in the Rines Auditorium
Portland, Maine - Portland Public Library has partnered with the Camden Conference to present three lectures in advance of this year’s Camden Conference held annually in Camden, Maine. This diverse series of free programs will focus around the theme of the 27th annual Camden Conference: The Global Politics of Food and Water.
On Thursday, December 19th, law professor David Owen will present a lecture about Maine’s Penobscot Project and the Global Future of Dams and Hydropower. Maine is currently the site of one of the world’s most ambitious river restoration projects. After years of negotiations, two dams on the lower Penobscot River have been removed, a third has been decommissioned, and fish passage facilities at others will be improved. Atlantic salmon, shad, alewife, sturgeon and other fish species will gain access to many miles of river habitat, with benefits stretching from the rivers and lakes of Maine’s interior to the groundfisheries of the Gulf of Maine. Normally, a river restoration project would create its environmental benefits by removing some hydropower, but the Penobscot project is different. Because of improvements at several remaining dams, the Penobscot River will generate just as much hydropower after the Penobscot River Restoration Project as it did before.
This combination of features should make the Penobscot River Restoration Project a global model. River systems across the world are filled with dams, and in many countries, large-scale dam building remains national policy. The environmental impacts of those dams have been devastating. But dams do produce societal benefits. Hydropower is one of the most important of those benefits, particularly in a world increasingly threatened by pollution from other energy sources. Finding better ways to balance hydropower and environmental protection therefore is an international imperative, and this talk will explain how the innovations of the Penobscot River Restoration Project could help achieve that improved balance.
Professor David Owen teaches courses in environmental law, natural resources law, water law, and administrative law. He is also a faculty member of Maine's Sustainability Solutions Initiative. Professor Owen is the faculty advisor to the Maine Law Review and serves on the Board of Directors of the Maine Bar Foundation.
The Camden Conference was founded in 1987 as a nonprofit, non-partisan educational organization whose mission is to foster informed discourse on world issues. In the years since, it has convened its annual Conference on the third weekend of February in the historic Camden Opera House, drawing some of the best minds on foreign policy to share their insights and expertise on a range of global issues with the community. Conference topics have included The Making of American Foreign Policy, The Influence of the News Media on Foreign Policy, US-Japan Relations, Globalization, The Politics of Energy and Water, Religion, Global Leadership and a number of conferences focusing on regions of the world.
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