MAINE MONITOR • December 14, 2024
When Whole Oceans announced plans to build a land-based Atlantic salmon farm on the site of a former paper mill in Bucksport in 2018, the town embraced the project. This diverged from the reception of a similar proposal in nearby Belfast, which was announced just a month earlier. Both projects were pitched as better for the environment than fish farms that use net pens in the ocean, which abound in Washington County but have been banned in all states on the West Coast due to their environmental impacts. Yet six years later there is nothing to see at the Bucksport site, and its local permits have expired. A land-based fish farm proposed for Jonesport has been hung up by legal challenges, as has the Nordic Aquaculture proposal in Belfast.