"Sears Island's Future May Finally Be Decided!"
The
breathless October 15, 2008 announcement by Maine Things Consider's AJ Higgins of a "truce" between combatants over the fate of wild Sears Island made it sound as though a win-win solution were at hand. It just ain't so, AJ.
But how would he know? When he spotted members of
Fair Play for Sears Island heading in his direction out in the hallway at the end of
MDOT's 45 minute presentation & Q&A session with the Maine Legislature's Transportation Committee, A.J. literally ran back into the hearing room, where another issue was being examined by the committee, to avoid having to point his recorder's microphone at them.
That's right, Higgins never troubled to ask any of the no port no way people from Fair Play For Sears Island who were so in evidence at the committee room for their point of view
Instead he tut tuts along with Committee chair Dennis Damon that only the compromiser groups are capable of a "reasonable discussion". Why ask the unreasonable opposition, with their sinister black coffin in the meeting room doorway, and their large color photographs of the port sacrifice zone (how Damon winced at that word "sacrifice"!). Why ask them anything at all?
What sort of unreasonable things might Maine Things Considered's reporter have heard?
They might have told him things that would've conflicted with the win-win greasy skid-ness of AJ's spin of inevitable virtuous compromise.
He might have heard how the "Joint Use" plan really only engages in planning for a "Single Use" - the dimensions and operations of the entertainment/education complex that the "environmentalists" want to build in the 'protected' north end of Sears Island - while carrying out zero planning for overseeing and managing the other Joint Use: industrial development of those 300+ acres of irreplaceable natural Maine that cover the supposedly 'port-appropriate' side of Sears Island.
Read Summary of JUPC Report Page 1._ Page 2
No planning there. Rather, the plan is not to plan. Only to react when Johnny ContainerportSeed comes whistling into town.
Had he quizzed opponents of the JUPC plan, AJ Higgins might have heard about the nearly two decade old campaign to re-open the estuarine waterway between the island and the mainland, blocked since the late 80s by a solid fill causeway that isolates the twin ecosystems of waterbodies Stockton Harbor and Searsport Harbor from each other.
A campaign dropped by Sierra Club and by former Earth First! activist Jim Freeman like an overripe haddock. MDOT wants piercing the Sears Island causeway "off the table"? Fine. Into the dustbin of ecological history it goes.
Higgins might have heard how smolting atlantic salmon take refuge in the brackish water shoal off Sears Island as these young freshwater fish adjust to their first encounter with salt water.
Ditto for sturgeon. You know, that seagrassy shoal? The one that nourishes Penobscot Bay's juvenile cod and other groundfishes in their first months of life before heading downbay? The shoal that would be dredged out to ease the way in for container ships?
Yeah that one. Indeed Mother Nature is being asked to give up much more than the port wannabes and the easement wannabes combined.
But the moderate green enviros of JUPC are hard pressed to identify any compromises that they forced port developers to make. These former supporters natural island supporters have literally given away the island store. For a fistful of....what?
Jim Freeman the once-bad boy of Maine Earth First!, 
once indomitable defender of Sacred Wassumkeag against any and all port ventures there; the bane of port wannabe Angus King and Baldacci1, Jimmy seems to have made his peace with the Porties and their supporting cast of politicos like Senator-who-would-be-governor Dennis Damon
It would be a "clean container port" Jim once assured me at an NFN-GOM meeting in Augusta. Besides, he says optimistically, seemingly forgetting that good Green pledge of considering the effect of one's actions on those up to seven generations in the future, "who knows what could happen in twenty years anyway" (mp3)
"No ones really enthralled about having a port there." he told a reporter, ignoring the shipping and rail interests that have surrounded him for two years at every meeting of the Sears Island Joint Use Planning Committee. All of them, the railroaders, the global traders, the shipping industrialists, are enthralled to the gills about having a port there; something Mr. Freeman has made much more likely with his participation in/validation of MDOT's little consensus group. 
He consensed anyway with MDOT Commissioner Cole that a port would be "appropriate" on Sears Island.
Freeman consensed that no environmental review under applicable state and federal laws of the agency's plan of making Sears Island available to containerport builders was needed.
Ditto that the mile long causeway to the island from the Mainland must not be pierced, lest the railroad industry be forced to shell out big bucks for a bridge that would allow upper Penobscot Bay's ecosystem to return to its clam-rich, cod-rich, sturgeon and salmon-rich recent past. Off the table THAT notion went. Big industry's stinginess with Angus King similarly killed his woodchip port proposal.
Sierra Club. Where to start?
In 1985, the club prosecuted two federal lawsuits
here and
here 
to protect Sears Island through the federal courts. The Club filed more cases in
1989 and
1990 and
1992 In 1995 Sierra Club helped fight off the 27 acre 1995 port proposal - Helped fight off the
LNG follies of 2004, This began in 2005, when Sierra Club
let itself be talked into sacrificing ten times as much of Sears Island - 330 acres - the whole western third of the island - to the port wannabes.
Let us clarify: the Sierra Club's Maine leadership did. For the tiny top of the Maine Chapter pyramid decided not to poll its membership. Treacherously, they
lied to port opponents' repeated importunings: Sure we'll ask our members, Ken Cline said, from his perch as Conservation Chair of the Maine Chapter of the Club. From which perch he helped stop the porthuggers in their tracks a decade ago.
But (wink wink) he didn't. The legal eagle has become an Administration parrot. He and of-a-feather Maine chapter longtimer Joan Saxe opted to go with the Baldacci flow. Studiously ignoring those industrialists waiting anxiously in the wings for that western shore to be handed them.
Then there's the truly big winner - Maine Coast Heritage Trust - which ould get the north and eastern portions of the island - 600+acres of priceless island public land -
given to it free. In perpetuity!
But what a quid pro quo these earth defenders agreed to:
Sierra Club, too, meekly agreed with MDOT's very first demand that the island causeway be pierced & bridged, (like other causeways on the Maine coast), unblocking critical nutrient-rich water flows between Stockton Harbor, Searsport Harbor, Penobcot River and Penobscot Bay. The formerly rich shellfish abundance of these waters could be restored.
Maine DOT port wannabes grumped that a bridge that could support heavy rail traffic would cost too much. Bay ecology be damned! The once rich clam beds of Stockton Harbor are to be literally priced out of existence.
AJ? Maybe you were just in a hurry to go cover the Callahan Mine cleanup story. But always try to do that 'fair and blanced' thing, will ya?
