We took a few days vacation this summer and headed out to St. George’s peninsula in Maine, around the Midcoast area, where we go pretty much every summer.  My wife and I and several other relatives and friends stayed right on the water, in the kind of rustic cabin that Maine used to be known for, and I hope still is.  No insulation, no heat, but a fireplace and a porch not six feet from the rocky shoreline bordering the water.  One afternoon when we were sitting on that porch, we spotted a bald eagle and shot several photos of it.  That eagle circled once or twice, swooped down to the water and soared back up with a duck in its talons.  It was really something to see.

In that beautiful ocean-side setting, I was thinking about how tragic it would be if the Maine coastline had suffered the same fate as the Gulf shore along Louisiana’s coast, in the wake of the BP oil spill.  Here I was in this picture-postcard setting, and it was almost unimaginable to think about something like what happened in the gulf happening in Maine.  That led to my thinking about the impact of that oil spill:  how it’s changed perhaps a thousand years of natural history down there, and taken people’s livelihoods from them.  Birds and wildlife, shellfish and sea creatures, tourism—what it’s taught us is that it can all be gone in an instant.  It’s going to take years to bring it back, if it’s actually possible to bring it back to its original state.

You can’t possibly put a value on the loss.  How can you assign a dollar amount to someone’s livelihood?  For many people down there, it’s the way they were programmed—it’s all they’ve ever done, from generation to generation.

It made me realize how lucky we Vermonters are to live in a part of the country where the preservation of the environment is such a priority, and so conscious a part of our daily lives.  And it reaffirmed my pride in working for a company that places such a high value on the environment as FiberMark does.