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Issue 76 - September 2021

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

By Mark Friedman, the RLNews Environmental Reporter.

DDT barrel off PV. Photo by Dave Valentine

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. Montrose discharged over 1,800 tons of DDT into Los Angeles County sewers, which empty into the ocean off White’s Point. Montrose was allowed to use County sewer lines that run from its plant to the ocean dumping 200 tons of DDT off the Palos Verdes Coast.

DDT was banned in the United States in 1972 due to cancer-causing effects and deaths of marine and terrestrial organisms. One of the leaders of the efforts to ban DDT was Rachel Carson, the founder of the environmental movement, who discovered that DDT laden brown pelicans could not incubate their eggs without crushing them.

However, after more than 20 years of meetings and extensive studies, the dumpsite and Superfund site are still awaiting cleanup. Mitigation efforts proposed at the time, still under discussion decades later are: 1) Attempt to degrade DDT by using anaerobic or aerobic microbes; 2) Cap the area with soil and hope nature would take its course; 3) dig up the DDT and transport it to an incinerator. (that sounds like a good plan, make it all airborne-MF) Thus, there has been no action to clean up the toxins.

A special 150-page report in the 1980s by a California Regional Water Quality Control Board scientist Allan Chartrand estimated that up to 500,000 barrels were dumped. The board approved the report— and further investigation, but no action on the means to deal with the contamination. The report was ignored till Professor Valentine began new research. (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7212619-Ocean-Dumping-Under-Los- Angeles-Regional-Water)

Random Lengths has covered this saga since 1986. In a series of articles by David Steinman, who points out that Montrose produced one half of the world supply of DDT, investigations begin with blood drawn from a local fisherman that had a rate of 3 to 10 times higher concentrations of DDT and PCB than the national average. Steinman refers to a previous study of DDT in Michigan farmers, conducted by the Michigan Department of Public Health Dir. Harold Humphrey documenting a greater incidence of cancer, especially in women from DDT.

At this time, the California state officials urged “pregnant women to eat no more than one fish per month.” Why is PCB so dangerous? Dr. Gary Wikholm of the Glendale Medical Center told Random Lengths then that “PCBs cross the placenta during pregnancy and are also found in breast milk. The result is a “neuromuscular immaturity” and side effects similar to pregnant mothers who smoke. In 1980, 100,000 people were regularly eating fish from Santa Monica Bay and water off PV and LA and Long Beach harbours, according to the EPA researcher Ljubenkov. The report cites higher than allowable levels of PCBs in local mussels.

The complicity of LA officials with toxin dumping

Amazingly, this degradation of the environment occurred with the complicity of the LA Sanitation District, which said that the industry had a permit to discharge PCBs into public sewer systems, especially the outfall near White Pt. No citation was ever issued against Montrose. Freedom of Information documents obtained by this newspaper at the time showed so that the pesticide levels had increased 100%. At this time LA County sanitation department sought a waiver to the guidelines of the federal 1972 Clean Water Act.

A 2019 study by researchers at UC Santa Barbara recently highlighted in the LA Times, estimates that between 377,000 and 500,000 barrels remain in the channel between Palos Verdes/San Pedro and Catalina Island. The barrels contain a by-product mix of toxic sludge made up of petrochemicals, DDT and PCBs was produced.

Dave Valentine Prof. of Biology and Earth science and UCSB began his research in 2011 and with indisputable evidence campaigned for action by several government agencies, trying to get some response, but to no avail. Ultimately it took October 25, 2020, LA Times Story to solicit a response following public outcry. Valentine told Random Lengths that his efforts focused “on the reality of the deep dumping which was an entirely new area different from the original Montrose area settlement near shore. The first order of business must be to determine the scope of the problem, understanding the survey by Scripps, and that there are other dumpsites. We don’t know how much more there is. There was another dumpsite that Montrose originally planned to use north and west of Catalina Island but decided not to. A question is, to what extent this site was used by others, or perhaps initially by Montrose.”

“The chemicals that are escaping from a variety of shapes and sizes of containers, from 55-gallon drums to other objects that appear to be a cylinder inside buckets filled with concrete to make it sink. We need to understand the processes actively going on with the microorganisms. The bioaccumulation of contaminants by worms and how DDT moves around through the trophic levels in the marine environment.”

Montrose never admits wrongdoing, nor charged with illegal dumping

Although they were fined in 2000 for illegal dumping of poisons, they never admitted dumping barrels of the poisonous chemicals.

As part of a December 2000 settlement, chemical companies that created the world’s largest DDT dump paid $14 million to help restore the ocean environment off Southern California.

Who owned Montrose? Chris-Craft Industries, a 50% shareholder in Montrose, Aventis CropScience, and Atkemix Thirty-Seven. With Montrose non-existence, who should pay for that clean-up that never happened? Those that bought the company and profited from it?

What is the complicit role of the EPA is not enforcing clean-up, in allowing, as they did with the recent Exide battery decision, the company to walk away with working people facing contamination, enhanced cancer rates, and higher morbidity.?

The settlement brought to a close a decade-long legal saga to deal with DDT that lingers for now 75 years on the ocean floor off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

In addition, the companies and local governments agreed to pay a total of $8.6 million to the EPA for onshore contamination around the Los Angeles plant where Montrose Chemical Corp. manufactured the DDT. What happened to those funds?

Funds were expected to be sufficient to pay for a massive project to cover much of the deposit and stop DDT from leaking into the environment. Funds were presumably paid yet the clean-up never happened.

Allegedly, most of the $140 million has been used by the Montrose Settlements Restoration Program (MSRP) to try to restore the contaminated sites. Half of the funds were allocated to the EPA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to rehabilitate ecosystems impacted by the poison. NOAA said it used its share of the funds to manage almost 20 restoration projects off the LA coast, like restoring kelp forest habitat, helping migratory seabirds and restoring 500 acres of critical coastal marsh habitat in Huntington Beach. The final project, recently completed, is an artificial reef off the beaches of Rancho Palos Verdes.

While Montrose called the settlement “fair and equitable” they hypocritically denied liability and did not admit any of the government’s charges in the case.

They vigorously fought the government’s charges. They said the DDT found in local birds and fish could be coming from old farm runoff, not their ocean dumping. They also contended that the DDT degrades naturally and poses little harm to marine life and people.

Today, hundreds of tons of DDT remain spread across 17 square miles of the Palos Verdes shelf in Santa Monica Bay and San Pedro Bay. The suit was filed in 1990, and in 1996 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared the ocean off Palos Verdes a national Superfund site, designating it as one of the country’s most hazardous sites.

Government officials and researchers like Valentine at UC Santa Cruz have determined that DDT is seeping from the sediment on the Palos Verdes shelf and moving up the food web, from worms to fish to mammals and human eating toxin-laden fish. DDT is most dangerous to fish-eating birds of prey such as eagles and peregrine falcons, but it also is suspected of causing cancer in humans who consume contaminated fish and disrupting the hormones of marine animals.

DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) move from contaminated sediments into the water, so although the dumping of DDT stopped in 1982, the Palos Verdes Shelf remains contaminated.

As part of the agreement, the EPA could not seek future funds from Montrose for any offshore work. (So theoretically they, or those that purchased Montrose, are exempt from paying for the recent discovery. But who should pay now if not the polluters and those that bought Montrose-MF)?

Some biologists and engineers wondered whether capping the ocean deposit and trying to fix the damaged resources was worth the large expense. Some said the best and least risky solution is to leave the deposit alone.

But some programs from the settlement were implemented according to the Montrose settlement website. 1” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Department of Toxic Substances Control used a share of the funding to reduce the exposure of people and wildlife to DDTs and PCBs. These agencies considered several remediations, or “Cleanup,” options, and conducted efforts to prevent commercial catch of and reduce public consumption of contaminated fish.” https://www.montroserestoration.noaa.gov/

But state and EPA officials said at the time that the threat was too serious to Californians who eat locally caught fish and that the companies that profited from making the DDT should be held responsible. So, what happened, why did the government turn a blind eye to this gross marine pollution?

Consumption of white croaker, which has the highest contamination levels, should be avoided. Other bottom-feeding fish, including kelp bass, rockfish, queenfish, black croaker, sheepshead, surfperches and sculpin, are also highly contaminated. Fisherpeople take note.

Recently discovered, and an alarming unprecedented rate of cancer in the state’s sea lion population, with 1 in every 4 adult sea lions plagued with the disease. (10 December 2020, Frontiers in Marine Science)

State and federal officials crafted a program to advise the public about the risk of eating fish caught in the
area. This writer, in 2003, a teacher with a unique and the only inner-city marine Biology program in LA County, had firsthand experience.

Animo high school, drawing students from Lennox and Inglewood, formed a fifty-member marine Biology and Environmental club whose first public campaign was educating on safe fish consumption. This entailed distribution of multi-lingual materials produced by the Montrose settlement at community events, parent meetings, participation in Ocean science competitions, science fairs and distributing materials to fisherpeople at local piers.

Montrose was sold in 1987 to Rhône-Poulenc, then resold to Solvay, a Belgium enterprise) with 145 sites, Solvayemploys 30,900 people in 53 countries with €12.4 billion in revenues. Another company involved was Stauffer Chemical Company and Chris-Craft Industries’ Boats, automotive, chemical divisions which went defunct in 2001. Another was Aventis, with $36 billion in revenue, $112 billion in assets.

Senator Dianne Feinstein has been pushing for action. The report “confirms my worst fears that possibly hundreds of thousands of barrels in DDT-based sediment were dumped in just 12 miles off our coast.”

So has Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn is calling on the US Environmental Protection Agency to assess the extent of the damage and expedite the necessary cleanup. She also asked her colleagues to put the County’s support behind Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell’s legislation currently being considered in Sacramento.

“We now have confirmation that there are at least 27,000 barrels of illegally dumped barrels of DDT off our coast,” said Supervisor Janice Hahn. “This is appalling and those responsible for this need to be held accountable. We need the EPA to step in to assess the damage this dumpsite has wreaked on the local ecosystem and expedite the necessary cleanup.”

Adrienne Mohan, Executive Director Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy adding to the call for clean-up, told this reporter:

“Science has revealed the detrimental impacts that DDT has caused to brown pelican, bald eagle, and peregrine falcon populations (among other birds). While these species have recovered across their ranges from tragically – low numbers, research on this topic has proven how marine and terrestrial ecosystems are inextricably linked. The Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy mission is to preserve land and its native wildlife. It is alarming to learn of vast amounts of DDT dumped into the ocean off the shore of the Palos Verdes Peninsula and to think about what harm it may cause to the marine and land-loving wildlife in this precious region.”

Chris Lowe, CSULB marine scientist and director of his shark lab participated in a UCSD Scripps town hall meeting and added these crucial comments:

“New data reveals a greater quantity of DDT (1800 tons), DDE (derived from DDT) and PCB (1200 tons) filled barrels but in 25 years virtually nothing has been done.” It is NOT buried. The LA Sanitation department knew of the illegal dumping and looked the other way (so who was paid off by Monsanto? -mf).

“There has been a transfer of the contaminants thru the food web, to fish, birds and humans. DDT binds to fat and bio-accumulates and bio-magnifies over time…so that those higher up in the food chain, like humans, get higher concentrations.”

He added that marine mammals have been feeding on poison laden organisms for some time and “since it cannot be metabolized, it is stored in the blubber, and the contaminants are offloaded to their offspring thru the blood and mammary glands. Exposure to these toxins in humans causes tremors, hypersensitivity and is a known carcinogen. It disrupts the endocrine system and causes diabetes, obesity and impacts reproductive development.”

“We are disgusted by this act and the extent of past DDT dumping in our channel. We are grateful to Scripps Institution of Oceanography for their efforts in researching and dealing with this environmental mess. Scripps is an important partner at AltaSea. AltaSea is committed to supporting, innovating, and advancing ways to sustain and protect our ocean — including the use of underwater drone technology, high-tech submersibles, and 3D mapping, so that one day, dumping like this is made nearly impossible or caught early and mitigated before irreparable damage occurs.”

Tim McOsker, CEO of ALTASEA

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Issue 76 - September 2021

SEVENSEAS Travel Magazine – September 2021 – Issue 76

Cover Issue 76 September

Feature Destination: Your Maine Experience

a woman and her daughter are standing by the bay

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…

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…

Still Seeking Moby Dick: Spotting Whales from space

whale banner

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…

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…

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

a scuba diver under the water with a school of fish

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…

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

a robot holding a plant

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…

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…

Under the Waves with Karim Iliya, October 2021

Whale banner for October 2021

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

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…

Collisions with Vessels, the Deadliest Threat for Whales

whale graphic painting banner

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…

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…

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…

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

shark banner

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…

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

FK210726-Dive440-BrittleStarOnRock-20210726-20

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…

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…

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…

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

a book cover

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…


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.

If you are interested in contributing or getting involved, email us Here


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Feature Destination

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

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?


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Feature Destination

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

By Dennis Perkins

“The Long Coast” shows Maine’s shoreline from many angles. Photo courtesy of Ian Cheney

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.

Clammers are among the many ocean-dependent workers featured in “The Long Coast.” Photo courtesy of Ian Cheney

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.


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