The most comprehensive online source of conservation news and events in Maine and beyond, edited by Jym St. Pierre
BANGOR DAILY NEWS • July 9, 2023
The planet’s life-support system veers toward breakdown and the Bangor Daily News illustrates with a photo of kids jumping joyously into a lake (“UMaine scientists find world hit unofficial hottest days on record,” in the BDN on July 6). It would be hard to imagine a more irresponsible choice. Climate chaos, wheeee! ~ Larry Gilman, Southwest Harbor
MORNING SENTINEL • July 8, 2023
With the constant downpour that’s only recently seemed to cease in the area, just finding time to get out on the water has been difficult. The recent heat wave has also put a damper on matters with fish less likely to strike.
ASSOCIATED PRESS • July 8, 2023
A solar storm forecast for Thursday is expected to give skygazers in 17 American states a chance to glimpse the Northern Lights, the colorful sky shows that happens when solar wind hits the atmosphere. Northern Lights, also known as aurora borealis, are most often seen in Alaska, Canada, and Scandinavia, but an 11-year solar cycle that’s expected to peak in 2024 is making the lights visible in places farther to the south.
ASSOCIATED PRESS • July 8, 2023
As Earth this week set and then repeatedly broke unofficial records for average global heat, it served as a reminder of a danger that climate change is making steadily worse for farmworkers and others who labor outside. Climate change makes extreme heat more likely and more intense. Farm work is particularly dangerous because workers raise their internal body temperature by moving, lifting, and walking at the same time they’re exposed to high heat and humidity. “It’s not normal to go through these heat waves and, you know, act as if nothing is happening,” said Edgar Franks. Farm workers are 35 times more likely to die of heat exposure than workers in other industries.
PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • July 7, 2023
Two fishermen caught an eight-foot great white shark off the coast of Cape Elizabeth last month. It’s one of a few reported shark sightings this season, but experts say more are likely to come as more sharks, including great whites, spend time in Maine waters. Dan Harriman and his sternman were fishing about 600 feet off the coast of Cape Elizabeth near Richmond Island on June 12 when they caught the eight-foot great white in their nets, said Kurt Shoener, manager of Two Lights and Crescent Beach state parks. The shark was tangled up in fishing gear in about 30 feet of water, Shoener said on Friday. Harriman and his sternman hauled it on the boat, untangled it from the net, and released it back into the water before calling marine patrol. So far, there have not been any beach clearings in Maine due to shark sightings this season.
KENNEBEC JOURNAL • July 7, 2023
The Kennebec Land Trust has acquired 7 acres of hayfields in Sidney, preventing the area. The donation by Leann Diehl, a former resident of the town, extends the conservation group’s neighboring 35-acre Reynolds Forest property. Reynolds Forest offers a range of recreational opportunities, including hiking along about a half-mile of trails, cross-country skiing, fishing and birding. The site features waterfalls along Goff Brook and the foundation of a cellar from a former saw or grist mill established there in the 18th century.
SUN JOURNAL • July 7, 2023
Preliminary estimates of damage to local roads and sewer lines from the June 29 torrential rainstorm is nearly $4 million, Town Manager Shiloh LaFreniere said. The rainfall June 29 was between 5 and 6 inches in a two-hour period. One resident on state Route 133 registered 9 inches in her rain gauge. The damage to a section of Whistle Stop Trail, a multiuse rail-trail owned by the state, is estimated now at $500,000, Brian Bronson, supervisor of the state’s Off Road Recreational Vehicle Program, said.
BANGOR DAILY NEWS • July 7, 2023
The new majority owner of a shuttered Hampden waste facility says that it has enough funding and experience to get the plant restarted in the next year-and-a-half. That facility closed three years ago in part because it couldn’t secure enough funding to get it through a difficult start-up period. Other challenges included changes in the recycling markets, the COVID pandemic, and delays in getting permits to resell products it made from waste. But a firm called Innovative Resource Recovery is buying the shuttered facility for $3 million, and CEO James Condela says it’s expecting to invest another $35 million to $40 million to re-open it.
MAINE PUBLIC • July 7, 2023
Maine has become the third state this year to pass a law tightening reporting requirements for public utilities funding political activities, such as lobbying and campaign advertising. Supporters say the millions of dollars being spent by electric utilities in a referendum effort this fall underscore the importance of added transparency. In recent years, Mainers have been flooded with ads funded by power companies.
HARPSWELL ANCHOR • July 7, 2023
The sale of Harpswell Coastal Academy’s campus has been completed and the buyer’s name revealed. Public records show a limited liability company formed by local residen to Scott J. Merryman completed its purchase of the now-closed charter school’s campus at 9 Ash Point Road in Harpswell on July 5. Merryman did not return multiple calls seeking comment on his future plans. An auction held May 10 for the campus ended in uncertainty, with the leading bidder offering to donate his bid to Harpswell Heritage Land Trust. But the trust declined, saying the decision deadline did not afford it enough time to responsibly research the potential legal and financial risks posed by accepting the property.
BANGOR DAILY NEWS • July 7, 2023
I’d never been to Ferry Landing before. It’s one of those preserves that is so small it’s easy to overlook. Covering 23 acres of fields and forestland on the Bagaduce River, it’s home to a one-mile hiking trail that’s marked with blue blazes and maintained by the Blue Hill Heritage Trust. If you live outside the area, you might consider the preserve too tiny to travel for, but I have an easy solution: Visit multiple preserves in one day. There are several in Brooksville and surrounding towns. That’s what we did. I have to thank the rain for one of the major highlights of our adventure: mushrooms. They were everywhere. Fungi love water. Lichens and slime molds like rain, too. So as we walked, I tried to find as many colorful fungi species as possible. ~ Aislinn Sarnacki
BANGOR DAILY NEWS • July 7, 2023
The Maine Legislature solved a thorny divide over solar policy on Thursday, when both chambers agreed to support industry-backed tweaks that aim to pare back the state’s large incentives for smaller projects.
SUN JOURNAL • July 7, 2023
In rebuttal to Dorthea Seybold’s letter, Maine’s DEP needs to protect water resources (June 23), she is mistaken. No one has “blasted” a beaver dam, and there has been no meeting with the Department of Environmental Protection. Tripp Lake has been artificially high for several years and this is doing untold damage to the lake and shore. The answer is to get the lake down to its natural level and keep it there. High water is killing the lake. ~ Fern Bosse, Norway
WASHINGTON POST • July 7, 2023
In addition to supercharging the U.S. solar, wind, and EV industries in the near term, incentives in President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law are paving the way for still-nascent technologies to help bring down global greenhouse gas emissions in decades to come. Buoyed by provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, three emerging technologies – sustainable aviation fuel, clean hydrogen, and direct air capture – could reduce carbon emissions by 99 million to 193 million metric tons per year after 2030, according to an analysis released Thursday by the research firm Rhodium Group. For every ton of CO2 avoided in the U.S. thanks to these IRA incentives another 2.4 to 2.9 tons of emissions would be reduced in the rest of the world.
MORNING SENTINEL • July 6, 2023
A Florida man drowned Wednesday in the Kennebec River after the airboat he was piloting suddenly became upended and sank into the river. Mark Henry, 72, of Fort Pierce, Florida, died when the airboat he owned nose-dived into the river in Anson at about 6:30 p.m. Henry was on the boat along with Matthew Sleeper, 63, of Anson. Both men were thrown from the boat and began swimming to shore, Latti wrote in a statement released to the news media. Sleeper made it out of the water, but when he looked back, he could not see Henry. North Anson firefighters were later able to locate and retrieve Henry’s body.
PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • July 7, 2023
A bill to allow the four Wabanaki tribes of Maine to access the same benefits available to every other federally recognized tribe in the United States died on Thursday after the Maine House fell 10 votes shy of overriding a gubernatorial veto. “I do not want to see the Wabanaki Nations unfairly excluded from benefits that are generally available to federally recognized tribes. I simply believe the interest we share to do right by the Wabanaki Nations and Maine people must be accomplished through legislation that is clear, thoroughly vetted, and well understood by all parties. I fear it would result in years, if not decades, of new, painful litigation that would exacerbate our government-to-government relationship and only further divide the state and our people,” Mills said in her veto letter.
BANGOR DAILY NEWS • July 6, 2023
Most of Maine’s breeding birds are easy to see. Some aren’t. I nominate Bicknell’s thrush as the most difficult to observe. The quest to locate the elusive bird took me to a mountaintop last weekend, fighting wind and fog, trying to see one. I succeeded, barely. One flew by, just as I was steadying myself on a rocky outcropping. In three hours of searching, it was the only one I saw. But I heard several. ~ Bob Duchesne
WASHINGTON POST • July 6, 2023
A remarkable spate of historic heat is hitting the planet, raising alarm over looming extreme weather dangers – and an increasing likelihood this year will be Earth’s warmest on record. New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their swift evolution: Historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak; unparalleled low sea ice levels around Antarctica, where global warming impacts had, until now, been slower to appear; and the planet experiencing its warmest June ever charted.
ASSOCIATED PRESS • July 6, 2023
Drinking water from nearly half of U.S. faucets likely contains “forever chemicals” that may cause cancer and other health problems, according to a government study released Wednesday. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in March proposed the first federal drinking water limits on six forms of PFAS, or per- and polyfluorinated substances, which remain in the human body for years and don’t degrade in the environment. A final decision is expected later this year or in 2024. But the government hasn’t prohibited companies using the chemicals from dumping them into public wastewater systems.
BANGOR DAILY NEWS • July 6, 2023
The veto letter Gov. Janet Mills wrote last week opposing a bill that would let Maine’s tribes benefit from more federal laws is six pages long. But underlying it is decades of debate over the relationship between the state and its four federally recognized tribes that make up the Wabanaki Alliance — the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Mi’kmaq and Maliseet. Among the main sticking points: Mills said an amendment to the bill that exempts environmental laws does not achieve its intended aim, and removing nearly 300,000 acres of land held in trust by the tribes and any new lands they acquire in the future from state or local regulation could lead to “federal meddling.”
