PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • December 13, 2021
The life-altering consequences of climate change are bearing down on Vinalhaven, an island of 1,200 people 15 miles offshore, wholly dependent on lobster, where the pounding waves of change grow louder by the day. When the federal government announced its decision in late August to close a 1,000-square-mile swath of ocean off Maine’s coast to traditional lobster fishing for four months a year, outrage ricocheted from boat to boat. The suspense was finally over. Now the lobstermen had to face new federal rules that could threaten their livelihood. Despair came first, then decision time. Since 1974, the hub of the Atlantic lobster population has shifted by 110 miles to the north. The relocation of lobster habitat has dramatically accelerated over time: In the 1970s, it was shifting about eight miles north per decade; today, it is moving more than four times faster, about 40 miles per decade. “Climate change has thrown a wrench in the traditional ways that some fisheries have been managed, scrambling social structures,” said Malin Pinsky, an associate professor of ecology at Rutgers University who studies how climate change displaces marine species, “and conflict is often the result.”