Salarius: Which communities have you selected for your study and why?

Johnson: We’ll be looking at Eastport and Lubec, but separately. Many profiles treat them as one, but they are very different: they focus on different species; Easport is in the bay, while Lubec faces the open ocean; they have long-standing cultural differences and deserve their own stories. Also Port Clyde, because they are emerging as a great example of resilience. They’ve organized themselves well, and have responded to change by hanging on to their groundfish fleet. How are they able to do that? And then Rockland. I grew up in the Rockland-Thomaston area, and I’ve seen the significant changes in the community. I like that there’s more opportunity, and people want to come to Rockland. These are good things, but questions linger in my mind, like what if the fisheries came back? Would they fit into the community the way they did before, at the same level?

Salarius: Are there things Maine’s fishing communities are already doing to become stronger and more resilient? Does resilience come from the bottom up or from the top?

Johnson: Groups like Penobscot East Resource Center, Cobscook Bay Resource Center, the Island Institute and Sea Grant, are assisting fishing communities strengthen what they already have. They’re not telling fishermen what to do, but working with them to provide resources and assistance with things like marketing, and facilitating discussions about what these communities want for their future. They also provide the leadership that is so necessary. Also the working waterfront efforts in the state help fishing communities keep a foot in the door, so that if and when the fish come back—and I do believe they’ll come back—we’ll be able to go fishing.

Salarius: So what then is the role of larger government entities like the Department of Marine Resources or NOAA Fisheries?

Johnson: They provide support: funding research, collecting and providing data, supporting groups like the Lobster Zone Councils. They also act as a conduit between local and federal levels.

Salarius: To what extent is fishing community decline the result of a linear pattern that begins with resource depletion, followed by regulation and loss of access?

Johnson: In a paper I wrote with my colleagues that was published earlier this year, we talked about “creeping enclosure,” the way that regulations and policy changes have a cumulative effect of restricting a fishery without that being the explicit goal.

Salarius: How did we let this happen?

Johnson: We didn’t plan. Cumulative impact is supposed to be evaluated[i] but how do you do it? How do you account for unintended consequences? Did anyone intend for limited entry followed by days at sea rules to make it so that small-scale groundfishermen who lost their boats or switched to lobstering couldn’t go back?[ii]

Salarius: What can communities do when confronted with such a fate?

Johnson: Communities have to know what they want, and we have to create space for people to ask, What does it mean to live and work in this community? What do we want to be in the future? What can we do to make it possible for our kids to stay and work here? If you don’t have vision, then you are just reacting. But if you know what you want, you can imagine the possibilities, and what you need to do to achieve that desired future.

It is troubling that we are so dependent on lobster now,[iii] and the recent economic downturn opened a lot of people’s eyes, and got people talking about what to do. There’s no good answers, because we don’t know what’s going to happen, but having these conversations is important. And it’s an opportunity for other members of the community to help, to educate themselves about who is fishing in their community and what species are caught and how they can buy local seafood. In these communities, people who aren’t fishermen are just as tied to fishing, and they can take ownership of that identity. The ‘sense of place’ in some of these communities is about a shared experience that brings people together and lifts them up.

Salarius: So, what is the role of culture in community resilience?

Johnson: Resilience literature uses the term “social memory”[iv] to describe the importance of local knowledge to reminding communities about how things used to be, to understand how the community responded to change in the past and what the possibilities are for the future. Key people in the community keep the stories alive. Look at what Penobscot East is doing with their “Sentinel Fishery” project– they’re having to remember and re-learn where and how to catch fish in coastal waters that haven’t been fished for decades.

Salarius: Aha! That is where culture, art, music, poetry comes in—the role of culture in resilience that I’ve been struggling to identify: it keeps social memory alive.

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