Save the Working Waterfront: Fishermen resist as proposals for Portland waterfront projects mount

September 14, 2017 New England

A spurt of hotel, office and shopping developments planned for Portland’s waterfront is rekindling concerns that space for fishermen and other traditional marine businesses is disappearing as Commercial Street becomes a shopping and dining mecca. Commercial fishermen who have unloaded lobster and groundfish on Portland’s wharves for decades see the changes as the next step in a long process to change the face of the waterfront, to their disadvantage. “They just don’t get it,” said Willis Spear, who has berthed his lobster boat on Custom House Wharf for 40 years. “We said in the beginning that this would happen, we’d just get squeezed out. It is going way faster than anyone knows.” click here to read the story 10:56

Commercial Street, Custom House Wharf, Fishermen resist, Portland, waterfront projects mount, Working waterfront

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The New England groundfish debacle (Part III): who or what is at fault? Nils E. Stolpe/FishNet

It took me a while to decide how to most accurately describe the situation that has been visited upon the New England fishing communities that are and since colonial times have been dependent on the groundfish fisheries.

NILS STOLPE: The New England groundfish debacle (Part IV): Is cutting back harvest really the answer?

While it’s a fact that’s hardly ever acknowledged, the assumption in fisheries management is that if the population of a stock of fish isn’t at some arbitrary level, it’s because of too much fishing. Hence the term “overfished.” Hence the mandated knee jerk reaction of the fisheries managers to not enough fish; cut back on fishing. What of other factors? They don’t count. It’s all about fishing, because fishing is all that the managers can control; it’s their Maslow’s Hammer. When it comes to the oceans it seems as if it’s about all that the industry connected mega-foundations that support the anti-fishing ENGOs with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in “donations” are interested in controlling. Read the article here

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