Maine’s new governor, Paul LePage, announced his nominees for several key administration posts last month. Some were politically divisive, like the appointment of a developer with a legislative record of opposing environmental regulations to head the Department of Environmental Protection or the selection of a former Bangor Hydro vice-president as commissioner of the Department of Conservation. But his nominee to head the Department of Marine Resources was an exception: Norman H. Olsen appears a candidate likely to get support not just from the political parties, but from fishermen and conservationists as well.
Should he be confirmed by the Republican-controlled senate, Mr. Olsen’s life will have gone full circle from Maine fishing to high-ranking, globe-trotting foreign diplomat and back again. In the process he’s accumulated an intriguing combination of job experiences: lobsterman, newspaper reporter, shellfish company executive, fisheries management representative, war zone peacekeeper, counter terrorism official, and a diplomat with a ranking equivalent to that of a Brigadier General.
The son of a multi-generational fishing family from Cape Elizabeth, Olsen started fishing at age 12 in the early 1970s, a time when fishermen could still be generalists, switching species and gear types in response to the seasons or the vagaries of the resource. His father was a master mariner and founding member of the Maine Fishermen’s Cooperative Association, a group Norman was later executive director of. His uncle trapped mackerel in weirs, the stationary fish traps now extinct west of Eastport.
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