Transcription of Tim Glidden for the show Island Time #270
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Doctor Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Doctor Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Tim Glidden: When we closed that project, Judy Marsh came in with a shoe box full of checks and bills and pennies and quarters, $20,000 that people had just given to help us make that million dollar project happen.
Roger Burle: I loved to build, and I still love to build, and that’s why I got into the construction business. I have for 35 years, and now I’m doing the same work for fun.
Lisa Belisle: This is Doctor Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 270. Island Time, airing for the first time on Sunday, November 20, 2016. How do we keep Maine’s coast and islands accessible and productive as our state grows in popularity? Today we speak with two individuals who offer unique perspectives on this question. Tim Glidden, President of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, and Cliff Island conservationist Roger Burle. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Berlin City Honda, where the car buying experience is all about easy. After all, life is complicated enough and buying a car shouldn’t be. That’s why the Berlin City Honda team goes the extra mile by pre discounting all their vehicles and focus their efforts on being open, honest and all about getting you on the road. In fact, Berlin City recently won the 2015 Women’s Choice Award for strong testimony to their ability to deliver a different kind of car buying experience. Berlin City Honda of Portland, easy. It’s how buying a car should be. Go to berlincityhondame.com for more information.
Lisa Belisle: My next guest is Tim Glidden, who serves as the President of Maine Coast Heritage Trust, a state-wide land conservation organization that has helped to conserve over 144,000 acres of Maine’s most special places, including more than 300 coastal islands. Prior to joining the organization, Tim led the Land For Maine’s Future program from 2001 to 2011. Thanks for coming in today.
Tim Glidden: My pleasure.
Lisa Belisle: What I love about what you do is that we all get to experience this. We all get to be part of the coastal heritage that we have. I know that when we go out on our boat from Little John Island, we’re very close to the Goslings for example. Everybody up and down the coast has that same proximity. That must be pretty special for you.
Tim Glidden: It is very special. I’m really glad you framed it that way, because it’s such a huge part of our purpose and my own personal goal to make Maine available to people. The special elements of the coast are just so wonderful, a wonderful place for people to go to, to renew themselves, to discover new things about themselves, to raise their kids. It’s a wonderful place to be. The Goslings, since you mentioned it, were a wonderful recent success story for us. That was a place that had been used by folks in those communities for probably … For generations really, multiple generations.
The owners had let that happen, just as generosity of their hearts, but when they couldn’t afford to own the land anymore, they came to us and said, “We’re going to need to sell this, but we’d really like it to stay available.” We took that on and opened it up, and the community outpouring of support was just amazing. People … My favorite story there is we worked with a local marina, Paul’s Marina, up in Brunswick, and when we closed that project, Judy Marsh came in with a shoe box full of checks and bills and pennies and quarters, $20,000, that people just given to help us make that million dollar project happen.
Since the last couple of summers when we’ve owned it, we just keep hearing from people about how appreciative they are. We own these lands. We own these lands, but we really hold them in trust. They’re lands that are really for Maine and for all the people of Maine.
Lisa Belisle: You were born in Texas. That’s far away. Not as much water. There is a coastal element to Texas.
Tim Glidden: I was born about as far from the coast of Texas as you could get. I was in North Texas. I was there for all of six months, before my family, my mom and dad moved up to New England. Outside of Boston, which is where I grew up, but my dad’s family was from Maine, from New Castle, and we always had that connection to Maine. That’s really been bred deep in me.
Lisa Belisle: From what I understand you also went to Colby?
Tim Glidden: Yes. I was at Colby at a time of great change 70 to 74. It was a … They were just starting up their environmental sciences program for degrees. I got a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies there. That was the first academic or formal training that channeled, I think, what was in my heart and connections from … My connections to the natural world. That launched me on a career, which has been mostly in Maine every since. A little bit outside, but I’ve been bouncing around in Maine, different kinds of environmental challenges and issues ever since.
Sometimes I look back on that go, “Oh my God, that was forty something years ago now.” It’s been fun. All of that has been fun. I’ve taken new challenges as they came and have always felt there was a new opportunity around the corner, something exciting to look forward to.
Lisa Belisle: You were going through school just after the time of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, if I have this correctly from a timing standpoint?
Tim Glidden: Pretty much simultaneously. There was early legislation in the late sixties. I think the Clean Water Act itself might have been 1972, so I was still in school. All of that was taking shape at a time, as I said, of great change, but there was also a sense of optimism. We can really make things better. It was a wonderful time to be coming into the beginnings of a career.
It was a wonderful time to be in the beginnings of a career in Maine because, following Governor Muskie’s work on the clean water act, he really got his teeth into that issue while he was governor here in Maine, looking at the Androscoggin and thinking about what had to happen. There’s some … It just strikes me as we’re talking, I am now working on the banks of the Androscoggin River in Topsham and where Governor Muskie would’ve seen blankets of stinking foam go by his window, I now see eagles, osprey. I see sturgeon, four and five foot surgeon jumping out of the water in the spring. It’s just …
The vibrancy, the fecundity, just the life that is in that river now, just speaks to what is possible if we put our minds to it.
Lisa Belisle: I know that back when you started clean air and clean water were fundamental to the environmental movement, and we’ve moved into a better place with that, but we still have issues. Now we’re dealing with issues like climate change. This is something that your organization is very much interested in.
Tim Glidden: We are. Maine Coast Heritage Trust has always been focused on the land itself. 1970, ironically, was the year that MCHT started. There I was starting at Colby, and Maine Coast Heritage Trust was starting in Maine at just the same time. We are looking at how society shapes the land and how the land, or the landscapes, shape society. It’s our belief that there can be a very healthy relationship between those ingredients. We look to conserve land. We look to take care of it. We call it stewardship and we also look to make sure that people can have a ready connection to that land, experience it directly themselves.
If they do that, that sort of restorative quality that a natural experience or an experience in nature has for people, it will lead them to understand how they can shape their own lives in ways that have a later impact on the planet. We’re doing a whole bunch of more technical things, trying to restore salt marshes, or protect lands around salt marshes, so that as sea level rises, those marshes will have a place to go, and the Gulf of Maine will still have those nurseries that the salt marshes are, so that we’ll still have productive fisheries and all of those kind of things.
At its core, our work is about the relationship between people and land and trying to maintain the healthy relationship there. We talk about trying to conserve the character of the Maine Coast, which is that blend between the granite outcropping and the villages that are nestled into those harbors, and how those interact, and how people live on that land and make their living from the sea. All of that goes into that special character. If we can conserve the key pieces of land that support that character, then the second part of our efforts, our mission of supporting the wellbeing of those communities, can be accomplished.
Lisa Belisle: You actually have lands all up and down the coast. If we were to drive from your … As far down as one could to as far up as one could, it would take us hours and hours, or even if we boated really.
Tim Glidden: I’m very familiar with that trip.
Lisa Belisle: Yes, I’m sure you are. How do you see … What are the differences between the communities and the lands of Kittery and the lands of the communities of Lubec. What are the similarities? What types of things have you had to, I guess, wrap your collective brain around as an organization?
Tim Glidden: That’s a great question. Let me start, maybe, with the similarities. The similarities that we find are that, despite a very wide range of economic conditions, obviously a lot more people in the south or in the west than in the east, everybody in those coastal communities really cares about their relationship to the ocean, number one, and they also really care about the quality of their communities. Maine is blessed with a very strong community spirit.
You really see it everywhere. From our biggest cities to the smallest towns, people care about where they live. They tend to care a lot about their neighbors. They’re concerned for them, even as they have their own quite strong sense of independence and don’t tell me how to do something. They are looking for ways to make sure their kids’ lives in the future are as good as what they had, if not better.
That similar community spirit and commitment to the quality of their communities is a strength that we try to build on. Many people, regardless of their walk in life, really care about the natural lands around them and appreciate them. Some appreciate them because it’s how they make their livelihoods. They know that those lands, or the waters, have to be treated well in order for that livelihood to continue. It can also be in the form of tourism, or it can just be in the form of “this is a wonderful place to live and raise kids.”
I make my living off of some Internet-based thing. It’s the whole gambit. I would say that in terms of differences, that the growth in southern Maine over the past 50 years has given folks there a much keener sense of what is at risk. They see that they can lose access to the water. They can lose that viewscape. The pollution can close clam flats. They’re probably more prepared in southern and western Maine to take steps to avoid those problems, whether it be creating a local land trust or adopting a zoning ordinance than folks, perhaps, in Washington County. It’s not because they care less in one place or care more in the other, it’s just that they’re responding to these pressures. We are now seeing different kinds of pressures the further east we go. Many of the eastern Maine communities now have very high levels of second home ownership in town, where it’s absentee ownership.
The town, although the buildings are there, there’s a lot less people there year around. The folks who do live there year around, who really care about their communities, are looking for ways to strengthen the fabric of that community. What we are doing now, which is a little new for us in a 40 year context, we’ve been doing it for maybe five or 10 years pretty thoroughly, is we’ll go to communities like that and try to listen. What’s going on in your town? What kind of challenges do you face?
Then after we develop some rapport we can say, “Is there something that a land conservational organization can do that would help you on those problems?” Just as an example, in the town of Milbridge, which is pretty far down east in Washington County, we’re now working with a wonderful local group, kind of a combination of public nutrition or public health and food security group, called the Women’s Health Resource Library.
They have done a wonderful job of raising awareness in that town about the need for better eating and better nutrition, but they didn’t have the resources to really start a community garden. We had partnered with them, bought a piece of land right in downtown Milbridge, and they’re going to be putting in community gardens and maybe some exercise, walking tracks and perhaps some other elements. We’re still shaping this, but it really has shifted how people see land conservation because that connection between nutrition and land conservation, which seems obvious in hindsight, but wasn’t looking forward, has become a real … Just a transformative force in that town.
It’s going back to what I said earlier, it’s really tapping that quality that many Maine communities have of looking to better themselves, looking to strengthen their communities. In this case we were lucky to be able to come in and be a supportive partner in that effort.
Lisa Belisle: What are some of the policy issues that you have found some success with or maybe some struggles with when it comes to protecting the land?
Tim Glidden: We may be somewhat fortunate there. The policy issues in Maine around land conservation have been shaped, really, decades ago, in terms of there is basic support for local non profits to make a difference in their own communities, land trusts. We’ve helped to conserve, I mean to create I should say, many of the land trusts in Maine, to support local folks coming together to do that. There’s now 84, 85 land trusts in Maine, and we continue to support them.
They as non profits have tax exemptions, so there’s a policy issue there that Maine has consistently supported local charities to do that kind of good work. It was actually a Maine Supreme Court case a couple of years ago that affirmed that land held in conservation for the benefit of all was in fact tax exempt. Many land trusts in Maine, recognizing that even though it is legal, that towns are challenged by that, will make payments in lieu of taxes.
I would say that in some senses, the policy environment in Maine is pretty good for land conservation. We have been challenged over the last few years by the administration’s efforts to restrain conservation efforts or land conservation in particular. When people, when the public focused on that issue, they overwhelmingly said, “No, we voted for that Land for Maine’s Future program. We want those funds to be released.” The legislature has agreed. That program is slowly moving along.
I think it’s still going to be a challenge for a few more years, but I don’t have any doubt that the electorate in Maine and the people of Maine, there’s just a deep abiding support for land conservation and for the environment more broadly. The broader issue, when you eluded to it earlier, that is beyond policy issue, that really transcends Maine, transcends the US as a global issue, is climate change.
All conservation organizations and many beyond the environmental movement are working really hard on that one. What we are doing with that is, every time we look at a piece of land that we think might be a good piece of conservation land, we think about, what might it look like 100, 200 years from now? Will it still have those conservation qualities that would be important?
More specifically, one of the things we’re doing right now is we’ve analyzed wetlands up and down the coast, salt marshes, to see, as I think I mentioned a few minutes ago, when sea level rises, not if, it’s happening, when sea level rises, will those marshes have a place to migrate to, so that they can reestablish themselves and they can fulfill their ecological function of nurseries for small fish, for lobsters, for all sorts of … the base of the food web that then supports everything that happens out in the bays, along the coast and the Gulf of Maine itself. I would say the big over arching policy challenge has got to be seen as climate change.
Lisa Belisle: I’m thinking about what that must be like to be working forward 100 years. I guess there’s modeling that you can use to understand where the buffer zones are currently and what needs to be conserved so that in 100 years this is all still the way that it needs to be?
Tim Glidden: There are models, and anything that’s involved in predicting the future, whether or not it’s the weather next week, or the climate a 100 or more years from now, have to be taken with a little bit of a grain of salt. I think there are a number of things that are very clear. Sea level is rising. Temperatures are going up in Maine. We are now looking at a situation where, in the next 100 years, Maine is going to be one of the most appealing and attractive places to live on the east coast.
There was some analysis released a little earlier this year that indicated that the major cities along the eastern seaboard, many of them will be seeing more than 100 days per year with temperatures over 95 or 100 degrees. Maine would not be seeing anything close to that. When you look ahead like that you go, “Okay. There’s going to be a lot of people who want to live in Maine.” In a lot of ways that could be a really good thing. Maine’s population has been very flat.
New opportunities, new skills coming in, new resources could be really good for Maine, but are we ready to handle that? We see, and I would say this is probably true of most people in the land conservation world, we see ourselves as protecting opportunities and protecting options for the future. If we conserve lands that are productive lands, farm lands, or lands that give access to the coast so people can always get to the water, either for fun or to make their livelihoods, we’re protecting the opportunities for folks to have the same quality of life, or maybe even better, in the future as they have today.
If and when a lot of new folks do move into Maine, the coast is always going to be a really appealing place to live. We will have protected and conserved the places that really shape the character of that coast, while at the same time leaving places for folks to move in and build their homes and make their livings and have a full and complete life.
Lisa Belisle: It does seem like an interesting challenge, because I think about … I think about just Popham Beach and the shifting sands and the way that the character of that coast line has evolved, even since I’ve lived in Maine and since I went to school. Then I think about Yarmouth, which has needed to dredge the Royal river, and how we used to be able to go under the Cousins Island bridge and now there’s a very small channel and we don’t even really recommend that you do that. These shifting sands are not even 100 years out. The shifting coastline and the rising tides. It’s happening right now. How do you work with the fact that what is currently coastline may not be exactly in the same place?
Tim Glidden: You put your finger right on it. That really is what goes to the need to protect options. We can’t with any degree of confidence predict precisely where, how, a river is going to cut it’s channel to get to the sea 100 years from now. You can’t even really predict it in some places 10 years from now. You have to be thinking about, maybe we need two or three different options for that. If we are building new bridges, or in the case we’re a little bit more familiar with thinking about, just how water moves under roads, you don’t want to be building for today’s storms. The volume of water going through today, you need to be building for the possibility and, increasingly, the likelihood that the amount of water moving through our streams and rivers could be much higher as precipitation goes up. We’re now in many cases sizing the culverts, the pipes that carry the water under the roads, much higher and designing them in ways which allow the fish to move back and forth underneath them.
This is stuff that we never used to really think about. You’re having to … It’s kind of like contingency planning. You’re having to think about, “well, what if,” and then if the likelihood of that “what if” seems sufficiently high, then maybe you need to build a little redundancy or a few other options into this planning.
Popham is a tough one. Popham Beach when I first came to Maine was a gorgeous wide, expansive, beautiful sand, even at high tide and if you go there now, at low tide there’s lots of beach, but at high tide there’s not a lot of beach. Now, 10 years from now, 50 years from now, it could be very different. That system is constantly changing and moving, but as sea level rises, it’s very clear that those beaches, if they are pinned in by something else, those beaches will be gone.
Where else might we go? How else will we get to the water? What other properties would we want to protect? That’s the kind of thing that Maine Coast Heritage is looking at all the time, thinking about where that might … where those alternatives will be.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been working on this for a little while now, and you still have a youth and vitality to you. I suspect you’re going to be out doing this for a while yet…
Tim Glidden: You’re kind to say that.
Lisa Belisle: You seem energized by the job that you have, and not everybody has that good fortune, that they love what they’re doing. Is there any one thing that you would like to try to see happen, before you finally hang it up in few decades?
Tim Glidden: Wow, a big question. There’s no one thing that I would want to see happen. I would want to have done everything that I can to be sure that the same opportunities that I had, to have that restorative relationship with the natural world, that those opportunities are available to as many people, especially as many younger people, as possible in Maine. I think that experience is quite an important ingredient in what makes Maine a special place and what makes Maine’s culture a special place.
You look across the whole spectrum of human activity in Maine, work, art, food, play, all those things. So many of them are grounded in some aspect of the natural world. I just want to make sure that those unique special attributes of Maine, that there’s enough of those still here, so that future generations are inspired in the same way that I’ve been and that I have … I’ve been blessed and I hope to pass that blessing forwarded.
Lisa Belisle: We will put information about the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, the Love Maine Radio show notes page. We’ve been speaking with Tim Glidden, who serves as the President of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust and who also led the Land for Maine’s Future program from 2000 to 2011. Thank you for all the work that you’re doing and you’ve inspired me to want to go spend more time on the coast. It doesn’t take much to inspire me to do that, but you’ve done it. I appreciate it, thank you.
Tim Glidden: Thanks very much Lisa, it’s been a real pleasure to be with you and I appreciate the invitation. I hope everybody takes advantage of the Maine Coast.