By BEN JACKSON
Just what is it about the coast that draws so many to it? From turn-of-the-century painters to middle-aged Connecticut brokers in SUVs, it seems the shore’s power to attract, rejuvenate and inspire us has changed little, even if economics have. Dr. John Roberts explored the reasons why at a lecture given on Thursday, November 19, at the Marine Environmental Research Institute.
The former pediatrician and emeritus professor at Boston University also has served previously as president of the Blue Hill Historical Society. His talk, the last in this year’s Ocean Environment Lecture Series, entitled “Living on the Edge (of the Sea),” centered on the question of why people pay huge sums of money for shorefront real estate.
The average appraised value of a one-acre house lot in Blue Hill in 2008 was around $30,000. A comparable piece on the water in South Blue Hill cost upwards of $600,000.
To find the underlying reason for this disparity meant looking for a deeper understanding of what attracts us to the coast—the spiritual, biological and metaphysical answer to an economic question.
Inspired, he says, by Harvard University sociobiologist E.O. Wilson’s concept of “consilience” (meaning a synthesis of different sciences and humanities, or a “unity of knowledge,” according to Wikipedia), Roberts scavenges through historical archives, media headlines, galleries of New England seascapes, economic forecasts, statistics, assessor’s maps and recent theoretical anthropology—picking up along the way various flotsam and jetsam of information like an enthusiastic beachcomber.
He started off his talk in the prosperous Blue Hill of the early 19th century, when shipbuilding and shipping (mostly timber in Blue Hill) gave the area its first and only “golden age” of capital and commerce. It was a time, says Roberts, when trash was simply “thrown on the shore” and lobsters pulled from the rocks by hand “and fed to the pigs.”
Though it’s hard to imagine the people of the day not enjoying sunrises in the bay or watching a wild storm from shore, the draw to the sea was driven by the wealth that could be made from it rather than any lofty aesthetic feelings.
But by the end of the American Civil War most of those industries had fallen by the wayside: what sailing vessels that remained unscathed by the war were fast losing out to steam power, and cargoes of ice, granite and lumber were fast being made obsolete by new technologies and markets elsewhere. “A sad time” for Maine, says Roberts.
It was the traveling painters of the mid-19th century from prosperous Eastern cities, who through their depictions of coastal Maine scenery, fueled a much greater migration of well-off city-dwellers to the area in the coming years. With polio epidemics and the pollution from industrialization back home in the urban centers, coupled with new-found wealth, the clean air, sea spray and idealized rural charm of Maine was irresistible to the vacationers.
Roberts points out, however, that for the people already living here, there was little in the way of picnics, pleasure boats “finely dressed ladies” or golf. People got by mostly through serving the vacationing class or in local sardine and clam canneries.
This tension between working waterfronts and vacation land has run through Maine culture ever since—the tourism industry overtaking fishing profits only in the 1970s, according to Roberts. The trend of well-off urban dwellers resettling the rural coast is, he says, global.
The difference today, says Roberts, is demographic: a 2006 Blaine House conference on aging forecasts that, between 2010 and 2020, the population over the age of 65 in Blue Hill, Ellsworth and Bar Harbor will double. A large-scale migration of retirees, often with sights set on shorefront homes, may well mean “the working waterfront will be all but gone,” says Roberts. Welcome to “retirement land,” the way life should be.
Roberts says he finds that for coastal towns, taxing these shorefront properties is a “goldmine.” He surveyed the tax maps and says he found that if a quarter of the value of shorefront properties was somehow lost, Blue Hill would bring in about a third less tax revenue.
One variable in all this might be rising sea levels influenced by melting polar ice. A rise of 3’ (considered a conservative estimate by some) would mean a .5 percent decrease in Blue Hill’s area, while an 18’ rise would mean a loss of 1.6 percent. Surrounding seaside towns like Brooklin and Brooksville stand to lose more than five times that. How global climate change will affect the expected exodus to the coast remains to be seen, but Roberts says it doesn’t seem to have any effect so far on those moving: “even though sea levels keep rising, people keep moving.”
As for explaining the attraction in the first place, Roberts points to the oft-cited fact that human bodies are 60 percent water (55 percent for women). Not only that, he says, but we share 88 percent of our DNA with sea urchins and depend on the omega 3 fatty acids of marine food webs.
He also cites anthropologist Michael Crawford’s support for a theory of human evolution in which early hominids first walked upright to cope with shallow marine environments (against the more mainstream view of running on open savannah).
But the deep attraction to water might also lie in the fact that both the origins of life on Earth and our inception in the womb happen in similarly oceanic environments. “We feel the tug of its amniotic power,” Roberts says, quoting French novelist Yann Queffélec.
Roberts put his question to several local artists, musicians and poets (the artists, he says, are “still hanging around here”) and shared their answers, who said it was the “energy,” “constant change” and “penultimate silence” of the sea that led them to settle on its shore.
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