March 13, 2017 — I spent Valentine’s Day making a whirlwind trip to Washington, D.C., on behalf of my company, Mook Sea Farm, an oyster farm on the Damariscotta River. For 32 years we’ve been raising oysters from egg to market size and selling seed oysters to other East Coast farms. I made the trip to oppose Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt’s nomination to be the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
On the trip to Washington, I thought long and hard about what I might say that would make a difference, especially to Sen. Susan Collins, who at that time had not yet announced her position on the Pruitt nomination. It seemed unnecessary, given the widely publicized information about his record, to point out Pruitt’s lack of fitness for the position. So, I decided to focus on my own story.
I talked about almost being forced out of business in 1998 by illegal dumping of septic and chemical waste next to my hatchery, and the personal anguish and stress this caused for an entire year. Mook Sea Farm would likely not have survived had it not been for the Clean Water Act.
I also explained that a decade or so later, the impact of carbon emissions suddenly became very real – no longer an abstract, future problem. Carbon dioxide emissions, dissolving in the ocean and changing precipitation patterns in the Northeast, had slowly degraded the lifeblood of my company: the seawater we pump into the hatchery. Our shellfish larvae were having a tough time growing shells in seawater as it became increasingly acidic. Production became erratic, forcing us to adopt a suite of remedies that include buffering our seawater (think of taking Tums).