As mentioned in prior posts here and here, CLF’s lawsuit to reopen the St. Croix River to alewives resulted in this letter from EPA agreeing that the Maine Alewife Law violated water quality standards for the St. Croix. Yesterday, the Maine Attorney General responded to that letter here and the response is disappointing to say the least.  The first half of the letter is not even related to the Alewife Law but rather a gratuitous attempt to bolster the State’s efforts to restrict the jurisdiction of the Passamaquoddy Tribe and other Maine tribes.  The second half of the letter does not contest the findings in EPA’s letter that the Alewife Law constitutes a change in the St Croix’s water quality standard but rather attempts to justify that change as a read more…

I felt like thumping my chest last week after reading an article in the Portland Press Herald about the decline in the number of cars registered here in Portland and the increasing number of people who are getting to and from work by bus, bike or foot. Ours is a small office (4 full time employees and this summer 4 student interns) and it was not unusual to see 5 or 6 bikes in the office, representing commuters from Deering Oaks, the West End, South Portland and Falmouth. Last Spring, one of our interns, a 3rd year law student commuted from Biddeford by bus. As our intern Brian Lessels wrote on this blog, he, like others at CLF, are biking devotees. As the article points out, the move away from read more…

Ceaseless, predictable, powerful – the tide is all of these things. We may be adding “illuminating” to that list as our nation’s first grid-connected commercial tidal energy project gets underway off the coast of Maine and begins to light up homes sometime in August. As part of a renewable energy plan, tidal energy may hold great promise for a cleaner energy future. It’s a relatively simple process to convert the kinetic energy of tides into power for the grid (not much different from a wind turbine, really) – but the process of siting and building tidal energy farms in our coastal waters is much more complex. Cobscook Bay off Eastport, Maine may be one of the most ideal spots in the US for tidal energy. It sits at the mouth read more…

Last week I found myself on the beautiful shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington Vermont at the 36th Annual meeting of the New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers. Normally, this meeting is a low key affair that doesn’t have a big impact on the place where it is being held. That was not the case this year. Protests outside the meeting drew attention to issues, like potential import of tar sands oil into New England, that were not on the formal meeting agenda. An Op-Ed by CLF President John Kassel which ran in a number of regional newspapers before and after the meeting and can now be found on the CLF blog, as well as those protests and pointed inquiries by the press in the meeting forced drew focus read more…

If the weather during the rest of the summer remains hot and calm, this year may well be remembered as one of the worst for blue-green algae bloom in recent memory on Lake Champlain. That is too bad, because it means days of ruined beach visits, vacations when kids can’t go in the water and declines in income for lakeside businesses. But it could also cause a shift in attitude about what lake phosphorus pollution means, and how serious we are about dealing with it. And that would be a good result from a bad situation. One of the interesting things about blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria as they are more accurately known, is that, unlike an invasive species or pollution by hazardous materials, they are normal inhabitants of land and read more…

Against a backdrop of protesters vehemently opposing bad proposals to bring energy from Canada into New England, governors from the six New England states this week demonstrated their commitment to a clean energy future for our region. They resolved to pool their buying power, regionally, for renewable energy. This will boost wind and solar energy, among other clean sources, at the best available price—a much-needed step on our path to affordable renewable energy and independence from dirty fossil fuels. read more..

"Local" has become a new buzz word in America but what does it really mean, and why should we get on board? The reality is that within our own lifetimes we will witness the end of cheap oil and will have to learn to get by with less, whether we want to or not. In an attempt to practice just that, I planted a 600 sq. foot vegetable garden on some family property last year and found it to be very rewarding. read more..

This week on TalkingFish.org: read about sea scallops in the last edition of the Local Summer Fisheries series, public support for opening the St. Croix river to alewives is evident in a Bangor Daily News editorial, and read about what's new in New England's fisheries in the weekly Fish Talk in the News. read more..

Recently, Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation attempted to make recycling easier for Rhode Islanders by creating “single-stream recycling.” Now households do not have to separate paper from plastic – everything can go in the same bin and other items can also now be recycled, such as plastic cups, tissue paper and just about any plastic container 2 gallons or less in volume. Sounds simple and great, right? Sadly, it hasn’t caught on yet. read more..

Champlin’s Marina may be CLF’s oldest active case. Originally filed in 2003, the case has been to the Supreme Court (more than once), Superior Court (more than once), and the Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) (more than once). The most recent hearing before CRMC was Tuesday evening, July 31, 2012. Here is how this came about. In January 2011, the full CRMC voted unanimously to deny Champlin’s a permit to expand its marina in Block Island’s Great Salt Pond. Champlin’s appealed to the Superior Court, as it had a legal right to do. In the Superior Court, Champlin’s filed a brief raising a curious issue: Champlin’s claimed that it had suffered a violation of its equal protection rights because CRMC had granted a permit for Payne’s Dock to expand, but read more…