This journal gathers art and writing that emerged from community art-making sessions along the Little River, moving from the headwaters to the bay, during the summer of 2021. It also includes a conversation with a Belfast community member who has been involved in the movement to protect the Little River from industrial development.
Edited and compiled by Lauren Valle and Laura Sheinkopf
Published in Belfast, Maine
Front cover art by Lauren Valle
Back cover art by Laura Sheinkopf
All content is the sole property of the artists.
The mission of Little River Speaks Project is to give a voice to the waters and land of the Little River and all of its kin.
This project creates space for reciprocity, listening, communication, prayer, processing grief, healing and creativity. We create art together and host gatherings to honor the wisdom of nature and build community.
The Little River of Belfast and Northport, Maine, is the only contiguous greenbelt and waterway from Belfast to the Penobscot Bay. The five miles of public hiking trails that hug its shoreline weave between tall white pines and wide-girthed hemlocks and are enjoyed throughout the seasons by residents and visitors of Belfast. The Little River and its surrounding mixed forest are home to diverse species of waterfowl, nesting songbirds and resident winter birds. Edible and medicinal plants found throughout the woods include reishi, oyster, maitake and chicken of the woods mushrooms along with nettles, elderberry, asters, jewelweed and willows.
Nordic Aquafarms, a Norwegian company, is currently planning to cut down 42 acres of forest adjacent to the river to construct a land-based industrial aquafarm which intends to produce 33,000 tons of salmon annually.
Recently, the City of Belfast finalized the sale of Belfast’s Water District site to Nordic Aquafarms for just over $1 million dollars. This undeveloped land contains a reservoir at the mouth of the river and also serves as the public trailhead to the Little River Hiking Trail. The City vocalized their approval of this sale to a reporter at the Bangor Daily News:
“‘This is a beautiful spot,’ Keith Pooler, the superintendent of the quasi-municipal public utility, said of the site by the Little River. ‘But the customers are paying for the maintenance of the reservoir and the dam that goes along with this, and water that hasn’t been used for over 40 years now and never will be again.’“ [1]
In other words, the reservoir is no longer being tapped as a municipal water source for the City of Belfast, so we might as well sell it and stop paying to maintain the site. Despite the fact that the City of Belfast recognizes the imminent and broad-reaching impacts of the climate crisis and is developing a Climate Action Plan to reduce emissions and address our contribution to climate change. Despite the fact that carbon emissions from the proposed salmon facility would prevent the City from meeting its own targets and Nordic would be one of the largest power users in all of New England. Despite the fact that Nordic would be running eight massive diesel generators 24 hours a day to keep oxygen flowing in the tanks. Despite the fact that energy bills would increase for taxpayers across the state of Maine in order to cover the $64-million upgrade required by Central Maine Power. Despite the fact that the City of Belfast is giving Nordic $100,000 toward the land sale price so that public can continue to use the hiking trails that the city already owned.
How much is 42 acres of vital habitat and a river “worth”—is it worth $1 million dollars? What will it cost the city of Belfast in 30 years, the expected life span of this facility, when the salmon are gone and what’s left is a series of massive tanks, buildings and those giant smokestacks? When the Penobscot Bay is suffering from algal blooms from too much nitrogen? What will we do about the bare bedrock along the river where 20 feet of topsoil has been stripped away so the five-story fish tanks don’t sink into the ground? The fish tanks—can they be rented out as office space?
How much will we be willing to pay to attempt to regain a tiny portion of our ecological wealth that we are currently selling away so a foreign company can profit? Will it have been worth $1 million dollars? Is the city going to put the $1 million in an investment account, hope it triples, and earmark it for site remediation in 2055? One could argue that the Little River, when valued as a carbon-sequestering forest and a wildlife habitat, is not so “little.”
We want to do the work ourselves of dreaming a future for our City of Belfast that knits us together as a community. We want to prioritize quality of life, clean water and air and our local food supply. We want to shore up our infrastructure against the 1 foot of sea level rise we will see before our kids in preschool hit middle age. We already face so many interlocking crises that make this work the monumental undertaking of our lifetimes. Why invite in a project that is sure to contribute to the very problems we are trying to overcome, and which would never be approved in Nordic’s native Norway?
What will we tell our tiny children about what happened to the Little River as their eyes grow wide at butterflies and they wrap their chubby arms around trees, in rapture and in love with a dying world?
“Yes, this used to be a wild, quiet place with old trees, but people decided that they needed to cut down the forest and take the water from the river to grow fish, so people could eat them. And our City decided we needed the money instead of the river. The healthy river will try to come back to health, but it will take a really long time.
(Hand over another peanut butter sandwich triangle and some apple slices) But aren’t those smoke stacks cool? Look at the smoke! Big, big smoke!
And yes, we used to swim in the bay—but we don’t want you to swim in there now, honey. We want to keep you healthy, and that water isn’t safe.”
These are the thoughts that keep us young mothers up at night curled into balls, barely breathing, hearts writhing, our babies tucked into our armpits—how to explain?
How to reckon this child tree love, these babies, these peanut butter sandwiches, this sea level rise, these living trees, this forest, this water, this soil, this beauty, these salmon, these rising temperatures, this mercury buried in the bay, this crisis, these questions, this future, our future, whose future, what future, can we make a future?
-Lauren Valle
[1] Curtis, Abigail. “After years in limbo, Belfast fish farm now owns the land it needs to begin building” March 17, 2022, Bangor Daily News.
Aimee Moffitt-Mercer
Don’t Look Away
Acrylic
That is how I feel in this moment when my heart is breaking for happy fish.
Laura Sheinkopf
Here we are
Pen on paper
Isla Hughes
Salamander
Pastel on paper
Lauren Valle
Untitled
Watercolor
Aimee Moffitt-Mercer
Meredith Bruskin Sitting by the Little River
Acrylic
Etta Hughes
Big Rock
Acrylic on wood
Laura Sheinkopf
Field Notes I
Pen on paper
Lauren Valle
Water Flowing Over Rocks
Watercolor
Aimee Moffitt-Mercer
Noble Salmon
Acrylic
Laura Sheinkopf
Field Notes II
Pen on paper
Anna Carter
Keep your Finger on the Pulse
Watercolor and collage
This piece is meant to capture my grief around environmental harms, most of which may not be reversible within my lifetime. I wanted to conjure the beauty of the bay and the forces we must reckon with in order to protect and preserve the waterways of our home.
Axel Phone
Nitrogesis
Digital collage
A Conversation with Ellie Daniels
By Lauren Valle and Laura Sheinkopf (edited and condensed)
Ellie is the owner of the Green Store, a midwife, and a founding member of the Friends of the Harriet L. Hartley Conservation Area. We began this conversation by reading the Rebecca Solnit quote on the preceding page and then asked Ellie to reflect on what gives her hope in the work of building sustainable futures. We likened the role she has filled at times to that of a goose flying at the front of the V -- leading and carving through the wind, while moving in solidarity with others.
Ellie: The long and short of it is that I was young in the 60’s during the Vietnam war, but I was a teenager, and I was a really depressed teenager. I was having all kinds of agony about the war and what was happening to young men from this country. What was happening in Vietnam and Cambodia. A real influencer in my life as a young person was Life Magazine, because they were, like, showing it. They were showing it. It was so radical to have those images. For me, they just evoked this sadness for the world. It was both the environmental destruction of it and also the human suffering of it. And it just really affected me a lot and moved me to this place of wanting a more immersed life in nature and wanting to parent children in a more pacifist way and a more aware being with everything.
I was a hippie homesteader in the seventies. I moved to Piscataquis County in ’74 when I was 21. I lived a mile in on a discontinued road for a year and half in a teepee while we built this Buckminster Fuller 40-foot geodesic dome from cedar posts that we harvested from our land. It was a very interesting project and it was the first thing I ever did, carpentry-wise, and I love to carpenter.
In the winter time, I did work in the woolen mills to make a few bucks and they were really terrible places to work. I stopped doing that because in ‘78 there was a big flood of the Piscataquis River and the Guilford woolen mill had all this TRS, a flame retardant chemical that had been outlawed by the DEP, in barrels in the bottom of this old brick mill building that was right on the river. They just forklifted these huge tubs of this stuff into the river, and some of them busted open, and some of them floated intact downstream. It was just like, so unconscionable. So terrible to think about. I just couldn’t do that anymore, I realized.
I became a midwife because I wanted to have my own babies at home which was also kind of a radical thing at the time and there were no midwives around in our area. There were a few midwives down in the coastal area. So, I began midwifing in 1980 and did that for 38 years, until 2018.
I had had a couple babies born out in the woods in our dome and so forth, so I was parenting little kids and we moved down to the Midcoast area, to Montville. I lived from ‘83 to ‘94 out in Montville but Belfast was my market community.
The thing with the fish farm goes way back in Belfast. It just goes way back. When we moved to the Belfast area in 83’ the chicken plant was still open, until I think 86’ or 87’. In the late 70’s, they were discharging guts, feathers, blood, poop, cleaning products directly into a pipe, it was squeegeed across the floor and went right out in the harbor. Which no doubt led to the complete abundance of lobsters in the Penobscot Bay.
When I really started coming in and getting involved in the City of Belfast was in 1994, when my now ex-husband and I, and another couple, started the Green Store. I kind of can’t believe we did it; none of us had any retail experience. At the time, about half of the storefronts were empty in Belfast. The chicken plant had closed, the shoe factory had closed in the red and white building, the sardine processing factory had closed, and MBNA which became BOA [Bank of America] was not here and Athena [Health] definitely was not here, there was just very little going on. All those carpentry companies that are so prevalent now weren’t here, all the art galleries weren’t here, the restaurants weren’t here, nothing was here. It was really something. A lot of buildings were vacant and decrepit all along the waterfront, residences as well as factories. All of that changed in 1996 when MBNA came to the city.
Flying at the front of the pack meant trying to make the business community in a beautiful little town that had had the good luck to make Route 1 take a bypass around it in the mid-50’s, so it was like, let’s get it right. There was an organization called Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility, which is still a national organization. There was just a whole bunch of really savvy business people that were about five to seven years older than me, on average, that I hung out with all I could. We had regular meetings and we hung out in Belfast.
It all began with mission and vision, this organizational stuff, that has been what has turned me on and powered me as a person. Learning about getting clear and organized in your mind about what it is you’re trying to achieve through your business or in your life, or how you are trying to integrate your life, your business or just your everyday life and relationships with people. It was incredibly transformative for me. There was a lot going on in Maine around that.
Lauren: What your story brings up for me is that the idea of Nordic coming into this town is all the more heartbreaking after putting in so many years of work to create a town that was thinking about the future on a small-scale and localized level.
Ellie: To me, staying engaged in movements, whether it’s sustainable business, is important. Why are people coming to Belfast? Because there are no downtowns left like this. There’s a few. But people come here and they are like, “Oh my God, these stores, these green spaces, this place where people are sitting outside, this mix of old and young, and this accessibility” and so forth.
