Her views are her own

What would Olmsted and Mrs. Bok do?

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 03:22:00 +0000

Imagine you are the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s first and most celebrated landscape architect, and you get a call from an old family friend. It’s Mary Louise Curtis Bok and she’s one of your firm’s most important and long-standing clients.

In fact, your fathers knew each other and worked together. Both are so famous now that part of your identity will always be caught up with theirs. But that’s ok. There’s a lot to be proud of.

Her father was Cyrus Curtis. He had recently died and Mary Louise, his only daughter, had an idea to honor him. She wants to demolish most of the family home that her father had built along with the gardens designed by their father some 30-40 years earlier. In its place, she proposes to create a space for trees and public recreation and she'll donate it all to the town in honor of her father.

And that's exactly what happened.

Can you imagine the type of environmentalism and philanthropic vision it takes to come up with a plan like this? This is the type of courage, generosity, and leadership that Mary Louise Curtis Bok and the Olmsteds partnered in over and over again.

And make no mistake, Mary Louise was far from being a simple funding source for these projects. She wrote letters, observed, opined, compromised and negotiated with groups and individuals that were sometimes frustrating and small-minded.

But Mary Louise Curtis Bok was a woman of unusual creativity and intelligence who used her family’s political and economic position to do extraordinary public good. She was also surrounded by a family who set similar standards for themselves, and she took every opportunity to employ the most cutting-edge naturalists in landscape design.

Cyrus Curtis was the publishing giant who printed some of the most popular and widely read material in the country and Frederick Law Olmsted invented landscape architecture. Yes, invented it. Everything before that was really just called gardening. But Olmsted rejected the term and saw his role as curating the unique genius of the place, working with nature to design public spaces where all people could enjoy the benefits of the natural environment.

“Service must precede art, since all turf, trees, flowers, fences, roads, walks, water, paint, plaster, posts, and pillars in or under which there is not a purpose of direct utility or service are inartistic if not barbarous... So long as considerations of utility are neglected or overridden by considerations of ornament, there will be no true art.” -Frederick Law Olmsted.

Curtis hired Olmsted to plan the gardens at his family estate in Wyncote, Pennsylvania called Lyndon. The existing home was soon demolished and replaced by a stone renaissance revival style structure designed by the architect William Lloyd Baily (with considerable input from Mr. Curtis who was himself quite knowledgeable in the field). This was approximately 1895 and Frederick Law Olmsted was hired by Curtis to landscape the grounds and gardens.

After Olmsted’s death in 1903, his sons took over the firm and went on to design hundreds of parks and landscapes all over the country, including several in Camden. The Curtis — and later Bok — families kept a steady stream of work in the pipeline for the Olmsted Brothers.

Olmsted, Curtis, and Bok all shared a progressive —and sometimes radical—vision for the importance of nature in the urban environment. You can read more about Olmsted's design principles at the Olmsted Network website. They have some special material dedicated to Olmsted parks and using the principles of nature-based solutions to address climate change. olmsted.org/olmsted-parks-and-places-adapt-in-the-face-of-climate-change

The name Mary Louise Curtis Bok gets thrown around in political circles in the town of Camden most frequently when someone is trying to make a point about preserving something in the same way that they have known it. That’s how I first became aware of her incredible gifts to the town, at least.

The same is true of the Olmsted landscape design dynasty. Knowing nothing about the values and philosophy of Mary Louise nor the Olmsteds, I knew only that they were the most commonly cited reason for the rules about amplified music on the Village Green or the reasons we might not be allowed to have picnic tables or kayaks in Harbor Park.

For many years, this was enough to satisfy any curiosity I may have had about Frederick Law Olmsted, his sons, or the Curtis/Bok family.

Today, though, thanks to a few other Camden residents and visitors, I dream about what they might say now if they could be here helping us grapple with challenges and opportunities we face today. Rather than a river and harbor that were too dirty to touch, they’d find a vastly transformed use of the beach, as just one example.

The portion of the shorefront that had been reserved as “grounding out space” for big boats to be painted and repaired is now a favorite place for children and the young at heart to examine crabs and periwinkles and dip their feet into the sea. The ramp that we now use to access the beach was there simply to give the Town a place to haul out the floats so they could be stored for winter.

They’d be delighted at some of these evolving benefits, I’m quite certain, but they’d probably describe the public landing in the same way as Mrs. Bok had done before. Disappointing. Dreary. Too much parking. Not enough trees.

As was always the case for Mary Louise, she would see many buildings in need of moving still today. In their place, we’d have trees or grass or views out over the harbor and river. If you look through the designs and photos of the Olmsted archives that relate to the projects she hired them to do, nearly every building pictured had been documented with thought of removing it if possible.

You might almost look at those photos as a type of hit list for buildings and I’ve come to find a certain amount of humor in it. Many of them are actually scattered around town in what she would consider to be more appropriate places.

She faced plenty of opposition in town as well. I’ve tried to be gentle in my sharing of some of these stories about the obstacles she faced in Camden because I know there are still so many opportunities to fulfill aspects of Mrs. Bok’s vision that were not quite ripe for the moment. But the opposition was not limited to Camden.

A 1937 article described public opposition from neighbors of Cheltenham Township at the idea of accepting a donation of 40 acres from the family which included the grounds of her father’s former home. Sixty residents showed up at a meeting of the elected officials to protest the gift, fearing that the playground and park “would attract undesirable people.”

As we talk about change here in Camden, I like to think about what it would have been like to be Mary Louise Curtis Bok in the 1920s and 30s as she mediated between the Town and the Olmsted brothers? She was so much more than a philanthropist.

While it’s true that most of her money came from her parents’ publishing business, her contributions to that business were anything but typical, especially for a woman born in 1876. At the age of 13 she was one of sixteen people on staff at the Ladies Homes Journal. Like her mother, she had a talent for writing and was published under her mother’s maiden name as Mary L. Knapp (her mother was Louisa Knapp).

I mean let’s just dwell on that for a minute. In 1890, 30 years before women got the right to vote, 13-year-old Mary Louise Curtis was writing for the Ladies Home Journal. That was also the year that Edward Bok took over as editor of the publication. Six years later, when Mary was 19, they were married.

The life of her husband was documented in a short autobiography titled The Americanization of Edward Bok and tells the story of how his family came to the United States after losing everything.

Edward Bok died of a heart attack in 1930 and shortly after his death, Mary Louise received a letter from Helen Keller, noted advocate for people with deaf blindness. An excerpt from the letter reads as follows but it is worth reading in its entirety. https://boktowergardens.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16755coll1/id/65

Surely we would all clamor to be associated with Helen Keller’s work today, but can we be sure how we would have behaved before we knew who she would become?

“Dear Mrs Bok.... There will be many a tribute to the great editor, the philanthropist, the peace advocate, the lover of birds and all things beautiful... this eagerness to share, to help, to call forth the best in men and women that endeared Mr. Bok to all who knew him... how warmly he encouraged me in my youthful efforts to write — how he held up my hands in the early days of my work for the blind...”

Today, it’s hard to imagine what Camden would be like without public spaces such as Harbor Park or the Village Green, but we also tend to forget how radical and even controversial the ideas were at the time.

Each time that major events such as fires forced a reorganizing of the landscape, Mrs. Bok swept in and purchased the properties, waiting until the pieces of the puzzle could be brought together with the help of the Olmsteds.

At the time, much like the design at Central Park had to work around the oddly unnatural and rectangular reservoir that pre-existed the park (and his since been removed), Mrs. Bok and the Olmsteds had to work around property boundaries that were outside their control.

Much like in Central Park where they had to accommodate the reservoir, they worked to naturalize and buffer buildings and the dam with trees and shrubbery as best they could in Camden. But we must realize that neither Mrs. Bok nor the Olmsteds ever saw their work as finished, and the designs that we have today include many compromises.

Today, the challenge of climate change and habitat destruction threatens both our parks and our ecosystem, but we have an opportunity to apply the same design principles that the Olmsteds and Mrs. Bok held dear as we plan for the future. The Olmsteds were the original proponents of using Nature Based Solutions, and it was long before the term became fashionable.

Even though the type of flooding we are seeing in Harbor Park and elsewhere in town is overwhelming, any careful reading of the Olmsted/Curtis/Bok philosophies would lead most people to see these challenges as opportunities to take everything that has been learned in the past 100 years and build back better and in greater alignment with nature.

The Town of Camden and the Camden Public Library are well positioned with funding from the National Coastal Resilience Fund to plan for the future by answering the question, what would Mary Louise Curtis Bok and the Olmsted Brothers do today?

Take a look at information on the National Coastal Resilience Fund and you'll swear that Olmsted himself had a hand in designing the program. http://nfwf.org/programs/national-coastal-resilience-fund

Fabled pass of death

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 04:07:00 +0000

From last week.

*****

Last week I wrote about Turnpike Drive and I’m returning to it again because this is one of those topics that has sent me both down the metaphorical rabbit hole and up the side of the mountain.

But I am forcing myself now to stop searching The Camden Herald archives for the words “turnpike” or “blasting” or “rock slide” or anything else for the rest of the weekend.

I have one of those personalities that doesn’t know when to stop researching and I often find myself distracted along the way by something that fits into a different research puzzle I’ve been working on.

I tend to exhaust the people around me with my unbridled interest in obscure historical details and feel a type of euphoria when I’m able to connect the dots and put something into a larger historical context.

Last week I attended one of the Historic Resources Committee meetings and was reminded of how much fun it is to connect with other people who see things the way I do. I don’t mean that we agree on all the issues facing us today. We don’t.

But we all share the habit of wanting to know what came before us and how it came to be and who played a part. We all appreciate a fuller picture and we delight in the details of the people and personalities and bedrock outcroppings of the past. The Turnpike and Megunticook Mountain is one of those places where most of its best stories I suspect have not been told.

Sometimes I think we all find ourselves relating more to the people of Camden’s past than its present. These people felt more interesting. More authentic. More in touch with the natural world. Their problems were existential and the range of solutions they considered was vast.

But with so much change, we also seek a certain amount of stability — granite markers and landmarks that can be referred to in survey after survey. There are very few things in Camden that can be used as enduring control points over the past 250 years.

We’ve changed where the rivers and streams enter the harbor. We’ve changed the shape of the bedrock on Main Street. We’ve buried most of the shoreline of the inner harbor beneath buildings and boardwalks and sea walls.

And it turns out, we’ve even remodeled the mountain.

On certain topics, there is a wealth of unexplored but well documented history, but on others, it seems that we’ve just repeated the same few things over and over again, with each historian just restating what they read before. This is more or less the case with the Turnpike. Very little information repeated again and again.

If you want to know what has been said over and over about the Turnpike, you can read what John Locke wrote in 1859, four years after he arrived in Camden and discovered that none of the inhabitants had bothered to write much of anything down since they began arriving nearly 100 years earlier. From that point on, everyone from The Camden Herald to the local attorneys quoted Locke as the gospel.

We are surely indebted to him for getting the ball rolling, but his accounts are based off town meeting notes that he described with some frustration as being very basic.

He cautions us that the complete history of the town will have to be written by future historians. He says of his writing that “we shall content ourself with merely writing a few memorials which we have obtained at sundry times from the lips of elderly witnesses, or gleaned from old records, books and papers.”

This is how we learn of “Sambo,” the manumitted (freed) slave who was featured in Locke’s book for being the only worker willing to risk his life during a particularly dangerous moment rolling boulders down the cliff of Megunticook to form the road that we all enjoy today.

The accent that Locke chose for “Sambo” was the same as the one for James Richards’ supposed African cook. The stereotypical drawl we now know is historically inaccurate, and we are not going to recreate it here. Locke quotes him as talking to his “master” and bravely stating that all he asks is that if he dies in the venture that he is given a decent burial.

The name “Sambo” itself is a derogatory term with questionable origins. “Sambo” is the name given to many African slaves by people other than their parents.

I don’t blame Locke, but you can’t help but feel a little uneasy realizing how little we know about the people who built the road and how some of its success depended on undervaluing some people’s lives.

Daniel Barrett hired freed slaves at a time when half the country still held people as property.

From the archives, we know the Turnpike was widened and repaired a few times over the years with multiple articles over many decades saying that the Turnpike was “almost finished.” Most notably, major improvements happened around 1918 and again in the 1970s, always involving blasting.

I mentioned the other day to someone that I was surprised that we didn’t end up with rocks rolling into the road from time to time and was informed that it’s actually relatively common. Oh my… maybe what you don’t know can’t hurt you?

The Camden Herald archives confirmed there have indeed been several notable rockslides. The most serious that I have found was in 1975 when the whole area had to be roped off because of an unstable section of roughly 75-100 feet. A young hiker was seriously injured and Bob Oxton directed the rescue operation.

But if you ask the Camden Public Works Department, you’ll also hear the stories of the more minor events that didn’t make the news. Just a month or two ago, they were clearing debris off the road and notifying the State.

Blasting and breaking of rock is such a part of Camden history that I wish I knew more about the techniques over time. If there were one person I wish I could have met from Camden’s past, it might be William Barrett, the son of the same Daniel Barrett who was famous for the wild lifestyle he lived on the side of the mountain. He could tell me all about the blasting and moving of rocks around Camden.

Bill inherited the Barrett land by the lake and Turnpike when his father died. His brothers got the original Barrett homestead where the 12 children had been raised — now Aldermere Farm, Lilly Pond and the surrounding area

The house where Bill Barrett lived stood for many years in what is today the parking lot for the Maiden’s Cliff hiking trail. It wasn’t until 1968 that the old house came down as part of general improvements to the Turnpike area — much to the dismay of the Camden-Rockport Historical Society and others who wanted to save it. A photo can be seen in the Dec. 5, 1968, edition of The Camden Herald.

Bill suffered a serious blasting injury, which left him with part of a rock permanently lodged in his forehead. He reported to The Boston Globe around 1890 that he had been working off his tax debt to the town of Rockport and was ordered to blast a rock that nearly killed him. The recovery, aside from the physical side effects, left him with the nickname of Crazy Bill Barrett.

“I had to take to the woods and live on wild animals and herbs to help my head. I have been in the woods a whole year at a time… it was tough at times living in the wilds of Maine going sometimes for days without even crackers in the way of bread, and sometimes having to eat raw meat, but during the time I discovered a root and made snuff of it that cured my head trouble.”

Well, wouldn’t we all like to know the magical root that Bill Barrett found on the side of the mountain to cure his head troubles. I suppose that’s why a lot of us go out to hike in the mountains — to cure our head troubles with a big or little dose of Mother Nature.

Sometimes people who research can fall into the habit of looking too much at history books to try and solve this metaphorical puzzle rather than looking for clues in nature. Since the documented history before the 1870s is very scant, there’s probably a lot more value in observing the natural scenery.

I’ve driven the Turnpike a thousand times or more over my life but I had never really looked carefully at the rocks perched alongside.

I pulled off to the side of the road in one of the parking areas carved out on the Lincolnville side of the road and flew my son’s little drone up for a different look at the historical puzzle above and below me.

This time, there was nothing metaphorical about the puzzle. Rompecabezas, rather than puzzle was the word that instantly came to mind. As a Spanish teacher, I sometimes default to my second language when a phrase or word seems more appropriate than the English word. Rompecabezas translates literally to “head breaker” and that was immediately the sensation I got as I looked at the images coming up on the viewfinder of the drone.

The patchwork of broken rocks piled all around me, many of them showing obvious feathering marks from the splitting techniques used more than two centuries ago, was most definitely a historical rompecabezas in both the metaphorical and literal sense.

My goal had been to see if I could see signs of rocks shifting along the mountain, and you certainly can, but more unnerving than that was the unmistakable sound of tumbling rocks.

I’m sure most of it is stable most of the time and that statistically your chances of being hit by a falling boulder from Megunticook Mountain are quite low, but there’s a reason why so many of the early writings about the Turnpike refer to it as terrifying and not just beautiful like we say today.

There is a poem written by “Mary of Rockport” from September 1874 that speaks of recurring vision she had as a child passing by the mountain where she sees the mountain’s cliff forming and then an Indian in his canoe. It is worth quoting in its entirety, but since I’ve again written something much longer than I intended, I will choose just a passage to end with.

“But time rolled on, he passed away,

But left behind him a name;

For this path hewn out from the mountain side

Is his monument of fame.

And again I stand in this lonely pass,

With its grandeur deep and wild

This Vision of fancy comes back to me

As when I was a child.

And I dream again the same wild dream.

I pause and hold my breath,

And I think of many a wild legend

And the fabled pass of death.”

Alison McKellar is a Camden resident and member of the Select Board. Her views are her own and do not reflect those of the Select Board.

Camden natives: an uncomfortable conversation

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 17:01:00 +0000

November is Native American Heritage Month. What started at the turn of the century as an effort to gain a day of recognition for the significant contributions the first Americans made to the establishment and growth of the U.S., has resulted in a whole month being designated for that purpose and a proclamation from George H. W. Bush in 1990 calling upon “Federal, State and local Governments, groups and organizations and the people of the United States to observe such month with appropriate programs, ceremonies and activities.”

We have some catching up to do here in Camden, but we are so far behind that it seems no one knows where to start.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Camden natives, and what it means to be one. Terms like Camden native and “from away” get thrown around in political disagreements about things like sidewalks and school funding, but the fact is that most true Camden natives were driven out long ago. I’m not talking about the ones who moved to Union to get away from all the hippies who moved here in seventies and eighties. Their families may have been here a few generations more than others, but it’s all pretty inconsequential in terms of the history of the land we inhabit, where a culture and ecosystem endured and evolved for thousands of years before us.

In the same spaces where we squabble about tourist attractions, parking spots, picnic tables and honoring our history, a larger story and a longer history hangs heavy. The things that we call historic are but tiny blips in the story of the land we occupy, the Megunticook River Valley, carved out between mountains by the receding glaciers some 13,000 years ago and populated by the people whose memory lives only in the names of a few of our favorite places. This is the ancestral hunting and fishing territory of the Penobscot and Abenaki people, and their traces can still be found sprinkled among the ashes and buried in the mud.

Camden’s first permanent European settler, James Richards, is said to have sailed into Megunticook Harbor with his family 253 years ago. The details of this era in Camden history are poorly documented and leave much to the imagination, but it’s often where the telling of Camden’s history begins and we’ve fallen into the habit of repeating as fact the misstatements. We tell our kids that Mount Battie was named after Betty Richards and that Negro Island (later renamed Curtis Island) came from a comment made by the unnamed African cook who arrived with Richards and his family.

Really? Camden’s first settler was a slave owner? Did they all have slaves? If so, where are they buried? Very little has been documented that supports the fable, but still it is repeated. All of Camden’s serious historians, most of them from away, have noted how poor the record keeping was among the early Europeans. They were just trying to stay alive and struggled to keep track of their own history, never mind document what came before them.

George Weymouth, who is known for his early explorations of Penobscot Bay at the beginning for the seventeenth century, came at a time when a great number of indigenous people still lived here. In his efforts to colonize the land, he kidnapped several of the natives and brought them back to England. If only we could have convinced him of the great value it might have been to just leave them alone and learn the history of our beloved region through their eyes. What stories did they tell their children? What secrets had the mountains revealed to them? Beautiful paintings have memorialized Weymouth’s voyage and his ship, the Archangel, but how have we remembered the people that he disrupted? The question is a nagging one that has come up before, but not often enough in Camden.

The following is from a column by Nathan C. Fletcher published in the Rockland Opinion in 1883 (credit goes to Barbara Dyer for the fact that anyone knows about Fletcher’s writing at all). His son built the building known as the Fletcher Block about 10 years later (now home to Boynton McKay). In a series of columns for the newspaper he commented on the many inaccuracies and omissions in the town’s historical record, and produced what might be considered Camden’s first and only land acknowledgment statement.

“The Indians in great numbers met Captain Weymouth and his company, when they landed upon our shores, in a friendly manner and brought their furs to exchange for trinkets of but little value; and the Englishmen repaid them by invading their humble wigwams, and wrenching from the mother’s fond arms the best beloved boy, and from the father the girl, the delight of his eyes, who cheered him in his lonely hours in his embowered wigwam, when returning from his hunting grounds. The simple children of nature, who roamed the Everglades of the Megunticook valley, and rested upon the crests of these mountains, upon which I am now gazing, are entitled to a niche in history… I have been led to speak of those who preceded us in peopling these regions, when Camden was a solitude, as was the group of islands before me; which gracefully rest upon the peaceful waters of ‘Penobscot bay,’ as an act of simple justice and to leave on record my utter detestation of the villainous conduct of those freebooters…”

I have found nothing so strongly worded in any historical writing or commentary since Fletcher and if anything, our view of history seems to have condensed rather than expanded as a community. In Camden, honoring our history is mostly about the last hundred years or so, and even then, the emphasis is inconsistent and the oral histories are foggy and often contradict the source documents. The word historic, in Camden seems to evoke notions of dazzling homes on Chestnut Street or flower pots hanging from lamp posts…. We talk about the Village Green, the library, Harbor Park, all of which were designed less than 100 years old.

Even the story of James Richards and the struggle to survive has mostly been omitted from the narrative, but at his time there were still a few of the Wawenock tribe living in the area and although they are said to have coexisted peacefully with the new settlers, we don’t know much other than they would sometimes come and use the sharpening tools outside his doorstep.

According to Camden’s earliest history book, a few sites during James Richards’ time were said to have still been occupied by the Wawenocks. One of these was Eaton’s Point, as it was called. It is still a place notable as a landmark in the general vicinity in front of the condos in between Lyman Morse and Steamboat Landing. There is sizable boulder there too that once defined the northern boundary of Camden and it can still be seen right where the surveyor said it was in 1768 (I’m about 85% sure), cast down from the mountains by the receding of the glaciers and no doubt employed as a waypoint for thousands of years before us. Our deepest connection to history is looming large above us in the mountains, scraped in the bedrock by glaciers, buried in the soil beneath our feet.

A few people like Kerry Hardy and Harbour Mitchell have done more than most to prod us into more careful examination of our past. In many cases, a better understanding of the natural history of the region is the best starting point. The remnants of clam flats have been found in the soils at the outlet of Megunticook Lake, reminding us that all of Camden was once an ocean. Arrowheads along the banks of Dailey Brook and the early maps speak to a time when Camden Harbor’s intertidal zone extended nearly all the way to Route 1. The shape today is the result of a combination of dredging out of native clam flats and the importing of soil to fill in around the edges. Most of our streams have been dammed or blocked with culverts, so radically altering the habitat as to render them unlivable for many native species like Brook Trout.

Still, there are a few places that true Camden natives can be found hiding out in the cold waters that descend from the mountains, cascading naturally over the rocky ledge that connects us with the true native people of the region.

In the vicinity of Quarry Hill, Don Rainville and his wife Michelle stumbled upon some of Camden’s most ancient artifacts, some dating back 5-7,000 years, during a renovation to their home on Camden Street. Thankfully, they knew they had stumbled on something special and have taken on the burden of proceeding slowly with any new excavation, painstakingly inspecting and documenting their findings.

How much of Camden’s history is destroyed or unnoticed simply because we haven’t trained ourselves to look for the more subtle signs? If we value our history, we must learn to look for it and reflect honestly, not just in the concrete walls and brick buildings we’ve trained ourselves to recognize as historic but also the layers of soil, the wildlife, the bedrock, and the water that flows from all around.

Private piers and public trust

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 18:10:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to write as much as possible about Camden’s public access points to the harbor before I forget what it felt like not to know about them. They are easy to ignore when not enough people know they exist, so it’s great to see the new signs marking many of the lesser known spots like Eaton Avenue, Harbor Road, and the Curtis Island Overlook. We are still waiting on signage at Sherman’s Point Road.

It’s notable that many of the public access points contain the word “overlook”. It’s meant to make it clear that there is no obvious way to get down to the water—whether natural or engineered— but at each of these locations, the public rights goes all the way to the low tide mark. The adventurous and the physically fit are free to descend at their own risk. Everyone else is encouraged to request that the town prioritize safe ways to reach the shore at our public access points.

But you should also know that public rights to access the water extend beyond the official boundaries of the town owned land. They go all the way back to the 16th century when Queen Elizabeth recognized the public’s “inalienable right to the sea” and the public trust doctrine was established. It’s a somewhat complicated issue and case history in Maine, but in essence, it established that certain lands are held in trust by the government for public benefit.

Specifically, tidal waters and submerged lands belong to the state and cannot be sold to a private party. The public has the right to cross over “unimproved land” in order to access a great pond or tidal waters. Maine’s beaches or intertidal areas influenced by the ebb and flow of the tides are often privately held by the upland property owner but the public has a permanent right of way to access the land for the purposes of “fishing, fowling, and navigation” all broadly defined.

Maine has been mulling through case after case determining the evolving meaning of “fishing, fowling, and navigation” as it relates to the economic and recreational realities of today. For those who want to know more, I recommend an article published by the Ocean and Coastal Law Journal (2020) titled Access for the Future: Improving Maine's Implementation of the Public Trust Doctrine through Municipal Controls to Ensure Coastal Access for Continuing Benefit to Maine's People and Economy by Allison M. Kuhns

https://digitalcommons.mainelaw.maine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1392&context=oclj

Private land owners frequently attempt to keep the public off of the beaches in front of their properties, and court cases have delved into the details of creative applications of allowed uses. For example, crossing over a private beach to reach the ocean for scuba diving is a right under the public trust doctrine and so is digging for worms.

In many places, the private property owner’s right to access the water from their property has taken the form of private piers and docks, which in turn, interferes with the public’s right of passage. Some docks are required to have a set of public stairs that allow for passage above the structure when the tides are such that passage underneath is not feasible.

Piers also displace habitat for shorebirds and shellfish. Wading birds have been found to avoid a 300ft radius around pier structures. The pilings associated with the structures permanently consume real estate used by clams and other shellfish.

Most of our harbor access points are sandwiched between private property, sea walls, piers, and man-made precipices meant to keep the adjacent properties from losing any real estate to the sea. In some cases, the private property owners even managed to convince the townspeople to share in the cost of building the erosion control sea walls that protect their property while creating a virtually impassable vertical drop for the public access point.

We forget that beaches are formed by the natural process of erosion. As sea level rises, the beaches and intertidal zones will migrate landward in some places where they are able to. In other places, constructed sea walls (often built in conjunction with private piers) will keep the shoreline in a fixed position, shrinking the amount of dry beach that will be revealed on the outgoing tide.

This phenomenon is referred to as coastal squeeze and you can feel it at high tide if you try to walk anywhere along the beach in Camden Harbor. In some places, the footings of a private pier actually occupy the only spot that would allow a pedestrian to pass by at certain tides.

When I was first elected to the Select Board, I avoided taking positions on issues relating to boats and harbor infrastructure since it was clear to me that I have a lot less experience than many of my friends and neighbors. Being surrounded by family members who have spent their professional careers working in this area has prepared me well for the habit of deferring to the input of others on this topic. Even my kids are more proficient in basic marine vocabulary than I am, but there’s something liberating about accepting your role as an observer in need of learning from others.

This may be one of the reasons that so many people reach out to me with their own questions and concerns regarding the harbor. I’m not embarrassed by not knowing the answer and it’s easy for me to be open minded and ask my own questions. People have rightly assumed that I might be convinced to see things their way on certain topics because I haven’t established a rigid position of my own.

I’ve done a lot of listening about “the way things used to be” and all the public access that has been lost. There was a time when Camden Harbor wasn’t as popular as it today and it was viewed more like an airport and less like a destination of its own. Allowing some private property owners to build structures through the public trust resources didn’t seem like such a big deal if it was only a few piers and everyone who wanted a mooring in Camden Harbor could get one.

Today, every inch of Camden Harbor is potentially precious real estate. I do not anticipate personally wanting to have a boat moored in Camden Harbor, but I have many friends and family who pay fees every year just to be on a waiting list for the privilege. Demand is growing all the time. The Harbor itself is a destination for many and the economic importance that was linked to sustenance fishing in Queen Elizabeth’s day may look more like guided fishing and photography trips today.

One place you can see the changing pressure for space in the harbor is at the dinghy dock. Traditionally, the dinghy dock was for people to park their small boat which would get them out to their bigger boat, but a new class of boaters has emerged that is rapidly encroaching on the dinghy real estate. We are broadly referred to as paddlers and many of us are happy to never leave the harbor at all. Smaller vessels are supposed to get out of the way of larger ones but in Camden Harbor there is a single established channel. A trip over to Sherman’s Cove is magical by paddle board if you hug the shoreline and gaze at the rockweed but sooner or later one of the massive private piers will force you out into the main channel to compete for space with launches, tenders, schooners, and more.

Sometimes I go down to check on my little dingy and I become so enamored with fish and underwater flora and fauna that I never even leave the dingy dock at all. The harbor to us is not a launching point to get us out onto Penobscot Bay but a destination all its own. The intertidal habitat, the changing tides, the beaches, and the estuarine waters where Megunticook and other small streams mix with the sea provides an experience that attracts anglers, tourists, shell collectors, beach walkers, paddle boarders and even swimmers.

Until recently, shellfish harvesting in Shermans Cove and other swaths of Camden’s mud flats was an activity that drew both hobbyists and the hungry down to the harbor, but the concerns over pollution within a certain radius of wastewater treatment plant outfalls has closed the area for now. This has opened up for door for new pier applications to say with a straight face that they won’t interfere with any existing shellfish harvesting, but shouldn’t we be looking for ways to eventually reopen the shellfish harvest rather than allowing more private structures on the grounds that we already polluted the water too much for certain types fishing?

With so many missed opportunities to look back on, let’s not miss our opportunity to keep the keys to the castle that remain. There may come a time when we need or want to build commercial or public use piers, docks, and even breakwaters. As sea level rises, the water may become deep enough in some places to support new moorings and we have an obligation to safeguard precious public resources now rather than give them away to private interests. We can always go back and decide to give more of it away to private development if we choose to later but it doesn’t work the other way around.

In 2015, the harbor committee and the planning board unanimously recommended a ban on new private residential piers but the Select Board voted in a split vote not to pass the question on to voters. It’s time to make that happen.

Building over the Megunticook River

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 18:04:00 +0000

After my sister died in 2018, I was a mess. And the two coping mechanisms that worked best for me were filming fish underwater and digitizing old town records. I’ve always been kind of a nerd. One of the projects I took on was digitizing the old Camden Select Board meeting minutes from the 1930s. Although they lack detail, there are many interesting tidbits that remain relevant today and the cartoon in last week's paper got me thinking about Main Street.

At the May 18th, 1931, meeting of the Camden Board of Selectmen, a letter was read that had come from the woman who donated most of the land for Camden’s library and adjacent park. The minutes from the meeting include only these words: “Letter from Mrs. Bok regarding building over river, read.” Mary Louise Curtis Bok hired and worked closely with the famed Olmsted Brothers to do the design work for this and multiple other locations around Camden and Rockport.

I always wondered. Did she want to build something over the river? Did she want to improve the buildings already there? Something else? I filed it away for a time when I would have more context, but anyone reading those minutes at the time would have had a pretty good idea. Now that the Camden Herald has digitized so much of their archive (actually credit goes to the Camden Public Library, not the newspaper), it’s clear Mrs. Bok was not a fan of allowing the river to be hidden under buildings.

The discussion had been going on for a few years, ultimately prompting a Camden Herald Editorial in the August 23rd 1928 edition in response to a presentation given by Edward Bok (the husband of Mrs. Bok) and Dr. Charles Codman (think, Codman Island on Megunticook Lake) which encouraged the townspeople to value the fact that in Camden we “have the greatest gifts of nature” but have allowed “a beautiful mountain stream, flowing right through the very heart of the town to become a foul cesspool, hidden from view by a few buildings.”

The editors of the paper agreed:

“Dr. Charles Codman, at a recent Board of Trade meeting, pointed out the fact that the river flowing through the town as it does, is not a sanitary or desirable thing. Moreover, we are wondering whether it is lawful for any town to allow the placing of buildings on spiles over a public stream in such a manner as to clog the stream, catch waste and sewage, and hold it. A few years ago, we had a heavy flood and the first place that clogged and gave rise to serious danger was the main Street bridge with the buildings across it.”

They were referring to the devastating rain storm of 1922 which swept at least one Main Street building and many bridges into the river. Dean’s stable — which used to be sandwiched in between the House of Logan and the Leather Bench — gave way, drowning one horse and nearly the rest of them. Most of the Main Street businesses were flooded and the recovery effort required the cutting open of the bridge on Main Street where debris was trapped.

As Mrs. Bok worked with the Olmsted Brothers to design Harbor Park, she slowly removed every building existing on the parcels she owned, but the park design also required working around private property, including the dam. At that time, what we know as Montgomery Dam was all part of a larger parcel that included most of the buildings on Main Street. Over time, the owner of that parcel had leased out space to proprietors of businesses that wanted to perch their buildings over top of the river to gain store frontage on Main Street.

The 1912 edition of the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps shows multiple buildings in Harbor Park that have since been demolished, and three fewer buildings over the river on the harbor side than there are today.

Eventually, each of these new buildings became separate parcels.

But before that, on June 23rd, 1931, a special town meeting was held at the Engine Hall “for the purpose of granting authority to the Board of Selectmen to invoke condemnation proceedings with regard to certain wooden buildings now located on the Main Street bridge.” The paper reported that the meeting “was well attended by a representative group of citizens… The vote was unanimous, there being no dissenting voice raised.”

On July 1, 1931, the municipal officers of Camden gave notice of their intention to take, “for public park purposes”, the land over which was situated the Stratton fish market and the Drinkwater Garage. But it wasn’t all about Mrs. Bok and her vision for restoring the view of the harbor from Main Street. Plans were underway for replacement of the Main Street bridge — then owned by the county — and the Town had been told that work could not proceed until the buildings were removed.

August 1931, Mrs. Bok stated she hoped that someday the buildings which now rested directly over the falls on Main Street, hiding their beauty, would be removed, and a new artistic bridge erected on Main Street. In the same issue of the Camden Herald, the editors opined over “what a treat it was to hear from Mrs. Edward Bok herself” on the project underway at the Camden Public Library lot and that “many a rumor was put to rest by Mrs. Bok’s keen and masterly appreciation of the fine points of the scheme from the architectural and community standpoint.”

They went on saying “we agree with many of the suggestions that Mrs. Bok set forth, namely — the removal of the buildings from over the stream:—the diversion of waste, etc., into direct sewer lines to the harbor — a new bridge over the stream that shall be a thing of beauty for Camden. We hope that these suggestions will come to pass.”

It’s not clear what happened next, but it appears that compromises were made on the bridge design, and the buildings were allowed to stay. The compromise has involved a delicate balancing act where the water level is raised to improve aesthetics and then lowered as needed to work on the buildings and bridge. The Megunticook River is visible from only one spot on Main Street and so it’s easy to lose perspective of its course as it disappears beneath a labyrinth of bridge piers and building supports before re-emerging on the other side of the Smiling Cow (the former Drinkwater Garage).

The way the buildings and the bridge are designed requires that the water be lowered in order to perform a variety of maintenance tasks. When the flow is at low to moderate levels in the river, the pool underneath the Camden Deli can be drained by opening up the gate on the Montgomery Dam and letting water out the sluiceway into the harbor.

During the May 1st storm, logs and debris got caught in the bridge and the buildings, and had it been worse, we may have gotten a taste of what they saw in 1922. One of the purposes of the early dams was to help float logs over long distances, and the Montgomery Dam in the closed position facilitates floating of debris, which then has to pass through narrow openings of the support systems for the bridge and buildings. This is one of the reasons why modern bridges give rivers more room with wider spans and no center pier if possible.

Luckily, a few days after the storm, the pool under the bridge and buildings could be drained in order to make it possible for MDOT to pull things out with a boom truck. The same thing happens when one of the building owners needs to paint, fix their footings, or make other improvements. Sometimes, additional water must be held back from the lake in order to make this possible.

Unfortunately, draining the pool reveals a scene that is cringeworthy under the bridge and buildings. A derelict fuel tank, impounded sediment, hanging wires, fallen plumbing, sunken timber and collapsed piers. It’s not clear who is responsible for all the stuff, but everyone usually agrees it looks awful enough that they request to fill the pool again as quickly as possible. Out of sight out of mind.

Almost 100 years after Mary Louise Curtis Bok proposed a more aesthetically pleasing bridge on Main Street, we are no longer generating power at the site, but we are still treating this section of the river more like a canal than a beautiful mountain stream. No matter what happens with the dam, we can't put off cleaning up the mess underneath forever.

Communities are wrestling everywhere with the collective responsibility to clean up their waterbodies and remove debris to prevent flooding. Luckily, we are at an unprecedented moment where federal funds are available to improve all of it and the funds can even be used to help improve the support structures under the buildings so they are resilient and aesthetically pleasing.

I am so curious as to what Mrs. Bok would have envisioned for a bridge on Main Street now that it is once again due for replacement. Was she imagining something like what we have on Knowlton Street or near Megunticook Market or would it have been more like the arched granite of some of the other Olmsted parks?

All natural engineering?

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 02:58:00 +0000

Column from a couple weeks ago: All natural engineering?
https://knox.villagesoup.com/2022/11/17/column-all-natural-engineering/

Not another meaningless buzzword to make us feel all warm and fuzzy about sustainability. Please. Anything but that. Promises of green products and eco-conscious ingredients have left some of us rolling our eyes and suspicious of all terms referring to nature.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) is the latest term you’ll see highlighted in grant opportunities ranging from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to The Nature Conservancy. Billions of dollars are being leveraged to encourage solving human challenges by restoring, protecting and learning from natural systems.

But is all this rhetoric just the engineering version of “all natural ingredients” in the food we eat? The proverbial paper straw that makes us feel better about spending money? It depends, but for the most part, the idea is so simple and obvious that it’s a wonder we’re just coming around to embracing it.

FEMA defines Nature-Based Solutions broadly as “sustainable planning, design, environmental management and engineering practices that weave natural features or processes into the built environment to promote adaptation and resilience.”

In short, the agency tasked with hazard mitigation and recovery has noticed that certain things last longer than others and that sometimes the most durable and resilient solution has already been worked out by nature. Just because it may seem easier to put a stream in a pipe, bury it underground, and build on top of it, doesn’t mean we should do that.

Just because there’s a composite aggregate that looks just like granite doesn’t mean it will behave like granite over the next couple hundred years. Systems that depend on sealing the cracks between rocks with cement and grout will eventually fail.

Insurance companies are actually one of the main drivers pushing for nature-based solutions and funding their adoption. It’s not because insurance executives have suddenly become “tree huggers.” It’s because they don’t want to pay the high price of rebuilding things when they fall down.

As many have noted, the ocean has been rising and falling since time immemorial just as the rivers have been expanding and contracting as they meander, overflowing their banks and altering their course. It’s nothing new, but large boulders remain perched atop bedrock for a very long time under a wide range of conditions whereas saplings with shallow root systems only rarely beat the odds.

Some stones were dragged hundreds of miles by the glaciers or crushed up into sand whereas others held strong. Water slowly erodes everything in its path. If we don’t want our creations swept out to sea, we would be wise to deploy concrete and grout a little less frequently near the shore when rocks and bedrock can do the trick.

Nature-based solutions are different depending on the climate but it’s fun to try and start noticing what seems to stand the test of time with minimal human effort and what does not.

A few years back I remember watching as a stone retaining wall was constructed in the front yard of a home down the street from me. It was very pretty and the stones reminded me of the ones we used to sell from our farm out in Union when I was a kid. My sister and I always laughed about the people coming to buy rocks from my mom. What a strange thing for adults to buy and sell.

My mom was probably 110 pounds with long hair and not at all what most people were expecting from a rock broker. She knew the value of good, flat landscaping rock and the wooded areas beyond our horse pastures had plenty of it woven into quickly built walls — a payout on the sweat equity invested hundreds of years earlier by people as they toiled to turn the rocky Maine woods into suitable farmland.

My mom used the stones herself to build patios, steps and benches, but it still surprised my sister and me that people would come from Camden, Rockland, and sometimes further just to buy the rocks we had dragged out of the woods in our GMC Suburban.

Rock harvesting was the only time we spent in a vehicle when we didn’t have to wear seatbelts. My mom would let us sit on top of the bench seats in the back, pretending we were on horses and trying not to fall off as the Suburban bucked and balked at the decidedly not-so-suburban terrain.

Sometimes we would be out on the trails with the horses and my mom would see the “perfect” rock for one of her projects—some funny shape that was just the complement to another rock she had already laid down. She couldn’t get it with the horse but she’d go back later with the Suburban.

But aside from the few we kept for ourselves, it was off to the suburbs for most of the stones — at least the flat ones. Nature doesn’t usually build with straight lines and that’s probably why flat rocks are a little less common too. The natural evolution of things doesn’t produce straight lines but rather densely woven and interconnected patterns.

OPINION Posted November 17 INCREASE FONT SIZEResize Font
Column: All natural engineering?
Rocks are the original nature-based solution, and try as we might, humans have not engineered anything that can hold a candle to well-chosen natural stone when it comes to durability and even long-term aesthetics.

BY ALISON MCKELLAR
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Alison McKellar is a Camden resident and Select Board Vice-Chair. Her views are her own and do not reflect those of the Select Board or the editorial position of The Camden Herald. We welcome letters and guest columns reflecting other viewpoints via editor@villagesoup.com.
Not another meaningless buzzword to make us feel all warm and fuzzy about sustainability. Please. Anything but that. Promises of green products and eco-conscious ingredients have left some of us rolling our eyes and suspicious of all terms referring to nature.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) is the latest term you’ll see highlighted in grant opportunities ranging from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to The Nature Conservancy. Billions of dollars are being leveraged to encourage solving human challenges by restoring, protecting and learning from natural systems.

But is all this rhetoric just the engineering version of “all natural ingredients” in the food we eat? The proverbial paper straw that makes us feel better about spending money? It depends, but for the most part, the idea is so simple and obvious that it’s a wonder we’re just coming around to embracing it.

FEMA defines Nature-Based Solutions as a broadly as “sustainable planning, design, environmental management and engineering practices that weave natural features or processes into the built environment to promote adaptation and resilience.”

In short, the agency tasked with hazard mitigation and recovery has noticed that certain things last longer than others and that sometimes the most durable and resilient solution has already been worked out by nature. Just because it may seem easier to put a stream in a pipe, bury it underground, and build on top of it, doesn’t mean we should do that.

Just because there’s a composite aggregate that looks just like granite doesn’t mean it will behave like granite over the next couple hundred years. Systems that depend on sealing the cracks between rocks with cement and grout will eventually fail.

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Insurance companies are actually one of the main drivers pushing for nature-based solutions and funding their adoption. It’s not because insurance executives have suddenly become “tree huggers.” It’s because they don’t want to pay the high price of rebuilding things when they fall down.

As many have noted, the ocean has been rising and falling since time immemorial just as the rivers have been expanding and contracting as they meander, overflowing their banks and altering their course. It’s nothing new, but large boulders remain perched atop bedrock for a very long time under a wide range of conditions whereas saplings with shallow root systems only beat the odds.

Some stones were dragged hundreds of miles by the glaciers or crushed up into sand whereas others held strong. Water slowly erodes everything in its path. If we don’t want our creations swept out to sea, we would be wise to deploy concrete and grout a little less frequently near the shore when rocks and bedrock can do the trick.

Nature-based solutions are different depending on the climate but it’s fun to try and start noticing what seems to stand the test of time with minimal human effort and what does not.

A few years back I remember watching as a stone retaining wall was constructed in the front yard of a home down the street from me. It was very pretty and the stones reminded me of the ones we used to sell from our farm out in Union when I was a kid. My sister and I always laughed about the people coming to buy rocks from my mom. What a strange thing for adults to buy and sell.

My mom was probably 110 pounds with long hair and not at all what most people were expecting from a rock broker. She knew the value of good, flat landscaping rock and the wooded areas beyond our horse pastures had plenty of it woven into quickly built walls — a payout on the sweat equity invested hundreds of years earlier by people as they toiled to turn the rocky Maine woods into suitable farmland.

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My mom used the stones herself to build patios, steps and benches, but it still surprised my sister and me that people would come from Camden, Rockland, and sometimes further just to buy the rocks we had dragged out of the woods in our GMC Suburban.

Rock harvesting was the only time we spent in a vehicle when we didn’t have to wear seatbelts. My mom would let us sit on top of the bench seats in the back, pretending we were on horses and trying not to fall off as the Suburban bucked and balked at the decidedly not-so-suburban terrain.

Sometimes we would be out on the trails with the horses and my mom would see the “perfect” rock for one of her projects—some funny shape that was just the complement to another rock she had already laid down. She couldn’t get it with the horse but she’d go back later with the Suburban.

But aside from the few we kept for ourselves, it was off to the suburbs for most of the stones — at least the flat ones. Nature doesn’t usually build with straight lines and that’s probably why flat rocks are a little less common too. The natural evolution of things doesn’t produce straight lines but rather densely woven and interconnected patterns.

A natural stormwater conveyance system capable of transporting millions of gallons of water from Hosmer Pond to Rockport Harbor, also known as the Goose River. A nature-based solution so logical, we almost forgot how well it works. Photo courtesy of Alison McKellar

Humans seek out flat rocks to fit into their straight lines, so that everything can be built efficiently and according to a plan drawn up by an engineer — the type of line they can mow around.

The irregular and rounded rocks got to stay in Union, marking the edge of horse pastures and property lines, but the flat ones were sent off to places like the Camden village. Ultimately, my neighbor’s vertical stone wall with the neat lines and the flat stones fell down and was quickly replaced by a design consisting of only a few large boulders, some soil, and plantings. At first I was sad for the eye-catching stone wall but soon enough I decided I actually like the new design better.

Most of our built-up areas were long ago cleared of the rocks that held the earth together. They were removed to make way for smooth roads, hayfields, and later, the loam and grass seed that now partially enslaves us. Today, when it comes time to landscape close to town, not everyone has all the rocks they need or want so close by, and so they import them or they come up with a less expensive alternative like pouring concrete.

I suppose rocks are the original nature-based solution, and try as we might, humans have not engineered anything that can hold a candle to well-chosen natural stone when it comes to durability and even long-term aesthetics. The benefits are compounded when we can learn to arrange the stones in a similar fashion to nature, complete with irregularities.

Modern society has gifted us with the technology to turn swamps into high-rise hotels and build swimming pools in the desert and grow food virtually anywhere. We can create land where there was ocean and put deep-water dockage and bustling harbors where there were only mudflats. The science and practice of engineering has been obsessed with finding the limits of natural systems and then finding a human solution to transcend them.

Concrete, cement, and grout are a few of the things that we keep getting better and better at manipulating. They are wonderful for creating the smooth surfaces that allow wheelchairs and roller skates to safely pass but they should be deployed cautiously as a method of fighting the flow of moving water.

That’s just one small example of the type of strategy being encouraged by the bipartisan infrastructure bill and millions of dollars in corporate financing. What’s working in nature? Try that first.

https://knox.villagesoup.com/2022/11/17/column-all-natural-engineering/

Camden without a car

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 04:00:00 +0000

The need for town government and taxes evolved in large part out of the need to build and maintain roads for public use. The original settlers all had to agree to let public roads be erected across their lots wherever it was deemed necessary, and instead of paying taxes, they were required to assist in building those roads and keeping them passable by working a certain amount of time each year for the first ten years of settlement.

Keeping the roads passable was the name of the game and no one had to worry about the danger of any group getting by too quickly. The roads were slow and rocky and muddy and often washed out. And in the winter, they were slippery and all sorts of other things.

The need for sidewalks didn’t come along until the roads began to be heavily used by horses and other livestock and the downtown became dense enough that sanitary issues arose. The lines began to form between the use of town roads by those with horses and those without.

In the March 24 edition of the Courier-Gazette from 1903, the editor offered the following reminder:

“we submit that we are not, as taxpayers living in a progressive community with a live Board of Trade, doing right when we permit the elements to make walking unbearable for an entire winter… We pay for making the middle of the streets comfortable for horses, which are never heard to complain, but we let poor tender-footed humanity slip and stumble and break its bones and the commandments and appear to regard it quite as a matter of course.”

How many times have we heard complaints about pedestrians walking in the road even when there is a sidewalk? Well, I’ll bet the reasons are almost always similar to the ones from 1903.

Yes, there are certainly inconsiderate pedestrians, but for the most part, people only choose the road over the sidewalk when there is a noticeable disparity in the conditions.

Almost every road in Camden is in better condition than the sidewalk, if there is one, and it is the sidewalks and not the roadways that are frequently obstructed by telephone poles and mailboxes. Just as towns prioritized horse and cart passage over making the sidewalks passable for people, we fall into the same patterns today with cars. Some assume that the only people out using our sidewalks are those walking by choice or children who are not yet old enough to drive. They also tend to imagine that the activity is seasonal and that by winter everyone is in cars.

There are of course many reasons that someone might make the choice to walk around town rather than drive but there is also another demographic: the carless. I’ve been renting rooms in our home on Mechanic Street since 2008. Advertising on Craigslist and wading through all the inquiries and getting to know the people during their time has shown me that many people are without a vehicle either by chance or by choice.

In fact, I got so used to having people without cars that we actually started charging more if a tenant would need to park a car in the driveway. The reasons that our tenants have not had cars have been numerous, including financial issues, physical disability, license revocation, anxiety, a preference for walking, never learned to drive, no need for a car, and probably more that I can’t think of.

When I first moved back to Camden after college, I quite comfortably shared a car with one of my housemates, but the longest I went without a car completely was about 9 months. My kids were very young at the time, and I worked to conquer my nervousness on a bike in order to be able to pull them around in one of those carts.

So much of our town is designed and operated on the assumption that everyone needs or wants or can afford a car, but it’s time to start acknowledging the fact that not everyone has one.

If the carless in Camden suddenly all had an automobile that they needed to park and drive, we’d notice an increase in congestion.

On a similar note, if a few more of us could get by without one more often, we’d all benefit with cleaner air and less congestion. One of the many obstacles to the creation of affordable housing is that it all has to be built with the assumption that we are building space for as many cars as people, and sometimes more.

For the people who already need to walk or bike, we owe it to them to make that experience as safe and accessible as possible, and that will mean clawing back a little space and preference that has been ceded to automobiles.”

Originally published by the Camden Herald https://knox.villagesoup.com/archives/column-camden-without-a-car/article_c0b9c560-4afc-51ed-9b7c-ec9594c3f744.html

Camden's Cancer

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 01:48:00 +0000

A lot of what I read in the old Camden Heralds is stuff that predates my own living memory and that of most people living in Camden today. Sometimes, though, I stumble upon things that I remember all too well.

One thing I came upon recently that I did remember was a guest column from 2001 titled Camden’s cancer. It was written by a fellow student who attended high school with me at a time when we were facing an unprecedented number of tragic deaths in our small town, a result of both suicide and accidents.
I remember Evan’s writing got a lot of attention at the time, puzzling-and sometimes frustrating-the adults but hailed as “spot on” by everyone in my age group that I remember. It started like this: 
“For as long as I can remember, Camden, Maine, has been very sick, and finally Camden is dying. We live in a town infected with an obsession. We are a community stricken with almost every serious affliction common among teenagers… the truth is that we as a community are to blame. We are a superficial group, perpetually concerned with our image as a town.” 
At the time, this resonated widely and almost wildly with many of us who felt exhausted trying to keep up in Camden. He went on to make vague references to the efforts and institutions that were concerned more with appearing to address problems than really solving them. Some residents responded with letters to the editor expressing a range of responses from agreement to defensiveness. 
I graduated from Camden Hills Regional High School in 2002 so I was one of only a few classes to spend time in both the old high school and the new one. It was a time of rapid change. Not the little changes of a few parking spots and street trees that seem to consume us today, but a major reshaping of the town. 
The high school was moved from Knowlton Street to Route 90 in a move that provided a state of the art facility while also radically severing some of the community interaction that used to happened organically. 
Somehow we used to fit not just the middle school but the entire high school and all of the student and teacher vehicles onto Knowlton Street at the edge of downtown Camden. 
You can still see the little signs on a few side streets prohibiting parking during school hours. They seem oddly placed today as unlikely streets to be overrun as a convenient parking spot. They are leftover from another time when some of the residential neighborhoods felt they needed protection from a high school bursting at its seams. Now, the complaints are occasionally directed at parents picking kids up at the skate park… imagine what it was like when the whole high school was there!
An even bigger problem was that skateboarders were overwhelming the freshly built ADA ramps at MBNA and the Post Office. That and dealing with the problem of teenage loitering was a topic of endless concern from the downtown business owners. MBNA had a solution for that too, and an old lot on Knowlton Street was transformed into a fully staffed skate park. 
But when our school community was confronted the horror of multiple student suicides, the conversation changed for a moment from the problems that teenagers created for the town to the not so obvious problems that the town might be breeding in its teenagers. The relentless pursuit of perfection and the focus on improving the way things look rather than improving the way things are seemed embedded in the collective consciousness.
The 2001 column continued:
“I have spoken to peers who honestly believe that a C in math is the end of their academic career and their lives as a result. Students must learn to understand that there is so much more to life than high school. It’s far too easy to get caught up in the everyday stresses that our elitist community forces on us and lose sight of the bigger picture.”
20 years later, I can say with certainty that the school district has done a lot to foster an atmosphere that is more inclusive and less stressful. I’m not so sure that Camden as a town is making much progress winning the battle against the cancer that Evan Thomas spoke of back in 2001. We do have fewer kids downtown, that is for sure.
It took leaving Camden and seeing the types of problems that are faced in other parts of the world to shake myself mostly free of the paranoid fear of not fitting in or not meeting some standard of what success looks like here. 
I’ll admit to secretly cheering for the people and properties that are overgrown and unkept in Camden. Too much perfection is bad for the soul, and sometimes, by striving so hard to force people and landscapes to conform to a template, we rob ourselves of beauty and creativity that we never imagined. 
When the little parking lot next to Camden House of Pizza was redesigned and the retaining wall replaced, some were eager for a more manicured look, but I wished the whole thing would have stayed the way it was. We used to climb up the wall as kids in the same spot where there is now a staircase. Multiple mature trees had found a way to survive and prosper, embedded against the odds in rocks and pavement. They were nuisance weeds that had escaped the knife year after year until they became actual trees. 
Nothing about it looked nice in the traditional sense and it used to be notorious for attracting teenagers with nothing to do. One resident who shall remain nameless even spray painted the words “loser lot” in an attempt to dissuade teenagers from congregating there. But sometimes I really am convinced that It’s good for us to be at peace with the weeds, however we define them. 
Just recently, an arborvitae growing alongside Paul Gibbons’ old office across from the Opera House was cut, and now the incredible sound of the birds that used to hide there is gone too. I’m sure the new owner had no idea the sweet sounds that used to mysteriously come from that tree.
When Harbor Park becomes overgrown, there are those in town who scoff and wag their fingers, but some of us delight in seeing the triumph of wildness in Camden. 
For many years the Montgomery Dam used to be sprayed with Roundup on a regular basis in order to keep the weeds from growing on it. I’ve been told we don’t do that anymore but there are still plenty of ways that our obsession with a certain image can become poison to the people and natural resources we should cherish just as they are.
This piece originally appeared in the Camden Herald: https://knox.villagesoup.com/archives/column-camden-s-cancer/article_31017580-d556-5e56-b9db-c0c97f317924.html

Syria update... there's more to do!

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 02:30:00 +0000

Dear Friends of Syria-

An overdue update. I just checked and our first container is due to cross into the Mediterranean tomorrow and the second one is just leaving Rhode Island on route across the Atlantic after picking up her final cargo.

Two weeks ago, we sent out our second container to Syria, successfully loading an estimated 45,000 lbs of donated humanitarian and medical supplies in roughly 3 hours, thanks to an incredible turnout of motivated volunteers of literally every age.

And here's a great image of the CHRHS band room before and after.

FROM EMPTY TO OVERFLOWING IN UNDER 2 WEEKS

That photo is deceiving though because the donations have not stopped and we have the best kind of problem right now. Piles of donations, from hygiene products to clothes to stuffed animals and strollers all overflowing from the Mechanic Street porch. We also have a few residual things left on 64 Bayview Street (like an amazing maternity bed and some random medical equipment) and there are at least 9 exam tables and other equipment waiting for pickup in various places. Oh yeah, and we need to move our loading dock from the high school (the one we built).

NO CURRENT PLAN FOR STORAGE, but we're not quitting!

Here's the rub.... WE NEED SPACE. The current backup plan is to buy a 53ft storage trailer (about $2000-2500) and find a good place to park it (we're waiting to hear back from the American Legion Post on Pearl Street). We'd pay a fee to park the container somewhere and use a church, school, business, or home for bi-weekly one day sorting sessions and then move everything back into the container. We'd also love to share the wealth and expand the operation by partnering with a church or organization that helps local people. We already lend crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs, but we'd love to do more of that.

THE VISION FOR THE FUTURE

There is so much opportunity to turn this project into something EVEN BIGGER. I know it seems daunting, but we never imagined we'd get this big and reach so many people and the opportunities to save life saving equipment and materials from scrap metal, landfill, or the incinerator, is still bigger than we can absorb. That's right, the offers for donations are coming in all the time and things are still being wasted. Spend a day at the transfer station in Rockport and watch what goes into the hopper and scrap metal, and then remember that the SWAP SHOP isn't even open on Saturdays or the winter. What if we could accept an even broader range of things and be in a position to respond to all kinds of requests from local organizations. We could furnish apartments for veterans or people leaving homeless shelters. We could be a resource for local teachers and social workers. There is so much generosity out there and so much need, but we need a better system for making sure all of these resources are helping as many people with the greatest need.

Check out the www.thewishproject.org for inspiration if you're interested in helping our project grow.

When I began this process, I was deeply moved by the realization that all of our little efforts matter and add up to something much bigger than we imagine. I've spoken to so many of you who I know have been inspired too. We are not done yet and we either need to raise more money or find more space. This is the number one thing holding us back.

Anyway... here are a few more photos from the second container:

https://www.facebook.com/MaineSyriaRelief/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1102231859846627

Other assorted photos:

https://www.facebook.com/MaineSyriaRelief/photos

A huge thank you to all the amazing donors, lifters, sorters, thinkers, and cheer leaders. Thanks to you, there are many people in Syria who will know they are not forgotten and our shipment will provide hope and tools that will literally save lives. It doesn't get better than that.

Nothing quite like knowing you've given someone a little hope.

-Alison

www.nudaysyria.net

Don’t burn your trash. We can do better - PenBay Pilot

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Tue, 24 May 2016 13:32:00 +0000

ATTEND YOUR ANNUAL TOWN MEETING to VOTE NO to BURNING YOUR TRASH

Dear Friends and Community Members : There is an important meeting tomorrow, Tuesday, May 24, at 6:30 p.m. in the Washington Street Conference Room in the back of the Camden town office. This will be a public hearing and informational session on the issue of solid waste which we will be voting on at town meetings this year in Camden, Rockport, Hope, and Lincolnville.

Having spent an enormous amount of time researching this issue, I am very concerned that the Board of Midcoast Solid Waste Corporation (aka the dump/transfer station), is recommending an option that is not only going to be more expensive but also carries a much heavier carbon footprint than the alternative.

Trash is a complicated issue, believe it or not, and it takes extensive research to understand all the factors. Jim Guerra (transfer station manager, lifelong composting enthusiast, and pioneer recycler) has been very patient with me, explaining the intricacies of anaerobic digestion and the climate benefits of converting our trash to biogas rather than burning it to make electricity.

However, our boards have not done the extensive research that many other municipalities have done and have failed to listen to experts like Jim in our own community. They are choosing to drive our trash almost twice as far away out of an unreasonable fear that the newer and much more environmentally friendly facility won't work properly, even though there are hundreds like it in Europe. It will be the first of its kind in the United States and has been extensively vetted by everyone from private investors to independent engineers. And did I mention it will actually cost us less? It's a rare and exciting opportunity.

Anyway, please consider attending the meeting tomorrow. For those who want to learn more, below is a letter I wrote to Select Board members from the 4 towns, detailing my reasons for opposing the continued incineration of our trash.

Also, the Belfast City Council just voted unanimously to go with Fiberight. The archived video is a wealth of information for anyone interested. Here is the link. Scroll to item 10B.

And in case you're still reading this far down, here's a free press article by Andy Obrien detailing the issue: http://freepressonline.com/Content/Special-Features/Special-Features/Article/Towns-to-Vote-on-Whether-to-Burn-Their-Trash-or-Convert-It-into-Biofuel/52/78/44736

*************

Dear Members of the Boards,

We have a big decision facing us about where to send our trash after 2018. I write to you as a Camden resident, as an advocate for the environment, and as an engaged member of the community. I serve on the Camden Budget Committee, the Camden Conservation Commission, and volunteer maintaining the town Facebook page... so I know it's a busy time of year for you all. There have been an overwhelming amount of meetings lately, and if I feel a little weary from all of them, I can only imagine how you all feel. I appreciate you hopefully taking the time to read this. Who knows, maybe it will save you some research.

I've been attending Mid-Coast Solid Waste Board meetings for the past two years. I've only missed a couple, and feel I have a good understanding of the factors that were considered in the lead up to the MCSWC board recommendation to go with Ecomaine. I've also been attending meetings of the Hampden Citizen's Coalition and volunteering to maintain their website (the group of citizens that was formed to advocate for the rights of Hampden residents living near the now closed Pine Tree Landfill). You might say that solid waste has become a bit of an obsession for me and I actually began this process quite opposed to Fiberight out of a concern for the people of Hampden. But, as a Mainer and as an environmentalist, I know that Maine is in dire need of regional solution for waste disposal other than landfilling. I've spent many hours attending DEP meetings in Hampden and questioning and arguing with Jim Guerra, our representative to the MRC, and I've come to feel as enthusiastic about the possibility of Fiberight as he is. Jim is a lifelong environmentalist who worked closely with the other members of the MRC to come up with an option that is for once both the cheapest and the most environmentally friendly. I've learned enough to know that we have a long way to go, and there are no easy answers or silver bullets, but for the first time in many years, we have choices and what we decide matters. This is why I believe that sending our trash to Ecomaine and withdrawing from the Municipal Review Committee and the 186 towns we now partner with is the wrong decision for the Midcoast, for Maine, and for the environment.

Although the MCSWC board took this effort seriously, and I know it was a grueling decision for them, I don't think there was enough time or public participation to fully consider the options. There are a few things that I don't think were fully discussed by the MCSWC board, or perhaps misunderstood. I've broken my thoughts down into a few different areas to make it easier to digest...

BASIC OVERVIEW:

PERC is an incinerator that uses our trash to make electricity. Our contract with PERC has been overseen by the Municipal Review Committee for 25 years. The MRC is a group run by a volunteer board of directors, all municipal representatives elected by the member towns (our elected member is Jim Guerra). The problem with PERC is that they sold the electricity at above market value and now that the subsidies are running out, their business model doesn't work. The MRC has spent the past 5-7 years anticipating this issue and working on alternatives. They vetted many different proposals and eventually chose Fiberight, a company that uses mechanic biological treatment and anaerobic digestion to create biogas. Their process first pulls out as many recyclable materials as possible (things that still make it into our trash despite our best intentions). Then they use a special system for digesting the leftover material to create biogas which is sold on the open market. Member communities will be entitled to rebates based on the profits, which are expected to be significant. The MCSWC has voted to recommend that we break our ties with the MRC and go with Ecomaine instead, based largely on apprehension about the technology being new to the United States. Ecomaine is also an incinerator, although with a slightly more efficient and environmentally friendly business model, some would say.

INCINERATORS ARE THE PAST, ANAEROBIC DIGESTION IS THE FUTURE

Much of the discussion at the MSCSW board level has centered around apprehension that the Fiberight process won't work. It's understandable that they would feel this way. It has taken a lot of energy for me to understand it over the past two years and read about the similar things that are going on in Europe. But the reality is that Fiberight's biggest investor is Covanta Energy, the biggest waste-to-energy (incineration) company in the country. The biggest incineration company is investing 80 million dollars in a trash to biofuel plant. They have vetted the Fiberight technology and are funding the building of the plant because they know that it will work and they will make money from it, even if it takes a bit to work out the glitches. Yes, there is a risk. As critics have pointed out, Maine will be the first to use this exact process on such a scale, but since when have we been afraid of going first? Anaerobic digestion is not new, and across Europe, the process of turning waste into biogas is a well established part of the plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here are some of the main benefits I see for the environment:

Anaerobic digestion is like composting without oxygen under controlled conditions. Much of our waste stream is made up of organic material. Separate collection of food waste in a rural state like ours may come with a big carbon footprint, and some people still won't want to do it. Food scraps do not burn well in Ecomaine's incinerators but Fiberight's process will use anaerobic digestion to turn this portion of our trash into biofuels.
Displacing fossil fuels: Biogas is generally considered to be a carbon-neutral source of energy because the carbon emitted during combustion was "new" plant based carbon that was already in the atmosphere, as opposed to the combustion of fossil fuels which burns carbon that had been sequestered for millions of years, and releases it into the atmosphere. Thus, replacing fossil fuels with biogas cuts down on GHG emissions associated with energy production.
Fiberight's sorting facility will add to existing recycling programs by pulling out and baling the recyclable materials that people are still throwing away. Watch a video of the process at work in the demonstration facility.

CARBON FOOTPRINT MATTERS

Although I'm thrilled to see that the debate is centering around which choice is the most environmental, by a great project that was the best choice for Portland, and not for us. Environmentalists have long been critical of incinerators, and while they've improved, no one would argue that they are an efficient way of producing electricity. The air emissions they create are still the subject of much concern (considerably greater than any air emissions from Fiberight). Here's a link explaining some of the issues: https://www.ecocycle.org/files/pdfs/WTE_wrong_for_environment_economy_community_by_Eco-Cycle.pdf To think that we would be willing to pay extra money and increase our carbon footprint with the longer hauling distances for the environmental benefit of incineration is a bit laughable from an environmental perspective.

I've attached a proposal from Fiberight which spells out how we can partner with them to create a carbon neutral recycling/transfer station (see attachment)

ECOMAINE IS NOT A REGIONAL SOLUTION. THERE IS REAL POWER IN BANDING TOGETHER WITH OTHER TOWNS TO MAKE THESE DECISIONS.

Ecomaine is a facility currently operating at capacity. They take in mostly municipal waste from their member towns and also about 40,000 tons of commercial waste. They've been hit hard by the diminishing price of recyclables. Revenue is down about 3 million dollars, and for them, it makes sense to replace as much commercial waste as they can with municipal waste. They can charge a higher tipping fee. The MRC towns represent about 180,000 tons of trash annually and the Fiberight facility needs about 150,000 tons worth of trash to operate profitably. This means that if Ecomaine succeeds in getting 40,000 tons worth of towns to sign up with them, it may mean the Fiberight facility can't be built. This will reduce the options available to the whole region. By sticking with the MRC, we maintain municipal oversight that protects our interests as they always have and we invest in a solution for sustainable waste to disposal in our entire region.

FIBERIGHT WILL SEND THE SAME AMOUNT TO THE LANDFILL AS ECOMAINE, WITH MUCH LESS AIR EMISSIONS

Ecomaine often mentions that they reduce the waste they take in by 90%, only landfilling 10% of waste by volume. The key here is that they refer to volume whereas the rest of the solid waste calculations are always done by weight. 10% by volume translates to 20-25% by weight, which is about the same as the Fiberight process. The big difference is that Fiberight will have a fraction of the air emissions that an incinerator has.

COST OF HAULING EXTRA DISTANCE

The bottom line is that it is going to cost us more to go to Ecomaine. It is considerably farther away, and with the hauling rates we've been quoted, it will be about $80,000 in additional fees annually. The trouble is that gas/diesel prices are quite low right now. These hauling fees will only increase. When oil prices rebound, so will our hauling costs.

EDUCATION PROGRAMS NOT REALLY FREE

One of the things the MSCWC board was impressed with were the education programs from ecomaine that we can hopefully use to help educate the community and reduce our waste. I too loved the model that is working well for Portland. However, the education programs rely entirely on us switching to single sort recycling. This may end up making sense for us in the long run, but it is going to be cost us, and it will cost us more with ECOMAINE than with FIBERIGHT. Currently, we actually make money some years on our recycling program, but Ecomaine will charge us $38/ton to process our recycling. That doesn't include the cost of hauling the material which is $32/ton. Current Ecomaine member communities deliver their recyclables to the facility for FREE, but they will charge us the private hauler rate. Essentially, we will be subsidizing the Portland area waste disposal program. We are of course free keep doing what we do with recyclables, but ecomaine's education programs won't be useful to us.

WE DO NOT NEED ECOMAINE TO DO EDUCATION PROGRAMS

There are education program curriculums widely available and we could implement them for without going through Ecomaine. Here's a link to a proposal from the Maine Resource Recovery Association, an organization that is already doing education programs in Maine that supports the Fiberight proposal. They have worked with us for years helping to market our recyclables. They are the go to resource for recycling in Maine and have programs available to boost participation no matter what direction we decide to go with our recycling (single sort vs staying the way we are).

WE SHOULD BE INVESTING IN A SOLUTION FOR OUR CONSTRUCTION DEBRIS. OUR LANDFILL IS FILLING UP FAST AND IT'S EXPENSIVE

The conversation about where to send our trash centered around all the waste reduction we could implement if Ecomaine comes and trains our communities how to recycle and compost. It's a nice idea but the options that have worked for Portland to reduce waste have been single sort recycling and curbside composting, and those may not be our highest priorities. Composting is great, don't get me wrong, but we have very limited space here at the transfer station and it's hard to imagine a curbside compositing program taking off in our rural areas. People do this at their homes and that makes lots of sense. This is something people are willing to pay for in urban/suburban areas only. Where we should be focusing our energy is on reducing what goes into our own landfill. We should be composting our yard waste, not allowing it to rot in our landfill and produce methane. We should dedicate a space for sorted construction debris so that reusable lumber and other things can be sorted and perhaps even marketed. Our landfill is going to close eventually and we'll have no where for construction debris to go. At the same time, it will continue to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for pumping leachate and a variety of other things due to the environmental hazards it presents. We should be investing extra money in things like this, not in trucking our household waste extra distance to Portland.

IN THIS CASE, WE SHOULD TRUST THE EXPERTS AND STICK WITH THE GROUP.

As a community group that cares about the environment, I hope that we will look beyond our own little bubble and see ourselves as part of a larger state that needs a regional solution for our waste. Sure, we could pay the extra money so that Ecomaine will take our trash and kick out the commercial trash we'll replace to the nearest landfill, but if we all make decisions like this, where does that leave Maine?

I appreciate you considering these things as you make your recommendation. Here are a few links that may be of interest to you:

Here's an example of an MSW facility in Europe with similar technology:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwALdw7AQs0

Here's a final article from the Maine Resource Recovery Association in case you missed it: http://freepressonline.com/Content/Download-the-current-issue-as-a-pdf/Letters-Opinions/Article/About-the-Proposed-Fiberight-Project-for-Municipal-Solid-Waste-/93/450/44074

South Thomaston voters just decided not to go with their Solid Waste Board's recommendation of Ecomaine. Convincing residents to pay more for something has to come with very clear environmental benefits, in my opinion. This article explains some of their reasons for choosing to stay with the MRC:

https://bangordailynews.com/2016/03/30/news/midcoast/south-thomaston-voters-back-fiberight-for-waste-disposal/?ref=moreInmidcoast

Profit sharing information on MRC:

http://bangordailynews.com/2016/03/25/news/state/panel-tackles-confusion-over-hampden-trash-plant-profit-sharing-deadline/

Thanks to all for your time and consideration.

Don’t burn your trash. We can do better - PenBay Pilot

Maine shouldn't have to take trash from other states

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 03:27:00 +0000

My interest in the Maine waste stream began a couple years ago when I read an article about cancer cases among some Hampden residents who live near the now closed Pine Tree Landfill. It made me realize that many of us on the coast have gotten used to sending our trash inland and letting someone else live next to it, and I felt a little embarrassed. No one has ever proposed a state owned landfill or incinerator in Camden or anywhere close to us. In Camden, we busy ourselves fighting against ambulance stations and rehab clinics for the rich and famous, while in Hampden they fight against mountains of trash (some of it ours), and the leachate, odor, and uncertainty that goes along with it. We have it pretty good here on the coast and I decided the least I could do was start to educate myself whenever possible about responsible waste management in Maine. I've attended meetings, argued at board meetings, read articles, studies, and proposals. I've learned enough to know that we have a long way to go, and there are no easy answers or silver bullets, but for the first time in many years, we have choices and what we decide matters.

For about two years, ever since I read that article about Hampden, I've been attending meetings of the Hampden Citizens Coalition, led by Bill Lippincott, and I volunteer to maintain their website. When I met them, they were focused on making sure that Casella properly monitored the landfill that Hampden residents had fought against for 25 years and we all assumed that it would be some other town's turn to receive the region's special waste, construction debris, and incinerator ash. It seemed like a cruel joke when the Municipal Review Committee proposed Hampden as the site for Maine's new waste-to-energy partnership with Fiberight, a company that proposes turning Maine trash into biofuels.

As a friend of Hampden, I believe these folks have served their time and I don't like the idea of sending our trash to them again, which is why I was prepared to oppose the new facility. But, as a Mainer and an environmentalist concerned about our carbon footprint, and after much research and criticism, I've come to feel hopeful about what Fiberight can accomplish. I agree with other experts in the industry that the technology stands a good chance of reducing our carbon footprint, displacing fossil fuels, and keeping a higher percentage of useful materials out of our landfills. Yes, there is a risk. As critics have pointed out, Maine will be the first to use this exact process on such a scale, but since when have we been afraid of going first? Anaerobic digestion is not new, and across Europe, the process of turning waste into biogas is a well established part of the plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The alternative is business as usual, and as a Mainer (and an environmentalist) I don't like that this means a system where other states send their trash to Maine to be burned or buried. I suspect I'm not the only Mainer who doesn't want Massachusetts sending its trash here, but few Mainers realize that this is exactly what has been happening. Some of it just gets buried in state owned or commercial landfills because companies like Casella have found creative ways of making this legal and profitable, but some of it comes here because we need it, or at least our incinerators do. For almost 30 years, a group of 187 Maine towns, represented by the Municipal Review Committee, has been locked in a contract with the Penobscot Energy Recovery Center, an incinerator that turns our trash into electricity. The problem is that we don't make enough trash for PERC to operate profitably, so they have to import about 100,000 tons a year from out of state.

Yes, it sounds awful, but this system has actually served us fairly well. Financially, it was a good choice, and from an environmental perspective, it was certainly better than the alternatives at the time, since almost everyone agrees that incinerating our trash is better than landfilling it.

But technology has changed and so have our choices. We now have a chance to do something new and better. Our contract with PERC is expiring at the same time as some important subsidies. The incineration of our trash creates electricity that is sold at artificially high rates, keeping our waste disposal fees relatively low. The MRC, which is controlled by an elected board of volunteer directors, was the entity that negotiated and monitored the agreement with PERC on behalf of the towns. As the end of the subsides drew near, they worked hard to find a way of making PERC a sustainable option. This is a group of 9 volunteers who oversee a couple employees. They are busy people who already have demanding jobs in municipal government. It certainly would have been the easiest thing for them to simply go along with PERC, but it became clear that there were less expensive and more environmentally friendly options available, and the MRC ultimately selected Fiberight.

Here in the Mid-Coast, we are lucky to have a representative on the MRC who is both an environmentalist and a seasoned expert with a lifetime of experience in waste management and recycling. Jim Guerra, who currently serves as the facility manager at the MCSWC transfer station in Rockport, has a background in chemistry, and was a pioneer in the recycling industry long before the rest of us thought it was cool. Jim, along with other volunteer board members, has spent hundreds of hours reviewing, proposing, tweaking and presenting the best options available for our towns. They have made these decisions and recommendations in meetings which are open to the public and have been soliciting the input of experts and stakeholders since they began several years ago. Each step has been well documented and communicated on the website. Jim is the only one I know personally, but many of them have been volunteering their time, after hours and on days off, for much longer than Jim, trying to do right by the towns that elected them. They deserve our appreciation for doing a job that is more important to each of us and to our planet than we tend to acknowledge. I imagine that most people who study new proposal carefully and alongside the alternatives will agree.

Here are my top reasons for supporting the Fiberight plan, but take a look for yourself.

No more importing out of state waste. To run at capacity, PERC’s 25 megawatt incineration plant needs more trash than the MRC's 187 Maine towns produce, so they import about 120,000 tons of waste (or 40% of the total) from out of state. As a Mainer and as an environmentalist, I believe we can do better than a strategy that requires us to truck trash in from Massachusetts and burn it here in Maine.
Anaerobic digestion is like composting without oxygen under controlled conditions. Much of our waste stream is made up of organic material. Separate collection of food waste in a rural state like ours may come with a big carbon footprint, and some people still won't want to do it. Food scraps do not burn well in PERC's incinerators but Fiberight's process will use anaerobic digestion to turn this portion of our trash into biofuels.
Displacing fossil fuels: Biogas is generally considered to be a carbon-neutral source of energy because the carbon emitted during combustion was "new" plant based carbon that was already in the atmosphere, as opposed to the combustion of fossil fuels which burns carbon that had been sequestered for millions of years, and releases it into the atmosphere. Thus, replacing fossil fuels with biogas cuts down on GHG emissions associated with energy production.
Fiberight's sorting facility will add to existing recycling programs by pulling out and baling the recyclable materials that people are still throwing away. Watch a video of the process at work in the demonstration facility.

*** I am trying to get back in the habit of updating this blog about the humanitarian work I do, but I've been busy! You can follow our efforts at Facebook.com/mainesyriarelief and be sure to check out www.nudaysyria.org ... I am very proud to serve on the board of directors of this incredible organization that has inspired me beyond words. For now, I needed somewhere to publish this article which deals with a considerably more local topic. Resource management, recycling, and responsible waste disposal is another topic near and dear to my heart. There will always be a connection between alieviating human suffering and managing what we reuse and throw away. Waste less, give more.

Introduction to salvaging shrink wrap for temporary shelters.

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Mon, 04 May 2015 02:51:00 +0000

This blog entry will be completely overwhelming and way too detailed for most of you. I apologize to anyone subscribed to this blog who may not want such a detailed explanation of how to use recycled shrink wrap for refugee shelters. This is intended as an informational post for my volunteers and for others interested in replicating the project...

As many of you know, I've been following the crisis in Syria for the past several years, and thanks to an organization called NuDay Syria, I've been able to translate my feelings of horror and frustration into a few meaningful acts. For the first time in my life, there's a way to send physical items to people living through the worst humanitarian crisis we've seen in a generation. In my mind, the ability to see the horrors unfolding in real time on social media combined with the ability to actually send things that I've touched with my own hands... well, it eliminates every excuse that might justify our failure to act. It has also catalyzed a certain obsession with trying not to waste anything that might be useful to Syrians. And that's where the shrink wrap project came from. I won't go into all the details of how I got started... you can watch the videos for that, but it's enough to know that we are throwing out massive amounts of highly durable plastic every year. Plastic that does an incredible job protecting fancy yachts all throughout the harsh Maine winter. When it comes off, the vast majority of it is still in very good condition and can easily be turned into temporary shelters for people. All it takes is a quick google image search for "internally displaced tent syria" or something similar and it becomes abundantly clear how useful shrink wrap could be for people, especially those inside Syria who can't get to one of the nicer refugee camps in Jordan or elsewhere.

I'm in my second year of the project now and I'm getting lots of great feedback and interest from people who want to help, which is great because I need a LOT of help, but I'm running out of time when it comes to explaining the process to everyone. What follows is a somewhat detailed tutorial of the process I use to sort, fold, and prepare the recycled shrink wrap for shipment.

For those who want a little more background on the project, you can check out these videos and links.

Video that Josh Gerritsen made about the project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNNk4VnQTc

Short video that I made when I first started this which explains my rationale and basic process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XQAJ0EUTa4

Here's a recent press release that the Dr. Shrink Company sent out to their customers, encouraging them to donate the ends of their shrink wrap rolls our to our project:

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Shrink-Wrap-for-Syria---Dr--Shrink--Inc-.html?soid=1102111875565&aid=I5wk7-LXMj8

If you want to follow my efforts on Facebook, become of a fan of Maine Syria Relief .... It's basically just an extension of NuDay Syria's page for people that live in Maine. You can find NuDay Syria's official facebook page here. It is updated regularly and is a good way to follow all the amazing things that the organization is doing, but more on that later. I use my house as a drop of location for everything from shrink wrap to medical supplies, gently used clothing, food, diapers, etc... NuDay Syria has a warehouse in New Hampshire and the containers leave from there.

OK... this is what I'm going to have people read before helping process the shrink wrap at my house, and it may be useful for others interested in expanding the collection in different areas.

SUMMARY

Check for holes and thin spots.
DRY
Clean
Cut off overly hardened and bulky ends
Rolled as TIGHT AS POSSIBLE.

It's useful to think about where the shrink wrap comes from. Every piece will be slightly different. The bow and the stern often have overlapping parts that get shrunk and melted altogether, making it take up a lot of space in the container. Other parts, depending on the shape of the boat, might be too distorted and oddly shaped to be very useful for shelters in Syria. Each piece should be evaluated, but you can often tell by looking at the covered boat itself, whether or not the shrink wrap that comes off of it will be good quality. All 3 of the above boats look pretty ideal.

Most of them will have this nylon strapping/rope welded into the bottom edges. This is what helped secure it to the boat. I leave all of this. The rope is extremely strong and in some cases the entire boat cover, complete with these ties in places could be used as a rain cover for an existing tent at an IDP (internally displaced persons) camp in Syria. Even if they decide to cut the plastic to be better suited for a certain design, they can salvage all of this super strong rope. If you look at pictures of temporary shelters online, you'll see that rope is always an important part. Try not to cut this rope any more than you have to.

This just shows you what the edges look like on the other side.

This part at the end should be cut off so that it's easier to roll it up very tightly.

This is a zipper door. Many of the covers have them because they allow access to the boat during the winter for repairs, etc. I leave them in place. In Syria, they can always cut them out and relocate them to different places on the tent if they want.

These are vents that get slipped into a small cut made in the plastic. They are extremely helpful and important because they allow for ventilation. Otherwise, condensation forms on the inside of the plastic and can be a bit of a tropical greenhouse... very wet. Even if these fall out, they should be collected and sent along with the covers.

Next comes folding/rolling. I double it over in half lengthwise, and then fold it again, and roll it up as tight as possible. The tighter you roll, the less space it takes in the container which is enormously important! Every inch that is taken up by wasted air and loosely packed plastic is an inch that can't be used for something that may save someone's life, whether that be food, medical supplies, a blanket, or more shrink wrap.

We cannot send dirty, moldy, wet plastic on a container. It runs the risk of creating a moldy environment for the rest of the container which could be disastrous. Sometimes it's worth it to clean off the shrink wrap, but sometimes not. Don't waste a bunch of time cleaning and drying this if you have a whole pile of good clean stuff. If you just need to dry it, the best bet is usually a bunch of towels and it doesn't take as long as you might think. The picture above is an example of something that is probably not worth our time.

Another thing you have to watch out for is shrink wrap that has these darker grey patches. Often times, these areas are paper thin due to the plastic being "over shrunk" with the blow torch heating tool. If there are a bunch of areas like this on a cover, it's not worth it to send. We want to only send plastic that will last a long time. If it has a couple holes, but the rest of the cover is really good, I repair it with donated shrink wrap tape. Amazing stuff that is used a lot by the people who put these covers on.

At the end, the rolled up plastic can be tied off with a little of the nylon strapping/rope that will inevitably be littering the area.

These photos are just for fun. I love making test shelters trying to experiment with different prototypes and designs that might be useful for Syrians. They also work well to keep the shrink wrap dry between shipments.

One of the many test shelters I've built..... also works well to store the shrink wrap because I have to dry it before it goes on the container ship.

scenes from last summer

Recycled shrink wrap, repackaged and on the shipping container.

Some of the pieces are REALLY big and we always lay them out, repair any holes, and dry them. Occasionally, I decide the overall quality is too low and the plastic is too thin or too distorted to bother with. I don't want to send anything to Syria that isn't useful.

The covers usually come complete with vents and often zipper doors. It's fun to make test shelters on my lawn and then I even have a place to store my shrink wrap between shipments.

Another test shelter.

This is how it often arrives.

Shrink wrap being used as hospital walls in Northern Syria and a special thank you note they taped to the wall for me.

Shrink wrap being turned into a shelter at a new refugee camp in Northern Syria.

Salvaged marine shrink wrap as refugee shelters in Syria

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Thu, 19 Jun 2014 22:47:00 +0000

I apologize for not writing something more in depth, but I just read the Camden Herald article about my work with NuDay Syria and forgot that it was going to reference this blog, so I wanted to post something really quick! Check out this little video and then, for more information, check out https://www.facebook.com/MaineSyriaRelief ... I'll post a link to the article when it's online, but in the meantime, don't throw away your shrink wrap!

5 years later....

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 18:59:00 +0000

I keep waiting for the perfect time to resume by blog posts... hoping that somewhere in my life I'll have all the time and inspiration to sit down and write a full explanation of what I've been doing since my last post, but there is never enough time, so I'm just going to write something, however insufficient....

As is evident, this blog has been abandoned for the past five years due to the fact that my life took a bit of a turn... Since my last post, I've purchased a house and now have two young boys (ages 1 and 3). The normal responsibilities of life, which I was able to avoid for some time, due to my full scholarship at Stetson University, have caught up with me, and I no longer am able to devote myself full time to volunteering, but I remain as committed as ever to pulling my weight as a citizen of this world, and helping improve the lives of others. I found that my model for helping people impoverished people turned out to be quite unsustainable, mostly because I was never comfortable starting my own non-profit and raising enough money to pay myself a salary. I just wanted to help other people make a difference in places like Colombia and El Salvador, which worked out great until I became totally overwhelmed by hundreds of emails from people who wanted to help, people who needed help, people who wanted to give money, etc., etc....

I'm hoping that by resuming my blog posts, this will help me to chronicle and focus my efforts, as well as provide a place to share information I come across that might be useful to others. After working for 4 years at the Watershed School as a high school Spanish teacher, I resigned last year in order to stay home until my kids get a little older and can attend school. I served as the Vice-Chair on the international board of Partners of the Americas, but recently resigned in order allow more time for targeted volunteer projects based here in Camden.

For now, one of the things I am most proud of my work on this project. More to come later...

Gloria's first ever window and door

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:09:00 +0000

Here are some more recent photos from the construction of Gloria's house for which we fundraised $500 dollars back in January. If you don't remember her story, click here.

12 small victories in El Salvador

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Sun, 04 May 2008 05:15:00 +0000

Some of you will remember reading about a woman in El Salvador who told us that the greatest need she and her community faced were ten dollar barrels for water storage. Her story was very moving and you can read about it here if you missed it.

With all the abundance that surrounds us, it's unimaginable that this lady was suffering for a lack of a ten dollar water barrel. At first, I blamed human selfishness and greed when I heard stories like this, but now, I think it's more accurate to say that people feel unconnected. They don't believe they can make a difference, and, rather than selfish, they feel helpless or hopeless.

I hear many heart-wrenching appeals for support during my time in Latin America, and sometimes try not to lose myself in frantic pursuits to rescue individuals. I have so often been told that I can't help everyone, that the only way to have a large scale impact on poverty is by not wallowing in the despairs of individuals but rather by thinking logically about solutions for many. We prefer to look at poverty, human suffering, and global inequality as abstractions, too complicated for any of us to solve. Sometimes, though, the matter is much more simple than we care to imagine.

After hearing this story, I wrote blog entries, uploaded pictures and captions to Flickr, saved the woman's picture as my computer desktop, and printed various photos to hang on my walls. One of the people I told was Alison Mynick, a lawyer at Briggs and Counsel, the law firm that has been helping me with some of the legal aspects of the organization. When I told her that ten dollars could buy a water barrel, she immediately said, "well my gosh, if it's that simple, take this donation and get ten of them."
I did exactly that, and am delighted to say that Alison's donation has actually purchased not ten, but 12 barrels for the most vulnerable families of the Las Nubes community on the outskirts of San Ramon, El Salvador.
I also left a digital camera in El Salvador with the community that Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Parish maintains a sister relationship with, and yesterday, they finally sent me these pictures.

The people are very grateful for their water barrels and I am very grateful to them for all the inspiration and joy they give me. They help remind me every day of just how fortunate we all are, and of how big a difference we can make by doing very small things.

Slideshow Tuesday 6:30PM at the Congregational Church in Camden

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:35:00 +0000

Many of you have asked me to let you know the next time I'm speaking about my work in Colombia.

Tuesday, the 29th of April, at 6:30PM at the Congregational Church, in Camden, I will be speaking, along with several others, about our recent trip to Colombia. We'll share a full slideshow and stories from the trip as well as some of our plans for the future.

Many thanks to Helen Kuhl, who has taken the lead in organizing the event. Helen, along with her husband, Jon, has been a big help to GOG ever since returning Camden.

Gloria's new walls...

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:17:00 +0000

Some of you will remember raising money for Gloria's new roof and walls a couple months ago. Well, during the recent trip to Colombia, we were able to see the progress that they're making and Kevin, a volunteer in Colombia who has been working with Formemos, tells me that he just took some more recent pictures and that they've made even more progress. If you don't remember Gloria's story, you can read about it here and if you're interested in hearing more about Kevin and his work, you can check out his blog.

Thanks to volunteer, Sasha Felix, for taking these pictures!

If you'd like to see more of the photos taken by Sasha during the trip, check out:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/globalopportunitygarden/sets/72157604268874637/

Seeing globally...

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:15:00 +0000

Last Monday, I had the great pleasure of speaking with the Camden Lions Club with member Jon Kuhl and his wife, Helen, who were both with us in Colombia. I shared my experiences working with deafblind people in Colombia and told them about how I learned about the Lions Club on an international level because of the great help they've been to us at Fundación Formemos and Jon and Helen shared their thoughts on ways that Global Opportunity Garden and the Camden Lions Club could team up to help finance vision screenings for rural and displaced children in Colombia. Above, Jon and Helen are pictured during one of the home visits in the community surrounding the Foundation, and below you'll find an article published in the Camden Herald about our presentation to the Lions Club.

Camden Lions see globally with eyeglass campaign

By Kim Lincoln
(Created: Sunday, April 6, 2008 4:13 AM EDT)

CAMDEN — The Camden Lions Club had a first-hand look, recently, at how their organization’s eyeglasses recycling program benefits people in need in other countries, and it has been proposed that the Club help fund eye-care programs in a community in Columbia for one year.

Alison McKellar, left, and president of Camden Lions Club Teddy Wilcox. Reprints available online at www.MainePhotosNow.com. KIM LINCOLN

Alison McKellar, 23, of Camden, who runs an organization called Global Opportunity Garden, was the guest speaker at the April 1 Lions meeting.

She created her organization after spending six months in Columbia in 2005, volunteering at a farm and school for children who have been displaced by violence in the country.

While there she also worked with an organization that helped deaf blind children, but found that the displaced children at the school were having difficulty with their vision, too.

Through the help of a Lions Club in Bogotá, Columbia, she helped to get 230 children eye exams, and 30 of them were given eyeglasses. The cost was $1,122.

One of the Lions Club’s missions is to conduct vision screenings, support eye hospitals and participate in an eyeglasses recycling program. More than one million pairs of eyeglasses have been collected by Lions Clubs in Maine and distributed to third-world countries, according to club members.

After McKellar came home from Columbia and began telling people about her trip, and what she had accomplished, she found support in this community from people that wanted to help. That’s when Global Opportunity Garden was founded. She then began organizing a group trip to Columbia.

Camden Lions Club member Jon Kuhl and his wife Helen were in the group. Also traveling from this area were Anna Sideris, Meredith Ralston, Sasha Felix, Eliza Massey and Laurie Lane.

Jon Kuhl said that he was very impressed by the ocular center in Bogotá. For $25 people could get their eyes examined, get a prescription and be fitted for glasses. Kuhl has proposed that the Camden Lions Club help fund eye-care programs in Columbia for one-year. The club is still thinking about the idea.

Now back home, McKellar has been speaking with different organizations to inform them about Global Opportunity Garden, and hopes to match up more organizations and their causes to areas with the need.

Global Opportunity Garden also has a digital photography initiative that delivers digital cameras and training in photojournalism in areas of extreme poverty and violent conflict in Columbia.

McKellar is also working with students at the Riley School in Rockport who have helped raise money and also started a letter writing campaign to the students at the Columbian farm school.

For more information about McKellar’s organization, log on to www.globalopportunitygarden.org.

And as part of the Lions regular club work, members will be collecting used glasses at The Green Fair at Plants Unlimited on Route 1 in Rockport, April 19. They also have a drop box outside their facility on Lions Lane in Camden.

(Kim Lincoln can be reached at klincoln@courierpub.com.)

The original article can be found at: http://mainecoastnow.com/articles/2008/04/08/camden_herald/local_news/doc47f682b7d05c7246262375.prt

I need your help!

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:20:00 +0000

I know some of you are probably sick of reading all the information I've been forcing on you about Colombia, but please keep reading. I don't often take advantage of people who read my blog by making direct appeals, but this is the most important thing I've ever been involved in.

I know, a bold statement, but I mean it. Last week, I told you about about how I had about a citizen's initiative to organize a peaceful, nonviolent march to the Colombian jungle and demand the rescue of the kidnapped hostages there. Jorge Altuzarra explained, in his interview with Caracol Radio in Colombia, that the initiative began with Facebook groups after a series of hugely successful peace marches in Colombia and around the world. I was so inspired by this grassroots initiative that I posted a message on the Facebook group (which now has thousands of members) and offered to help.

Several hours later, I got an email from Jorge, whom I had heard on the radio, saying that they would be delighted to have my help since they will need to get international news coverage and the support and accompaniment of many humanitarian organizations and individual volunteers. I've now been given an email address, which is information@rescatecivil.org and working with a team of people in Colombia, Europe, Australia, Canada, and another Colombian representative in Miami, to get the word out and translate documents to English.

I have just finished translating the open letter from the group that explains the overall goals and mission. There are other documents in progress directed at the FARC, the United Nations, and various humanitarian organizations around the world. I need letters from organizations in the United States expressing support for the non-violent march and media coverage from U.S. or international news media. After all, Colombians are doing their part to rescue victims of kidnapping, and the French have been working for years to free the French-Colombian, Ingrid Betancourt, so let's do our part for our three fellow American citizens that are now on their fifth year after being kidnapped by the FARC.

CIVILIAN RESCUE:
THE NEXT STEP IN THE SEARCH FOR PEACE

The idea of a civilian-lead rescue of the more than 700 hostages held by the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) is not new, nor does it belong to any one individual or group. For over sixty years, the Colombian people have been the victim of a vicious and violent power struggle between the National government, and Left wing insurgency groups, and right wing paramilitaries. While violence has diminished in much of Colombia, and there is much reason for optimism, government negotiations with the FARC for the release of hostages have frequently failed. Many of those kidnapped by the FARC, which include several foreigners, have spent the last ten years held captive in the Colombian jungle.

Several recent events have renewed hope and solidarity among Colombians, leading to a uniquely civilian, non-violent, and non-political uprising. On June 17th, 2007, Professor Gustavo Moncayo, commonly known as the “peace walker”, set out on a walk that took him 1,186 kilometers to the capital city of Bogotá, in an effort to promote an agreement for the release of his son, Pablo Emilio, who has kidnapped by the FARC in 1997. On July 5th of the same year, Colombians responded with nationwide demonstrations against kidnapping, and February 4th of 2008, peace marches around the world were organized to speak out against the FARC. More than 5 million people participated in Colombia alone, and simultaneous marches were held in more than 100 cities around the world. For many, it seemed the next logical step should be a peaceful march to the jungle, where most of the hostages are held.

Some prominent individuals, like ex-mayors of Bogotá, Anthanas Mockus and Lucho Garzón, announced the idea in public. Furthermore, the Association of Disabled Policemen (FRAPON), who marched more than 500 kilometers in their wheel chairs to demand the liberation of FARC hostages, proposed the idea after completing their journey in Bogotá.

Nevertheless, the civilian rescue initiative has its origins many years back, inspired by non-violent movements lead by Gandhi and many others around the world, as well as more recent examples of non-violent civil resistance, such as the groups of Colombian indigenous groups who confronted the FARC at the edge of their communities in order to prevent their lands from being destroyed. Indigenous groups can also be credited with the first example of successful, civilian-lead hostage rescue, when, in August of 2004, the indigenous guard, composed of more than 500 people, but armed only with wooden staves, mobilized and entered the jungle to rescue two indigenous ex-mayors held captive by the FARC.

After the February 4th marches against the FARC, many Colombians proposed a civilian rescue initiative in more than 10 groups in the social networking site, Facebook; all with the same idea: to go to the jungle and rescue the people held hostage there by FARC guerrillas. However, only one group turned the idea into a concrete initiative, and, with a defined plan of action, began to unite hundreds of people willing to commit themselves to a clear and viable proposal - in short, to march to San José del Guaviare, the epicenter of the recent hostage liberations, and bring together at least 1,000 volunteers, at least 18 years of age, in good physical condition, and available for at least two weeks, who are willing to march to the jungle.

Under the premise of “strength in unity”, seven groups accepted the invitation, giving birth to the Civilian Rescue Group “LET’S GO GET THEM”, which, under the humanitarian principles of respect for liberty, non-violence, and voluntary disarmament, was made public and presented as an entirely peaceful and humanitarian proposal, respectful of the Rule of Law, and without any political affiliation or bias.

This initiative, which is now under way, is divided in three phases that allow for its execution and success. The first is an appeal to, and examination of, public opinion, looking to establish the group of marchers, minimum security guarantees, and the support of the national and international community.

Being aware of the inherent risks of the proposed zone, which is in the heart of FARC territory, and with such cases as those of the ex-governor Guillermo Gaviria, who was kidnapped during a peace march in 2002, and Ingrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian presidential candidate who was kidnapped during her campaign the same year, the Civilian Rescue Group has adopted serious physical/personal safety measures as a priority of utmost importance for the undertaking of the march. Thus, it is required that the participants be of legal age, in good physical shape, and available for at least two weeks. Along this same line of thought, we are securing the attendance and accompaniment of national and international human rights organizations, as well as some minimum security guarantees that should be offered by the Armed Forces, granted under Article 2 of our National Constitution.

Additionally, we are presenting a formal petition to the National Government for a humanitarian landmine removal squad to go to the zone with us to remove landmines and other explosive devices.

The second phase comprises much more than just a symbolic march between Villavicencio and San José del Guaviare. It is a humanitarian call to the members of the FARC that are holding people captive, to demobilize and unilaterally hand over the hostages to the Colombian people. Furthermore, the Colombian, whose well-being is the supposed objective of the FARC’s armed struggle, invite and demand the members of the FARC, to free, not only their hostages, but also to free themselves and return to society.

This is the essence of our humanitarian initiative, advocating dialogue and reconciliation as a determining mechanism in achieving the peace that we all long for, but demanding an end to kidnapping as a means of manipulating the population and extorting funds. It is now when we most need Colombian people, and all people, to unite as one voice, in one call for peace that will be heard in the greatest depths of the Colombian jungle.

The final phase of our proposal calls for the installation of a center of operations in San José del Guaviare, so that from there, various expeditions may go out into the jungle with the goal of finding FARC camps where the kidnapped hostages are held. However, this phase will only be carried out once the path has been cleared by anti-explosive experts who can guarantee our safety, in this regard. If we are unable to meet this minimum security condition, we will remain waiting, as a group, for seven more days, inviting the FARC to demobilize and release those hostages facing the greatest risks to their health.

Independently of the result of this humanitarian operation, the group of marchers will return to their places of origin on the 27th of June in order to multiply the humanitarian initiative in each part of the country where victims of kidnapping are held. The Civilian Rescue Group will not rest until those unjustly deprived of their freedom have been released alive, and Colombia is free of the tragic and barbaric practice of kidnapping.

CIVILIAN RESCUE GROUP “LET’S GO GET THEM”
Onward for peace…

Update from the photography project in Colombia

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:07:00 +0000

It has been very exciting to start seeing the first pictures from the photography project going on in Colombia. The ten foundations that received cameras are learning how to use them and getting the opportunity to share their stories and images with people from all over the world. Getting all the foundations to upload their pictures to Flickr, and place the appropriate tags, descriptions, and titles, is difficult, because, for many of them, they're stepping into totally new territory, trying to navigate the internet, social networking sites, and slow connections, but I'm more convinced than ever that we're on the right track. This past week, Kevin Hanson and Michael Burch, two volunteers who are currently in Colombia helping me with this project and volunteering with various other NGOs, spent a couple days last week in Bucaramanga, visiting the Living Hope Foundation. They were astounded by how committed the people from the foundation were, and Kevin, a soon to be law student, was able to learn a great deal about the way organizations can go about advocating for the rights of kids with cancer.
I'm realizing, as I attempt to coerce the ten foundations into actually uploading all the pictures they take, that it will take a lot of training to make them familiar with everything that flickr will enable them to do. Learning to share digital stories and images with an online community is like learning to speak a different language, and, in order for them to invest time into this endeavor, there must be an incentive. It's difficult to explain to my seemingly technology-savvy friends the concept of creative commons copyrighting and citizen journalism, so, quite predictably, it is also difficult to explain the concept to hungry children who have been displaced by the violence. Still, it's not as difficult as one might imagine, because, as soon as they start to get the idea, they get so excited, because the camera offers them the first chance they've ever had to show their reality to the outside world.
During the next month, I'm going to begin a new, open-source, digital photography-based, educational, online grant proposal project. I know... it sounds a little out there, and I haven't quite figured out what to call it, but the basic idea is that foundations will apply for small, 500-1000 dollar grants by using digital images and descriptions within photo albums on Flickr. Having a applied for countless grants, I know the process is boring and often a total waste of time. When you apply for a grant, and don't get it, you feel like the entire process was wasted energy. No one reads the grant except the committee, or person, that makes the decision, and you often never get a good explanation for why a grant was approved or denied. You hope you have a contact with the donor and you cross your fingers. Why aren't grant proposals open to the public? Why can't we all see all the proposals that all these different organizations make? Why can't they be educational and interesting? The process should be educational for both the people and organizations that apply for the grants, as well as for the public in general. So, my goal is to use small grants as ways of teaching foundations to use the new internet technology that will help them get the word out about their cause. They will have to describe their foundations' mission and the proposed use of funds with photographs and descriptions open to the public on Flickr. Thus, even if they don't get a certain grant, they will have created an online multimedia space that describes a certain social, political, or economic issue, and they will have learned how to use a new type of web based software more effectively. After all, we've all had plenty of practice with microsoft word!

Colombian Citizen Initiative to Rescue FARC Hostages

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Collective Civilian Rescue is the response of many Colombians and people from abroad, who are, sincerely and without reservation, committed to doing something to get our fellow citizens out of where they are being held. We know that we are taking on a difficult objective, but, without a doubt, we will achieve it.
All are invited, the only condition is that you not bring your political banners. The only thing that matters is a love for Colombia and the will to carry out our unique humanitarian task, which is, to "rescue civilly" those who have been unjustly deprived of their liberty.

This is the mission statement of a collective initiative which began as a Facebook group. The group, composed of young people from Colombia and supporters from all over the world, is preparing for an unprecedented rescue mission to the Colombian jungle to demand that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) release the civilian hostages they have detained there. Colombians have been encouraged lately by a strong surge in citizen involvement and nonviolent protests such as the 5 million person peace march against the FARC which took place on the 4th of February of this year. This march is a continuation of this movement and an indicator of the renewal of hope and civic unity among the Colombian people.
A representative from the group told Caracol Radio that they are currently in the initial planning stages and are in the process of consulting with security experts, humanitarian organizations, and Colombian and international NGOs to assess strategies for the march. They hope to secure 1,000 volunteers willing to march. Right now, they plan on starting on June 16th, from Villavicencio, near the center of the country, and marching all the way to San Jose de Guaviare, which is where many hostages have been received after liberation by the FARC.

I have found that this initiative, and many other happenings in Colombia, are not commonly covered by English language news media. Rescate Civil has a blog in Spanish and I will do my best to update the blog with any English coverage that emerges.

"I am a free man only so far as I recognize the humanity and liberty of all men around me. In respecting their humanity, I respect my own". Mikhail Bakunin

Peace Without Borders

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 04:30:00 +0000

On March 16th, Colombian, Venezuelan, and Ecuadoran singers got together to offer a free concert in Cúcuta, on the border between Venezuela and Colombia. The idea came from Juanes during tensions between the the three countries a couple weeks ago as a way of reminding people from all three Andean countries of the great connection shared between them. The concert was titled, Peace Without Borders and was organized in a matter of days by artists eager to work for peace. The concert was attended by more than 200,000 people.

One Right Hand and One Smoking Gun

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:00:00 +0000

Colombia has once again disappeared from the news, and, while I'm thankful not to see the skewed and slanted coverage that characterized last week's reporting of the "crisis", I find myself equally frustrated that the mainstream media seems to have stopped their coverage right in the middle of an ongoing saga. Although CNN, and almost all English language news would have us believe that last week's meeting of the Rio Grupo in the Dominican Republic marked the end of the crisis between Uribe, Correa, and Chavez, back at home, the plot thickened as another high ranking member of the FARC was killed; this time by a most unlikely assassin.

First, although Ecuador responded with indignation when it was suggested that they were offering refuge to the FARC, an article published by El País, in Spain, reports just the opposite. The FARC camps in Ecuador are permanent camps that allow for the storing of weapons and the transport of drugs across the border. The Colombian military reports that it has been the victim of 39 attacks from the other side of the border. In the words of an ex-guerrilla fighter, "the FARC wears the uniform of the Ecuadoran military and moves along the border in trucks." This new information, long suspected by Colombians, makes it a little easier for the world to understand why the military had to go ten kilometers over the border to seek out Reyes.

The death of Reyes and the confiscation of his computer has provided another important window into the operations of the FARC and the behind the scenes political alliances that have surrounded Chavez' work as "peace negotiator" for the liberation of kidnapped civilians held by the FARC. The international community has been hesitant to criticize Chavez openly after having several successes in the release of several kidnapped civilians, but it's now clear that his agenda was far from strictly humanitarian. It turns out that Chavez had pledged 300 million dollars to the FARC to be given in installments of 50 million dollars throughout the year. This information comes from several confiscated computers and the testimony of several recently demobilized guerrilla members. Second hand weapons were among the other in kind donations offered to the Colombian terrorist organization by Chavez.

The President of Colombia and Colombians in general are obviously furious at the betrayal of Chavez but they're not surprised. Chavez has long been known to have deep rooted sympathies with the extreme Leftist insurgency group, and at least now, these ties are clear and obvious enough that Chavez will be left exposed to the light of international public opinion. Still, many questions are left to be answered. Harboring terrorists, a phrase Americans are used to hearing in White House reports on the Middle East, is a serious charge that has devastating consequences for the civilian population. The support from Chavez and the complacency of Ecuadoran officials with respect to FARC operations has allowed the terrorist group a safe harbor from which to organize kidnappings and massacres launched almost exclusively on the civilian populations.

But the FARC presence in Venezuela and Ecuador isn't all bad, according to many military strategists, ex combatants, and community leaders. It also means they're feeling the pressure of the military, and no longer have the stronghold on Colombia that allowed them to carry out their operations for freely for so many years.

The Colombian conflict is complex and academics and politicians alike have struggled to arrive at coherent explanations and solutions. That said, one of the most enlightening and hopeful commentaries that Colombians have heard in years come from an illiterate man who never even finished second grade. Pablo Montaya, better known as "Alias Rojas" spent sixteen years in the FARC, lured by the promise of a better life, and for years unable to see a viable way out of the group. Last week, as the his brigade felt the military closing in on them, he made the decision to kill his commander, Iván Rios, and turn himself in to the Colombian military along with Rios' computer, his right hand, and a wealth of inside information on the past and future of the FARC terrorist activities. Rios' hand, cut off in a scene straight out of the movies, was sent with a messenger, turned in to the army, and checked for fingerprints in order to prove that it was, in fact, Rios who had been killed.

When asked why he chose to desert and why he hadn't done it earlier, Rojas tells Caracol Radio that before, no one was sure what would happen to people that turned themselves in to the military, but now, the government has made it obvious that they provide rights, guarantees, and a clear path to people that wish to leave the armed groups. Since Uribe took office, over 10,000 FARC members and 35,000 from the paramilitaries have demobilized. During the last week, Uribe's popularity, which has been consistently above 70%, rose to a record 82%.

As Rojas sees it, the FARC is on their way out. The fact that they're borrowing money from means their own wealth is withering. He speaks of the meager rations and poor treatment given to members of the FARC and assures us that the group long ago stopped representing the voice of the rural poor. He offers a call to all members to demobilize and predicts that the FARC will be defeated from within more than from the outside as mistrust and deceit among leaders and combatants cause them to fumble and fall.

All in all, things are looking up for Colombia. In the words of Rojas, the death of Reyes and the right hand of Rios "has split the FARC's history in two parts", and the resulting revelations about financial and political ties to Chavez give Colombia and Uribe the smoking gun they needed to secure international solidarity for a hard line against terrorist groups and the countries that harbor them.

Newsworthy news from Colombia!

noreply@blogger.com (Alison McKellar) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 16:07:00 +0000

True to form, mainstream media has covered the Colombia-Venezuela-Ecuador "crisis" in gripping detail, making sure to alert Americans on the latest details of Venezuela's troop movements, border squabbles Ecuador, and FARC rebel deaths. People who have never so much as brought up Colombia in conversation with me have emailed, called, and inquired with concern about the "close call I had with the fighting in Colombia". "So you got out just in time," they ask me, no doubt imagining all of us ducking behind cars to avoid the gunshots. I resist the urge snap at them, trying to remind myself that people ask me questions like this because they are misinformed, not malicious. I'm sure I harbor mistaken stereotypes about many people and countries, and I hope that those who know better will forgive my ignorance and kindly inform me.
When I heard the news that Raul Reyes of the FARC had been killed in a raid by the Colombian military, I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but I felt a certain morbid sense of excitement, even joy. The FARC no longer enjoys any support within the Colombian population and their supposed fight for poor Colombians and social justice has diminished to an incoherent mixture of kidnappings, indiscriminate violence, and terror. Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, has used the hostage exchange between Colombia and the FARC as a tactic to push his own agenda, and, as his close ties to the terrorist group becoming increasingly apparent, Colombian and Venezuelans alike, are crying enough is enough.

The February 4th pro-peace anti-FARC march in Colombia was a direct reaction to President Chavez' appeal to the international community which asked for the FARC to be taken off the list of terrorists. Colombians won't stand for it. Millions of protesters all around the world gathered peacefully with signs like the one above, proclaiming, "yes, they ARE terrorists". 5 million people marched in Colombian cities alone, which is over 12% of the entire population, and simultaneous marches were carried out in over 165 cities around the world. CNN reported that "thousands" had marched. Let's be clear about the difference between "thousands" and "millions".

When the Colombian military killed Raul Reyes last week, ten kilometers over the border into Ecuador, it was considered one of the biggest victories for the Colombian military in years. Chavez responded to the violation of Ecuador's sovereignty, with his characteristic temper tantrums and name calling, but this time, he ratcheted things up by breaking diplomatic relations with Colombia and mobilizing troops to the border. Meanwhile, Venezuelans are increasingly unable to meet basic needs with rationed goods, staggering poverty, and growing divisions. Breaking relations with Colombia carries a high price for many average Colombians and Venezuelans who cross the border every day to work and who depend on the economy of the other.
Colombians rolled their eyes and shook their heads at Chavez' antics, which have reached cartoon-like proportions in the recent months, and Uribe assured Colombians and the world that we would not fuel the fire by moving troops or breaking relations, and, for most, life went on as usual. After all, the raiding of FARC camps had happened in Ecuador, not Venezuela, and both borders are a long way from major Colombian cities. That's why Ecuador and Venezuela have been such a convenient refuge for members of the FARC, and a computer uncovered in the raid shows that ties between Ecuador, Venezuela and the FARC may run deeper than anyone realized. The bottom line is that the whole "crisis" was played off by mainstream media as a legitimate showdown between Venezuela and Colombia, and this really isn't fair to say. The Colombian government had no choice but to seize the opportunity to close in on high ranking leaders of a terrorist group that has been tormenting the Colombian people for more than 40 years. And no, there was no shooting in Bogotá, no civilians were in danger, and the event shouldn't scare you from going to Colombia anymore than our National Guard troops on the border with Mexico should dissuade tourists from visiting the United States.

What should, however, call your attention is that yesterday, while CNN replayed the same blurb five thousand times about the so-called crisis in South America, which wasn't much more than another one of Chavez' temper tantrums, tens of thousand of Colombians once again took to the streets to march peacefully in favor of the victims of paramilitary violence. They conducted vigils and ceremonies for the disappeared and displaced people and called on all Colombians to keep working toward peace and reconciliation for the victims of the armed conflict and against paramilitary violence and massacres. But this, of course, didn't make the news. We were too busy watching Chavez stomp his feet and waive his arms, stirring the South American pot, and diverting attention from the all things truly newsworthy.

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