Home Rule is the Best Rule

For some, Maine’s dedication to home rule may defy logic, especially for those who have moved to the state. It may seem like a foreign concept that each organized municipality in the state, all 482 of them, has its own government, ordinances, procedures, and schedules, but we think it’s makes perfect sense.

Here individual voters form the legislative body and annually approve what the elected and appointed officials can spend money on and what level of decision making they can do without a further vote. Some native New Englanders might not know it, but in much of the rest of the country, municipal decisions are made at different levels of government and not directly by the people.

The Myth of "Sustainable" Aquaculture

For decades, industrial aquaculture has been framed as a win-win: farm fish to spare wild fisheries, reduce environmental harm, and meet global demand with a healthy, efficient protein. This narrative—popularized as the industry’s “Blue Revolution”—has profoundly shaped policy, conservation strategies, and institutional purchasing decisions. 

This report examines what that story leaves out: that, through greenwashing, aquaculture has brought factory farming from land to sea. Across five central claims that anchor “sustainable seafood” messaging, it shows how industrial fish farming has expanded at a scale that inherently drives ecological harm by intensifying pressure on wild fisheries, spreading disease and drug dependence, worsening climate impacts, and leaning on labels and certifications that often substitute for real accountability.

Lubec Board of Selectmen imposes vessel‑length limit at commercial pier after collision

LUBEC — Early Tuesday, Cooke Aquaculture’s Ocean Provider collided with Lubec’s newly rebuilt commercial pier, damaging three of the recently installed pilings.

A 14‑inch piling buckled under the impact, and two 12‑inch pilings cracked, according to Ralph Dennison, the harbormaster.

Dennison said Cooke Aquaculture has already agreed to pay for the repairs. The company did not respond to inquiries in time to appear in this article.

The Ocean Provider is a steel‑hulled boat about 80 feet long and owned by Cooke Aquaculture, which uses it to serve fish farms on both sides of the border in Cobscook Bay.

The pilings were damaged when the boat attempted to dock at the commercial pier at about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday.

Anti-salmon farming groups win fight to maintain ban in Discovery Islands

Anti-fish farming groups in Canada have won a legal battle to maintain a ban on salmon farms in the Discovery Islands area of British Columbia.

The ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal upholds a June 2024 Federal Court decision which affirmed the ability of former Canadian fisheries minister Joyce Murray to refuse aquaculture licences in the Discovery Islands based on conservation concerns. Salmon farmer Mowi Canada West had appealed the 2024 decision.

Environmental law charity Ecojustice represented anti-fish farming groups the David Suzuki Foundation, Georgia Strait Alliance, Living Oceans Society, and Watershed Watch Salmon Society, and veteran anti-salmon farming activist Alexandra Morton, in the appeal.

Cushing Residents Speak Out on Industrial-Scale Aquaculture

CUSHING — A proposal for the town to acquire the first public access to the waterfront received a mixed reaction Jan. 15 with several residents and out-of-state property owners of Pleasant Point Road voicing concern about the impact from added traffic.

But the harbor master and a longtime town official said they did not expect those would be impactful issues.

This town currently has no municipal-owned public access to the water.

Residents will get to vote on the articles by secret ballot at the polls on March 16. The in-person town meeting will be held at 6 p.m. March 17.

Dead Fish and Statehouse Battles: Fighting Fish Farms in Maine

As Keith Decker assumed the role of CEO of American Aquafarms in 2021, the firm was seeking to build a massive salmon farm off the coast of Acadia National Park. The first order of business was damage control. It wasn’t just the bad press about his predecessor, who had been convicted and jailed on fraud charges in Norway a decade before. There was also growing public resentment toward the project.

It was meant to be the largest salmon farm in the world, with a 30,000-ton pen to grow the fish. The proposal claimed it would produce 66 million pounds of non-GMO salmon each year and make Maine the testing ground for mass-production aquaculture.

The farm would be situated in one of the poorer areas of the state, where job creation is a constant topic of interest. Locally, the company pitched the project as a job creator; more broadly, it said it aimed to curb the U.S.’s dependence on imported seafood.

More Maine towns assert authority over aquaculture, but is it legal or sustainable?

Beals is a visually stunning place, an archipelago ripe with the kind of Instagram-ready seaside and working waterfront scenes that draw summer-long crowds to southern Maine destinations. But dangling like a pendant from the Downeast coast, it’s far closer by distance and tradition to maritime Canada than Portland. 

Driving south over the crest of the Beals Island Bridge reveals much about the community ahead. Modest homes dot Beals’ gently sloping uplands. Fishing piers and wharves jut from the shoreline. Commercial lobster boats and the odd bottom-dragger crowd the mooring fields. During the summer months, pleasure craft powered by either motor or sail are conspicuously absent.

For some towns like Beals, whose economies revolve around heritage fisheries, the growing number of aquaculture leases along Maine’s coast warrants a degree of vigilance and even action. Thirty-three leases were approved in 2025, a 27% increase over the previous five-year average of 24. Since 2022, eight Maine towns have responded by asserting varying degrees of home rule over aquaculture development.

Nylon aquaculture nets found to release five times more microplastics than other materials

Norwegian research organization SINTEF has released a report finding that nylon aquaculture nets release five times more microplastics than nets made from other materials.

The release of most microplastics into the marine environment is commonly believed to come from land-based sources, but according to SINTEF, fisheries and aquaculture farms are becoming increasingly reliant on plastic equipment and infrastructure, introducing microplastics directly into ocean waters and contributing both to environmental and seafood contamination.

“I’m not sure the aquaculture industry, or anyone else for that matter, really had any idea about their relative contribution to microplastic emissions,” SINTEF Ocean Chief Scientist Andy Booth, who was the report’s lead author, said.

Towns across Maine say No to industrial scale aquaculture.

(Portland, Maine) You can add the town of Cushing to a growing list of communities that are putting local limits on large scale aquaculture. On November 4th, the voters of Cushing approved a moratorium on industrial-scale aquaculture by a wide margin of 467 to 193. Cushing is the latest community to adopt a moratorium on industrial scale aquaculture in its coastal waters and now will build its own permanent ordinance to protect Maine waters against the damaging community impacts of such operations.