Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

SPEAKER: Kate Dempsey, State Director of The Nature Conservancy in Maine In the fall of 2016, water was released into a bypass around a dam on the Penobscot River in Howland, Maine, marking the completion of a sixteen-year collaborative project to provide diadromous fish species with access to hundreds of miles of spawning habitat with […]

Talks in this session will focus on sustainability research by students in Maine. Lightning Talk Rules: Each presenters will have 5-minutes for their talk. PowerPoint presentations are allowed but will be limited to 10 slides. Selected Student Talks: Brady Davis, UMaine Cheesemaking in Maine: Investigating Network Connections and Sustainability  Sarah Ebel, Nicole Ramberg-Pihl, Michael Torre, […]

Savoring Maine’s Artisan Cheese: Opportunities, Challenges, and Prospects for Sustainability Speaker: Jeff Roberts, President, Cow Creek Creative Ventures Over the past decade, Maine’s artisan cheese community grew at a rate that surpassed most other states. The sector, one of several exciting examples of a sustainable food systems, adds considerable value to dairy herds, offers high […]

Speaker: Laura Wildman, Director, New England Regional Office, Princeton Hydro People have been building dams since prerecorded history. Dams have served a wide variety of economically valuable purposes including water supply, irrigation, navigation, flood control, mechanical and hydroelectric power, and recreation.  However with the rapid progression of dam building in the US also came significant […]

Maine is fertile ground for environmental journalists. It’s got marine waters, estuaries and rivers, great ponds and little bogs, rugged peaks and thousands of miles of woodlands. All of these become controversial from time to time, with conflicts over everything from dams and wind turbines to clearcutting, wetlands and shoreland zoning. If that’s not enough, […]

Speaker: Yellow Light Breen, President & CEO, Maine Development Foundation Leadership: Intangible. Elusive. Indispensable. Maine Development Foundation has almost 40 years of  experience convening, developing, and catalyzing leadership from state policymakers and CEOs down to local downtowns. How do we use research, analysis, and experiential learning to drive collaborative action? How do we use cross-sector […]

Title: George Mitchell: Building Consensus on Taxes, the Environment, and War Speaker: Douglas Rooks, Author of “Statesman: George Mitchell and the Art of the Possible” About the book: The first full-length account of the life and career of one of Maine’s most notable citizens, and a public figure of national and international standing, Statesman traces […]