Every end-of-the-year-2025 Maine news summary I’ve read, and I’ve read several, says something about offshore wind.
Tux Turkel, in a Portland Press Herald op-ed, wrote, “Perhaps the greatest source of my pessimism comes from witnessing the sabotage of offshore wind.”
“The political climate has dimmed Maine’s offshore wind development plans…” Stephanie McFeeters wrote in the Maine Monitor.
Jim Leonard at the Midcoast Villager reported that, “Waldo County and Maine more broadly were also buffeted by changing national and state energy policies, particularly around offshore wind and alternative energy development.”
But all the numerous 2025 news summaries I’ve seen fail to mention the surge of interest in permanent protection of Sears Island that began years ago but grew in scope, number and conviction during the past year.
Maine residents responded with dismay when, in November 2021, Governor Mills released a consultant report recommending development of Sears Island. Immediately, a vocal groundswell of support for the environmental benefits of undeveloped Sears Island arose, while embracing development at nearby Mack Point as the better alternative.
As would-be candidates for Governor came forward in 2025, John Glowa identified protection of Sears Island as an important piece in his campaign. “I do support preserving all of Sears Island in perpetuity as a state park,” he wrote at https://johnglowaforgovernor.com/sears-island/.
Also, during this past year, Maine’s academic community carried forward research assessing Sears Island’s iconic status at the nexus between industrial development and the environment, between climate change and ecosystem benefit. Chloe Sheahan (Bowdoin); Caroline Noblet, Teresa Johnson,
Julia Hiltonsmith, Amber Schultz, and Holland Haverkamp (UMaine); Benjamin P. Neal, (University of Victoria, BC, Canada); Jessica Reilly-Moman (UMaine, Darling Center); and Alison W. Bates all pursued educationally rigorous Sears Island study in 2025.
Paula Gerstenblatt, Professor of Social Work, and Jan Piribeck, Emerita Professor of Art, University of Southern Maine, culminated five years of collaboration in September 2025 titled “Intersecting Ecologies, a project that combines art with the social and natural sciences to explore cultural, environmental, and socio-economic changes facing coastal communities in Maine and Greenland” with an exhibition at The Parsonage Gallery in Searsport and a retreat with Friends of Sears Island and more than 30 invitees from across Maine and eastern Canada.
The Campaign to Protect Sears Island/Wahsumkik identifies six reasons to permanently protect the Penobscot Bay island, including “Sears Island protects the Penobscot Bay Estuary, Importance Historically and Currently to Wabanaki People, Sears Island Provides Unparalleled Recreational Access
and Educational Opportunities, Conservation is Climate Action, Wasted Taxpayer Dollars for Developing Sears Island, and Sears Island is a Critical Stopover for Migrating Birds.”
Sears Island postings regularly appeared and may have increased in 2025 on the eBird website’s Maine Rare Bird Alert .
The Sears Island Stories website continued in 2025 to share “stories from people who cherish Sears Island.”
The Alliance for Sears Island updated its mission statement in November to, “We support permanent conservation of all of Sears Island, and we support the development of a wind port facility at Mack Point, if any such facility is to be built in Penobscot Bay.”
Meanwhile, though the Mills Administration and Maine Department of Transportation are currently silent on developing Sears Island, neither appear ready to surrender the long-term State fantasy that would invest public funds to develop Sears Island, thus exacerbating climate change and industrializing Penobscot Bay.
Geologists suggest that Sears Island, connected to the mainland, rose above the lowlands around it like a small mountain in what’s called the post-glacial period 11,000 years ago. But even then, Wahsumkik must have drawn the attention of Wabanaki ancestors who inhabited the region.
Attempts to destroy the island landscape over the past 50 or so years, to further misguided illusions of economic profit, witnessed controversy, lawsuits, rancor, deceptive reports, spurious exaggerations and a waste of millions of public and private dollars.
The Alliance for Sears Island and the many, many others who understand that the treasured island plays a significant ecological role in fact and symbol for Penobscot Bay, believe that the time has come to put this reckless and wasteful past behind and embrace full, permanent protection of Sears Island.
Authored by Steve Miller
Alliance for Sears Island 