March 10, 2017 — For 15 years, shore-front property owners, rockweed cutters and Maine Department of Marine Resources regulators have attempted to balance the competing interests that have tended to define the state’s rockweed industry.
Maine case law has produced mixed opinions on the question of who actually owns the olive-brown algae that is used in fertilizer and in some consumable products.
But a Washington County Superior Court case could help settle what’s become a contentious rockweed debate.
At high tide, rockweed floats on the water’s surface along the Maine coast, its rubbery, olive-brown plant strands buoyed by a series of air bladders. At low tide, it drapes shore-front rocks to provide protective habitat for crabs and other creatures. It was a source of fertilizer for English colonists who spelled out access rights in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Colonial Ordinance of 1641-1647. Since then, though, who owns Maine’s rockweed – or Ascophyllum nodosum, as it is known in scientific circles – remains an unanswered question for property owners, conservationists and harvesters.
Gordon Smith is a Portland attorney who represents several Washington County landowners upset that their shore-front properties have become targets for rockweed harvesters. They’ve made Acadian Seaplants Ltd. the focus of a lawsuit filed in Superior Court. The Nova Scotian biotech company is the largest independent manufacturer of marine plant products of its type in the world. Smith says that based on his reading of case law, it is clear to him that landowners control access in the inter-tidal zone of their property – a point he repeatedly made during arguments in court last week.
