Philip Conkling grew up in the Hudson River valley and is the retired co-founder and former president of the Island Institute from Camden, ME. Since then, he has been engaged in environmental and nonprofit consulting.

Scope and Content Note

Philip Conkling recounts how his early work as a forestry surveyor on offshore Maine islands led him to focus instead on the sustainability and development of their year-round communities. He recollects some of the most salient first successes of the Island Institute and shares his insights into the most pressing issues that fishermen and islanders have to face today. Conkling highlights the issues and concerns he has observed in the communities where he has worked, particularly focusing on the 15 year-round island communities he initially worked with. He explains how the Island Institute expanded its efforts by launching a coastal newspaper called The Working Waterfront, aiming to build a larger constituency for a balance between economic development, particularly in the marine realm, and natural resource management and protection strategies. One of the major concerns Conkling mentions is the heavy dependence of these communities on the lobster fishery, as other sectors, such as the groundfish sector, have collapsed. He emphasizes the economic and environmental vulnerabilities caused by this reliance on a single fishery and the challenges it presents when there are perturbations in the industry, such as price fluctuations. Conkling also highlights the shifting abundance of lobsters, with the center of the industry moving north and east, causing hardship for communities in the Midcoast area and the islands in Southern and Western Maine.