Robin Alden

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Robin Alden is the founding executive director of the Maine center for Coastal Fisheries. She retired at the end of December 2017 after 45 years of service in Maine's fishing communities. Thanks for coming in.

Robin Alden:

Great. Lovely to be here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So we're talking and the end of December 2017 has literally just happened. So you're really still kind of working?

Robin Alden:

I'm actually working this week, mopping things up and taking care of loose ends, yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So. So 45 years. That's amazing. I mean, you're not a very old person, so that's most of your adult life, I would guess.

Robin Alden:

Well, actually, I wasn't really an adult when I started because I was taking a year off from college and ended up in Stonington and became captivated with the mission that I've pursued ever since.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, talk to me about that, because I know that following your passion has been really important to you and also from what you tell me to your husband, and you've encouraged your son to do the same thing. So what was your passion that got you to this place in Stonington?

Robin Alden:

So it was a series of just chance things that landed me in Stonington and the job I lined up. I was taking a year off from college. I was a history major and I didn't really know. It was the early 70s, late 60s, and things were pretty tumultuous and I didn't really feel as if I knew what I wanted to study. And so I took a year off to kind of settle myself. My father had died When I was in high school. And he was a very important person in my life. And so I was still going through that grieving. And so I ended up in Stonington. The job I lined up didn't come through. And so I went down to the local paper because what do you know how to do when you're a sophomore in college? You know how to write. And that's about it. So I rapidly became aware that the freelance opportunities were covering the selectmen, covering the chamber of commerce, covering the school board, all land based, but the town ran on fishing. So I started interviewing fishermen and that connected things in my past together and with. So basically what I became aware of is how much fishermen know about the local ecology. They know things about mud that nobody else knows there is to know except for very, very specialized scientists. And they probably don't know the things that fishermen know because they have so many hours of observing the natural world. And so I also witnessed the frustration that fishermen felt at not being heard by scientists or policymakers in government. And so my 1960s activism said, oh, we can fix this. And so I spent the spring that year, I was off talking to fishermen. I just loved it. And to me it was the fishing seemed like the perfect business because it connects the. You have to take care of the earth, you have to take care of the ocean in order to be successful for the long term in making a living fishing. And you're feeding people and you're keeping community economies going. So it just, I felt as if I had found the answer and I wanted to make this disconnect, I wanted to fix this disconnect. And so the idea for starting a newspaper came to me sitting in a conference when I saw the then newly appointed commissioner, Marine Resources, Spencer Apollonio, talking with a fisherman from the mid coast. And they were talking about shrimp. And Spencer was a shrimp biologist, he knew a lot about shrimp and this fisherman knew a lot about shrimp. And they could not hear each other. And finally the fisherman said, I've got paint on my T shirt. I bet you've never had paint on your T shirt. And actually knowing Spencer, that's not true. But it was just this pure frustration. And I said to myself, what we need is something that presents the world that each one of these two people live in to the other one in a non threatening way. So I thought, oh, a weekly newspaper, not knowing anything about publishing that shows up on the desk or the kitchen table and just over time wears down those that, you know, bridges that gulf. And so long story short, I Didn't know anything about publishing and. And eventually got a monthly newspaper off the ground, which was called Maine Commercial Fisheries, and called my mother, who had been widowed a few years ago, and said, your daughter's dropping out of Yale and she's going to be starting a fisherman's newspaper with no money. Basically, that's what happened. And the newspaper's still going as Commercial Fisheries knew.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

How did your mother feel about that?

Robin Alden:

I was 21, so I didn't really register what she was feeling. Now, in retrospect, as a mother, I think about that and think that it must have been pretty devastating for her, but she ended up very proud of what I've done.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, let me rephrase the question. If you don't know how she felt, how did she respond? What did she say?

Robin Alden:

I really don't remember with the conversations, but I had $3,000 that my grandmother had given me and it was mine and that's what I did. And I waitressed and dug clams, not very successfully to try to make it happen during that next year. And the newspaper launched in September of 73.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I think you have, you've just kind of hit the nail on the head when you talk about when you're 21, you don't necessarily register because your parents say something and you think, well, I'm an adult, so you do move in that direction. But the interesting thing about what you're describing is that you were willing to do what needed to get done to make it happen, which doesn't always happen at the age of 21.

Robin Alden:

Yeah, I don't know where that came from or how it happened, but that's basically how I've done everything I've done because it's all been, you know, I eventually finished my degree at University of Maine in economics, but all of the things I've done have been self taught.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So where did that come from? Was this something that was modeled in your family? Was this something you learned in school? Where did you get the sense that you could figure out how to do what you needed to do?

Robin Alden:

I had a wonderful education. I grew up in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area. I went to independent schools and really. And I grew up in Cambridge during the. When Kennedy was president. And many of the parents of people that I knew were working in the Kennedy administration. So it was a sense of if there's a problem in the world, you need to step up and do something. And I had good tools and not good tools in terms of knowing things, but critical thinking skills. And I think I've always seen things as a whole. So, you know, some people are lumpers and some people are splitters. I'm definitely a lumper. And I see things in spectrums and the connections. And so I think that's why I approach fisheries in Maine and the future of fisheries in Maine as a major set of things that need to take place in order for fisheries to be successful. And it's, you know, it's everything from education to leadership to policy to really good science. The other thing, the other piece for this was my father was an amateur naturalist and had grown up on the water and worked on the water. And there's a lot of. I mean, if you've ever watched somebody sail small boats, they are very, very attuned to what the wind's doing, what the current's doing, what you name it. And that kind of fine scale observation is what fishermen do in order to make their living. And so, plus it was on the water. So it was a very nice way for me to connect to a father that I'd lost.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You spent summers in Maine and that was your original connection?

Robin Alden:

Yeah, my father was a schoolteacher and so he would take his little family to Maine while he got summer jobs working on the water. So he ran the yacht club in Prouts Neck for a number of years. We lived over the post office in a. And then later he was part of the founding of Hurricane Island Outward Bound School. And he did both the ecology and also the ran the waterfront there. But he died very early in Hurricane's history.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So that must have been a very formative time for you to lose your father so suddenly in high school.

Robin Alden:

Very much so, yep.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What I'm enjoying about this story is that essentially you saw that two different people representing two different groups had valuable information that they could each share but somehow were not able to interface on. And so often that seems to be the problem that it's not that one group knows more than the other group, they just know differently. And then somehow there's a translation issue. And so that's what I'm really enjoying about this conversation is that you understood the translation issue and you tried to find a way to break that down.

Robin Alden:

One of my favorite examples of this is actually with my husband, who is a lifelong fisherman. He grew up on Vinyl Haven and he fished his whole career except for when he went to the University of Maine and ended up with a master's in biochemistry, then decided that he wanted to go back fishing, but he needed to get a job while he got re established. So he Taught high school for a period of time and then went back fishing. And as he came ashore, he started to track historical groundfish locations. So cod and haddock and pollock and flounders are groundfish. They feed on the bottom of the ocean. And that was his favorite fishery. He fished every fishery that Maine fishermen fish. And so in the winter, he started mapping historical accounts that talked about where fish fisherman in Maine caught fish on the grounds that he knew. And he called me in one night, really excited, come look what I. And he had seen a pattern in his mapping. And I went in and looked at the screen and it looked like a bowl of spaghetti to me. I could not see any pattern. And that was what was going on, was that in his head, he had both the scientific rigor to map according to criteria three observations and all kinds of things, and the technical expertise to do the GIS mapping. And he knew the bottom of the Gulf of Maine, he knew that was a gully there, he knew there was a boulder over here, and he was seeing something that I couldn't see. And so he could see the pattern. And that's exactly what my life's work has been trying to do, is pull those things together. Because what we've learned about marine ecology in the last 40 years is that the local stock, there's much more local stock structure and local behavior and learned behavior in fish populations than we ever thought. The basic fisheries management has always been based on. Well, on average, there's fish in the ocean, and if you figure out how many are out there, you can figure out how many you should take, and then you'll live happily ever after. And it's not that simple. So this local ecological knowledge is much more important, and it's even more important now because of climate change.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Explore that a little bit more.

Robin Alden:

For me, if you're taking a mathematical approach to the ocean and saying, basically, you just need to know how many fish are out there. We can't see them, it's so bothersome. So we'll do sampling and then we'll build models and we'll be pretty good. And we are pretty good at that. We're not perfect, but we're pretty good. The underlying assumptions of that approach to fisheries is that it's basically a static system. We know it's dynamic and there's things built into the model to be able to show that, but it's fundamentally clunky. It's not really adaptive. Climate change isn't something that happens at a big scale. It happens at a lot of small scales. So the currents may change and one bay may change a lot, but the other, outside of that bay, it may not change, or this year or in this decade. So the fishermen who spend more hours on the ocean than any research cruise entity can ever hope to have the money to do, they are the first line observers. And if their observations are actually funneled into a process of science that has figured out how to accept this type of observation. And one of the questions you asked me before I came in here was, what's changed? When I published, I left the newspaper for a while in the mid-70s, and I was working for the sea Grant program at the University of Maine. And as part of that, we purchased a page in Commercial Fisheries News and I ran a newsletter there. And in one of those articles, I said, fisherman's observations are really good basis for scientific hypothesis. You don't have to accept them as truth, but they're a great set. They provide really good questions that can produce better science, more, more in depth perceptions than you would get if you were sitting in your ivory tower asking questions. So the federal agency, Scientific Lab, the leader of it, went to Washington to terminate my funding.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Wow, that's. And you were, you were just a college student.

Robin Alden:

I was at that point back in school, working half time and in my mid-20s and luckily the vice president for research, famous guy in the University of Maine, Fred Hutchinson, who eventually came back and was the president, interviewed me and talked me through and he said, this is within academic freedom and we'll support you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why do you think there was such a strong response?

Robin Alden:

I was threatening the established. Back then, there was no collaborative research. Basically, people's approach to fisherman's knowledge was. I'd be extremely surprised if that were true. They assumed that it was an us in them. And fishermen were always trying to get more. And what I said when I started the paper, and it's true today, is I've been trying to give voice to all the fishermen who sit in the coffee shop and say, well, what they ought to do is. And they're not talking about, sure, every fisherman's aggressive, not every fisherman, but humans are greedy. They want to get more, whatever. But there is this underlying conservation and observer theme in most fishermen and certainly in some fishermen. And those are the people who are really thinking about, I want my grandchildren to be able to have this lifestyle. This is the best. I'm in the best business that there's ever been. And I want to make sure that we restrain ourselves because we don't necessarily, you know, we don't always make the right decisions. And I want to contribute my observations and will somebody listen to me?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As we've been talking, it has reminded me of the struggle that just for example, healthcare providers have where there is the scientific knowledge, which is proven by numbers, and then there is the clinical knowledge, which as a doctor for, you know, more than two decades now, there's stuff that I have learned by being on the ground, you know, by sitting with patients over and over and over again. But that's not the stuff that comes down from the scientific bodies. And yet both are very valuable. And I think a lot of doctors feel as if we don't have a voice in patient care these days.

Robin Alden:

That's really interesting because you also are increasingly regulated industry where a lot of what you're able to get paid for, you know, the patient's able to get paid for or whatever is may not. It has to be based on all of those scientific studies and doesn't readily lend itself to.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Which is not unlike fisheries.

Robin Alden:

Very similar. I hadn't thought of it quite that way. But you're, you're right. And it's the same kind of fine observation, fine scale observation.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So do you think that this is an evolving change that we are seeing?

Robin Alden:

I actually think that fisheries management's at a pivot point right now because of the acknowledgment of climate change. And that is. So first of all, fisheries is always about policy because it's a public resource. So you always have government involved, whether it's the town managing their clams or their alewives or the state or the federal agency. And that's the federal agency regulates outside three and the state inside three. But there's lots of collaborative interagency connections that make all of that work. So you always have to have government because otherwise there's no form of restraint. And that's been true. I mean, throughout human history, there have been rules or taboos that have tried to allow humans to live within the bounty that the earth provides. So government science is in a terrible position all the time because if they make the wrong decision one way, they're sued by the environmentalists. If they make the wrong decision the other way, the industry sues them. And in fact, often if they just make any decision, they get attacked from both sides. So it's a very defensive, conservative, cautious process. And I think this is again, health care would be, is a good analogy probably in the same situation. So if you're looking at the history of science, this changes very slowly. And most of fishery science has been federal for many, many years because that's where that's the only group that's had the incentive to have money for fishery science. Increasingly there is academic science going on as well and that's a big change. Part of where Maine has led the way in some ways on this. So there isn't a lot of, there hasn't been as much challenge and debate with the science that affects regulation, that affects fishermen. And so where there may be a lot of recognition, let's say about this fine scale population structure that exists not just for codfish in the Gulf of Maine not but for scallops in the Gulf of Maine. Who ever thought that in, in one small 14 square mile bay in Maine the scallops are genetically different from the scallops outside there? Or that in the middle of the Pacific a reef fish that's an inch long homes not just to the reef where they were hatched from, but to the specific portion of the reef. There's a lot of complexity that government science hasn't been able, the policy hasn't caught up to be able to figure out. And I think now that we're facing that we've got a dynamic situation. We're going to have to figure out what are the, what's the political structure, what's the, what are the decision, what's the decision making structure that's going to allow us to adapt faster. And I think that, you know, where I've been interested in and where I've been greatly affected by Jim Wilson, who's a marine professor in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. He's economist, but he's been very involved in both sort of the interface between ecology and fisheries policy. And he's been looking at computer complex adaptive system theory basically. And what you do when you have what you call a wicked problem or a very complex problem is you set up feedback loops, rapid feedback loops so that you're learning and you do this in a hierarchical way so that you can. Because there are some things that matter at the very fine scale local and there's some things that have to be done at a bay or gulf or ocean wide scale. And so for me the political science fascination right now is how do you set up systems that human beings can live within that create this information loop and that's decision making, adaptive decision making that makes smart, smart decisions going forward. And I think there are many, many people thinking about this now. And although the laws have not are still lock us into the old way of doing things at the Federal level, I think at the state level there's much more room for innovation. And I think and some of the things that we've been involved with recently are going to be contributing to the federal agency being able to experiment a little bit.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Like what?

Robin Alden:

As you mentioned, I'm just in the process of retiring right now. And one of the things that I am really pleased to have been able to do before I left was to develop an agreement with the National Marine Fisheries Service and the state of Maine in order to, and the organization that I led until just now, Maine center for Coastal Fisheries, to develop the science that would allow an ecosystem based approach to fisheries in the eastern Maine area. And this is just, it isn't even fully, we don't even know what this means yet. But the idea is two agencies in our organization have agreed to work to say how would we do this? It's a science agreement and it will take a number of years to figure this out, but we'll learn by doing. And it's building on the scallop co management process that Maine center for Coastal Fisheries was instrumental in helping get going in the state of Maine with the Department of Marine Resources. It will build on other types of local citizen science that's going on at the clam level or at the alewife level and we'll just see where it leads. But it gives Maine center for Coastal Fisheries and Paul Anderson, who's the new executive director, a wonderful focus for the next era.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I was thinking about the interview I did with Abigail Carroll, who is an oyster farmer, I guess she calls herself, and her mentioning that different oysters in exactly the same location can have different characteristics based on how far down in the water they are. So when you were talking about the these microscopic environmental changes that impact an organism, I was thinking how interesting it is that we live in a time that we now can see these things and we're just on the cusp of being able to do something with this information.

Robin Alden:

And that's what I mean about the basis for hypothesis or the basis for a business decision. Because there are all these things. We can't see currents, we can't see plankton distribution. These things are invisible. Some are too big for us to see, some are too small for us to see. We see the indicators which are the oysters at the bottom are growing differently than the oysters in the middle than the top. And as the currents change with temperature changes, we're going to have different plankton availability in different places at different depths. It's absolutely fascinating.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I appreciate the 45 years of service that you have given to Maine's fishing communities and also the time that you've taken to come up here, I guess down here from where you live in Stonington. I've been speaking with Robin Alden, who is the founding executive director of the Maine center for Coastal Fisheries, who retired at the end of December 2017, but I suspect it's not the last we will hear from you.

Robin Alden:

Thank you very much. A privilege to be able to do this.