PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • August 14, 2025
Scott Kern lives on Sand Island in Casco Bay during the summer months. He calls it Planet Sand. It’s all part of his plan to save Planet Sand, both the land itself and the world he’s created around it, complete with its own gods, laws and units of measurement (“too much or not enough”), as well as a website and merch meant to help fund the work needed to protect it from very real-world environmental threats. Sober for more than six years, Kern started coming out for camping trips that got longer each year until he was spending most of the summer on the island — a purchase that his parents, who both worked as corporate real estate paralegals, and another couple made in the early ’90s. Magical thinking is part of his diagnosis, schizotypal personality disorder, but his fears about the environmental threat to Planet Sand are far from imaginary.