Stretching from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, the Gulf of Maine is an economic and cultural cornerstone of New England. For centuries, humans have altered and exploited these waters. But as the climate changes, scientists are more worried than ever about the future of this rich ecosystem — which is warming 97% faster than the rest of the ocean, providing a glimpse of what could be to come.
NOVA’s upcoming three-part documentary series “Sea Change: The Gulf of Maine” immerses audiences in this environment to chart its history and see how jobs, residents and wildlife are adapting to change. GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath discussed the documentary series with John Bredar, one of the series’ executive producers and vice president of national programming at GBH. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: So first off, let’s dive right into the history of the Gulf of Maine — which as the documentary says, has provided immense natural bounty as long as humans have been here. But one of the things that jumps out right away is that the recent history of humans exploiting the Gulf of Maine is also a history of humans exploiting humans.
John Bredar: Yep, it’s a conflicted history — seriously so. The story there is the Triangular Trade from New England to the Caribbean and West Africa, where human slaves were part of that equation.
The history of New England — and a significant part of Massachusetts history — involves the export of cod, massive amounts of cod. In fact, so much that the wealth that was accumulated in Massachusetts was often referred to as building the “Cod Aristocracy.”
But unfortunately, a lot of that was due to trade in human cargo. And it’s just part of our past. It’s one of the remarkable twists, not all of them delightful, in this story of this incredible body of water.
Rath: It’s amazing seeing the role of cod in the slave trade. That’s how salted cod became a thing that people ate in West Africa?
Bredar: Yeah. That’s really interesting. We interviewed writer Mark Kurlansky, who has written a number of books, one on the history of cod. Through him, we learned about how the economies of those colonies were built. But Mark makes that point, he said that salt cod became a staple in West African cuisine, which was not something that I was aware of.
Rath: It’s easy to understand the effects of overexploitation and overfishing. There was once a lot of cod and now there’s not. What are the ways in which we’re seeing climate change manifest in the Gulf of Maine?
Bredar: So we’re starting to see the arrival of a lot of species that hadn’t previously been in the Gulf of Maine in great numbers. A good example of this is this little pernicious creature called the green crab. They’re an introduced species to the gulf of Maine — I think they’ve been in the gulf for over 100 years — but when the waters were cold because of our cold winters, their populations were kept relatively low.
But, as the gulf warms, scientists and fishermen are starting to see that green crab populations are exploding because they really do well in warmer water. And what they do is they undermine existing systems and species — they eat away at seagrass and habitat in salt marshes. They also like to feed on clams. And we have this amazing footage in the film — if you’ve seen a really quick shucker in an oyster bar, these green crabs, they shuck clams unbelievably. You can watch them. They just eat them, even when they’re little, teeny tiny. But they’re devastating the clam industry in the gulf.
So that’s a really good example of how you can see the direct impact of warming water and there are a lot of other examples in the show.
Rath: And the green crab, right now, seems like it’s winning. You show how the clam industry is really profoundly threatened by this. Is there hope?
Bredar: Well, I think there is hope, and we see it in a couple of different ways. It’s not to underplay the threat posed by something like green crabs, because the scale of the green crabs is something really to be contended with. But there’s still hope.
We meet a guy named Mike Masi, who is a former high school science teacher who lives just north of Massachusetts. And he basically defines it like this: “Green crabs are here in large numbers. That’s a resource. Let’s figure out how to use the resource.”
Not to be too cute about it, but he’s suggesting that maybe we could eat our way out of this problem. He’s starting a soft-shell green crab fishery. And he works with a bunch of different restaurants in the Portsmouth area, and he is persuading lobstermen that, if they want to have a side gig that can generate some decent revenue, they can put in three hours of work and make up to like $70 an hour harvesting soft-shell green crabs.
There’s also a pet food industry that can be spun up — and has been spun up — out of harvesting them. So, that’s one way it’s being addressed.
As far as the clams go, there’s another sequence in the film — and a fabulous story — about an enterprise happening way down east in Maine, where they’re basically farming clams with “clam gardens” is what they call them. That’s a really fantastic enterprise, and they’re starting to see some pretty good success.
Rath: They’re sort of protected the way that seedlings are protected.
Bredar: Yeah. You see these boxes that they set out — and the boxes are wrapped in a mesh that protects them from the predations of the green crabs. It brings them along so that they can get to a certain size where they’re no longer vulnerable. Then the clams can make their own way and, hopefully, return to what was actually one of the most lucrative fisheries in the United States.
Rath: Staying on the positive note of looking for solutions: One of the interesting lines that jumped out from this film was that, as much as the Gulf of Maine is showing us everything bad that’s happening with the oceans right now, there are also solutions to be found in the Gulf of Maine. What does that mean?
Bredar: The Gulf of Maine has this history of innovation and entrepreneurship. And a good bit of that innovation — over the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries — was pretty devastating to the Gulf of Maine. But it has always been a kind of a feature, maybe you want to call it “Yankee innovation.”
And we see that again today, but now we see it in what’s referred to as the “blue economy,” which is the development of a lot of different companies who are trying really ardently not to increase the carbon footprint or the carbon load in the Gulf of Maine.
So you’ve got kelp farmers, you’ve got people who are doing something called multi-trophic farming, which is when they raise mussels on the same ropes that are woven into a kelp far. And that may seem like a crazy idea — but, in fact, kelp is a carbon sink and it absorbs carbon out of the seawater. And if it does that, it has a beneficial effect on the mussel shells. They grow more robust shells, and they’re meatier mussels.
So you get this really interesting science happening where there’s an upside, and there are things to be hopeful about.
The first episode of the three-part documentary series, “Bounty in the Gulf of Maine,” airs July 24 at 10 p.m. on GBH 2.
