The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Peter Neill is the director of the World Ocean Observatory, producer of World Ocean Radio, a weekly audio feature on ocean issues, distributed worldwide, and host to the WERU Community Radio monthly program, Conversations from the Pointed Firs. He lives in Sedgwick.
Maine is strong because it is small; Maine is weak because it is small. Today it faces the challenges to its natural environment and the attractions of its quality of life. Various initiatives — offshore wind, and land-based aquaculture, for example — represent new opportunities for new industry, employment and tax revenue, although these face sometimes debilitating opposition from long-standing vested interests and fear of change.
The Maine economy is presently based on three primary elements: tourism, fisheries and manufacturing (mostly government subsidized). Our educational system reflects conventional organization and academic disciplines, and yet we face a pervasive decline in skilled personnel for the trades and other workforce specialties designed to meet even our present needs. In the past, we have experienced the outmigration of young people who left the state for better opportunities. And we must be aware that we are just one parasite or temperature gradient away from a collapse of traditional fisheries; just as we are one shift in the political wind from the catastrophic withdrawal of government grants, subsidies and contracts.
There is change in the wind. We are experiencing a renewal of people, young and old, from near and far, coming to Maine specifically for the quality of life that is reduced elsewhere by overpopulation, community conflict, and climate change. There is movement evident toward a shift in values enabling new structures and behaviors. The question becomes obvious: are we prescient enough to anticipate the needs of these new Mainers? Are we strong enough to have a strategic plan that will provide and accelerate the values these new “immigrants” bring to our community?
One of Maine’s historical strengths has been ingenuity, the spirit of invention that has contributed to a kind of practical “tinker” mentality that has given the world many things from the first trans-Atlantic television signal, sealed divers suit, machine gun and earmuffs.
That spirit is the basis for what today is described as “the creative economy,” a capacity that is traditionally characterized as art and culture, but which must now include science and communication as focus for creative minds everywhere. We know this creativity exists, as evinced by artistic rendition of our landscape, seascape and working life that lies at the core of tourism marketing and associated revenue and employment. We advertise that creativity by marketing brochures, media, and highway signs.
But it is so much more than complacent, stereotypical imaging. It is the authentic amalgam of independent creators — artists, musicians, poets and writer, yes, but, more recently, new farmers practicing new methods, new entrepreneurs building new companies, new engineers inventing new hardware and software reaching new global connections, and new scientists who find that their innovative research can be pursued here as easily as at an urban institute or an anonymous building amidst suburban highway sprawl.
But, we do too little to recognize this community as a serious aspect of our future. I believe that state government budgets in support of the arts and humanities are an embarrassment. We offer few ingenious incentives to lure such enterprise here or support it upon arrival. Our training programs are largely conventional, not enough to meet existing needs, and certainly not fully designed to train workers in the new skills required to take creative ideas from imagination to market. By not fully recognizing creativity as a vital economic force, measured both by finance and quality of life, we are ignoring what may be the most important force by which to create our future.
The demographic predictions of climate consequence indicate that Maine is one of the most beneficial places to live in the United States. Another wave from “away” is already arriving to rejuvenate our communities, our schools, our civic lives, and our values.
What will be our response? Will we fail to embrace that future because of a failure of imagination? Will we reinvent ourselves and move to acknowledge that this extant, expanding creative economy as the most important strategic opportunity we face to sustain and invigorate “the way life should be?”
The opportunity demands vision and leadership. Will we create our future, or just let it be?