Transcription of Maine Conservation & Restorative Seafood #257
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Maine radio hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Sean: I grew up outside of Boston and neither of my parents were what you’d call outdoors people, I think the biggest camping trip was in the backyard, in an old army tent.
Barton: It’s not just restoring the health of ecosystems and I don’t approach environmentalism in the traditional way, the tragedy of the commons, you know, bad human bad you’re in Eden and it’s your fault
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #257, Maine Conservation and Restorative Seafood, airing for the first time on Sunday August 21st, 2016. The importance of conserving our land and resources is less controversial than it once was. What remains a conundrum is how we go about doing so. Today, we discuss possible solutions with Sean Mahoney at the Conservation Law Foundation here in Maine and Chef Barton Seaver, an advocate for restorative seafood practices. Thank you for joining us.
Barton: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Berlin City Honda, where the car buying experience is all about easy. After all, life is complicated enough and buying a car shouldn’t be. That’s why the Berlin City Honda team goes the extra mile by pre-discounting all their vehicles and focus their efforts on being open, honest, and all about getting you on the road. In fact, Berlin City recently won the 2015 Women’s Choice Award, a strong testimony to their ability to deliver a different kind of car buying experience. Berlin City Honda of Portland, easy, it’s how buying a car should be. Go to berlincityhondame.com for more information.
Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick features a unique interactive space called the Collaboratory with rotating monthly themes for all ages and interests. Join us in September for the exhibit The Writers’ Life and on Wednesday, September 14th at 6:30 pm when Dr. Lisa Belisle and writer Joan Dempsey will continue a conversation begun earlier this year on the importance of writing spaces and Joan’s wonderful backyard writing shed, a former chicken coop, as well as the craft of writing and Joan’s acquisition of a significant research grant to travel to Warsaw and to Washington, DC for work on This Is How It Begins: A Novel In Progress. For more about The Writer’s Life, please visit curtislibrary.com for more information or call 207-725-5242, extension 219.
Lisa: As long time listeners of Love Maine Radio know, I am pretty impressed by people who do work for environmental causes and one individual that has been doing this for quite a while is Sean Mahoney. Sean serves as the executive vice president, director of programs and director of the Conservation Law Foundation’s Maine Advocacy Center. Prior to joining the conservation law foundation in 2007, Sean practiced environmental law in San Francisco and Portland for fifteen years, where he represented a variety of commercial and non-governmental entities in all aspects of state and federal environmental litigation and permitting. At the Conservation Law Foundation, Sean focuses on marine conservation and sustainability, climate change, transportation, energy infrastructure and restoring and protecting Maine’s rivers and coastal water sheds. Thanks for coming in today.
Sean: Sure. It’s great to be here.
Lisa: We were talking before we came on about our Bowdoin connection and you live in Falmouth now …
Sean: We do.
Lisa: You’ve had a long standing connection to the state of Maine.
Sean: We really have. Actually, the first time I ever took a plane was to Presque Isle, where we had a family friend who was a parish priest there and my parents thought it would be a good idea for us to see Presque Isle and to join in the potato harvest. So in tenth grade, we spent the last two weeks of August and first ten days in September in Presque Isle.
Lisa: That’s a very interesting introduction to the state of Maine.
Sean: Yeah, and aeronautics as well.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s true. That could not have been a very big plane.
Sean: It was not a big plane and it was about a half mile walk from the plane to the hangar in Presque Isle.
Lisa: Well, I’m glad that you were so impressed with our state that you decided to come back here and I guess go to school here.
Sean: Right. It was a great place to go to school. I lived in Brunswick for four years, had the opportunity to live out on the coast my last year of school which was just wonderful and I fell in love with the state. We were really lucky to be able to come back to Maine about a decade later to raise our family and do the type of work I love to do.
Lisa: Your wife Jan, who also went to Bowdoin …
Sean: That’s right.
Lisa: You have three children and as I said, you live in Falmouth. They’ve all been through the Falmouth school system?
Sean: They have. Well, we’ve got one who made it through and two more who are on their way and we consider ourselves very lucky to live in a community like Falmouth that’s got great schools and great open space which has been a nice community and a nice area, the Portland area as a whole to raise a family and to work in and to recreate in.
Lisa: I’ve been fascinated by the Conservation Law Foundation for quite a while and I think part of it, I was interested in conservation before I event went to school but Bowdoin has a very strong environmental program.
Sean: They do.
Lisa: It kind of normalized something for me, whereas when you’re growing up, you know, sometimes some people are about the environment and sometimes some people aren’t, but Bowdoin was very strong in that area. Did you have that same sense?
Sean: I did. I grew up outside of Boston and neither of my parents were what you’d call outdoorspeople. I think the biggest camping trip was in the backyard in an old army tent. Coming to Maine was really eye-opening and particularly one winter camping trip to Baxter State Park, which was really just an incredible experience and one that I think put me on the path to really wanting to spend as much time outdoors as possible and try and find a career that was consistent with that.
Lisa: How do you make that next step from wanting to be outside and wanting to protect the outdoors and then also you went to the University of Virginia and you have a law degree from there and you also, you were a law clerk and you were a Peace Corps volunteer in Sri Lanka. How do you bring all of those experiences together?
Sean: Those strains. The first bit I would say was going to the Peace Corps which was also a very formative experience. I grew up in a family that really valued giving back to community and having the opportunity to be in the Peace Corps for a number of years allowed me to see different parts of the world, to experience what it’s like to be a minority, I was the only white guy for about a 50 mile radius and it’s a very different experience when everybody is looking at you and assuming that you have certain character traits and personality and opinions just because of what you look like. That was really a tremendous experience.
Finishing that, I was a teacher in the Peace Corps, training people to be teachers. I wanted to be able to do something a little bit more and law school was a path that I thought provided one with tools to make some changes. At the time, environmental law was really still developing. This was back in the late 80s. It was a great time to be in law school for that. From there, I was lucky enough to work for two law firms that had not just wonderful colleagues and people to work with but a real commitment to pro-bono legal services. I had a number of cases that I was able to bring on behalf of other environmental organizations, both in California and Maine in addition to other clients. That was really a great opportunity to look at the various problems that our environment was facing and to see the path that I wanted to go down.
Lisa: We had the new Casco Bay keeper on the radio show not too long ago and she also is an attorney and …
Sean: Yeah. She used to work at Conservation Law Foundation.
Lisa: Oh, that’s right actually. I remember her saying that. It’s interesting to me that sometimes the legal profession has maybe been thought of as more interested in its own making of money. I’m trying to say this in the nicest way possible, but both of you are doing things that really is more externally focused and not so much about the making of money. I want to be really careful because I know a lot of attorneys and that’s not why they do it, it’s not because they just want to make money. In fact, two of my brothers are attorneys but you know what I’m saying.
Sean: I do. There is a lot of people in the legal profession who are wonderful at what they do and make positive impacts in so many different ways, including pro-bono services, or allowing their partners or associates to spend a lot of time on pro-bono services. I think Portland and Maine as a general matter is really lucky to have a legal profession that’s so committed to the public good. There are others who say, “I’m going to step away a little bit,” and instead of problem solving for clients that problems a lot of times revolve around financial issues, how much of a penalty is somebody going to pay for having to clean up some pollution or a commercial dispute between two parties, who is right about that.
I’m lucky to be able to focus on larger issues. What is the best way to ensure that we have a sustainable fishery in the Gulf of Maine? How are we going to get our arms around climate change? How are we going to help our municipalities adjust to climate change, to the adaptation resiliency issues? How do we want to make sure that our state and federal governments are holding up their end of the bargain and enforcing the laws that are on the books? It’s a privilege to be able to do that and it’s made possible in part as a non-profit through generosity of our supporters. It’s something that I’m thankful for on a regular basis.
Lisa: You have spent a lot of time working on issues surrounding water and this is something that is of course fairly important because we live … Well, you and I both live right here on Casco Bay and a lot of us, if we don’t live right on the water, we love near a river, we live near an ocean, we live near a lake or a pond. Water is a pretty big deal and Maine hasn’t always had very clean water.
Sean: No, it hasn’t, although Maine has been a leader in cleaning water. As you know, Senator Muskie was the father of the Clean Water Act as well as the Clean Air Act. When one thinks back to 40 or 50 years ago, many of our rivers and bays were open sewers. In Falmouth, I live on the Presumpscot River, and nobody wanted to live on the river because the smell and the fumes were so bad coming down from the paper mills in Westbrook that it would peel the paint off houses. We’ve made a tremendous difference in the last three or four decades, so our rivers aren’t open sewers. You don’t have chicken factories like you used to have in Belfast that are just dumping innards and feathers and carcasses into Penobscot Bay. To that degree, to that extent, we’re in a much better place than we were.
It’s harder though now to make the final step with respect to how do you ensure that you have clean water, swimmable water. How do you make sure East End Beach is not closed because of high fecal coliform counts? How do you make sure that the inshore fishery in Maine, which is basically non-extent now, comes back? Trying to address things like stonewater runoff, which is basically just everything that runs off roofs and pavements and gathers all the junk that’s on roofs and pavements and goes into the Bay, Casco Bay for example. Or we have more severe storms, so it overwhelms our wastewater treatment facilities and so they have to … It’s called the combined sewer overflow, which basically means you can’t treat what’s coming out of our bathrooms and sinks and drains and the like and so that’s not a good thing obviously.
Now that the waters are clean, how do you get fish back up? How do you insure that the river herring and alewives that are crucial cornerstone species for larger fish in the Gulf oF Maine? How do you ensure that they can come back up to their ancestral rivers, spawn, and go back out into the bay and serve as a food source? Those challenges are different but just as important to try and address on a day to day basis.
Lisa: Is it harder because the problem is not evident as it once was because we don’t see open … We don’t see sewage floating down the river or the waters look clean so they must be clean?
Sean: I think that’s exactly it. Most of the pollution, water pollution that we’ve had in the past would come from what are called point sources, pipes. You could go and you could watch the pipe by the paper mill in Westbrook and you would see the junk falling out or you would see … You know, as you said, stuff floating in the water. You don’t see that as much now and so it’s harder to grasp. I think as a community, as a state, it’s harder to grasp what the threats are. I always think of the old commercial with a Native American looking at all the litter and the tear coming down. That’s in your face. You don’t see that as much now, right? You still have these threats to the environment.
Lisa: Another tricky thing I would think is that we still need to have jobs for people. One of the issues with the mill in Westbrook was it employed a lot of people. How do you negotiate that? It’s a small state and we all have to live together and get along.
Sean: The mill in Westbrook still does employ a lot of people and hopefully it will continue to because those are good jobs that are hard to find today. I feel very strongly, having come from the private sector and now in the non-profit sector, that the supposed conflict between environment and economy doesn’t really exist. I think that industrial facilities like paper mills or the like, some of them are our best environmental stewards and deserve a lot of credit for cleaning up their operations, for using innovative pollution control technology and all the like. I think that there is a huge amount of money to be made in looking at how do we move forward in certain areas, like energy. There is a huge new world of how we’re going to generate electricity, how we’re going to power our cars, and the innovation that’s happening in Maine and across the region is going to lead to a lot of jobs.
I know this week is the Innovation in Entrepreneurial Week … I forget the title of it but it’s great because you’ve got all these people coming in, not just in the energy markets but all over that are looking at new technologies and new ways of using Maine’s natural resources which include not just our traditional natural resources like timber or fish and the like but also Mainers and Mainers’ own ingenuity as well as our energy natural resources. We have a lot of wind, we have a lot of solar. We have huge potential to generate economic gains while also making environmental gains. It is a balance. I think one of the things that I pride myself on with respect to the Conservation Law Foundation is we take into account what the costs are associated with environmental compliance and with getting cleaner water or cleaner air and try and factor that into what we call in our advocacy both in the courts as well as in the legislature.
Lisa: That’s an important point because I know in medicine we often feel as if there are unfunded mandates that are sent down so there is something that’s a really great idea and ultimately it’s going to do good for the public health, but it’s expensive to implement and there’s often a feeling that it’s very punitive in nature. I can’t imagine that that would go over well if you’re trying to help people understand the importance of conversation, sustainability, renewable resources, to go in there with that type of approach.
Sean: Right. You have to understand that people are running a business and they want to keep the business open and that kind of business is critical to a community. I think there is a path that allows for businesses and communities to thrive while also doing the right thing when it comes to addressing what the impacts are on the community and on the community’s health and well being as well as on the natural resources.
Lisa: What are some of the big issues that you’ve been working on recently with the Conservation Law Foundation?
Sean: We spend a lot of time on climate change. It’s a little bit like 90 degrees of separation, everything relates to climate change as we go forward. It is going to have such a dramatic impact on not just our lives, but on our children’s lives and their kids’ lives. We already know that we’re going to have a temperature rise of 2 to 4, 5 degrees Celsius on average. We already have much more severe storms. Phoenix, Arizona has got 117 degrees today. The way the weather and climate shapes our lives is going to change dramatically.
What do we do about that? Part of it is we need to address the root cause of that and the root cause of that largely comes from our use of carbon. We basically as a society have been burning different forms of dirt for energy for the last century, oil and coal primarily, and that has had a profound effect on our environment. We’re moving away from that slowly but surely and to get there, we are really focusing on what is the path that allows us to do it in a way that is practical, but also that will meet the goals that we’ve set as a state, as a country, and as a world to reduce our emissions by 2050.
We work in a number of different ways. We love to say yes to things. Many times lawyers and environmentalists get blamed for just saying no to things, “I don’t want this, I don’t want that.” We like to say yes as often as we can, so we want to support new forms of energy, whether it’s solar or land-based wind or offshore wind, and there are always going to be some issues with that, where do you put them, what impacts are they having on people and the like but as long as they’re properly sited, we think that those are things that we want to support.
[There also 00:23:16] a huge potential for economic improvement. We were really disappointed for example, this last session we worked hard on trying to get some changes made to how we pay for solar energy, and unfortunately the governor vetoed the bill and enough of the Republicans in the House supported the veto so that we weren’t able to make a change. We think that change would have been good for the solar industry, for consumers. We had a great coalition, we had the utilities, we had the Office of the Public Advocate, we had businesses, we had farmers, we had environmentalists. You never see all these people in the same room and the governor still brought out the veto pen. That was disappointing, but we are going to work. We are going to continue to work for those things.
We do say no to things sometimes. The governor wanted to invest $75 million a year of electric customers’ money in a natural gas pipeline and we just didn’t think that investing in natural gas was the way to go. It wasn’t a good deal for Mainers, it wasn’t a good deal for the environment. That’s some of the climate change work that we’re doing. That was a long answer, sorry.
Lisa: No, it’s interesting and it makes me think of my last question for you and that is you and I both have children who are college age and high school age. This is essentially what we’re working for now is something that’s really … This is going to manifest itself in their actual world as they continue to become adults. What is it that you hope to see for your children and what is it that you’re working for personally and professionally to have happen?
Sean: It’s a great question which is always the best stall answer, isn’t it? I think that the piece that I want my kids to have is a sense that they’ve got some control. They can have some impact on their environment, on the issues that they care about. Right now, Washington DC is so broken that trying to get new policy out of Washington, DC. Even old policy that was agreed to ten or fifteen years ago can’t get agreed to today. Senator King was just saying, “It’s an echo chamber down there and it’s broken.” I think that there is real opportunity to have impact in your local community and even in the state of Maine because of its size, that they can really get involved and follow their passion. My daughter is very passionate about the farm and food connection to the environment. We have a program at the Conservation Law Foundation on farm and food and provide legal services to farmers and food entrepreneurs using a lot of the Maine legal community.
It’s really a great program that we started here in Maine and that is replicable elsewhere. It’s something that you can have a real impact on and it connects to the bigger issue. Where you get your food, how far that food travels in a truck or a plane, how much we continue to make use of our land to grow food instead of houses, is really important. I know you said that you’ve got farming in your family and I think you can appreciate that. To the extent that they don’t feel overwhelmed, and I think that happens with a lot of people. Climate change is this big thing and on a beautiful Maine day like today, it’s hard to imagine that we’ve got this real issue with climate change. Who’s going to complain about a 75 degree June day, especially when you’re sitting in February and living with six hours of light a day? To have some sense of control and that innovation on a local level can really have an impact on a larger level.
At CLF, that’s what we think. We’ve got a footprint in each of the New England states and we focus on the issues that are important in each of the states but we also like to think that what we do in the state is replicable in other states and in the rest of the country and it can set an example. Maine’s motto is Dirigo, right, I lead? You know, Maine can be a leader again on the environmental front. That’s what we hope.
Lisa: I’ve been speaking with Sean Mahoney who serves as the executive vice president and director of programs and director of the Conservation Law Foundation’s advocacy center. It’s really been a pleasure to have this conversation with you and I really appreciate the work that you do an d the time that you’ve taken to come in and talk with me today.
Sean: Great. Thanks very much. I’ve really enjoyed it as well.
Speaker 1: Experience chef and owner Harding Lee Smith’s newest hit restaurant, Boone’s Fish House & Oyster Room, Maine’s seafood at its finest. Joining sister restaurants The Front Room, The Grill Room, and The Corner Room, this newly renovated two story restaurant at 86 Commercial Street on Customhouse Wharf overlooks scenic Portland Harbor. Watch lobstermen bring in the daily catch as you enjoy baked stuffed lobster, raw bar, and wood-fired flatbreads. For more information, visit theroomsportland.com.
Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is Portland’s largest gallery, and is located in the heart of the Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space. The current show schedule includes Ruth Hammil, Joanne Parent, Alan Bunker, and Jean Jacks. For complete show details, please visit our website, artcollectormaine.com.
Don’t miss the third Maine live event taking place on September 22nd at the Portland Museum of Art, presented by your friends at Maine Magazine. Take the day to be inspired by stories about creating a vibrant state from fifteen Maine speakers. Tickets are $100 and are sure to go fast. Find out more at maineliveevent.com.
Lisa: My next guest is an individual who I think serves to remind me that the world is actually pretty small, someone that I was connected to through the Harvard Extension school actually by an individual who teaches there, a physician who does public health work. This is Barton Seaver, who is on a mission to restore our relationship with the ocean, the land, and with each other, through dinner. Barton is a firm believer that human health depends upon the health of the ocean, and that the best way to connect the two is at the dinner table. Highlights of culinary career include three rising culinary star awards, twice earning best new restaurant awards and being honored in 2009 by Esquire Magazine as Chef of the Year.
Since leaving the restaurant world, Barton has become involved with a number of local and international initiatives. In 2012, he was named by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the United States Culinary Ambassador Corps. He uses this designation to curate internal conversations on sustainability and the role of food and resource management in public health. He is the director of the Sustainable Seafood & Health Initiative at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. An internationally recognized speaker, Barton has delivered lectures, seminars and demos to a multitude of audiences. His 2010 Mission Blue Voyage TED Talk entitled “Sustainable Seafood: Let’s Get Smart” garnered over 400,000 views. Barton currently resides in coastal Maine, a stone throw away from a working waterfront with his wife and their ten heritage chickens. Impressive, and thanks for coming.
Barton: Thanks. It’s a real pleasure to be here.
Lisa: I don’t know what a heritage chicken is. Is that just a chicken that just has deep roots in the community or is this like a special sort of …
Barton: Our chickens all look like punk dinosaurs. They just have feathers coming out of the top of their head or they look they’re wearing disco pants or just of such beautiful coloration which makes them fun to be around and fun to look at but inefficient as egg layers. They are a lifestyle addition rather than really part of our farm content.
Lisa: I see. So they’re not really contributing significantly to the food economy per se.
Barton: No. We actually don’t like eggs very much.
Lisa: Oh good. Good for them, anyway, right?
Barton: My garden does like what chickens produce, in addition to eggs, very much. That is really why we have them there is for constant compost.
Lisa: I like that. Compost is a favorite theme of mine. I feel like I’d get along really well with your disco heritage chickens. Maybe someday I’ll have to visit and see what these punk rock hairdos and pants and things are all about.
Barton: Yeah. They’re pretty cool looking things.
Lisa: That’s excellent. I’m interested in how you ended up in Maine. You’ve got so much going on and so many different places, nationally, internationally. Why South Freeport?
Barton: Well, my wife is originally from Bangor and her father before her up from the county and this was a long intended move to get her back to her home state. It also is something that I’ve long been working towards in my own career, starting in restaurants. I think we well understand as chefs that it’s our responsibility to sustain and support the people who walk through our front door, who pay our salaries but we also I realized have a responsibility to sustain and support the people that walk through our back door, the producers and my culinary career and thus everything after, my entire career trajectory has been around sustaining communities, producers, and specifically marine producers. The opportunity to come here to Maine, to live on a working waterfront within the very community that I’ve long dedicated myself to helping sustain, is a real honor. It’s a pleasure. To me, sustainability, the ultimate act of sustainability can be described simply as being a good neighbor and to do so, one must embed in the community.
It’s a nice sort of departure and opportunity for me to focus as I have so many things happening in so many countries and so many places. It may seem very scattered and spur of the moment but everything I do is very strategic and having a core, having a center place to call home and a community where I really feel I belong is the strength and foundation from which I am able to do all these things.
Lisa: Where did you grow up?
Barton: I grew up in the opposite of Maine, which was downtown Washington, DC during the height of the crack epidemic in Marion Barry’s era when we were unfortunately the murder capital of the world. I have wonderful memories of my childhood in a very unpleasant place. I’ve lived all over the world from Marrakesh to Barcelona to Chicago, New York, France, Italy and just … I’ve traveled the world enough with National Geographic when I was an explorer to know that all of those experiences have led me to be quite sure of where I want to be now.
Lisa: Why food? With all of this other stuff you have going on as an explorer. Why is it that food became your focus?
Barton: People are I think very hesitant and cautious about really listening to other people. We’re very closed in our lives. We don’t often know or practice how to find wisdom in the world, how to find relationships in the world and really draw from them inspiration, knowledge, wisdom, and how to give back. Food is a fluency that everyone has. You never know someone as well as you do until you break bread with them. Coming from the chef world, I quickly understood the power of food for convening and for disarming people and that is specifically the nadir of my work now is even though I’m working on global greenhouse gas emissions, though I’m working in public health impacts, though I’m working in marine economies and the preservation of cultural heritage, all of this, all of these very disparate seeming conversations are all linked together and food is oftentimes the most common avenue.
Lisa: I watched your TED talk and I was interested in this idea of restorative versus just simply sustainable seafood.
Barton: Yes.
Lisa: Talk to me about that.
Barton: Sustainable … God, what an unsexy idea. Just maintain the status quo. Sure, that’s a great place to be. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take sustainable because often times we’re heading the wrong direction but when it comes to sustainable seafood or sustainable agriculture, sustainable energy, whatever the conversation is, there’s a big ask inherent to that. I’m asking you to change your behaviors, change your lifestyle, make sacrifices, oftentimes, spend more money, move outside of your comfort zone, and what’s the reward for doing all that? Don’t worry, everything will stay the same.
That’s not really inspiring. You think back to the days of Bell Laboratories or the Space Race when every last little invention was this major step forward and there was this reward of pride and nationalism. How come we can’t encourage people with this great carrot of restoration? It’s not just restoring the health of ecosystems. I don’t approach environmentalism in the traditional way, the tragedy of the commons, bad human bad, you’re in Eden and it’s your fault. I look at it as a very positive. Hey, if we have the power to destroy ecosystems and make ourselves sick through the food systems we create, that’s fabulous. That’s great news. Because that means equally we have the power to heal and to restore. Restorative to me means creating resilient economic systems in which a daughter can follow in her daddy’s boot steps onto the lobster boat. It means an economic system in which neighbors are thriving. It means public health outcomes that are consistently improving and all of this is the measure of an enduring, thriving human community which is wholly predicated on a resilient and healthy ecosystem. It’s really looking at taking this idea of reward, taking this idea of growth and of betterment and applying it to ourselves so that the environment might gain as well.
Lisa: One of the things that you brought up as a possibility is that we maybe eat less. That if we’re going to have a lovely piece of fish, that maybe we parcel it out a little bit. We eat a little bit less of that. We don’t need as much protein as everybody says that we need. Let’s have some more fruits and vegetables. That’s fascinating, that idea that maybe just being mindful about our overconsumption of lots of different things including protein, maybe that is contributing in some ways to the overfishing of certain populations.
Barton: I think this applies to a lot of different scenarios that too often, we place the full burden of sustainability on the producer. That you, the farmer, you, the fisherman, it is your responsibility and yours alone to make available to me sustainable products. That shirks and completely abdicates our own responsibility as consumers which I think we have equal burden to bear. Not only must we produce sustainably and hold accountable producers, but when they produce sustainably, we must reward them and support them but then we have a responsibility to use those products sustainably. We can sustainably farm shrimp. I talk about this in that TED talk. We can sustainably farm shrimp but an all you can eat shrimp buffet is inherently and never will be sustainable. It’s simply just more than we need.
I think it also goes beyond this, just in terms of eating less, but also diversifying. For too long, a couple of facts and figures, in America we eat 14.6 pounds of seafood per person year. 95% of that is only 10 species. 65% is only three species, shrimp, tuna, and salmon. If our relationship with the ocean and thereby with fishermen and their economy is predicated on the notion of let me tell you what I’m willing to eat for dinner rather than asking of the oceans and fishermen what they are able and willing to supply, we’ve created this very irrational economy in which we only eat what we want and we discard the rest. Even though everything that comes from the ocean is equally profitable to the body for the purpose of sustaining ourselves, but we are not transferring that value back to the fishermen and allowing them to thrive.
I a lot of times focus on the opportunities we have as consumers to make very simple choices that have positive outcomes with our own health, with our budgets, and honestly with our enjoyment too. A diverse meal full of fruits, greens, grains, nuts, vegetables and small amount of protein, whatever it may be is far more interesting through its diversity. These are all wins. It’s just piecing them together in a narrative that whoever I’m talking to gets it because it’s not about me telling you what to do. It’s about providing a context for your own passions to be ignited, your own interests to find opportunity to act upon.
Lisa: One of the issues that I think sometimes people run across is that the types of species that you are discussing are … That’s what’s there. If you go to a restaurant, they will have shrimp, they will have salmon. Or if you go to the grocery store, your recognizable species are those things. How do we get more of the … What I’ve been told are under loved and sometimes the ugly fish? How do you get those types of things into the restaurants or into the supermarkets or into the fish markets where people can buy them?
Barton: You simply just have to ask for them. A business is not going to bring in a highly perishable item on the hopes that it might sell. You have to ask for it. You have to create the specter of demand by which a company sees opportunity. By which they feel that their risk is somewhat mitigated. Then there are also just incredible programs, think what Jen Levin is doing down at Gulf of Maine Research Institute, what Don Perkins is doing down there, with their Gulf of Maine Species that Hannaford’s and restaurants all over, the under loved species such as dogfish and scup and whiting and mackerel. These are available to us. I think now we’re still in a phase where we need to seek them out a little bit. If you see it at Hannaford’s all we have to do is seek out just a little bit of information and they’ve also done such a great job of educating around that so that there is a dialogue.
It’s not just sitting there waiting for you to come to it. If you look at menu and its got swordfish, scallops, shrimp, tuna and salmon on it, and brotula, guess what’s not selling tonight? What’s brotula? You have to sell it. You have to sell the story. That’s what GMRI does so well. That’s what I think Mainers also understand so well is they understand the impact. They understand that connectivity in the way that farmers’ markets have allowed us to understand the connectivity, see the dirt underneath the farmer’s fingernails and feel the passion of the agrarian hero which we so venerate. It is that sense of connection. It is that storied seafood that really begins to make us interested and comfortable with these new species and begin to ask for them.
Lisa: When we go to the farmers’ market, sometimes the things that are more readily available and maybe they’re the heritage type items, sometimes they’re not the prettiest. Sometimes you’re getting the ugly tomatoes or you’re getting the ugly root vegetables. Isn’t there also a reeducation around what something looks like and how one can create a beautiful plate even with an ugly type of item, and also an education around how long you have to use something because sometimes I think we’re throwing things out before we really need to.
Barton: Certainly food waste is one of the easiest ways to tackle our impact on the environment and gain so much in return in terms of money backs. The facts and figures are just astounding in how much food we waste and just our food waste in this country alone is equal to the greenhouse gas emissions of nations, just the amount of food that we throw out. Yeah. That’s just one thing right there and that encourages us to shop more smartly, is that the best way to say that, but also more often I think. To create a better relationship with food. If food is only something … ‘I have to go do the grocery shopping. It’s Sunday afternoon. I don’t want to do this but I got to fill up the fridge for the week.” Food is then only a convenience that’s only something that you have to do rather than something you’re really relating to. Yes, it is a pain in the butt to go more often. It does take time, but you’re also rewarded with foods, with meals that are fun, are creative, actually spark something in your brain and they bring your family together and actually give you something at the end of the day palpable, tangible that you’ve created and are proud of. There’s a lot of value in that.
When it comes to ugly fruits or ugly vegetables, I have never had a tomato sauce, ever, that I’ve looked at and said, “Ugh. That was made out of ugly tomatoes.” Cut up your parsnips or your turnips or whatever and roast them off and serve them with an anchovy vinaigrette with whole grain mustard and red wine vinegar and slug of olive oil in it. There’s far more on this plate to distract me than to entice me than the notion that this might not have been perfectly cylindrical in a conical form. I’m not sure exactly when we began to believe that perfection was all that we deserved and nothing less in terms of fruits and vegetables and it gets to that same idea of the seafoods, the under loved seafoods. When did we begin to feel as though we deserve to have salmon all the time and shrimp all the time? Even though dogfish might be what we should be eating. Again, this is not bad human bad, this is not judging, but rather this is really just saying we all live under this burden of anxiety, whether we live in a world that’s managed for abundance or one that’s managed for scarcity. Everyone deals with that in their own way and that affects them somehow. What I try and espouse is that we have great opportunities to take control of that narrative, in healthful, tasty, delicious, communal ways.
Lisa: I came to know of you through looking into a Harvard course and there’s a doctor who teaches public health and I have a background in public health so I was thinking, “Oh, maybe I’ll take this.” I’ve been doing public health for a while now. I want to kind of get updated. When you and I were talking, you said, “Yeah. There’s a lot of really great new data that’s out there that’s supporting the things that we have been talking about for a long time.” That’s very exciting because instead of just saying, “You should do this because it’s the right thing to do,” now we can say, “Here are some numbers for you and some scientific backing.” How has that been helpful to you as you’ve been trying to espouse as you say a more thoughtful way of living?
Barton: We care about what we can measure. I think it does matter that there is some empirical fact-based learning behind this. As we evolve our thinking about the environment, we need to understand what those impacts are. We need to understand that climate change is a threat to our health and when we have the papers, when we have the knowledge that says, “Okay, well here are the impacts,” then we can make rational choices and then we can really begin a learning process that is both efficient, that we can incorporate easily into our lives because we’re not seeking out some sort of mystical answer, just public health being this wild idea that you can’t really quite nail down what it is. It’s really opened the door for us to have a more consistent dialogue and to really answer the question of what are the problems that we are trying to solve and what are the outcomes of that.
I think all too often in public health, in environmentalism, the program or the idea is so obvious that it begs us to not ask question of, “Well, what are we using this campaign to accomplish?” A great example of this is recycling. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Legislated into municipalities everywhere. This is the law. This is hardwired into the brains of millennials. This is fabulous. Yet in the 50 or so years since recycling has really become a social and then legislative movement, the amount of recyclable goods flowing into our marketplace has increased exponentially to the point where we are now a disposable goods, recyclable goods economy. We prefer them.
We’ve been so busy reducing, reusing and recycling that we forgot to refuse. In this way, I think oftentimes campaigns, messaging, eat your vegetables, whatever it is, can end up being used as a confirmation bias that allows us to continue on in the very behaviors that have sort of proliferated the problem. Now with the science coming out around the impacts on public health of our environment, we are finally able to think about it in what is really a very simple geometric theorem. Humans can be no healthier than the foods we eat. The foods we eat can be no healthier than the environment they come from. If A equals B and B equals C, we can be no healthier than our environment and just being able to prove that theorem right there is such a powerful step forward that we didn’t have before.
Lisa: For people that have been listening to our conversation, what is one thing that you can say try incorporating this today and it will make an impact?
Barton: I think back to the portion size. Just with our protein, we have such a center of the plate mentality. When we go out to dinner, we order the steak and it’s eight ounces minimum. Their bodies simply don’t need that and literally don’t have the carrying capacity for it and we end up getting rid of most of that. Not only I think as I said earlier do we enjoy greater diversity of textures, tastes, colors, flavors. All the things that make eating fun, but also our impact on ecosystems drops dramatically and one step further than that, simply eat more seafood. Eat more seafood. The 3 S’s of public health. It’s this simple. Wear your seat belt, don’t smoke, and eat seafood.
Lisa: we will be providing links to your information so people can learn more about the work that you’re doing on our show notes page which is lovemaineradio.com. We’ve been speaking with Barton Seaver who is on a mission to restore our relationship with the ocean, the land, and with each other through dinner. I really appreciate your coming in and having this conversation with me today. It’s been fun.
Barton: Thanks. I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 1: Don’t miss the third Maine live event taking place on September 22nd at the Portland Museum of Art, presented by your friends at Maine Magazine. Take the day to be inspired by stories about creating a vibrant state from fifteen Maine speakers. Tickets are $100 and are sure to go fast. Find out more at maineliveevent.com.
Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick features a unique interactive space called the Collaboratory with rotating monthly themes for all ages and interests. Join us in September for the exhibit The Writers’ Life and on Wednesday, September 14th at 6:30 pm when Dr. Lisa Belisle and writer Joan Dempsey will continue a conversation begun earlier this year on the importance of writing spaces and Joan’s wonderful backyard writing shed, a former chicken coop, as well as the craft of writing and Joan’s acquisition of a significant research grant to travel to Warsaw and to Washington, DC for work on This Is How It Begins: A Novel In Progress and more about The Writer’s Life. Please visit curtislibrary.com for more information or call 207-725-5242, extension 219.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #257, Maine Conservation and Restorative Seafood. Our guests have included Sean Mahoney and Barton Seaver. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running, travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We would love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Maine Conservation and Restorative Seafood show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, Maine Magazine, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Paul Koenig. Our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our host production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.