36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The sky is falling, but not on lobsters, September 22, 2004
The sky is truly falling on many fish species. Nets come up empty, and fish-based economies collapse. But the Maine lobster seems almost immune to such disaster; a growing number of Maine lobstermen continue to haul in a grand 20 million pounds a year of delectable crustacean with no shortage looming on the horizon. Why?
The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier by Colin Woodard explains how Maine lobstermen voluntarily conserve their lobster population and keep the industry sustainable.
The stereotype of the Maine fisherman as stoic, independent and not easily impressed is apparently well deserved. Woodard suggests that Maine's lobsters benefit from small, traditional, often ancient, fishing communities that jealously guard their resource. Though anyone can theoretically obtain a license to fish for lobster in Maine, the pros protect their harbors from interlopers, snubbing neophytes with no ancestral ties to the community, and even vandalizing their traps.
Maine lobstermen have also protected their lobster population by making the breeding female lobster almost sacred. Woodard lauds the lobstermen's practice of "V-notching" egg-bearing females-punching a small hole in their tail fins before releasing them back into the ocean. Notching is code for "Cherished breeder-not for sale." Lobstermen have agreed among themselves to throw back the V-notched lobsters-even when they are eggless.
Maine's lobstering community also tosses back outsized male lobsters-a practice unique among fishing industries.
Woodard writes ambitiously about the whole state of Maine and its history, starting with its pre-Pilgrim inhabitation by Europeans. Throughout his book, he keeps an eye on lobstering, the industry that has been the backbone of Maine's economy, the ever-present default option as other industries, such as ice and granite, failed.
Woodard reports not only on the conflict between lobstermen and government scientists, but also on the friction between ancient lobster communities and encroaching suburbia-what he calls the "Massification" of southern Maine, i.e. the tendency of Boston professionals to sprawl northward, driving lobstermen out of their ancestral homes with tax increases, beach access restrictions and noise ordinances.
Woodard's chapter, "The Triumph of the Commons," is, itself, a triumph. Science has declared that, by and large, shared natural resources are doomed to overharvesting, but Woodard shows how Maine's lobster community has defied that trend through religious self-regulation.
Woodard takes as his focal point the beautiful and largely undeveloped Monhegan Island. On Monhegan, lobstermen have taken resource conservation a quantum step further: they only fish for lobsters December through June.
Monhegan is not only a model of conservation; for Woodard, it is also a symbol of Maine and lobstering culture at its very best. Monhegan, he writes, is "an ancient, self-governing village, essentially classless and car-less, whose homes, sheds, and footpaths appear to have thrust themselves out of the wild and arrestingly beautiful landscape. . . . [B]eing immersed in it pulls at something deep within our civic being, a hint of a simpler, perhaps nobler world that might have been, but can never be again."
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely fascinating and extremely well written book, April 26, 2005
Despite having grown up in midcoast Maine, the focus of this book, and having had Maine history in school, I learned so much from this book! I had no idea how fascinating the history of coastal Maine was---perhaps because much of it is rather disturbing---not something they wanted to teach us in 6th grade! I also now understand much more about the attitudes I grew up with regarding those "from away". I learned that I was part of a huge migration into Maine in the early 70s---I had always known that most anyone in my class that was not native had moved to Maine the very same summer we did (summer of '72) but I never really realized why. I've been away from Maine for a while now, and this book opened my eyes to some of the recent changes there---how many now are moving to Maine that have no interest in really becoming part of the culture they find there. And of course, I also learned a great deal about lobstering. Growing up, about half the kids in my class had fathers who were lobstermen, but this book greatly increased my knowledge of their culture and of lobsters themselves. I can't recommend this book highly enough!!
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More Than Meets the Eye, September 7, 2006
This review is from: The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (Mass Market Paperback)
After finishing the first short section, my first thought was that the book was a bit of a lightweight -- at best, a paperback to read while flying across the Atlantic. But when I got to the second section which filled in many of the historical gaps -- particularly the "why's" -- from Elizabethan England to the Pilgrims to the modern era, I realized how interesting this book really was. Anyone who enjoys travelogues will enjoy this book; perhaps you need to have visited Maine at least once or have some connection to the state, but if you do read it, you will learn much more about the history of the western world than the title suggests.
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