Talking the Two Maines, Maine-2, and the 2020 election with CBC-New Brunswick

Not surprisingly, the outside world is paying a great deal of attention to our pending election. An additional data point: I did interviews back-to-back Monday with journalists in Denmark and Canada about separate aspects of the cultural and political context for 2020.

The first of those interviews, with CBC-New Brunswick, is included in today's radio/text/television story on Maine's Second District, its politics, its differences with the First District, and its potentially decisive role in Tuesday's vote, as there's a scenario (however unlikely) under which its single electoral vote breaks a 269-269 Electoral College tie. Add in the race between Senator Susan Collins and his Democratic rival, former Maine House speaker Sarah Gideon, and there's a lot at stake.

Also, in a scene out of Cold War Berlin or Vienna, reporter, Jacques Poitras also interviews an American voter live across the closed border on the bridge connecting tiny Forest City, Maine (Population: 5) and Forest City, New Brunswick. It's fitting as Poitras is also the author of Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border, about our federations' shared frontier.

How New Brunswick stopped Covid-19 in its tracks

The Canadian province of New Brunswick has weathered the pandemic with zero deaths and no long term care outbreaks and is currently down to just two active cases and no hospitalizations. There was a sixteen day period in late April and early May when they didn't have any active cases at all.

How did a province of 750,000 with an aged population manage to outperform its neighbors -- including Maine, Nova Scotia, and Quebec -- to virtually contain a global pandemic? As I reported in Saturday's Portland Press Herald it was a combination of acting very early, closing its borders with the United States and with other provinces, not being as close to major hotspots and, well, a lot of dumb luck.

Enjoy.

Colony, Chapter 3: Massachusetts' conquest of Maine

Maine is celebrating the bicentennial of its statehood this year, but the story of our beginnings lies in the millennia and centuries that preceded March 15th, 1820, the day we regained our independence from Massachusetts. 

Colony, an ongoing six-part series in the Maine Sunday Telegram, tells that story, and the third installment appeared last Sunday, telling the story of how Massachusetts Bay annexed the formerly-independent colony of Maine in the 1650s. At one point they even send soldiers in.

The conquest made Maine a colony of a colony, and Boston ruled what eventually became known as the District of Maine -- which didn't even border on the rest of the Commonwealth -- in the interests of mainland Massachusetts, not the people living on the eastern frontier. As we'll see in the next three chapters of Colony, this experience, which lasted until 1820, fundamentally shaped Maine's culture, economy and self-conception.

If you enjoy this series and want more, consider reading my cultural history of Maine, The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (Viking, 2004) and, on Maine-Wabanaki relations in more recent times, the Portland Press Herald series "Unsettled," also available as an ebook at the usual outlets.

The Maine nurse saving lives in the Mediterranean

In this week's Maine Sunday Telegram I profile Tim Harrison, a veteran Medecins sans Frontiers nurse from Union, Maine who has spent decades saving lives in some of the most dangerous and unstable parts of the world. Now he's on an MSF rescue ship off the coast of Libya, saving thousands of migrants fleeing war, torture, and sex trafficking in their home countries, which are spread across the Eastern Hemisphere.

European governments, for their part, tried to shut them down, refusing scheduled refueling stops or even threatening prosecution (because the rescuers don't return migrants to Libya, the lawless country they are fleeing from in overloaded rubber rafts.)

Details in the story.

Six years after lawmakers reverse ban, alewives have banner run in St. Croix River

For seven years now, I've reported on the strange saga of the alewives of the St. Croix River, which forms the border between the US and Canada in eastern Maine and southwestern New Brunswick.

They're the key forage food fish of the river system and near-coastal ocean, but back in 1995, the Maine legislature decided to order the fishways closed to them in the St. Croix, on the behest of guides for smallmouth bass, an introduced species they feared would be harmed by the native fish (an assertion lacking in compelling scientific evidence.)

In 2013 -- under heavy lobbying by everyone from the U.S. and Canadian federal governments to the Passamaquoddy tribe and Maine lobster fishermen --  lawmakers finally repealed the law and the fishways were reopened.

Now, six years on, the river's alewives have seen a record run -- nearly half a million fish, or double 2018's level and five thousand times the 2002 run of 900. I had the story in Monday's Portland Press Herald.

Rep. Pingree tours child detention sites in Texas, Rep. Poliquin speaks out against practice

I've been covering the Maine delegation's stance and reaction to the Trump administration's separation of migrant children from their families and the effort to reunify them for the Portland Press Herald.

Two developments:

Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-ME01, is in southmost Texas (where I once lived) to inspect child detention centers there. Here's my dispatch -- still updating at this hour as her tour continues -- on what she's found. [Update, 6/24/18: this story now includes latest information on what bills or legislative actions Pingree, Poliquin, Sen. Angus King, and Sen. Susan Collins are taking on the issue.]

Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-ME02, who for a time avoided discussing the issue, has taken a strong stance for immediate reunification, backing a new bill to that effect. Details in my story yesterday.

It not only can happen here, it's already started

My congressional representative here in Maine is heading to southmost Texas tomorrow to join a score of her colleagues touring federal detention centers where migrant children taken from their parents are being held. Her questions -- and the fact that they're all legitimate ones -- illustrate where we're at as a country: where are the detained girls? where are the detained babies? are reports that caregivers aren't allowed to touch or hug traumatized children true? Or that kids are being kept drugged to pacify them? how is the government going to reunite children -- especially babies -- with their families, particularly if the parents have already been deported? are they even going to?

The central message of American Character was that liberal democracies fail when the balance between the two pillars of freedom -- individual liberty and the maintenance of the common good -- gets too far out of whack. Written in 2015, before Trump was considered a serious candidate, it warned that the US was in danger of falling into authoritarianism for this reason, and that all the warning signs were present.

This week we learned that we're already there, replete with detention camps for babies and children, border agents effectively kidnapping children to terrorize migrants, and a stunning set of lies and reversals issued from the pulpits of the Trump administration on the issue.

The federation is at a crossroads, and its soul at stake. Let's hope we pass through in one piece.

Talking Maine's 1820 split from Mass. with KQED's California Report

This November, Californians will be asked if they want to split their state into three, a measure spearheaded by venture capitalist Tim Draper. I wrote about some of the problems Draper's borders present, in historical-cultural terms, over at Medium last month.

But this week, I got to talk about an entirely different aspect of historical background on KQED's statewide "California Report": the lessons and precedents set by Maine's split from Massachusetts in 1820.

Readers of The Lobster Coast are aware of the two entities were separate colonies back in the 1640s, when the English Civil War pit Royalist, Anglican, semi-feudal, West Country-dominated Maine against Puritan, Parliament-backing, East Anglia-settled Massachusetts. The execution of the King cleared the way for Boston to annex the Maine settlements, which they ruled as a colony -- the District of Maine -- for nearly 70 years. The War of 1812 -- when Massachusetts refused to defend eastern Maine or help the federal government rollback the British occupation of it -- was just the final blow to Commonwealth unity.

But I digress. Here's a link to the audio of our interview, and here's the web story. (KQED is the San Francisco NPR affiliate, and one of the nation's public radio "superstations."

Bad borders: what US secessionists' proposals miss

The sixth installment of my "Balkanized America" series is up over at Medium, looking at how contemporary US secessionists and state-splitters -- from Ted Draper's "Six Californias" and CAL3 plans to create an independent Cascadia or Texas -- set themselves up for failure by ignoring centuries-old regional fissures.

Those are, of course, the American Nations fissures.

Earlier installments in the series have run the gamut from debunking the assertion that the greatest divide in US politics is between urban and rural voters (hint: regional cultures have a far greater effect) to how the existence of these cultures shaped the run-up to the 1787 constitutional convention and even the reproductive clustering of North Americans (which surprised even me, as the paradigm argues for cultural effects, not genetic ones.)

American Nations, now in Korean

The Korean language edition of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America arrived recently in my mail.

Turns out Donald Trump made the cover, amid illustrative elements that evoke missile launches/prison bars and constellations/speech bubbles. Given the way Trump has heightened tensions on the peninsula via his twitter account, this is probably a savvy marketing move by Geulhangari Publishers. And it looks to be on sale now, at least at this website.

Amazingly, this is the first foreign language edition of American Nations, but Japanese is on its way very shortly too. Pleased to have the book available in South Korea, where I spent a fascinating two weeks on assignment during the "IMF" financial collapse of 1997-98. Even visited the DMZ, which seemed tense even then, despite the presence of a gift shop and golf course on the southern side, which I wrote about for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Hope those who can read it enjoy.

분열하는 제국

Maine: Dam owner wants to walk away, alarming lakeside residents

In Saturday's Portland Press Herald, I have a story from the eastern borderlands of Maine and the United States, where a pulp and paper company has announced it wishes to surrender ownership of two dams, a process that normally would result in their gates being left open, permanently lowering the water level of the lakes they impound.

This, as you'll read, is an alarming prospect to the communities around East Grand Lake -- Maine's eighth largest -- which could fall by six feet, turning waterfront property into interior lots and playing havoc with the local tax base, tourism economy, and ecosystem. Canada's not happy either, and they own half the lake bed and the land under one half of the most prominent of the dams. More, as always, in the story.

I previously wrote about Eastern Maine dams when the state Department of Environmental Protection messed up during the federal relicensing process (again) and also during a debate about allowing the passage of (native) alewives up the river system, and its possible effects on (non-native) smallmouth bass.

Trump's tariffs on Canadian softwood please Maine sawmill owners

In today's Portland Press Herald, I report on how President Trump's imposition of punitive tariffs against imported Canadian softwood lumber are being seen in Maine, a state where two-fifths of the land area is a continuous softwood industrial forest bordering on Canada. It's a complex situation, but Maine sawmill owners are really happy, and its likely to benefit loggers who work for them too

I wrote about this issue back in December in the Maine Sunday Telegram, after the idea first surfaced.

Reviewing "Prisoners of Geography" at the Washington Post

Tim Marshall, veteran foreign correspondent for Britain's SkyNews, has a new book out on geopolitics. Prisoners of Geography argues the influence of geographic elements is under recognized in our contemporary foreign policy and historical discourse and aims to fix that.

He does so with mixed success, as I argue in my review in yesterday's Washington Post. Marshall is strong on Russia, weak on North America and the Pacific, and doesn't really make a case for a new (or even renewed) way of analyzing world events.

My last review for the Post was on Brand Luther, a new book on Martin Luther's game-changing effect on the greatest social media innovation of his time: the printed book.

On Maine-New Brunswick border, a banner year for a newly liberated fish

I was in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick last week and learned that the St. Croix River's alewives -- which the Maine legislature banned from the river for 18 years -- are having a banner spawning run. Details are in my story in yesterday's Portland Press Herald.

The river's alewives have been at the center of a strange, science-denying political story for several years, one I visited in detail in this piece in 2012. I followed up on the story here, here, here, here, here, and here, and colleague Kevin Miller reported on a recent, unsuccessful effort by bass fishing guides to restrict the fish. [Update, 6/25/19: An update on the alewives story.]

 More stories from my trip East of Downeast are coming up.

American Nations and Belize

As a once-frequent visitor to Belize -- setting for part of my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas -- I was pleased to see one of their major dailies make use of my most recent title, American Nations. Inspired by the concepts they encountered in the book, Amandala's editorial board weighed in on Belize's national identity, arguing for a prominent place for its Ango-Creole culture vis a vis the Spanish-speaking Maya world which -- via Guatemala -- has territorial claims on the former British colony. (I wrote about the latter a decade and a half ago here.) Here's Amandala:

It is Belize’s black, English-speaking component which feels most threatened by the Guatemalan claim to Belize. In defining Belize’s national reality, however, it is precisely that black, English-speaking component which made us very different from Guatemala, the nation which has claimed Belizean territory...Using Woodard’s definition, we can argue that Belize is a nation which became a state on September 21, 1981. This is the reality which Guatemala seeks to reverse. This reversal is what we, the Belizean people, have vowed to resist.

Power to the people. Power in the struggle.

I'd say this: in American Nations terms, most of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Chiapas and other areas probably belong to a Maya cultural zone dating back thousands of years. Parts of coastal Belize -- along with the Bay Islands of Honduras, parts of the Mosquito Coast, and other coastal locales, might have claim to be a dominant Anglo-Creole regional culture under Wilbur Zelinsky's Doctrine of First Effective Settlement. Regardless, a country like Belize has long been bi-cultural in this regard -- tri-cultural if you give the Garifuna people their due -- and one hopes this will remain a source of its strength rather than strife.
 

National Journal: "What if we redrew state boundaries?"

The new issue of the National Journal includes a fun "what-if" piece on how the boundaries of the U.S. states might be better drawn if it were possible to do such a thing.

Staff writer Alex Steitz-Wald writes:

Federalism is a wonderful idea, but it can't be entirely realized with the current map. States are meant to act as "guardians of a common interest," as James Madison wrote in Federalist 46, but common interests—whether economic, cultural, or political—are often split by antiquated and arbitrary state lines.

And, I'm pleased to say, he goes on to introduce the cultural fissures described in American Nations and quotes from our discussion last month. Here's an excerpt of the latter:

Any sensible map, says author Colin Woodard, should ignore the existing political borders in favor of the country's latent cultural fault lines that developed organically over hundreds of years of colonialism and expansion. "There has never been one America but several Americas, each with their own cultural values and unique takes on what the American experiment should be," says Woodard, the author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New England Yankees, for instance, have a communitarian streak dating back to the days when their Puritan ancestors crossed the Atlantic in search of a theological utopia. Meanwhile, the Scots-Irish who populated the remote hollers of Appalachia brought with them a fiery libertarianism evident in today's tea-party movement.

Indeed. But I've said too much already: read his piece for more on my own and other people's thoughts on this topic. (And if you missed my recent Tufts Magazine cover story on the American Nations and violence, you might want to check that out too.)

Alewives return to St. Croix, spurring optimism about ecosystem recovery

A year ago, I wrote about the strange case of the alewives of the St. Croix River, which forms the border between Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The schooling fish -- which many ecologists regard as a key forage fish -- has been banned from the river since 1995 by an act of the Maine state legislature, a move based on scant science and poor politics. Many were pushing for the fishways on key river dams to be opened.

Fast forward a year and the state legislature has done just that, to the applause of the U.S. and Canadian federal governments, lobstermen, groundfishermen, alewife fishermen, environmentalists, and the native people of the watershed, the Passamaquoddy. Only smallmouth bass fishing guides remain opposed, fearful that the fish will somehow destroy their livelihood.

I returned to the St. Croix recently to revisit the situation; the result is a feature in today's Maine Sunday Telegram, which I hope you'll find enjoyable and informative. It's also upbeat, as many sources think the tiny fish could help jump start a wider ecosystem recovery, not just in the St. Croix, but in the eastern Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy as well.

[Update, 6/25/19: An update on the alewives story.]

At the edge of the nation, a new marathon is run

I've just returned from assignments in far Downeast Maine and southwestern New Brunswick. The first story ran today in the Maine Sunday Telegram and was on the backstory to the creation and organization of today's inaugural Bay of Fundy International Marathon.

The race, which concluded a few hours ago, started at West Quoddy Head light, the easternmost point in the United States, and continued through Lubec, Maine, over the F.D.R. Memorial Bridge, through Canadian customs and onto Campobello Island, New Brunswick. Runners ran the entire length of the 10-mile long island to East Quoddy Head light and back again to recross the bridge and border and reach the finish line in downtown Lubec, population 1100. I hear the rain even held off.

Florida investigators ding K12 Inc; alewives free at last; Connor under fire

After a long period of workflow-induced radio silence, a few updates of interest to Mainers and, perhaps Floridians, New Brunswickers, and some Pennsylvanians as well:

Investigators ding K12 Inc.: K12, the nation's largest online education provider, has been under investigation in Florida over accusations it used unqualified teachers in a taxpayer-financed virtual school there. As I report in today's Portland Press Herald, a draft report has been made public which finds against the company on two of three counts. Testimony to investigators also reflects on the sort of attention -- or lack thereof -- students of the school receive.

K12 has been seeking to operate a virtual charter school here in Maine, but has been rebuffed by authorizers, angering Gov. Paul LePage, who strongly supports their creation. It was at the center of the Sept. 2 Maine Sunday Telegram investigation that won this year's George Polk Award for Education Reporting.

St. Croix alewives free at last: Last summer I reported on the bizarre odyssey of the spring spawning runs of St. Croix River alewives, which had been banned from the sprawling international watershed by an act of the Maine legislature. After many twists and turns -- and reflecting the scientific and economic evidence that the fish help, not hurt the ecosystem there -- a bill ordering the state to open the fishways to the schooling fish has become law, after Gov. LePage chose not to veto it.

Former Press Herald chief Rich Connor accused of stealing $500K from company: The parent company of the paper I work for, the Portland Press Herald, has accused former CEO and editor in chief Rich Connor of essentially stealing over half a million dollars from the paper while it was in precarious financial condition.

Long before I ever expected to work for Maine Today Media, I covered the Press Herald's plight for Maine-based magazines. Connor -- who is being sued by his other former employers, the Times-Leader of Wilkes-Barre, for appropriating another quarter million -- did a lot of damage to journalism as well as the paper's balance sheets. Here's his "no scoops" vision as articulated to me for this 2010 feature in Down East and, for context, a bit about how he left the paper on the eve of its rescue (ultimately to S. Donald Sussman, not Harte and company, as it turned out.)

DePoy-Warren moving from state DEP to Department of Education: For inside baseball people, Samantha DePoy-Warren, the iconoclastic communications chief at the Maine Department of Environmental Protection is redeploying to the Department of Education, where she will take the communications portfolio from David Connerty-Marin. Warren confirmed her last day at DEP is this Friday. Marin said he's switching to another position within the education department.

Maine: Alewives move a step closer to the upper St. Croix

For those following the St. Croix alewives saga, the fish seem to be winning the fight in Maine's capital, Augusta.

As I reported this morning at the Portland Press Herald, a key legislative committee unanimously endorsed a bill that would essentially open the river to the spawning fish. The fish had been barred from the river by a 1995 law passed at the behest of smallmouth bass fishing guides who feared the fish were harming the (non-native) bass. Last week the same committee heard an earful from the alewives' many supporters, which include lobstermen, groundfishermen, the Passamaquoddy tribe, environmentalists, and the federal governments of both the U.S. and Canada, which share control of the river system.

The emergency bill could be voted on by the House and Senate as early as Wednesday this week. It would then go to the governor for his signature. (A compromise bill endorsed by his administration was unanimously rejected by the committee.)