Originally published in The Portland Press Herald.
Written by Rock Alley and Jason Faulkingham.
Communities should not be forced to accept pollution, escaped farm fish, weak monitoring and limited transparency as part of the cost of doing business.
Rock Alley is a Jonesport lobsterman and president of Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage Foundation. Jason Faulkingham is a lobsterman from Beals.
We’ve spent our lives learning Maine’s waters.
If you work on the water, you learn to pay attention. You learn the tides, the bottom, the weather, how your gear moves. Families pass down their trade and their best spots from generation to generation.
For lobstermen and women, fishermen, clammers, wormers, shellfish growers and the businesses that depend on us, Maine’s bays are our workplaces. Clean water is not an abstract idea or slogan. It is the difference between making a living or losing one, and between a thriving community or a collapsing one.
That is why lawmakers and regulators should be paying close attention to the Conservation Law Foundation’s (CLF) lawsuit against Cooke Aquaculture.
A federal court in Maine recently allowed most of CLF’s Clean Water Act claims against Cooke to move forward. The court has not decided whether Cooke violated the law, but it has allowed allegations involving pollution, monitoring and reporting at Cooke’s open-net salmon farms to proceed.
CLF alleges that Cooke’s operations have discharged waste, uneaten feed, dead fish and other pollutants into surrounding waters and onto the seafloor. That matters to anyone whose livelihood depends on a healthy marine ecosystem. If pollution harms the bottom, it can affect the habitat and food sources that lobster and other fisheries depend on.
Outside the courtroom, this case raises a basic question for Maine: Who should carry the risk when a private corporation is given access to a public resource?
Industrial salmon farming is often sold as progress. We are told it means more seafood production, more efficiency and more jobs. I understand why those promises can sound appealing, especially in rural coastal communities like ours where every economic opportunity feels precious. Nobody who works on the water is against jobs. And Cooke employees are not the opposition.
Cooke is a multinational company operating in Maine’s communal waters, and the communities, not Cooke, pay the cost of any harms. A state lease may give a company permission to operate in a particular place, but that should not equate to Maine communities accepting pollution, escaped farm fish, weak monitoring or limited transparency as the cost of doing business.
The corporation may be headquartered elsewhere, but the environmental and economic consequences stay here. Mainers deserve that private industrial infrastructure have meaningful accountability to the people already working there.
We have seen this pattern before in other parts of the food system. Industrial production gets promoted as efficient and inevitable. Then operations consolidate, decision-making moves farther away from local communities and the costs are pushed onto the people who live nearby. Farmers, workers, rural towns and ecosystems are left to absorb the consequences while corporations keep expanding.
Lawmakers and regulators have an opportunity to keep that exact pattern from playing out on Maine’s coast.
Before leases are renewed or industrial salmon farming expands, we call on the commissioner of the Department of Marine Resources and the next governor and Maine Legislature to enforce stronger accountability, transparency and public input.
The burden should not fall on coastal residents to prove harm after the fact. Companies operating in public waters should face strong monitoring, clear reporting and real enforcement from the start, with that information easily accessible so communities can see what is being discharged, what regulators are tracking and how they are responding.
Accountability is not anti-business. It is the basic expectation that any company profiting from Maine’s waters should protect the resources and communities that make that business possible.
Protections for our waters only matter if they are enforced. Public hearings only matter if the voices of people most affected carry real weight. Oversight only matters if it is strong enough to prevent harm before it is too late.
The court’s decision to allow most of CLF’s claims to move forward should be a wake-up call. Our waters should not be treated like dumping grounds. Nor should permission to operate there be mistaken for ownership of a resource that belongs to all of us.
If a corporation wants access to Maine’s working waters, it should meet the highest standard, not the lowest one. That’s why CLF’s lawsuit matters. That’s why lawmakers must act now.
Maine’s working waters have sustained families for generations. Now is the time for our decisions to ensure they can support generations to come.