Feature Destination: Your Maine Experience

Wow, a year has passed since we first launched Experience Maine. As I celebrate this milestone, I reflect on all the support and encouragement I’ve received from the industry and my peers. As well as all the love we’ve received from our clients. It’s been a roller coaster of a year, zooming by at first and then slowing to a crawl after Covid reared its ugly head. Read more…

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Ocean Soul Films Ltd. & Wildlife Media in association with The Claude & Sofia Marion Foundation present THE BLUE FOREST

Ocean Souls Films is a UK production company, dedicated to ocean conservation. Their inspiring films and documentaries raise awareness about marine species and ecosystems. Their latest release, THE BLUE FOREST, focuses on the importance of kelp forests and seaweed ecosystems and the current threats these productive and rich ecosystems face. Read more…

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Still Seeking Moby Dick: Spotting Whales from space

Modern space technology and artificial intelligence have combined to enhance the conservation of marine animals: the new service, “SPACEWHALE”, developed by a team of creative scientists in Germany and the UK, detects whales from space. Read more…

DroneSeed Acquires Largest Private Forestry Seed Supplier in the Western U.S.

DroneSeed announced today it has acquired Silvaseed Company, a 130-year-old titan in the forestry seed collection and seedling supply business. The move expands DroneSeed’s reforestation services beyond aerial drone-based seeding to span seed collection, seedling cultivation in nurseries, and on-the-ground tree planting services. Read more…

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SAWFISH NEWS by Tonya Wiley: Havenworth Coastal Conservation

The sawfishes are some of the most imperilled elasmobranchs (sharks, rays, and skates), with all five species assessed as Critically Endangered or Endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Read more…

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Still Contaminated After Years of Government Inaction. Who Should Pay for DDT Clean-up off Our Coast?

The Montrose Chemical Corporation of California was a chemical corporation that was the largest producer of the insecticide DDT in the world from 1947 until 1982. Its former plant in Harbor Gateway South area of Los Angeles near Torrance, California was designated as a Superfund site by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Read more…

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Package Delivery Robots’ Environmental Impacts: Automation Matters Less Than Vehicle Type

Whether a robot or a person delivers your package, the carbon footprint would essentially be the same, according to a University of Michigan study that could help inform the future of automated delivery as the pandemic fuels a dramatic rise in online shopping. Read more…

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The Camden International Film Festival: Surveying the Maine Coast, Tracking Down Berlin Wall Segments, and Targeting Suspects Overseas

This is the time of the year when film festivals proliferate and now they are more accessible than ever because the pandemic has forced them to go virtual. Great documentary films can be seen in the comfort and safety of your home courtesy of the Boston Latino International Film Festival (Sept. 23-27; www.bliff.org), Read more…

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Under the Waves with Karim Iliya, October 2021

A surprise encounter from a pacific white-sided dolphin while I was freediving off the coast of Mexico. See the photo…

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Banggai Cardinalfish – Jack’s October 2021 Underwater Photograph

Banggai Cardinalfish (Pterapogon kauderni) in the wild are found living in shallow habitats ranging from coral reefs & lagoons to seagrass beds and reef margins. They prefer more protected calmer waters and are generally found in small groups of individuals ranging from 9 to 12 individual fish. Read more…

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Collisions with Vessels, the Deadliest Threat for Whales

Whaleship strikes have now become a significant threat to big cetaceans. Collision skills are 20 times more whales than the controversial practice of whale hunting or whaling. It’s a silent massacre most people are unaware of. Every year, up to 20,000 whales die because of lethal collisions with vessels. Read more…

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Mainers Guarding Right Whales launches campaign to inform lobster consumers, protect North Atlantic right whales from extinction.

Currently, there is no certification program that ensures Maine lobster is whale-safe. A new organization is working to change that. Mainers Guarding Right Whales, a nonprofit organization working to save North Atlantic right whales from extinction, has launched a new campaign to inform travellers heading to Maine “Vacationland” that lobster dinners at seaside harbours come at a steep price to North Atlantic right whales, the fifth largest mammal on earth. Read more…

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Backpacking Responsibly: Helpful Tips on How to Leave No Trace

Taking a backpacking trip through the woods either as an avid hiker or leisurely camper is a great way to unplug, connect with your surroundings, and enjoy the peacefulness of the outdoors. By being a responsible backpacker, you can help make a difference in preserving the natural landscapes that wildlife call home. Read more…

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Indie Film: ‘The Long Coast’ Lets the Stories of Maine Fishermen Convey the Challenges Facing the Ocean

Only living here since 1987 makes me “from away,” and I’ve come to accept that. But the Perkinses come from here, and Maine was the place where we escaped every summer through my childhood. My parents have retired to the (now winterized) ancient house on a cliff overlooking the waters off of Phippsburg, where, as a child, I goggled at the date inscribed on the side of the house. Read more…

Unprecedented Deep-Sea Shark Discovery in Israel Sheds Light on World’s Understanding of Climate Change

A research initiative led by the University of Haifa and partners in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea recently revealed deep-sea brine pools and related habitat hotspots, including hundreds of deep-water sharks and the largest concentration of deep-sea shark eggs ever found. Read more…

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Scientists Explore Mineral-Rice Seafloor & DDT Dump Sites; Discovery New Methane Seep, Whale Fall

Marine scientists aboard Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor have completed a 12-day expedition off the coast of Southern California to survey the biodiversity of deep-sea areas rich in minerals that are of interest to deep-sea mining developers around the world. Read more…

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OceanGate Expeditions Completes Groundbreaking 2021 Titanic Survey Expedition

ST. JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND – OceanGate Expeditions has completed six historic weeks of dives aboard Titan, the world’s only 5-person, 4,000-meter (13,123 feet) submersible. A team of renowned experts, researchers, and citizen scientists returned today to St. Read more…

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Hawai‘i Pacific University Uses Lasers to Investigate Corals and Marine Debris

Hawai‘i Pacific University (HPU) received a nearly $320,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the acquisition of an ultramodern Raman spectrometer that uses complex lasers to analyze coral reefs and marine debris found off Hawai‘i’s waters and beaches. Read more…

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Book Suggestion: The Secret Life of Fish by Doug Mackay-Hope

THE SECRET LIFE OF FISH is an exploration into the untold lives of 50 of the most compelling fish living in our oceans and waterways with a foreword by Jeremy Wade, presenter of River Monsters and Mighty Rivers, and official fish aficionado. Read more…

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The FREE Weekly Conservation Post and Jobs List

Signing up for the free Weekly Newsletter & Jobs List will get you a round-up of upcoming events, webinars, meetings, reports, funding opportunities, photos of the week, and recent postings to the jobs list.

To sign up for our free subscription, please Click Here or email us Here. 

Since 2004, SEVENSEAS Media has fostered an informal and non-partisan platform to promote understanding of key issues and challenges while building partnerships across an increasingly diverse group of marine conservation professionals and students.

Our mission is to promote communication and build partnerships across the global marine community and to identify and address gaps in the community’s work. SEVENSEAS Media achieves this through multimedia promotion and partnerships. The community consists of a diverse and growing group of participants, including non-governmental organizations, government agencies, foundations, bilateral and multilateral agencies, fellowship programs, independent consultants, and academia/students.

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By Peter Keough

This is the time of the year when film festivals proliferate and now they are more accessible than ever because the pandemic has forced them to go virtual.

Great documentary films can be seen in the comfort and safety of your home courtesy of the Boston Latino International Film Festival (Sept. 23-27; www.bliff.org), Boston Film Festival (Sept. 24-27; www.bostonfilmfestival.org/index.shtml), and Roxbury International Film Festival (Sept. 30-Oct. 5; www.roxfilmfest.com). And two festivals in the coming weeks — the GlobeDocs Film Festival (Oct. 1-12; globedocs2020.eventive.org/welcome), which I will cover next week, and Camden International Film Festival (Oct. 1-12) — focus exclusively on documentaries.

The latter, usually held in picturesque Camden, Maine, and neighbouring towns, has reliably programmed recent nonfiction films that are ambitious both in style and content. Here are three such films I recommend — inventive and unique studies of people interacting with their habitat and surroundings.

Maine filmmaker Ian Cheney’s “The Long Coast” (it can be streamed on Oct. 4 and is available within a 72-hour window) is a gorgeous and engrossing tour of his state’s coastline and those who live and work there. It evokes films as disparate as Frederick Wiseman’s rigorously observational “Belfast, Maine” (1999) and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s intimately rhapsodic “Leviathan” (2012).

Divided into five parts and an epilogue, “The Long Coast” features seascapes as ravishing as paintings by Whistler and Turner and down-to-earth conversations with those who make their living from the sea. The latter includes a “Winkler,” who pries periwinkles from cracks in mossy stones, and the proprietors of fish-processing plants where a slab of frozen lobster bait is a surreal plank of pink ice with eyes. Cheney excels in showing the relationship between the environment and its inhabitants, hinting at the possibility of a sustainable interdependence but warning of environmental dangers ahead. Lots of kelp on display, but who knew kelp could be so photogenic?

By Dennis Perkins

I love Maine.

Only living here since 1987 makes me “from away,” and I’ve come to accept that. But the Perkinses come from here, and Maine was the place where we escaped every summer through my childhood. My parents have retired to the (now winterized) ancient house on a cliff overlooking the waters off of Phippsburg, where, as a child, I goggled at the date inscribed on the side of the house. It started with an “18,” and I’d stare at it as if it were from another planet.

So, my native cred shaky as it is, I grew up staring out on this rocky, cold, unimaginably beautiful shoreline. And I love it. Yet, writing about Maine movies as I do, sometimes I do imagine I’ve just seen enough documentaries about the picturesquely stark Maine coast. (Or as fellow from-away Mainer John Hodgman describes them in his book “Vacationland,” Maine’s “painful beaches.”)

“The Long Coast,” from Maine filmmaker Ian Cheney and available to stream through PMA Films, is the sort of movie that disabuses one of that notion. A meditative mix of interviews, striking but unobtrusive cinematography, and, yes, Maine’s uniquely picturesque, majestic coastal beauty, “The Long Coast” is a portrait in collage and montage. The 86-minute film’s five segments (and a sombre, chilly COVID-era epilogue) have plenty to say – about Maine’s working ocean culture, global warming, overfishing, conservation, and innovation. But “The Long Coast’s” impact comes when you step back. The individual pieces are uniformly fascinating, but the overall picture Cheney presents of Maine’s vast and varied (and ever-changing) fishing ecosystem is a down-home masterpiece.

The interviews are conducted in wide shots, each subject-centred alone in the frame. A clammer explains the lonely benefits of his trade, while we see the mucky work up close. A young lobsterwoman tells how she worked her way through high school, hauling traps before captaining a ship of her own. Oyster farmers – both tank- and ocean-based – extol the benefits their industriousness brings to the ecosystem, while a 40-year lobsterman explains why he saw it was time to switch to farming oysters and kelp. Two women (a kelp farmer and a retired former lobsterwoman) relate how their very dreams have been infiltrated by their chosen professions.

Elvers, clams, lobsters, oysters, salmon, alewives, even lowly periwinkles (which one man cites as key to his decades of self-employment). All variously bountiful, all subject to effects of overfishing, climate change, industrial farming, conservation and plain old bad luck. And all as interconnected, in ways Cheney draws delicately throughout his film, as are the lives of the ocean’s scuttling, squirming, swarming creatures.

It sounds facile to say that humans and the things they fish, dig, and farm are all interdependent. But “The Long Coast” presents that fact as so intrinsic to the individual lives spotlighted within that the message emerges like something so basic as to be inarguable. More straightforward documentaries might make the case for adaptation and conservation with alarmist (if inescapable) lectures, but Cheney weaves a net of simple fact. A woman notes plainly that the Maine sea urchins her husband once pulled up with lucrative ease are gone, as are the once bountiful cod lobsterman notes once made up a fleet’s main baitfish.

The young lobsterwoman has branched out into oyster farming because overfishing and resultant restrictions necessitated it. “It’s another way of staying on the ocean,” the woman states, as she hauls a clattering wireframe full of her oysters from the cold sea.

Cheney (as seen in his similarly observant documentary about a single Maine field, “Thirteen Ways”) always comes back to the source. The ocean – seen here from above, below and aboard various choppy vessels – is the reality of working life for thousands of Mainers. And the ocean is always changing. Changing along with the tides isn’t a “from-away” idea, it’s intrinsic to the life of those who depend on them. The clammer, who’s seen local mussel stocks all but disappear and his chosen river’s clams becoming sparse, talks about attending a seminar on scallop aquaculture, noting simply, “We need technology because we don’t know how much longer Mother Nature’s gonna keep providing stuff for us.”

So Mainers are providing solutions. Oyster tanks utilize other fishing industry waste to feed their crops while not crowding out fishing grounds or creating pollutants of their own. (Although, as one farmer notes, there is still some consumer snobbery around tank oysters.) A longtime bait merchant explains how the lack of cod has meant a boon to pork producers, whose castoff pig hides are becoming a lobster trap staple. (There was some diner unpleasantness before they figured out to shave the hides.) An eel fisher (and beauty salon owner) lays out her plans to cut out the foreign middlemen in the elver harvest. (We ship the comically adorable baby glass eels to China, which then sells the full-grown eels back to Maine.)

The thing about “The Long Coast” is that global and environmental concerns – so often simplified into shrill political talking points – are as vital to the livelihoods of Maine’s ocean workers as are their nets, boats, and that cool short-handled hoe clammers use. Cheney’s subjects know that, and so, obviously, does he. “The Long Coast” takes the long view, and it’s a gorgeously photographed, exquisitely edited and uniquely Maine view indeed.

“The Long Coast” can be rented through PMA Films’ virtual video store at portlandmuseum.org/films. The 72-hour ticket for this 86-minute film is a very-worth-it $10, with a portion of each rental going right to PMA Films.

Dennis Perkins is a freelance writer who lives in Auburn with his wife and cat.