Transcription of Sean Mahoney for the show Maine Conservation & Restorative Seafood #257
Lisa: As long time listeners of Love Maine Radio know, I am pretty impressed by people who do work for environmental causes and one individual that has been doing this for quite a while is Sean Mahoney. Sean serves as the executive vice president, director of programs and director of the Conservation Law Foundation’s Maine Advocacy Center. Prior to joining the conservation law foundation in 2007, Sean practiced environmental law in San Francisco and Portland for fifteen years, where he represented a variety of commercial and non-governmental entities in all aspects of state and federal environmental litigation and permitting. At the Conservation Law Foundation, Sean focuses on marine conservation and sustainability, climate change, transportation, energy infrastructure and restoring and protecting Maine’s rivers and coastal water sheds. Thanks for coming in today.
Sean: Sure. It’s great to be here.
Lisa: We were talking before we came on about our Bowdoin connection and you live in Falmouth now …
Sean: We do.
Lisa: You’ve had a long standing connection to the state of Maine.
Sean: We really have. Actually, the first time I ever took a plane was to Presque Isle, where we had a family friend who was a parish priest there and my parents thought it would be a good idea for us to see Presque Isle and to join in the potato harvest. So in tenth grade, we spent the last two weeks of August and first ten days in September in Presque Isle.
Lisa: That’s a very interesting introduction to the state of Maine.
Sean: Yeah, and aeronautics as well.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s true. That could not have been a very big plane.
Sean: It was not a big plane and it was about a half mile walk from the plane to the hangar in Presque Isle.
Lisa: Well, I’m glad that you were so impressed with our state that you decided to come back here and I guess go to school here.
Sean: Right. It was a great place to go to school. I lived in Brunswick for four years, had the opportunity to live out on the coast my last year of school which was just wonderful and I fell in love with the state. We were really lucky to be able to come back to Maine about a decade later to raise our family and do the type of work I love to do.
Lisa: Your wife Jan, who also went to Bowdoin …
Sean: That’s right.
Lisa: You have three children and as I said, you live in Falmouth. They’ve all been through the Falmouth school system?
Sean: They have. Well, we’ve got one who made it through and two more who are on their way and we consider ourselves very lucky to live in a community like Falmouth that’s got great schools and great open space which has been a nice community and a nice area, the Portland area as a whole to raise a family and to work in and to recreate in.
Lisa: I’ve been fascinated by the Conservation Law Foundation for quite a while and I think part of it, I was interested in conservation before I event went to school but Bowdoin has a very strong environmental program.
Sean: They do.
Lisa: It kind of normalized something for me, whereas when you’re growing up, you know, sometimes some people are about the environment and sometimes some people aren’t, but Bowdoin was very strong in that area. Did you have that same sense?
Sean: I did. I grew up outside of Boston and neither of my parents were what you’d call outdoorspeople. I think the biggest camping trip was in the backyard in an old army tent. Coming to Maine was really eye-opening and particularly one winter camping trip to Baxter State Park, which was really just an incredible experience and one that I think put me on the path to really wanting to spend as much time outdoors as possible and try and find a career that was consistent with that.
Lisa: How do you make that next step from wanting to be outside and wanting to protect the outdoors and then also you went to the University of Virginia and you have a law degree from there and you also, you were a law clerk and you were a Peace Corps volunteer in Sri Lanka. How do you bring all of those experiences together?
Sean: Those strains. The first bit I would say was going to the Peace Corps which was also a very formative experience. I grew up in a family that really valued giving back to community and having the opportunity to be in the Peace Corps for a number of years allowed me to see different parts of the world, to experience what it’s like to be a minority, I was the only white guy for about a 50 mile radius and it’s a very different experience when everybody is looking at you and assuming that you have certain character traits and personality and opinions just because of what you look like. That was really a tremendous experience.
Finishing that, I was a teacher in the Peace Corps, training people to be teachers. I wanted to be able to do something a little bit more and law school was a path that I thought provided one with tools to make some changes. At the time, environmental law was really still developing. This was back in the late 80s. It was a great time to be in law school for that. From there, I was lucky enough to work for two law firms that had not just wonderful colleagues and people to work with but a real commitment to pro-bono legal services. I had a number of cases that I was able to bring on behalf of other environmental organizations, both in California and Maine in addition to other clients. That was really a great opportunity to look at the various problems that our environment was facing and to see the path that I wanted to go down.
Lisa: We had the new Casco Bay keeper on the radio show not too long ago and she also is an attorney and …
Sean: Yeah. She used to work at Conservation Law Foundation.
Lisa: Oh, that’s right actually. I remember her saying that. It’s interesting to me that sometimes the legal profession has maybe been thought of as more interested in its own making of money. I’m trying to say this in the nicest way possible, but both of you are doing things that really is more externally focused and not so much about the making of money. I want to be really careful because I know a lot of attorneys and that’s not why they do it, it’s not because they just want to make money. In fact, two of my brothers are attorneys but you know what I’m saying.
Sean: I do. There is a lot of people in the legal profession who are wonderful at what they do and make positive impacts in so many different ways, including pro-bono services, or allowing their partners or associates to spend a lot of time on pro-bono services. I think Portland and Maine as a general matter is really lucky to have a legal profession that’s so committed to the public good. There are others who say, “I’m going to step away a little bit,” and instead of problem solving for clients that problems a lot of times revolve around financial issues, how much of a penalty is somebody going to pay for having to clean up some pollution or a commercial dispute between two parties, who is right about that.
I’m lucky to be able to focus on larger issues. What is the best way to ensure that we have a sustainable fishery in the Gulf of Maine? How are we going to get our arms around climate change? How are we going to help our municipalities adjust to climate change, to the adaptation resiliency issues? How do we want to make sure that our state and federal governments are holding up their end of the bargain and enforcing the laws that are on the books? It’s a privilege to be able to do that and it’s made possible in part as a non-profit through generosity of our supporters. It’s something that I’m thankful for on a regular basis.
Lisa: You have spent a lot of time working on issues surrounding water and this is something that is of course fairly important because we live … Well, you and I both live right here on Casco Bay and a lot of us, if we don’t live right on the water, we love near a river, we live near an ocean, we live near a lake or a pond. Water is a pretty big deal and Maine hasn’t always had very clean water.
Sean: No, it hasn’t, although Maine has been a leader in cleaning water. As you know, Senator Muskie was the father of the Clean Water Act as well as the Clean Air Act. When one thinks back to 40 or 50 years ago, many of our rivers and bays were open sewers. In Falmouth, I live on the Presumpscot River, and nobody wanted to live on the river because the smell and the fumes were so bad coming down from the paper mills in Westbrook that it would peel the paint off houses. We’ve made a tremendous difference in the last three or four decades, so our rivers aren’t open sewers. You don’t have chicken factories like you used to have in Belfast that are just dumping innards and feathers and carcasses into Penobscot Bay. To that degree, to that extent, we’re in a much better place than we were.
It’s harder though now to make the final step with respect to how do you ensure that you have clean water, swimmable water. How do you make sure East End Beach is not closed because of high fecal coliform counts? How do you make sure that the inshore fishery in Maine, which is basically non-extent now, comes back? Trying to address things like stonewater runoff, which is basically just everything that runs off roofs and pavements and gathers all the junk that’s on roofs and pavements and goes into the Bay, Casco Bay for example. Or we have more severe storms, so it overwhelms our wastewater treatment facilities and so they have to … It’s called the combined sewer overflow, which basically means you can’t treat what’s coming out of our bathrooms and sinks and drains and the like and so that’s not a good thing obviously.
Now that the waters are clean, how do you get fish back up? How do you insure that the river herring and alewives that are crucial cornerstone species for larger fish in the Gulf oF Maine? How do you ensure that they can come back up to their ancestral rivers, spawn, and go back out into the bay and serve as a food source? Those challenges are different but just as important to try and address on a day to day basis.
Lisa: Is it harder because the problem is not evident as it once was because we don’t see open … We don’t see sewage floating down the river or the waters look clean so they must be clean?
Sean: I think that’s exactly it. Most of the pollution, water pollution that we’ve had in the past would come from what are called point sources, pipes. You could go and you could watch the pipe by the paper mill in Westbrook and you would see the junk falling out or you would see … You know, as you said, stuff floating in the water. You don’t see that as much now and so it’s harder to grasp. I think as a community, as a state, it’s harder to grasp what the threats are. I always think of the old commercial with a Native American looking at all the litter and the tear coming down. That’s in your face. You don’t see that as much now, right? You still have these threats to the environment.
Lisa: Another tricky thing I would think is that we still need to have jobs for people. One of the issues with the mill in Westbrook was it employed a lot of people. How do you negotiate that? It’s a small state and we all have to live together and get along.
Sean: The mill in Westbrook still does employ a lot of people and hopefully it will continue to because those are good jobs that are hard to find today. I feel very strongly, having come from the private sector and now in the non-profit sector, that the supposed conflict between environment and economy doesn’t really exist. I think that industrial facilities like paper mills or the like, some of them are our best environmental stewards and deserve a lot of credit for cleaning up their operations, for using innovative pollution control technology and all the like. I think that there is a huge amount of money to be made in looking at how do we move forward in certain areas, like energy. There is a huge new world of how we’re going to generate electricity, how we’re going to power our cars, and the innovation that’s happening in Maine and across the region is going to lead to a lot of jobs.
I know this week is the Innovation in Entrepreneurial Week … I forget the title of it but it’s great because you’ve got all these people coming in, not just in the energy markets but all over that are looking at new technologies and new ways of using Maine’s natural resources which include not just our traditional natural resources like timber or fish and the like but also Mainers and Mainers’ own ingenuity as well as our energy natural resources. We have a lot of wind, we have a lot of solar. We have huge potential to generate economic gains while also making environmental gains. It is a balance. I think one of the things that I pride myself on with respect to the Conservation Law Foundation is we take into account what the costs are associated with environmental compliance and with getting cleaner water or cleaner air and try and factor that into what we call in our advocacy both in the courts as well as in the legislature.
Lisa: That’s an important point because I know in medicine we often feel as if there are unfunded mandates that are sent down so there is something that’s a really great idea and ultimately it’s going to do good for the public health, but it’s expensive to implement and there’s often a feeling that it’s very punitive in nature. I can’t imagine that that would go over well if you’re trying to help people understand the importance of conversation, sustainability, renewable resources, to go in there with that type of approach.
Sean: Right. You have to understand that people are running a business and they want to keep the business open and that kind of business is critical to a community. I think there is a path that allows for businesses and communities to thrive while also doing the right thing when it comes to addressing what the impacts are on the community and on the community’s health and well being as well as on the natural resources.
Lisa: What are some of the big issues that you’ve been working on recently with the Conservation Law Foundation?
Sean: We spend a lot of time on climate change. It’s a little bit like 90 degrees of separation, everything relates to climate change as we go forward. It is going to have such a dramatic impact on not just our lives, but on our children’s lives and their kids’ lives. We already know that we’re going to have a temperature rise of 2 to 4, 5 degrees Celsius on average. We already have much more severe storms. Phoenix, Arizona has got 117 degrees today. The way the weather and climate shapes our lives is going to change dramatically.
What do we do about that? Part of it is we need to address the root cause of that and the root cause of that largely comes from our use of carbon. We basically as a society have been burning different forms of dirt for energy for the last century, oil and coal primarily, and that has had a profound effect on our environment. We’re moving away from that slowly but surely and to get there, we are really focusing on what is the path that allows us to do it in a way that is practical, but also that will meet the goals that we’ve set as a state, as a country, and as a world to reduce our emissions by 2050.
We work in a number of different ways. We love to say yes to things. Many times lawyers and environmentalists get blamed for just saying no to things, “I don’t want this, I don’t want that.” We like to say yes as often as we can, so we want to support new forms of energy, whether it’s solar or land-based wind or offshore wind, and there are always going to be some issues with that, where do you put them, what impacts are they having on people and the like but as long as they’re properly sited, we think that those are things that we want to support.
[There also 00:23:16] a huge potential for economic improvement. We were really disappointed for example, this last session we worked hard on trying to get some changes made to how we pay for solar energy, and unfortunately the governor vetoed the bill and enough of the Republicans in the House supported the veto so that we weren’t able to make a change. We think that change would have been good for the solar industry, for consumers. We had a great coalition, we had the utilities, we had the Office of the Public Advocate, we had businesses, we had farmers, we had environmentalists. You never see all these people in the same room and the governor still brought out the veto pen. That was disappointing, but we are going to work. We are going to continue to work for those things.
We do say no to things sometimes. The governor wanted to invest $75 million a year of electric customers’ money in a natural gas pipeline and we just didn’t think that investing in natural gas was the way to go. It wasn’t a good deal for Mainers, it wasn’t a good deal for the environment. That’s some of the climate change work that we’re doing. That was a long answer, sorry.
Lisa: No, it’s interesting and it makes me think of my last question for you and that is you and I both have children who are college age and high school age. This is essentially what we’re working for now is something that’s really … This is going to manifest itself in their actual world as they continue to become adults. What is it that you hope to see for your children and what is it that you’re working for personally and professionally to have happen?
Sean: It’s a great question which is always the best stall answer, isn’t it? I think that the piece that I want my kids to have is a sense that they’ve got some control. They can have some impact on their environment, on the issues that they care about. Right now, Washington DC is so broken that trying to get new policy out of Washington, DC. Even old policy that was agreed to ten or fifteen years ago can’t get agreed to today. Senator King was just saying, “It’s an echo chamber down there and it’s broken.” I think that there is real opportunity to have impact in your local community and even in the state of Maine because of its size, that they can really get involved and follow their passion. My daughter is very passionate about the farm and food connection to the environment. We have a program at the Conservation Law Foundation on farm and food and provide legal services to farmers and food entrepreneurs using a lot of the Maine legal community.
It’s really a great program that we started here in Maine and that is replicable elsewhere. It’s something that you can have a real impact on and it connects to the bigger issue. Where you get your food, how far that food travels in a truck or a plane, how much we continue to make use of our land to grow food instead of houses, is really important. I know you said that you’ve got farming in your family and I think you can appreciate that. To the extent that they don’t feel overwhelmed, and I think that happens with a lot of people. Climate change is this big thing and on a beautiful Maine day like today, it’s hard to imagine that we’ve got this real issue with climate change. Who’s going to complain about a 75 degree June day, especially when you’re sitting in February and living with six hours of light a day? To have some sense of control and that innovation on a local level can really have an impact on a larger level.
At CLF, that’s what we think. We’ve got a footprint in each of the New England states and we focus on the issues that are important in each of the states but we also like to think that what we do in the state is replicable in other states and in the rest of the country and it can set an example. Maine’s motto is Dirigo, right, I lead? You know, Maine can be a leader again on the environmental front. That’s what we hope.
Lisa: I’ve been speaking with Sean Mahoney who serves as the executive vice president and director of programs and director of the Conservation Law Foundation’s advocacy center. It’s really been a pleasure to have this conversation with you and I really appreciate the work that you do an d the time that you’ve taken to come in and talk with me today.
Sean: Great. Thanks very much. I’ve really enjoyed it as well.