A Conversation with Devyn Campbell, Fisherman, and Candidate for Boothbay Harbor Selectman
A young man with strong beliefs and an inquiring mind and generational roots to the community
Yesterday I enjoyed a conversation with Devyn Campbell. Among the three candidates whom Justin Beth of the Maine Green Party. contacted, Devyn responded in the most pro-active way and so Justin suggested that I call Devyn.
I will get to the content of that discussion, eventually, but first I will add some new context that I recently learned. Devyn is the son of Nathan Cambell who is the son of June Rose, who is a good friend who has been very supportive of Andersen Design. After speaking with Devyn, I sent June a note who wrote back with this further information:
”Yes - Devyn is 20 years old - he will be 21 in September - He has always been ahead of his age verbally, especially when talking about his passions in life - -
Thanks for letting me know about your contact - - He hasn't run a big campaign - - but he has gained stature as a solid fisherman and was one of the committee members that saved the East Side Waterfront Park. He has quite a few adult friends who know of his good intentions and have told me they have enjoyed meeting him.”
Devyn’s age and his involvement in the East Side Waterfront Park is more reason to support him. I do not know if he will go full Green Party but I did say that the Green Party candidate should be of a younger generation and you can’t get much younger than twenty years old in politics. Devyn is a representative of the younger generation and of the local community with very long roots, and of course a solid voice for the working waterfront.
“The Fleet” has endorsed Devyn in this letter to the editor in the Boothbay Register, making the well-targeted point that the fishermen support the local tourist industry by providing the fish that is served in the local restaurants and also bringing up the intent by developer activists to change the ordinances that protect the working waterfront, which I wrote about in Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole Into A Dystopian World Or Is This Really Real?
Allyssa Allen is another local connection. She lived with her mother uphill from us when she was growing up. Her mother worked for our studio for a while, as did Nathan Cambell, Devyn’s father, and even June Campbell, Devyn’s grandmother. We provided year-round jobs, and potentially still can.
Terese Bryer responded to Justin with a thank you on Facebook. She also has a very local last name. I do not know if she is related to our town manager Dan Bryer and if they are related to the same Bryer family that attended the local school when I did, but I suspect this is so.
There has long been a culture clash between the deeply rooted locals and the new arrivals on this peninsula. My family was a new arrival in the 1950s but my parents moved to Maine because of what Maine was and what it was not- a grid-style community with regulations that would prohibit inhabitants from starting and growing a business in a home. The Boothbay Peninsula was then a place where roots-styled entrepreneurialism was possible, but as I frequently write about, that is no longer the case in Boothbay where the ordinances are written to allow businesses in a home but in an extremely limited way and as long as the business does not grow.
Today the Boothbay Peninsula has copied language word for word from the Industrial Partnerships Act (Maine 2013), which instructs municipalities to encourage businesses in a home to relocate to industrial parks, in the usual disconnected way of grid thinking that sees no individuality in business environments and asserts that the State knows best where every business should be located and everything else about running a private business as well. As of late when I have contacted centrally managed economic development resources in Maine, they have tried to be very helpful by advising me that I can get technical support from one of the state technology communes as if a technology came into being in the digital age. Andersen Design is a technological innovator in our own field, one of mankind’s oldest technologies that existed centuries before computers were invented, but the State barely recognizes ceramics as an industry, let alone technology. I have contacted some of the recommended resources to receive no response, and so after years of trying to connect with Maine economic development resources. to no avail, it is refreshing to find that it is possible to connect with people through politics.
For generations upon generations, many of the local people view the new arrivals as those who want to replace the pre-existing lifestyle and culture with what is called in contemporary terms, the megalopolis. My family moved to the Peninsula for what it was, a Garden City, as conceived of by visionary industrialists responding to the cesspool of the Industrial Revolution megalopolis. Unlike the suburbs, which also represented a return to a more natural environment, the Garden City included industry within a residential setting and in that sense, it was conceptually more holistic. In that tradition, my parents introduced something new to the area- operating a business in a home and ceramics as an industry, but what they introduced was in addition to not a replacement of the existing culture.
Devyn and I touched upon an introductory range of topics. About Allysa Allen, he said, “We know what she’s about”. I took “we” to mean the fishermen and his comment to mean that they did not feel she would represent them well. He added for clarification that she had worked for Paul Coulombe, which I was unaware of and have not verified. Coulombe is leading the movement to replace the existing culture of the peninsula with a wealthy tourist destination and supports the fifty-million-dollar school as a means to attract families with children to the area, but it has dubious financing plans.
Devyn is a young person of the peninsula. In regard to the forces at large, including those trying to change the ordinances protecting the working waterfront, he said the only thing they care about is money. This statement does not need verification as the advocates for the megalopolization of the Boothbay Peninsula are always reducing everything to money and taxes - as in “it is really stupid to put in a waterside park where there could be a commercial operation- think of all the lost taxes!”
We got into discussing the new floating windmill construction that is scheduled to go in around Monhegan island, another topic I likewise covered in Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole Into A Dystopian World Or Is This Really Real?. In brief, the project, billed as a University of Maine project is in partnership with other large corporations that are not as willing to work with the fishermen about where the windmills should be located as the fishermen want, adding that previous company, Statoli, now called Equinor, a project nixed by Paul Lepage. was better to work with. Equinor built the first floating windmill project off the coast of Scotland in 2014. It should be a good resource of study for the Maine project.
Devyn also brought up federal antitrust laws passed in the sixties that prevent lobstermen from forming a union. I was going to look that law up but instead, I came upon a PDF document published by the Ocean and Coastal Law Journal about the history of the Maine lobstering industry, starting in the 1930s. The title is Mayday, Mayday: Maine's Lobstermen Need Exemption From Federal Antitrust Laws. I am starting with that.
New England Aqua Ventus LLC, a joint venture between Diamond Offshore Wind, a subsidiary of the Mitsubishi Corp., and RWE Renewables, the second-largest company in offshore wind globally, has replaced the previous company behind the project, Maine Aqua Ventus 1 GP LLC, according to Jake Ward, vice president for innovation and economic development at the University of Maine. Lincoln County News - New Developers of Monhegan Wind Project Aim for 2023 Deployment
In such a young person of twenty years, Devyn Campbell has the right leadership qualities needed for the peninsula, long roots to the region, a connection through the land and sea, and an interest in the laws and ordinances and how they affect everything, which is essential to a selectman’s job.
Devyn is running in Boothbay Harbor, where the election takes place a week later than in Boothbay. where voting takes place on Monday. May Third from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Boothbay Town Hall at Boothbay Railway Village.