The Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability

By Leslie Moore   Artist Statement I am a relief printmaker whose subject is often animals. My work is influenced by Japanese printmakers, especially Ohara Koson (1877-1945), although I don’t use the same multi-woodblock technique. Instead, I practice the reduction method, cutting a single linoleum block and printing a succession of colors—one after the other, […]

By Alice Hotopp   The morning before, the nest had been full of fat, begging chicks. At six days old, they had grown large enough to be nearly spilling over the nest’s strained, woven-grass walls. Their bellies were soft with newly unfurled feathers, and plastic-y sheaths still covered the growing flight feathers on their wings. […]

By Sydney Read   I’ll Become a Whale When death comes            and if I’m lucky  I’ll go back to the water.  I’ll become a whale.    Watch me slip, steady                      Out and Into               […]

By Allan Lake   If my car is idle for a couple days, ambitious spiders create competing empires in uninhabited valleys between bumper and side panel or where seldom used rear door meets rear panel and even within springy trapdoor that opens to allow my car to drink fossil fuel so I can drive to […]

Dominic Piacentini Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology & Environmental Policy University of Maine Welcome to Spire’s seventh issue! We are glad to announce Leslie Moore as the winner of this year’s cover design contest. Her linoleum block print “Hunters’ Moon” and her series of paired prints and poems are a bright look into the eccentric wildlife of […]

By Jim Krosschell    March into April “I have an appointment with spring.” Google informs me that none of the two million words of Thoreau’s Journal offer any description, drawing, or meticulous tracking of the emergence, in spring, of the crocus. Pity. I would have liked to compare his feelings with mine. I would have […]

By Lucia Owen    Maine: Wildlife Management in the Anthropocene 1. Euthanizing Canada Geese Rangeley  No one really wants to, not the State guys or the Selectmen, but no other way to keep the tourists from stepping in the goose shit or local business losing money because of it. No one to scoop it or […]

By Erin Coughlin   Artist Statement Growing up and going to college in Maine, the coast has been an important part of my life. The shapes, colors, sounds, and atmosphere all resonate with me in different ways. As an environmental scientist, I have studied the coast and become even more familiar with its subtleties – […]

By Will Reid    This is about a “renewed wilderness” that existed only briefly as such and is now gone. Even though it is presently considered “preserved,” the area is too accessible and heavily visited for anyone to experience what we did in 1959 and 1960.  Steve Bunker of Bucksport and I became good friends […]

By Tom Lagasse   Grade 7 | Science | Unit 8 | Dissecting a Frog A sour fog permeates the entire second floor  of St. Ann’s School and lingers with foreboding.   Is this what death smells like? Several classmates gag and bolt.  Under banks of cold fluorescent lights, Sister Theresa pries  open the white plastic […]