The Boston Globe recently interviewed Marsden on a matter crucial to the future of Maine's coastal waters. Here's how the article begins: "MARSDEN BREWER REPRESENTS the transition Maine is hoping to see. The 64-year-old has spent most of his adult life as a fisherman, but a few years ago turned his hand to scallop farming with his son Robert. I visited Brewer at his home in Stonington, an eminently Instagrammable lobstering town of roughly 1,000 residents on the southern coast of Deer Isle. Brewer is sympathetic to the 26 Bar Harbor-area fishermen who signed a statement of opposition to American Aquafarms’s salmon farm. That statement prompted the Bar Harbor Town Council to ask the Department of Marine Resources for intervenor status, allowing the town to participate at public hearings about the Frenchman Bay decision. Their shared concern is that massive farms will erase prime fishing ground for lobster, scallops, shrimp, and other sea life due to pollution and other problems.
“For someone growing scallops, this is a very scary proposition,” Brewer says. “When they say they are building ‘closed pens,’ I don’t trust it, not even close. When you get an accumulation of feed and other waste in the water, you can get big algae blooms in the summer, and those can be toxic. Scallops hold onto those biotoxins, so that would spell the end of my business. Not so bad for me, I’m getting on, but I think of my son and his kids.”