Walter A. Lawrance with students, Lewiston, ca. 1949
Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library
Maine and the Environment
In addition to tackling Maine's difficult economic problems, Governor Muskie addressed a longstanding need to improve the quality of Maine's river and coastal waters.
Before the war Maine hosted some 37 pulp and paper mills, 80 textile mills, and 11 large tanneries, each dumping tons of waste into the state's rivers daily.
This, along with raw sewage from riverside municipalities, raised serious health and nuisance problems. During the Depression, industrial output was relatively low, but as Maine and the nation mobilized for war, the pollution problem quickly became intolerable.
Because of slime, algae and foam on the rivers and the odor arising from many rivers, people began to protest and demand action. The complaints were mainly economic, but activists also raised quality-of-life considerations that would grow in importance as the economy improved.
As a result of these protests, the state created the Androscoggin River Authority in 1941. Engineers at Bates College required mill owners to build holding lagoons, and the authority set levels for discharge from the lagoons.
Meanwhile, a statewide Sanitary Water Board began classifying all Maine rivers at existing pollution levels; once completed, the classification would halt further deterioration of Maine's upper waters.
Summary of river condition, Lewiston, 1948
Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library
Still, the response was wholly inadequate; with no enforcement authority and an annual budget of only $400, the board moved at a glacial pace, and not a single action was taken against a polluter between 1942 and 1953.
The mid-1950s brought rising popular concern and creation of Maine's first modern environmental organization: the Citizens for Conservation and Pollution Control, formed in 1953 in Auburn.
Muskie's equivocal response reflected the realities of the era, in Maine as well as elsewhere. State agencies with an obvious interest in clean water – the Board of Health, the Fish and Game Commission, and the Development Commission – stood mute, and previous governors had all but ignored the crisis.
The "action clubs" in Lewiston and Auburn were in the hands of business leaders who, despite their frustrations, were ideologically unprepared to support strong regulatory measures, and Maine's citizenry, steeped in a tradition of citizen-lawmaking, feared giving a small body like the Water Improvement Commission veto-power over key segments of Maine's economy.
Industry lobbyists – the "Third House" in the state legislature – exercised enormous political influence, and legislators typically deferred to their mill-town colleagues when bills affecting paper production were proposed. The most formidable barrier, however, was Maine's economic climate. With the textile mills mired in depression, legislators were unlikely to endorse regulations that would further jeopardize Maine's competitive position.
Pine log drive on Machias River, ca. 1950
Ambajejus Boom House Museum
Progress on pollution was accordingly slow, but it was steady. And, by the 1960s, Senator Muskie was well positioned to aid Maine's antipollution campaign at the federal level. Under Muskie's leadership the federal government provided matching funds to encourage towns and cities to build waste treatment plants.
Although most pollution came from industrial sources, the new municipal treatment plants changed the politics of pollution. Cities began pressuring the legislature to force industry to do its share, and the Maine Municipal Association, once a formidable ally of the paper and textile industries, fell in line behind its constituents.
The federal Water Quality Act of 1965 required states to issue water quality standards, and these new regulations helped level the playing field as Maine tightened down its own regulations.
The environment was becoming a prominent political issue. In 1966 Bowdoin College photographer John McKee published As Maine Goes, a series of graphic black-and-white images depicting Maine landscapes degraded by pollution and sprawl, and in 1968 environmentalists Peter Cox and John Cole launched the weekly Maine Times, which set new standards for hard-hitting investigative reporting on environmental issues.
Jean Pollard's Polluted Paradise: The Story of the Maine Rape and William Osborn's Paper Plantation: The Nader Report on the Pulp and Paper Industry in Maine, both published in 1973, challenged industry's monopoly over Maine's rivers and forests, and both received widespread media attention throughout the state.
