None of the editors of From the Ground Up pretends to be an expert on fisheries, or marine and coastal ecosystems. Yet we know these are crucial pieces of the integrated landscape of New England conservation and communities. Luckily, our past work has touched the sea often enough that we do know a few people who can help us dip our toes in the water.

Sea and shore tie to terrestrial ecosystems in important ways. Most directly, they are connected by nutrient runoff from forests, farms, roads, cities, and towns. So much of what we create on the land ends up in the sea—from the ground down, if you will. But New England land and sea share more: a history of Native dispossession, followed by rampant exploitation. The rise of a voracious market economy that drove both land and sea to become mere suppliers of commodities and quickly depleted many of those commodities, along with other ecological values.

Land and sea also share more hopeful but tenuous threads of ecological recovery, still far from a complete reweaving. Millions of alewives are returning to Maine rivers, primarily because of the removal or opening of dams. Will they now move through the food chain to help support the return of cod? Both land and sea are also blessed with deeply rooted working cultures of people who understand them, but struggle to care for them as well as they might, given economic realities. And both belong to a beloved natural and cultural landscape that has itself become a commodity, increasingly available only to those with enough wealth—making access increasingly unaffordable for those who actually work on land or sea, or want to.

The most striking similarity that links New England forests, farms, and fisheries is the need to rebuild and maintain robust, complex ecosystems, and to harvest sustainably from them while enjoying all their other benefits. But the market mainly rewards more “efficient” extraction from simplified ecosystems: monoculture row crops, pulpwood, lobster. I once heard fisherman-turned-fisheries-scientist Ted Ames describe the Gulf of Maine as “a collapsed ecosystem crawling with crustaceans.” The lobster fishery has been productive and well managed for a century now, mostly by those who catch the lobsters. That is good, but perhaps there are more lobsters out there than there might be, and not enough larger, longer-lived things—like, say, cod. And maybe those things are somehow connected.

Last spring, our ecological forestry issue explored how to rebuild and sustain healthy forests, while still making a decent living from them. We have addressed similar challenges in farming. Think of this issue as our first take on ecological fisheries—how we empower fishermen to care for and harvest from entire, complex ecosystems.

We start with Joshua Stoll reflecting on the importance of reconnecting people, from fishers, to eaters, to the sea. Marissa McMahan digs into a leading example in clamming, and Monique Coombs looks at the challenges to coastal communities posed by gentrification. We have an interview with Carter Newell on the history of mussel and oyster farming, a photo essay from Paul Breeden that shows how even bustling wharves and waterfronts have a serene beauty to them, and a book chapter from Chelsea Steinhauer-Scudder on the threats to salt marshes.

We move from Maine to Massachusetts, where Wayne Castonguay reviews coordinated efforts by state agencies and nonprofit organizations to protect and restore key coastal ecosystems including salt marshes, eelgrass meadows, and oyster reefs. Then we have an interview with Sarah Schumann from Rhode Island on the conflicts and complexities of protecting the ocean as a healthy ecosystem and productive fishery, but also as a crucial place for large-scale wind energy production and carbon capture, in the face of climate change.

This is just an introduction to this complicated subject, and we will return to it in future issues. The sea around us cannot be a place that is mostly out of sight, out of mind—where people enjoy a day at the beach or an occasional sail; where we (mostly invisibly) procure all the lobsters, clams, and scallops that the present state of nature can supply; and where we hope to consign a large part of our electricity generation—as long as the turbines are tiny on the horizon. In the end, truly healthy, productive, and accessible coastal and marine ecosystems will be the surest sign that we are getting things right on the land, too.

With gratitude,
The Editors of From the Ground Up

Brian Donahue, David Foster, Marissa Latshaw (Publisher), Alex Redfield, and Liz Thompson (Managing Editor)