Scripting Maine’s Environmentalist Majority: The “Theater of Oil,” 1968-1975

Abstract

Christopher Beach argues that Maine's contemporary environmental movement was created in the late 1960s when oil companies seeking sites for new refineries and tanker ports saw the Maine coast as ideally situated for expansion: close to southern New England and the mid-Atlantic coast, but relatively undeveloped and in need of economic re-energizing or so they thought. Hearings and conflict among fishers, state and local officials and politicians, residents (seasonal and permanent) and environmentalists created a long-term debate that in turn spawned a new understanding of Maine as a pastoral landscape for the modern world. Christopher Beach received his J.D. from the University of Maine School of Law and his Ph.D. in Cana dian-American History from the University of Maine. He is an assistant professor of History/Humanities at Unity College in Unity, Maine.