World Oceans Day is today, June 8, and ocean health is something Maine can celebrate every day. The Gulf of Maine is a special place. Named for our state, it stretches from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia with 70,000 square miles of life as deep as the Empire State Building and as cold as the refrigerator in your kitchen.
Those of us lucky enough to live in Maine appreciate a healthy ocean. We appreciate the ocean for the fishing industry that brings us dinner and jobs. We appreciate the ocean for the lobsters that employ 18,000 and deliver $700 million each year.
We appreciate the sparkling waters for the cool summer breezes that bring visitors from hot summer cities to admire and exclaim and spend their vacations on Maine shores. Jeffrey McCarthy is a professor of environmental humanities at the University of Utah. He is the author of “The Anthropocene Ocean,” and lives in Belfast.
Moreover, we appreciate the ocean for its variety of glorious animals – from humpback whales to harbor porpoises, from periwinkles to codfish, from osprey to eiders. All these ocean species make the Gulf of Maine home, too. Yes, we appreciate the Gulf of Maine on World Oceans Day.
Our appreciation, though, needs to extend to care because the Gulf of Maine is struggling with the same threats that poison the world’s oceans. In the shallows, acidification threatens lobsters and urchins and clams. Offshore, overfishing has endangered swordfish and tuna and cod.
Along the intertidal zone, sewage and m.
