August 2, 2021 — A few weeks ago, Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham (R-Winter Harbor) met with several dozen concerned citizens in Ellsworth for updates on Maine’s offshore wind proposals. The man facing that audience was grim-faced, fatigued and struggling for the proper words to express his apparent anxiety.
A husband, a father of three and a longtime lobsterman out of Winter Harbor, Faulkingham, who also serves on the Joint Standing Committee for Marine Resources, has been a strong voice of reason in our Legislature for many efforts at bettering our state, but primarily for working to protect Maine’s lobstering industry.
As Faulkingham described it, three seemingly combined forces are aligned and have put the bull’s-eye on the men and women in Maine whose lives depend on lobstering — whales, warming and wind power.
The right whale protection consortium has heightened its efforts to alter nearly every aspect of Maine’s primary (and most significant) fishing industry by pushing the federal fisheries agencies to limit, reduce and even eliminate the fishing methods currently employed in the local waters and the Gulf of Maine despite several studies indicating negligible right whale incidents within these waters over the last few years. At best, the supposed science is leaning toward saving whales, with little regard for the men and women who are active conservationists every day while doing their jobs.
The warming water folks, often the same groups and agencies that are involved with the right whale restrictions, also want to promote bureaucratic rules that will severely impact all forms of fishing in Maine’s coastal waters.