Activists bury Sierra Club Sears Island deal draws ire of groups

SEARSPORT – Environmental activists dedicated to preserving Sears Island held a mock funeral for a former friend Saturday – the Sierra Club.

Members of Penobscot Bay Watch and others are incensed at the environmental group for having signed off on a compromise proposal that would reserve enough land to allow the state to build a cargo port on one third of the island. The activists want the 900-acre island preserved in its present, undeveloped state for all time.

“I’m terribly disappointed that they have gone for this instead of protecting the island,” activist Ron Huber said. “I strongly believe the Sierra Club is mistaken on this, this thing that I don’t even want to call a compromise.”

The Sierra Club of Maine recently agreed to the “compromise” that would enable the Department of Transportation to set aside 340 island acres as a location for a future container port. The club was one of many groups with differing agendas that participated with the DOT on the Joint Use Planning Committee that was formed three years ago to determine the future of the island. Except for the portion reserved for a port, the compromise set aside the rest of the island’s acreage for recreational uses.

Huber described the Sierra Club’s position as a “deal of shame” and said he was particularly upset because the club was the lead group that successfully fought against a cargo port on the island when it was first proposed three decades ago. He said that when then-Gov. Angus King decided to drop the effort in 1996, lovers of the island thought the port idea had been permanently laid to rest.

Instead, it was the Sierra Club that needed to be symbolically laid to rest for abandoning the cause, he said.

Huber said a cargo port would require a massive dredging effort, the destruction of wetlands, pollution from large vessels that transport non-native marine species in their ballast water and that decimate fields of underwater eel grass that serve as a nursery for fish, clams, lobsters and other aquatic life. King cited concerns over eel grass destruction as the major factor in the state’s decision to end the port project.

“This is a pivotal moment for the Sierra Club,” Huber said. “We have to realize that the entire Penobscot Bay is nourished by the eel grass and this estuary of the Penobscot River. You can’t deny this stuff. They are treating the island as if it is floating in space by itself and has no bay around it at all.”

Wearing black ribbons, the activists carried a handmade black wooden coffin with a painted white cross on its top to a point on the island’s western end overlooking the site of the proposed industrial zone. Huber and others spoke of the need to preserve the island and then sprinkled sand from the beach onto the casket. The coffin was then wrapped in black fabric and taken back to the mainland.

Peter Taber said the island would be “destroyed” if the current compromise plan was allowed to stand. He said there are no other undeveloped islands the size of Sears Island left on the East Coast. Taber said he wanted to save the island for the people of Maine for all time.

“What’s always forgotten in this is that this is a limited resource, and like petroleum we are coming to the end of this resource,” Taber said. “This is a rash decision. This island belongs not to the DOT; it belongs to the people of Maine. The group we expect to protect the island is doing the opposite.”

Taber’s daughter Avril, an eighth grader at Mount View High School in Thorndike, said she had been to the island many times with her father, brothers and sisters. She said the island was a beautiful place that should be protected for the future.

“I’d like it to be left the way it is,” she said.

Huber called on the Sierra Club to work with others to hold public hearings on the Joint Use Planning Committee’s proposal. He said hearings were conducted for the Plum Creek proposal for the Moosehead Region and that Sears Island deserved the same treatment.

He noted that before the causeway linking the island to the mainland was built in the early 1990s, Stockton Springs Harbor was known as the “clam capital of Penobscot Bay” with an annual harvest of 26,400 bushels a year. That figure is down to about 26 bushels, he claimed.

“That causeway is the original sin of Maine DOT,” he said. “Causeways kill. That causeway is a bad heart valve.”

Huber said he was saddened by the fact that the dreams of many had been turned into nightmares by “people who worked to save this island.” He urged the Sierra Club to “get away from cozying up to industry” and return to preserving the island.

Huber reminded the gathering that native people named the island Wasumkeag, and he called on the ghosts of Wasumkeag’s past to save the island.

“It wasn’t Brigadier’s Island, it wasn’t Sears Island, it was Wasumkeag,” Huber said. “We hope the spirit of Wasumkeag is still alive and that the people of the dawn are still with us.”

wgriffin@bangordailynews.net

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