Growth comes with costs. On this episode of Here's The Thing, Alec Baldwin talks to two individuals who are protecting places that are most vulnerable to development and destruction.
Andrew Berman has been called one of the most powerful people in New York real estate, but not because he's a deep-pocketed developer. Berman is the Executive Director of The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, where he advocates for the protection and conservation of historically important buildings and sites, including cultural touchstones like the Stonewall Inn. Rob Synder works with thousands of individuals living on islands off the coast of Maine. His organization Island Institute develops community alliances, economic programs, and sustainability initiatives to ensure that island culture remains vibrant, and that local resources remain intact as climate changes and development encroaches.
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to. Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policy makers, and performers, to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work? This week, conservation a subject I'm deeply committed to. My guests today are passionate about protecting two very different locations. Rob Snyder helps island and remote coastal communities in Maine adapt to changing environmental and economic factors. But first I sit down with Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Berman goes after the big dogs in New York City real estate, like n y U and Donald Trump, and he and his team can count many victories. Under his direction, the society secured landmark protection for over one thousand buildings. I want to know about his biggest heartbreak, the building that got away. I expected him to be moaned the upcoming expansion of the Chelsea Market, pushed through by Christine Quim, former Speaker of the New York City Council and Merrill candidate, But I got a very different response. You know this is gonna sound sort of strange, but one of my personal favorites that we lost was this beautiful building called the Tunnel Garage, which, believe it or not, was a parking garage. Would you would never think who would care about a parking garage? It was one of the first purpose built parking garages in New York. It was this beautiful Art Deco building that had a medallion on it that was an image of a model t forward emerging from the Holland Tunnel, which hadn't even yet been built. When this tunnel, which was built near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Where was this. This was on the corner of Broom Street and Thompson Street, so sort of at the edge of soho the South Village. Beautiful building, I mean it really, if there's a parking garage anywhere on Earth that people would rhpsodize about, it was this one. And it had been on sort of lists for years of a building to be saved. A developer came along and bought it and said, you know, I just want to tear it down and build a slightly larger condominium building. Here. How many stories, eight stories? How many units? I think about thirty or so, you know, pretty a bland, you know, sort of you never look at the building, you never look at it twice. What's another example, Well, here's one where sort of the opposite. There was a vacant lot at the northern end of the Greenwich Village Historic District and there was a plan to develop it, which we had no objections to. You know, vacant lots are there to be developed. Um. But the developer put forward a proposal for this thirteen story curving, entirely glass walled building in the Greenwich Village Historic District and we thought that's ludicrous, that would never never be approved. What does that have to do with the Greenwich Village Historic District. The notion is new development in these areas should kind of fit the character. They don't have to mimic it. It doesn't have to be a town some compatibility. The Commission unanimously approved it, which we were really taken aback by. Um. What's one that was a tremendous victory for you whereas where something where you guys really fought and scored. I'd say one of the ones that we're most proudest of is the part of Greenwich Village South of Washington Square what we often called the South Village, the part of Greenwich Village that everybody associates with, you know, the folk Revival, the Beatnicks in the nineties and nineteen sixties. Bleaker McDougal. That area amazingly was not protected by landmark protections. Any of those buildings could have been demolished and replaced with pretty hiddeo New York. Yes, very much so. UM And after really fifty years of people trying to get that area landmarks, we were able to get it landmarked in two stage. Uh. It took uh thousands of people really coming together and pushing the city. In One part of it is we actually had almost sort of blackmailed the city. They wanted to get an area adjacent to that reasoned as basically a sort of a stop to a developer, Trinity real Estate in this case, UM, and we pushed the city council to say, we won't approve the reasoning that you the city want, unless you move ahead with this landmarking that the community has been asking for for years. So we really kind of backed them into a corner. UM. And we, to be honest, we sort of used um election year of politics as a bit of a cudgel. Um. You know, people were trying to look like they were being friendly to the community, so uh, we were able to make them do something that they had not wanted to do and had been unwilling to do for years. What area do you live in yourself? I actually live in Hell's Kitchen, so I'm a bit further to the north. UM, but I'm a lifelong New Yorker. I've worked in the village where I grew up, in the Bronx, but I've been working in the village and on the West side of Manhattan since uh for over twenty years. Where did you go to schools? I went to Bronx High School of Science. UM, so I've lived in New York my whole life. What about college where you go? I went to as Leyan University. Would you study art history with a focus on architecture and urban planning? Talk about if you would. What happened to Christine Quinn with the Chelsea Market, Because of my understanding is correct, that was in her district. And I want to be very clear that during that political race, I endorsed de Blasio and worked for de Blasio and did not support Quinn. And this is not you know, to bash Quinn at all, but describe what happened in that Chelsea marketing and what you think was going on pressures that were on her. Yeah. Well, so you know, Chelsea Market is this old industrial complex built by Nibisco in Chelsea, UM. That was Nibisco Factories, Bisco Factories where the oreo was invented bakery. Yeah, and who developed into into the current Chelsea market how long ago? It was originally another group of people, including a guy named Irwin Cohen, and that was in the late ninety nineties that have been sitting there basically abandoned UM. And he came up with this idea that everybody thought was crazy at the time because this was a real backwater fifteen years ago, of turning it into this huge retail market UM with offices and things like that. Yeah, and it was wildly successful. You know, the neighborhood around it transformed. It's a huge building. It's a beautiful old building, but it's a huge building. They have air rights up above. They did not have air rights up above, and that that's that's where the key comes in with this. So they wanted to build basically two towers on top of this lovely old building. But they couldn't because they had no development on top of the eight stories that are already there on top of the building that already exists. So they came to the city and they said, we want you to rezone us to give us these stories that they Originally it was going to be, uh, the addition was going to go up to something like two fifty feet in the air or something like that. I mean huge, and one on the west end, one on the Yeah, yeah, huge building, huge building. Um. And you know, at this point Quinn had already kind of shown herself to be very willing to be accommodating to developers, so we knew this was going to be an uphill battle at best. Although Chelsea was where she was from, and a lot of the people who were very animantly opposed to it, where people she'd known and worked closely with for years, We were opposed to it as well, and she did eventually approve it. A slightly scaled back version made it a little less a little less bad as the work started already. No, and when it's not been clear to us why they haven't moved ahead yet, but they have all the approval, so it's really up to them to go any time that they want. But this was definitely a disappointment. And what was particularly disappointing was that there were commitments that were quote unquote made as part of this approval about how it would have to remain all independent businesses, there couldn't be chain stores and all these other kinds of things, which it turned out none of these agreements were enforceable. It was really just sort of window dressing to this approval that the city gave them, and that's disappointing when you see things like that happen. When do buildings need to come down? Things have to change, We need to make room for more people. Is that a reality for you? Oh, it's absolutely reality, and you know we would want Did you acknowledge that one you wanted to save ultimately didn't need to be saved. I'll give you an example. There's areas of um Our neighborhoods where we've fought for new zoning that we thought would encourage good development as opposed to bad developments, which meant the expectation was things will get built. Give us an example of an area where this kim into play. For instance, in the East Village. We working with a coalition, we're able to get almost the entire East Village re zoned. So the old zoning would have encouraged big, tall towers, It would have encouraged building things like dormitories and hotels. Believe it or not, but as an n y U, that's where n Yu went to build a lot of their dormitories and along Third Avenue in that area. Yes, and we didn't want to see n Yu take over the East Village, so we pushed foreign got a rezoning that said, yes, there can be new development here, but the size and scale of it is going to be more like what you think of the East Village. Seven story building, six story buildings. This is what zoning does. You can get these what are called contextual zoning districts that says you can build but to a certain high, certain number of square feet, things of that nature. So we've seen a lot of developments go up in the East Village under this new zoning that are so much more in character with the neighborhood than what would have been built under the old zoning. So we weren't pushing there to say no new buildings or nothing can ever be torn down, but that there should be new buildings, but it should really reinforce the character of the neighborhood. Just around the corner from our office, there was a huge parking lot that was just built on with an eight or nine story building. Right next door to it is a dorm that n YU built a couple of years earlier. That's twenty six stories. Um, there's been quite a few new buildings closer to the traditional campus, but this will be a whole additional campus for the university. Do you feel like, um, the city you turn around one day, you know, we have another subway tunnel, we have water tunnels that are coming in. I mean, the city is constantly, constantly, constantly being changed. And if you had one wish, I mean, I'm sure you have a laundry list of things. What's one wish of how you'd like things to change in the next thirty years, you know? I mean, I think the biggest pressing issue facing New York is ensuring that it stays a place that's affordable and accessible for a broad range of people. So I'd say, if if I had one wish for the city, it would be that that somehow we could it could be a place where you know, sort of the most successful you know, innovators and and zillionaires can live there, and poor working folks and the middle class people who are you know, sort of raising kids, are starting out or living on their own or sort of whatever, and everybody in between, you know, the immigrants, the longtime residents, um and see some of the steps that were taken to allow for like Mitchell Lama, that's dying, that Mitchell Lama housing, and it's it's tragic for those who don't know who we're listening that don't know what Mitchell Lama housing was. This was an attempt back then to have the city developed property where developers would build affordable housing and men should as affordable housing. I'm being very shorthand with this, and manage it as affordable housing for a given period of time, like thirty years or something, and then after a certain period of time it would slowly devolve, if you will, into or evolve into private housing. They would sell it as condominiums. And right now we're hitting that place where, especially in Manhattan, very few of them are left, a lot of them. Mitchell Lama's rolling over now to private condominiums. Which is really changing the city. But New Yorkers have resigned themselves to the fact that affordable housing itself, just like pay phones, is a thing of the past, and now more and more people who never dreamed of going to Long Island City and to Astoria and to Brooklyn is just a part of Manhattan in terms of how many people who live and work there and put their kids in school there, but who work in the city and commute. More and more and more people have resigned themselves or even are happy to commute. Is that your experience as well? Yeah, And you know, in some ways, I don't think it's such a bad thing that a lot of people who would have only considered living in Manhattan before now are living throughout the city. What I think would be a terrible thing is if Manhattan became a place that only the wealthy could live, and that more and more the other boroughs that became the case as well. I'm not sure that I know what the answer is. I mean, clearly, if we had a different political environment, we'd have things like Mitchell Armor programs and other things to create and build affordable housing, saying this is an investment in our city's future. The construction is good. It creates jobs. The fact that we give good, affordable housing to people who we need to you know, uh, to be teachers, to be firemen, to be a sanitation. We don't have housing for those people, now, you know, we were One of the first things that happened in New York years ago was the police were successful in argument against the residency requirement because they said, you can't force me to live here because I can't afford the rent here on a policeman's salary. So they did away with But of course this is a city where rather than build affordable housing for people like the police and have them invested in the community they live in, they all leave, which makes them somewhat us invested, I think in the community they live in, although many of them come from the city. It seems we could do a whole hour about the power of the real estate development community and the landlords support in this. I mean, they run the city. They run the city in so many ways, and they run the city. I mean what gets built, what doesn't get These guys like you fight them and win because public outrage and public passions about these things still have some power, right well, all ultimately government makes the decisions, and while certainly the people with money and access have enormous influence over them, the average people do because they vote. And if you, if you exercise that um strength that we have, and it's the only thing we have, is the power of the vote, that's the way that we can affect these I want to finish with this. The society has an LGBT initiative for some of the preservation. They do talk about that New York and especially the village really has such a wealth of sights connected to the LGBT les being gay, bisexual, transgend. The civil rights movements. I mean, uh, the one that everybody knows, of course, a Stone Wall where the riots took place in nineteen sixty nine, which in many respects exactly um, but there's many other ones as well. I mean, just around the corner from there, there's Julius Bar, where in nineteen sixty six there was this sit in or sit in as it was called, the first planned civil disobedience for gay rights. At that time, A few people sort of know or remember this. It was actually illegal to serve alcohol to someone who you knew was a homosexual. Um, So it in essence made gay bars illegal. That's why they were all the Hotel Tennessee. Williams of A stated people were breaking the law. I know. Yeah, So as a result of this, actually there was a legal case that more or less change that um and so that was put that in a movie. I love that. Yeah. You know, back when there were very very very few places that gay people could meet, almost all of them were in places like Greenwich Village. And this year, in late June, just a few days before New York City's annual Pride Parade, and after many years behind the scenes politicking, Andrew Berman and his colleagues celebrated early the Stone Wall in one it's New York City Landmark status, making it the first site designated primarily for its significance to LGBT history. Take a listen to the Here's the Thing Archives. I talked with another hard working advocate, Josh Fox, the environmental activist who's filmed gas Land exposed the dangers of fracking. They would say, oh, your water is fine, and then they would go and get them a glass of water to drinks. All right, Well, if you think this is fine for my mother to drink, then you go ahead and drink it, and they wouldn't drink it. Take a listen at Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin and or listening to Here's the Thing. Conservation isn't only about preserving urban sites. It's also about saving a way of life. Rob Snyder, president of the Island Institute, helps communities in remote coastal Maine thrive. I know a bit about fishing towns, having spent much of my life on Long Island. Pressures are different in eastern Long Island and rural Maine, where I live. It's constant commercial development, but the struggle to survive as a working fisherman remains. Coastal Maine. As Rob Snyder explained, the situation is more remote. People is the largest island community in Maine, which one Vinyl Haven off of Rockland, Maine, mid coast area, and they take a ferry. Yeah, you take a ferry out there. Yeah, you take a ferry year round, year round. You can take a ferry. If you're on Matinicus, you have to take a bush pilot flight on Scotland, air plane flies a couple of times a day as long as the fog is lifted, and you can get year round so there's no ferry service too, there's a monthly ferry, so I kind of want to go hang out way, Why are we interviewing those people? So? You know, I think that interestingly though, the kinds of pressure you're talking about about how to conserve place and conserve community in places where the land is finite and so finite, um, you know, you really have a huge challenge in balancing conservation and community. Is there pressure to develop those islands? There really isn't the kind of pressure you're talking about. What you see more so is the as property values escalate, the year round community, the people who have been there for many generations are having a harder time holding on being able to pay their tax bills and stay on the islands, whereas there be you know, whereas you're seeing increasing pressure which changed, Why is it harder? Why is it harder? I think there's a two things going on at once. I think you have uh main is as you point out, it's got an iconic stature that the natural beauty of the places absolutely stunning, and so it attracts people to the coast and more remote more remote. Absolutely people come there because they want to get away from UM the New York Yeah, too much about long and they talk about the cape and and other places they want to get. Don't have Tiffany and Maine have a Tiffany No, they have not even a Tiffany outlet store. Yeah. If you want a shop, you do not go to the main island. Um. You know, it's it's a you know. You also have pressure because so much land has been conserved over time, because the main coast has been a place for rustication for a hundred plus years, you had people come in and conserve large amounts of the main coast, And so the communities that are left in these places often are highly constrained to raise additional tax money to function as a town. A lot of the land is with the tax. French Borough has of its land conserved. Um where some of those families over the last hundred years were the families we would know of course, for example, I mean that the Rockefellers had. Yeah, and and to their credit they put some land aside for future development when they made the large land transaction. What we're thinking about now is because more and more people still can as as they should want to consider how to conserve their land if there if they're going to sell it off or if you know, because generations are changing, the younger kids don't necessarily want the property anymore the money. They want the money and they also are potentially able to put that land into a land trust. So what what is the town going to do. Well, we're having a lot of discussions about how can you be really creative about conserve land so you can actually contribute to the community's economy. So on french Borough, you know, they're looking at all all options for for example, for example, um, could you put camping facility on some of that conserved land? And that's just one example. In other communities, this is a big tension on the customine. How much conserve land is enough is often the question. I think the kind of the better question is how can we take advantage of the economic opportunity to conserve land creates. But back then, when somebody would have a piece of land, let's say it's a thousand acres and you have a compound somewhere and you pocket a few hundred acres, you pocket a couple hundred acres for your descendants, and you're gonna leave land people to build houses in the future and then give away the rest and now that's all kind of changed. And that's all change in terms of land use. And when people are thinking about climate, like you've mentioned climate change, they're thinking about how can I use this land to actually make a difference in the place that I love. I've been coming here as since a child. You know, maybe I want to put a solar array on this piece of land, or maybe I want to put a wind turbine on this piece of land. You know you doing up in Maine. I think it's doing well. The Islands too, worked with the North Haven and Vinyl Haven Islands off the mid coast to build three wind turbans, so that those communities could be energy neutral. Right, they produce as much as they consume. Alternative energy is is radically. It's incredibly important because unless we start inevitable, it's inevitable. But until we stop putting carbon in the atmosphere, we're just going to destroy the ocean. Yeah, I mean, it's just it's awful plants exactly. I mean, we're just the Gulf of Maine is a gigantic sink for CEO two. It's I mean, we're seeing clams that are unable to build shell fast enough clambers who used to go fill a bucket with clams down in Casco Bay, which is off the city of Portland's you know, it's got a number of island communities there. They can't fill a bucket all the way anymore because it just crushes the shelves. I means it's incredibly such. You know, in a time when the ocean is changing so much and you're seeing species move through your community, you're looking to diversify. You're trying to figure out what is the future hold for me? What are my economics right? And so you see you know, you see fishermen starting to experiment with investing in oyster aquaculture, looking at Kelp growing Kelp for eight. You're heavy into this fishing industry and this and this fishing fishing and energy and energys of our work. I mean, you're trying to protect communities and lifestyle. And the Island Institute is about sustaining island communities, island and remote coastal, about conserving land. It's really preventing building on land. No. I mean, when we started thirty years ago, there's no question that people, you know, we we owned islands, we helped develop model, experimental models for how you could reintroduce sheep to island private islands, and how you could maintain pastures and how you could do homebuilders have an alliance there that you have to contend with their no. I mean we're we are viewed as a bridge because that's ultimately the people who do live in the community year round. What do they do typically? Well, you have age, yes, so large service sector, a lot of caretaking, a lot of how we keep housekeeping, you know, transportation, fairy transportation. You have people who um do telecommunity so we have increasing number of people who are working online from the islands in Maine, and I think that's an important part of the future. I hope, you know, I see, I see that as being possible. Obviously, education, healthcare, the stuff you would expect. There's elder care facilities on these islands. There's beautiful schools, whether it's a one room schoolhouse or a K through twelve uh school. You know, they they're large employers as well as the municipality because we have of course a lot of local control in Maine. But then the vast majority the rest of it's fishing, right, it's you know, you go to a place like Vinyl Haven. You have three D fifty boat captains and their crews living on that island. Right. You have six thousand lobster fishermen in Maine. It's the last large it's an incredibly small boat but very large fleet fishery. Right, So six thousand of those guys I think about active, actively fishing. You know, there's obviously folks who are retired and too young to be full time. But you know, that's a big that's a big piece of the economy. That's why you hear me talking so much about this. Affordability is a big piece of it. We've made a lot of headway on that in recent years. A lot needs to still be done. But the average island income can only afford one half of the average island home price. Right, So you if you're a teacher and you're married to a fisherman, you're increasingly unable to afford a home in your own community. And so we're very focused on how do how do you transition? How do you help people All the kids that left and went to college that came back to couldn't afford Yeah, so how do you help people transition in But one of the big things that we're doing in Maine right now is investing a lot in kind of the infrastructure, the processing of seafood, the processing of lobster. How do you get enough capacity online to handle you know, we we caught million pounds of lobster last year and off the coast of Maine. A lot of it's getting processed over in Canada, right and so we're moving those trying to move those jobs to Maine. It was cheaper up there. It was cheaper up there. Without're gonna make it cheaper down here. That's right, that's the idea. But and that the there aren't many people who want those jobs. They don't want them. They don't want to stand in the cold and pick lobster. Where are you from. I'm actually from Cleveland, Ohio, from the east side of Cleveland. And you grew up when you would your dad do. My dad's an insurance and my mom was a nurse, and Cleveland was a great place to leave. Good to leave was like, oh my god, you got me there. I love Cleveland. Yeah, I've come to love it a lot more since I left. I mean, it's interesting it's become a place since you know, you know, I kind of grew up with the you know, the river on fire and the you know, the terrible stuff in the lake kind Yeah, and it's all it's all turned around. I had a hard time growing up there only because it felt like anywhere USA. And you left him. Where did you go to college? I went out to Colorado, Colorado white there because you wanted just the opposite fresh Yeah, I mean I had a transformative experience with outward bound. I was able to learn mountaineering skills. So what I'm warsmen. People like the fresh air and getting out absolutely, So I went out west, and you know, but I've always you know, I thought I was going to run bike shops. That's what I thought I was going to do. I loved if you were in Colorado now you have a marijuana bike shop, I would have. I'll let my brother know that's an option now. Ye. So I mean I have family out there now, and I loved living out there. But again, you know, I've got married my wife's families back here in New Hampshire, and you know, we wanted to live near family, near the ocean and get to know the coast of Maine. You were in Colorado, how long I lived in Colorado for ten years. Wow, and when what was part of the decision to leave there? It sounds whenever I go to Colorado, if you are an outdoors type, it's just eden, It's just so beautiful. It is when you wanted to leave there, you want you want to be near water. I really I left because I was looking for real community. I felt like the front Range of the Rockies was being over developed and exploited and it was horrible. It was a place I didn't want to live in the future. For available water, for thoughtless development. That's why you mightn't want to stay and fight that issue there. No, I I actually once I got married, you know, it was really important to my wife to be back near her family, which is New Hampshire. She was in New England. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she So you went somewhere before Mayne. It's true. I lived in Toronto. I lived in Canada for a while, and you know, and I had thought for a long time, and you know, this is one of these kind of crazy ideas you get. At some point You're just like, I'm gonna go live in China, and so I had this, this is this one I'm leaving up to Troyes. Where did China. China came into it because I thought I wanted to get into our communist Oh no, I thought I wanted to get involved in international relations, and I thought that would be the place in the future where I'd be able to find work, getting involved with potentially helping the business community um negotiate opportunities in China. I constructed this near it in my head. Yeah, without having any experience or resources to back it up. But it's just that it was a different from you. I lay a bit and I'm thinking, what if I got that Those Chinese folks want I get over there and said what do I have? So I DVD collection South of the Chinese. I went and studied over there as an undergraduate, and I got really interested. Instead of international development work. What really struck me. I lived in the southwest of China. There's twenty seven minority groups living in a province called Yunnan Province, southwest China. South of the Clouds is what the name stands for, and it's gorgeous. It's an incredibly environmentally diverse area. It's got everything from the Tibetan Plateau down to the Makon River, all on the same all in the same province, in one part of an incredible country. You know, in the readings I was doing in school, is all about, you know, these gigantic international aid or organizations and international development organizations. They come in and they tell the locals what to do, right, and they take stuff from them, and they tell them how to live their lives. And you know, and and I thought, people talk to each other, we're friends with each other. There's a way that money moves from U. S. A. I. D or Ford to a very local hill tribe on the border of Vietnam in China. I just wanted to go see it. I wanted to make some friends, and so I spent time exploring this kind of how how is the rural economy of China evolving as a result of international aid? And it was very I guess probably not very surprising. But to me, I what I learned was in China, these minority groups were going to be wearing their costumes and dancing for time immemorial so that tourists could come and watch them and appreciate them. Right, And I thought, this is the classic kind of tourism development. It's like the disnification of culture. And I also saw that it was made possible because at every step of the way, relationships were created, deals were cut. It was not some invisible hand of international money coming in and changing people's out of those people changing their own lives in ways that maybe they wanted those consequences. I don't know, but I wasn't going to make a value judgment. And I thought, well, I could spend the rest of my life over here and not change that. I can never make a difference. I felt like it was going to be impossible to have an impact in this world if I spent my time over in China. And I thought, you know, and I had met my wife, and I said, you know what, let's go home. Let's go back to the US and apply this energy and effort to try and to make the world a better place at home. How long will you in China? Oh? Just for collectively a year, right, Not a long time, you know, not a long time. I was there to get a preliminary research visa, and that was before or after Colorado. This is after Colorado, so ten years in Colorado. Then this little kind of spent a couple of ye I was that was part of graduate work. Go back to New England. Did you know when you were heading back to New England that this environmental based work was what you wanted to do? Did you go there gunning I want to work in the nonprofit sector. What happened was that colleagues of mine in Toronto were at a bar on Prince Edward Island when staff from the isl Institute were at the same barrin Wow, great things happen in bars, especially in remote bars in Canada, and so they they got me into the Island instit So you should check out this place. These communities are really incredible. The challenges they face are remarkably complex, and you know you've got this background, even though it's over in China, Like, what about taking the thinking about how to how do you do smart work to help communities sustain themselves? How do you take into account the limits on the environment, and how do you take into account the social cohesion of small communities? How do you how do you bring those things together, those strengths that these places have to help make them sustainable for years to come right to me? That was an incredibly compelling mission. When I came to Maine, I thought I'd left China behind. I thought, there's nothing I'm gonna see on the coast of Maine that's anything like China. And you know what I found was kind of surprising, right that if we wanted to get involved in preserving a commercial fishing wharf so that fishermen could always go down to see to make a living, and the only way to conserve that work wharf was under the existing state statutes around land conservation, scenic beauty, cultural importance, you know, open space, just farmland, you know, like forest land. Yeah, the requirements, but none of them applied to fishing, right that. You know, like you figured we on our flag, we have fishing, farming, and forestry in Maine, and um farming and forestry have these land protections. There's nothing there to preserve access to the ocean for fishermen. And so we that first piece of land. And I don't want to take too much credit here, there were groups, a lot of groups that worked on creating language that allowed that land to be conserved because of its scenic beauty and the only because that was what was available. So the esthetic coding written into that initial easement on that wharf. What does the architecture need to look like on that wharf. What kind of fisheries will be allowed to land there? I mean, you're having to design the future. And I thought, oh my god, Like, if we're not careful, we're going to have like the disnification of the lobster fishery. You know, like guys are gonna have to wear their orange Grundin's and have lobster boats with certain lines. Yeah, I mean, it just could be. It could be the worst of all situations. And so you know, I thought, that's exactly what we don't want as an outcome. I don't want to see what happened in China happen on the coast of main So we we changed this to its constitution actually to include fishing as a new category. When I think about what the future holds, it's if we if we're successful, the coast of Maine will really be a beacon for how we could live in this world because people will understand how to live within environmental boundaries. They'll know how to live relying on each other. Right, They're gonna and they'll be and the coast of Maine will be connected. It's gonna technology will allow the coast of Maine to be sharing what it's learned practical adaptations to climate change will be able to be shared easily with similar communities anywhere. That to me is the opportunity. For Rob Snyder, the current opportunity is to help main fishermen, both current and future, move beyond lobster as a source of income. He hopes there is money and kelp. He says it tastes great by the way, and he is encouraging fishermen to add muscles, scallops and oysters to their hall. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to. Here's the thing