A new threat to the coastal environment has appeared lately, moving generally under the radar in the era of highly publicized climate change, extreme weather, and increased hurricane activity. This real, if low-profile, threat has found its way downeast to the normally politically quiescent communities bordering Maine’s pristine waters.
The cruise ships are coming, and they’re coming in force. Depending on your point of view, this is either a good thing or a potential disaster. Business interests see dollar signs, with the promise of a future Miami North. Many ordinary residents, on the other hand, see crowds, pollution, and the beauty of their natural surroundings at risk.
Two small coastal towns, Rockland (population 7,000) and Bar Harbor (population 5,000) have wrestled in recent months with the question of whether to willingly accept becoming the newest T-shirt emporiums along the tourist waterway that now stretches north from the Caribbean; the alternative, a hopeless one some think, is to resist and try to preserve a unique environment.
Resistance means limiting vessel visitation by restricting anchorage permits, and controlling shoreline access (berthing piers and terminals, shore visits) and land-side service infrastructure (bathroom facilities, tour buses). In March, the Maine legislature temporarily stymied Bar Harbor’s developers by voting down an application for a port authority to facilitate expansion. Last fall, Rockland’s city council debated the pros and cons of fully laying out the welcome mat for the cruise lines, a conflict pitting chamber-of-commerce interests against opposing residents.
To some degree, the cruise industry is already in evidence. Bar Harbor, trailing only the large, well-established port of Portland, was visited by 105 cruise ships in 2016 and 166 in 2017; it expects a record 180 visitations once the 2018 season begins in April. The number of ship passengers coming ashore reached 185,000 last year, creating serious congestion and overcrowding problems in and around nearby Acadia National Park.
Rockland, coming late to the game, accommodated four large cruise liners carrying 2,000 passengers each in 2016; that rose to six in 2017, representing such prominent shipping companies as Royal Caribbean International and Norwegian Cruise Lines. Bookings are in for nine cruise visits in 2018. As far as the cruising industry is concerned, coastal Maine has reached the tipping point — critics would say the saturation point — and it’s decision-making time.
The decision facing Maine’s coastal communities is whether to get along by going along, allowing the cruise-ship industry to follow its bliss wherever that leads, or to push back and force a slowdown and reassessment. The Adriatic city of Venice, Italy, considered architecturally the most beautiful in the world, is the leading object lesson in the perils of doing the former.
Venice under siege is the cruising industry’s foremost cautionary tale. The island city is overrun by literally millions of tourists each year, 700,000 of them arriving by cruise ships that fill canals, tower over the skyline, and blot out scenic and historic landmarks like St. Mark’s Square. As many as a dozen of the floating behemoths crowd Venice’s inner waterways in a single day.
Proposed harbor developments to accommodate the expanding waterborne traffic include dredging new deepwater navigation channels, potentially undermining Venice’s famous lagoon by causing erosion and imperiling the fragile quasi-urban ecosystem, which encompasses over 100 alluvial islets. In 2016, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) placed maritime Venice on its list of endangered world heritage sites, yet no remedial action has been taken by the Italian government, which according to one respected observer, the Louvre Museum’s Salvatore Settis, has been seduced by the big money dangled before it by the tourism/cruise-ship complex.
The deep pockets of the cruise-line owners, acquired partially by treating their ships as floating tax havens, cannot be underestimated. According to the latest available figures, they control a $32 billion industry that claims to generate 330,000 US jobs, although the largest operator, Carnival Cruise Lines, accounts for only 37,000, most of them low-paying positions with minimal or nonexistent benefits and exceedingly long hours. Accurate data is sketchy and hard to come by, because while industry leaders Carnival and Royal Caribbean are headquartered in Miami and sail from there, they are incorporated in Panama and Liberia, respectively, and operate their ships under foreign “flags of convenience,” placing them beyond US legal jurisdiction, regulation, and (most importantly) taxation.
These companies are among Wall Street’s favorites, with perennially high profits and stock prices. (Carnival has annual revenues of $15 billion and a chairman, Micky Arison, in the Forbes 400.) As a group, they have not been averse to using their wherewithal to lobby heavily against attempted congressional legislation aimed at stronger regulation of their chronic pollution of the seas.
The primary cruise lines have not, in fact, been good corporate citizens; they have a long and deplorable history of despoiling the marine environment. Partly, this is a result of a revolution in naval architecture since the 1980s, which has turned cruise ships into huge floating cities that spew out concentrated waste products: sewage, garbage, plastics, wastewater, oily bilge refuse, and hazardous toxins.
Such discharges in American waters are restricted, but imperfectly and haphazardly by multiple conflicting laws and international protocols. Cruise lines have gamed the system whenever possible, giving lip service while covering up violations. In 2016, Carnival was prosecuted by the Obama Justice Department for illegal oil dumping in US territorial waters and served with a $40 million fine.
Pollution is an inevitable by-product of the mega-ship trend in cruising. In pursuit of the vacation dollar, cruise lines have entered the realm of wretched excess in vessel size, seeking to accommodate human cargoes of 3,000 to 5,000 people — or more. The latest example is Royal Caribbean’s new Symphony of the Seas, 18 decks high (access by elevator) and, at 228,000 gross tons, five times the size of the famous Titanic, with all the onboard entertainment accouterments and space for nearly 7,000 passengers and a 2,000-person crew.
Such cumbersome, top-heavy seagoing monstrosities appear clearly unstable, although their designers claim the opposite. Maybe so. Then again, the Titanic was considered unsinkable. Not to worry, though. If trouble arises, the US Coast Guard will come to the rescue, as it did twice in recent years for Carnival ships — at a $4.2 million cost to the exploited taxpayer.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2018
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