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 Maine. As we received submissions this year, I was thrilled by the diversity of the pieces and inspired by the contributors’ engagements with conservation and sustainability in Maine. In an increasingly uncertain world, one filled with dire climate predictions and toxic landscapes, the pieces here are a testament to Mainers’ commitment to their environment…
John Paul Caponigro Artwork by Ed Nadeau
I eat my home. I eat my yard. I eat the place I live. I put down roots by putting roots in me. They say we replace the cells in our bodies every seven years. That means this place has grown me many times over…
So small he makes two meals of a field mouse, yet his beeeep beeeep beeeep like an 18-wheeler backing up carries for half a mile. Once I heard one call from a cabin on the coast…
Tamra Benson Artwork by Johnny Sanchez
We are here to heal each other. We are here to honor our relationship and responsibility to the land and each other, to minimize suffering and maximize joy, and to work for the collective healing and liberation of the planet and its people. The way our economies currently function is extremely harmful to the planet and people, especially poor and marginalized communities…
Alice Hotopp Artwork by Logan Kline 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. When I had peeked into the nest they begged for food, chirping and gaping their tiny bills. The puddles on the marsh floor were wide and deep but the nest was still dry, perched in a tangle of grasses just above the water. Then last night, with the onset of the full moon, the tide rose high enough to sweep cold seawater over the marsh…
Lucia Owen Artwork by Elyse DeFranco
We keep bumping into bears invading our habitat. Tentacled twining suburbs, rich and fragrant garbage cans and the sweet greasy smell of burgers dripping fat onto charcoal lure bears. For our own safety we vote to extend black bear hunting by a month…
Kathleen Spear Artwork by Rachel E. Church I was made to smile. I have big, soft eyes and a neatly sewn smile that covers my whole face. I have floppy ears. I have limp arms and a flimsy body with a long, fluffy tail. Cheap, faux fur covers me from head to toe. I am a myriad of bright colors that are regarded with pleasure. I was made to smile.
And smile I must, as I look down at the endless tiled floor from my perch on a shelf midway down aisle seven of supermarket 53…
Jim Krosschell Artwork by Mohamad Bakr Rahim Karim
“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…
Allan Lake Artwork by Rachael Murphy 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…
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 while at Bowdoin and shared many fishing and hunting adventures during 1956-1960. Two that stand out in my memory, however, are the fishing trips we took in May of 1959 and 1960 to Eagle Lake in Piscataquis County. Back then there was no I-95 to go north from Brunswick on nor were there any roads in Maine that we could take directly to the lakes at the head of the Allagash…
Tovin Gordesky-Hooper Artwork by Jill Pelto
When a market economy is introduced into an area, the local population is incentivized to stop contributing to the commons because this economy predominantly rewards the production of goods for sale: “Under this fundamentally new economic order goods are bought and sold, not shared” (Johannes 1978, p. 356). The free-market economy can increase demand for resources, creating a stronger incentive to put one’s energies into gathering and producing goods for sale. In a free market economy, the exchange of goods is based on supply and demand, with the assumption that more income and goods improve everyone’s quality of life. However, the free market economy also shifts time and effort away from the commons…
Sara Delaney, Beth Jackson, Anna Olsen, and Paulina Torres
Causes of anthropogenic climate change must be addressed at all resource management levels; individual, local, state, national, and global. The atmosphere, one of the most influential components of Earth’s climate system, is experiencing a rapid increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. Climate systems cannot be easily contained or controlled by one ruling authority, yet they must be protected and managed on a global scale. One option is to manage shared resources as a commons…
Causes of anthropogenic climate change must be addressed at all resource management levels; individual, local, state, national, and global. The atmosphere, one of the most influential components of Earth’s climate system, is experiencing a rapid increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. Climate systems cannot be easily contained or controlled by one ruling authority, yet they must be protected and managed on a global scale. One option is to manage shared resources as a commons…
