat than it is to attack a fisherman he's trying to get home to his kids baseball game you know who doesn't want to miss his wife's birthday like who's wondering what their kids are going to do when they grow up i mean they're human beings matt who's my fishing partner and i have worked together for two years roughly and the boat behind us helps to take care of eight kids that are under the age of 11. we're not looking for glory or fame we're just out there trying to do a job that we enjoy to do and provide a good product in the area that we live in this is what we have for an opportunity here if we lived in alaska we'd probably be mining for gold but we live on the coast of maine and lobster is what we have what could be more iconic about maine than lobster my name's andrew joyce i'm the person editing this video for me growing up in a lobster fishing family on tiny swans island maine lobster harvesting was just an ordinary part of my surroundings in the summertime my dad would bring me out on the boat to help him haul traps it was great to be out on the water but i just never had what it took to be a good fisherman to this day i still can't tie a proper knot to save my life i can barely tie my shoes what i love is making documentaries and this documentary series is all about the changes that have been planned for the gulf of maine changes that affect the atlantic ocean that affect marine life and that affect the fishermen who are more intimately familiar with all of it than any of us i wanted to share my background up front so that you know my biases because i am undeniably biased towards the people and the places i grew up with but i don't think it's hyperbole to say that the pending industrialization of maine's working waterfront could be severely traumatic both for locals and for the marine environment my dad elaborates on that here in the past as fisheries and fishermen become more responsible in our effects on the environment as we harvest marine species and harvest them sustainably we've discovered that heavier the gear the more destructive it is so they've tried to design gear which is lighter less destructive less of an impact well the impact of eight foot chain links you know hundreds of thousands of feet of chain 750 foot windmills on a giant platform all of us have concerns about offshore wind and what it means for the environment we're looking at these huge wind turbines going up in our fishing grounds they're going to take so many non-renewable materials to create these and then what do we do with them after they've served their purpose they don't have a long shelf life i saw a video the other day of a a windmill they were putting up over in europe and they lost this blade overboard the blades i think around 120 feet long that all goes down to the ocean do you think they're going to retrieve that no they're not going to retrieve that so okay so that thing goes down there now you've got marine debris all of these things that they're building say whether it's the chain or the yankers things like that they're not going to haul that stuff back up so eventually what are they going to do they're going to cut that stuff loose eventually you're going to have the decommissioning how they're going to decommission it are they going to haul up thousands of feet of chain which is worn now and rusted links will break off fall to the bottom fall to the bottom funnel bomb okay so they're getting the windmill the blades i've seen estimates so they say it'll take a couple thousand years for that stuff to break down and what they do now currently with windmill blades is they'll cut them up they take them to montana they dig a ditch they bury them and shove the dirt over them and wait for thousands of years for them to break down well all that stuff is not going to be out there it's going to be much more convenient and it's going to happen is there'll be oh lost them at sea well couldn't retrieve that too expensive so now you're creating all of this marine debris some of them would say well that's going to create you know marine habitat well no this right here is just going to be piles of crap everywhere and once that is there there's no way to ever retrieve it now as those things break down what are the chemicals as that leeches into the ocean floor what is that what is that going to do what about all of those electrical cables they probably will pull the electrical cables back up as best they can well if they have and things have started to grow over that now the destructive process is all over again it's almost better off with the cables if they left them there but if they do you've still left something there that's not natural and that is what is the damage from that okay you cut the ends you let it go what's leeching out from between the cable and the casing and and chemicals that are in there to make sure that everything is lubricated or that it functions correctly and all these cables they've got all these different metals in that those will corrode and there will be dissimilar metals that they'll come in contact with especially the ocean water going in those when they have a leak in them they'll either short out there's just so many things that just because it's out of sight out of mind doesn't mean it's not going to come back to bite us every energy source that we have has a consequence and this consequence is creating a giant dumpster in hundreds of spots off the gulf of maine and and the new england coast and is very disruptive to the sea life which is there this is a process that's happening incredibly quickly the goal was like 30 gigawatts by 2030 that's nine years you know and that's that's pretty fast right now and if it's going a mile a minute we don't have the capacity to engage in meetings we don't have the capacity of the resources to hire legal teams we don't have the capacity resources or knowledge to understand all of the jargon within some of this process but the companies that are trying to do this do and that's that doesn't make them a bad guy but it should be recognized that that puts us as the underdog in this process we have the most to lose we have nothing to gain in this process other than we're trying to protect what we don't want to lose they have everything to gain in this process and they have the time the resources and the money to do so and so fishermen are watching this development process speed up with seemingly very little accountability despite lingering questions about environmental risks which remain unanswered but they don't have the luxury of focusing all their efforts on it though because they've also now been put on defense by a crusade to hold them accountable for north atlantic right whale deaths that they did not cause now monique just mentioned that the initial wind farms are slated to be operational at a 30 gigawatt capacity by 2030 remember that year there's something else that also is set to take effect by 2030 and this could decimate maine's lobster fleet the right whale issue is extremely frustrating because the federal government has decided that if you have rope in the water you must be endangering whales but the day to say otherwise maine lobstermen have implemented measures starting back in 1998 to reduce their risk to right whales and our last big round of measures came through in 2009-2010 if you look at the data entanglement in lobster gear for the new england region has declined by 90 percent since we've put those last set of rules through the state of maine has had no entanglement since 2004 and we've never seriously injured or killed a whale yet the federal government is asking us to reduce our risk by 98 percent and that is based upon a model that allows whales to continue to die in canada it allows whales to continue to die due to vessel strikes and is looking solely at this northeast fishery as well as other fixed gear fisheries on the atlantic coast to reduce our risk by 90 percent so if you look over history what we've done we've taken all of our floating line out of the water and we've sunk it so we've got all of that risk out of the water column we put more traps on a trawl taken 30 of our vertical lines out of the water we're in the process of implementing another 60 reduction which will happen this year so more traps on a troll so our fleet is basically maxed out at this point our boats are only so big we're predominantly a day trip fishery so you can't safely get that many traps onto a boat and get them back over without it being a huge safety issue so everything we've done since 1997 is status quo we take a 60 risk reduction this year we take another 60 reduction on top of that in 2025 and then in 2030 we take an additional 87 risk reduction so cumulatively from status quo we are 98 below what we are now and honestly i just don't know what the fleet has to give to actually meet that and have a viable fishery so people might be coming to maine and wondering what happened to the lobster fleet because we are we are on a road to disaster right now [Music] could these two threats to maine lobstermen be coincidental the most recent major media story on maine lobsterman a joint effort by the boston globe and the portland press herald left the participating lobstermen dumbfounded at how they were portrayed heavy play was given to the idea that they are a threat to right whales despite zero main entanglements since 2004 no mention was made of the risk's floating wind farms posed to right whales and the lobstermen felt that they were used and misrepresented in the narrative of the lobster trap here the authors discuss the project and that's what made it compelling it is not oh they have overfished and now they're getting their just desserts they are conservation minded and still going to end up having to pay the price for climate change in some way or another pay the price for climate change in some way or another pay the price for climate change in some way or another pay the price for climate change the question is how much longer do they have should we as a state like look to try and prolong that spend our limited resources and our scientific you know assets on how to prolong that start looking ahead for things to replace it and whether offshore wind might represent an opportunity the state of maine is sort of helping in promote or work toward a just transition to help these folks from a dying industry or soon to be dying industry or near near-term to be dying industry move into something else and so the authors clearly view lobstering as a soon to be dying industry that's their own words implying it can't be saved but of course the as yet non-existent industrial floating wind farms are hailed as a bright future in the same conversation with none of the critical examination that lobstermen bear one key aspect that's largely gone unreported so far in most outlets is the reality that developments this large will block off huge swaths of the ocean the fishermen are an obstacle that the developers must remove to install these arrays if you put a floating wind farm and every turbine with fixed anchors and the diagrams i saw showed suspended cables between them because they didn't want them to chafe on the bottom that area is off limits to us we're done we cannot go in there they can tell us as much as they want that we'll be allowed to fish around them but they're going to take anywhere from two square miles to four square miles of bottom for every one of those and if they do a suspended cable between them that's even more so that's not sharing well the plan here is to have a corporation take tracks of the ocean that we will lose we are taking main jobs taking the most sustainable fishery in the continental u.s that has the most jobs on the water of any fishery in the continental u.s and to do something that puts all of our hard work and all of our communities at risk for corporations that'll take profits to wall street i can't figure out how that's good for maine the pressures are so immense and what i find so unbelievable is a lot of the pressure is coming from our own government it really is hard to understand why they're coming after the lobster industry as hard as they are because the data don't support that and we've never walked away from the table you know we've pioneered so many different gear modifications different gear designs you know we've done so much research we've tried to partner with the research community but we feel like we're constantly being made out as the villains of this we feel like they don't want to work with us to find common ground so the question is what else can we do so we feel like for future rounds to meet that 98 risk reduction it's going to require removal of all the rope from the water column and they're looking at a very high tech ropeless fishing which is not going to support our diverse fleet our small boats don't even have that sort of computer equipment you need to carry crew to do that the capital investment is massive looking at probably a million dollars per vessel to actually get that going and then you need to catch enough lobster to actually sustain your overhead so we know that the fishery as we know it will not continue to be we will need a new operational model a new business model and the future for our kids is very much up in the air and honestly it's pretty grim if we have to implement that one thing that is truly unique about the maine lobster fleet is that every vessel is owned and operated by a captain so nobody owns a fleet of lobster boats and hire people from local communities and maybe the corporate headquarters are in illinois everything is owned and operated in local communities in rural communities in maine and that literally keeps you know our island communities our our communities out you know 20 minutes down a peninsula to get there there are no other businesses there so it keeps the entire community going so each of these businesses you know they're struggling as a business there are good years and bad years but it's a very capital intensive business you have to keep a boat operating in the marine environment you have to keep your engine going you have to have gear that is going to be reliable to bring your catch in rope is extremely expensive so it's not what people think it is and you know there are a few people who do very very well but there are many many people who just get by and they fish because they love to fish and they might supplement work you know plowing roads or shoveling in the winter and then lobstering that you know in maine's rural communities you piece together what you can if we ever lose commercial fishing in maine you know that's just a dark and gloomy place that i don't even really want to think about the lobster industry specifically is a huge economic driver for the state as well as these coastal communities i think we can probably look to the south like places like montauk and even martha's vineyard as sort of a glimpse of what the future could potentially be if we don't do more to preserve the working waterfront in a lot of other states there is still working waterfront but they're very in pockets of communities whereas in coastal maine we still have communities with the large fishing population that plays a huge role in the culture it would literally change the landscape right everybody loves the colorful buoys the lobster boats um people love seafood so it's not that we're just talking about the the change in a culture but also the the change in access to a healthy wild-caught food [Music] you know and i think that that's actually a harder question these days because of the pandemic because it used to be that the commercial fishing community is what kept the lights on in the winter in these communities but we've seen because of the pandemic that a lot of people that used to be summer residents are now year-round residents which is obviously fine but living next to salt water in the summertime is much different than living on the coast of maine in the winter time what happens on land impacts the water as well and so you know we should be looking to the fishermen for how best to maintain a healthy ocean so when you start using pesticides when you don't take care of your septic system when you don't think hey if we live on islands maybe we should be thinking about where our water comes from and if we have a lot of people that's going to change how much water we have access to these are all really big questions that aren't necessarily being tackled and it's the commercial fishing community that's usually the people that are reminding others you know we have to do this we have to do that fishermen are some of the most practical people i've ever met probably by necessity and i think one of the the biggest concerns is just some of the impracticalities around offshore wind development the ocean is a wild place one fisherman i know calls it sort of the last frontier this is a move to urbanize it to develop it in a way that it should not be developed and the ocean controls our planet and our planet's health developing it for any means is going to do irreparable damage and i don't know fishermen are yelling it from the rooftops and i think people should be listening we're saying let's put the brakes on we need to know the repercussions of this sort of energy in the gulf of maine when we have one of the last sustainable fisheries in the world why would you take away a source that feeds the world for an energy source that's not permanent and we're not willing to give up natural resources for energy in the environmental community you have small groups of environmentalists they're not being listened to now if you're not one of the big groups who has all of the money all of the donations coming to them they're the ones who are feeding to the world how great this is you know where is the questioning of any of this do we accept it blindly do we do we take the opinions of people who spent hundreds of years on the ocean my family moved here 30 years after a revolutionary war we've been here for over 200 years will they take the opinions of my family people in my industry lobstering the commercial fishing industry people who just love the environment who know that you can't industrialize something that is fragile and expect it to survive and good to come from it it's going to come back to bite you and we just we're trying to reach out to people so they understand that we have the opportunity through public input to stand against this and to demand not to destroy the ecosystem to not destroy the ocean environment it's such a high price to pay to hopefully 100 years from now change the world temperature by 1.5 celsius it is big business and big government teaming together to snuff out the voice of the true environmentalists to make a dollar off of the american people this whole situation might be hard to believe but that's how my dad views the big picture and i'm with him in the next few episodes we're going to be hearing perspectives from some experts in maine's scientific community their views are certainly not carbon copies of what the fishermen are saying and indeed even the fishermen have a diverse range of views on all of the issues that are facing them right now but you might be surprised at just how much common ground there is between most folks from fishing and scientific backgrounds in the meantime if you want to learn how you can help maine lobstermen i'd ask you to consider supporting their legal defense fund savemainelobstermen.org is the crucial website where you can learn more about that we'll be highlighting different fishing advocacy groups in maine at the end of each episode they all took time out of their busy days to talk to me this year so it's the least i can do to share their missions with you and it's the main lobstermen's association that is heading up the save maine lobsterman campaign and so again that's save mainelobsterman.org and if you want to help me keep producing this video series you can check out the main reset pages on indiegogo or patreon and the links for all of these are in the video description below if you found this video to be interesting subscribing to the main reset youtube channel would be a big help until next week's episode thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: The Maine Reset

Views: 58,608

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Id: hrA2iytiHQ8

Length: 29min 54sec (1794 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022