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SOS: Save Our Salmon with Peter Neill and Andrew Kimbrell
Join us online or in person for a conversation with Peter Neill, founding director of the World Ocean Observatory.
Fundy, Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays are places of extraordinary marine abundance. The St. Croix river alone is estimated to have returned upwards of 30 million alewives per year, according to the DFO of Canada that number may have been closer to 100 milllion. Historical abundance in herring, pollock, halibut, cod was central to the indigenous and early settlement experience of this place. We still have the greatest diversity of commercial fisheries in the state of Maine.
Conventional thinking attributes the diminishment of traditional fisheries to overfishing, but fisheries scientists have long known that the impairment of river and coastal habitats, the loss of productive habitats for juvenile fish, forage fish and the connectivity between rivers and sea have the power to restore populations. From sturgeon to elver to alewives, species after species have in fact rebounded from fishways and habitat restoration work.
The salmon farming industry would have us believe that the only way to enjoy fish from the sea is to farm it, unfortunately the farmed fish are eating wild fish ‘from away’, and contaminating the wild fish right here with their effluvia. The open net pens are coming up for renewal, and a matter that deserves public input– but other threats are also proposed for our bays. A 400 million dollar proposal for underwater AI datacenter, huge cruise ships making noise that impacts cetaceans and eco-tourism, a proposed tidal barrage across the Pennamaquan that would totally block fish passage– to name a few.
How can we organize to protect our bays, how can we participate in decision making that will allow for the survival of this place we love? What can we learn from other places that have succeeded to protect their ecosystems and to see rebounding of native fish?
Meeting ID: 895 9226 1500
Passcode: 037702
Featured Speaker: Peter Neill is founding director of the World Ocean Observatory, and serves as host of World Ocean Radio, a weekly podcast about the health of the ocean; Editor of World Ocean Journal; and creative director of World Ocean Forum. In 2016 he received an appointment with the Climate Change Institute and represents the W2O as a Research Associate; he previously served 20 years as President of the South Street Seaport Museum, New York; is co-founder of The Sound School and The Harbor School; and has dedicated his career to marine affairs. He is the author of many non-fiction books related to ocean issues, available wherever books are sold. He lives in Downeast Maine and hosts a radio show on WERU called Land of the Pointed.
Moderator: Andrew Kimbrell is an attorney, author, and public interest advocate. He also holds a graduate degree in psychology. He currently serves as Executive Director of both the International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA), which he founded in 1994, and the Earth Advocacy Institute, founded in 2023. Kimbrell is Executive Director Emeritus of the Center for Food Safety (CFS), which he founded in 1997. He continues to serve on the CFS Board of Directors as Chair of its Litigation Committee. During his tenure as Executive Director, CFS, among numerous other accomplishments, helped create and defend the U.S. Organic Food Standards, successfully litigated to halt the commercialization of several genetically engineered crops, challenged and shut down numerous polluting factory farms, and secured protections for endangered species, including the monarch butterfly.
Under Kimbrell’s leadership, CFS also engaged in a successful twenty-year legal, legislative, and grassroots campaign to prevent the production and commercialization of genetically engineered salmon. The organization also succeeded in blocking the initiation of a multi-billion-dollar open-ocean fish farming industry in federal waters, thereby helping protect wild fish populations and coastal communities.
CFS also opposed industrial finfish and shellfish aquaculture, helping secure a permanent ban on commercial net-pen operations in Washington State’s public waters.
As Executive Director and senior attorney at ICTA, Kimbrell initiated the successful 2007 Supreme Court case that held the Environmental Protection Agency responsible for addressing greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.Kimbrell is the author of several books on psychology, technology, and environmental issues, and is the editor of Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. His articles and essays have appeared in numerous law reviews, magazines, and newspapers.
Among his most notable publications is the Twenty-Third Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture, “Salmon Economics (and Other Lessons).”He is currently completing Earthkind: Recovering the Human Place in the Community of Life scheduled for publication in 2027. In 2007, The Guardian named Kimbrell one of the fifty people in the world “most likely to help save the Earth.” He resides in Phippsburg, Maine.
The Cobscook Bay Ecology Series is a season-long learning series on Cobscook Bay Ecology presented by Downeast Salmon Federation and Greenhorns. Join us to learn more about the unique ecology of our beautiful bay and the rights we have as citizens to participate in shaping marine policy and governance. Speakers and experts from around Maine and the wider world present on topics of relevance as communities and regulators evaluate the plans for expansion by industrial-scale aquaculture.