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Down East Magazine, May 2025
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Philip Conkling
Joined09.09.21
Articles22
Philip Conkling is a Camden-based environmental consultant and the author of Islands in Time: A Natural and Cultural History of the Islands of the Gulf of Maine. Photographer Peter Ralston lives in Rockport and operates The Ralston Gallery. In 1983, the pair co-founded the Island Institute and its keynote publication, The Island Journal.
Lobsterboats and a purse seiner, photographed from Spruce Head Harbor, looking out over the Muscle Ridge Channel.
Land, Water & Wildlife

Just Say No?

For decades, Maine lobstermen and fishermen have had the same simple strategy to almost every proposed regulation.
Scott Lermond wrestling with a fyke net at the mouth of the Goose River
Land, Water & Wildlife

Eeling and Dealing

How a voracious market for Maine elvers inspired one aquaculture entrepreneur to start an eel farm.
Land, Water & Wildlife

The Speed of Spring

A unique school project exemplifies what a devoted, creative teacher can bring to our lives.
Our Towns

Lessons on Community — And Its Fragility

For lack of one person in one critical role, a whole community can disintegrate.
Vinalhaven’s wind farm rises through the clouds. Ralston calls this image Prophets, a nod to “the vision it took on the part of the community to make this extraordinary project happen.”
Issues & Politics

Tilting at Windmills

Where and how we are going to get most of our power in a fossil-free future?
Ralston captured the Native Son hauling traps off North Haven in 2007, a grand summer home looming behind.
Our Towns

Summah People, Some Ahn’t

Thanks to a shared love of place, summer folk and locals can communicate across what are sometimes vastly different experiences.
Land, Water & Wildlife

Circe’s Island

Like the Homeric enchantress, Betsy Wyeth created a magical new world on Allen and Benner islands.
Land, Water & Wildlife

In Winter’s Depths, Glimpses of Spring

“Robins are one of the supreme surprises of February, when nature’s rosy shades slowly return to our dawn and dusk skies.”
The steeple from Camden’s former Methodist church, built in 1893, rises up behind ship-mast crosses in the harbor in this photo that Ralston calls Faith, taken in 1989.
Land, Water & Wildlife

A Season for Faith and Ritual

You don’t have to be a druid to appreciate spiritual customs this time of year.
Ralston took this photo, titled Thorofare, in 1986, flying in a friend’s plane at dawn over the Fox Islands Thorofare, in Penobscot Bay. “I’ve been on virtually every island in this photograph,” he wrote in his book Sightings: A Maine Coast Odyssey.
Land, Water & Wildlife

Never Say No to an Island

"It turned out everything I had been taught about islands was, in Maine's case, wrong."
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