Main St., Belfast, Maine. Photograph Source: Centpacrr – CC BY-SA 3.0

It’s not every day a small town beats back a $500 million industrial project, but that’s exactly what just happened in Belfast, Maine, population 6,700.

The project was a land-based industrial fish farm as big as Gillette Stadium, Fenway Park and two Boston Gardens – combined. In dollar terms, it might have been the biggest industrial project in Maine history. It would have destroyed dozens of acres of mature forest, vital wetlands, part of a popular hiking trail, and the habitat of the extraordinary, and threatened, bobolink bird, which, at all of 1-2 ounces, migrates 12,000 or more miles a year, and 1,100 miles or more in a single day.

And in the best-case scenario, Nordic Aquafarms of Fredrikstad, Norway would have destroyed dozens of acres of mature forest, wetlands, and wildlife habitat, and then would have simply walked away when the mammoth project had run its course and become inoperable in 20-30 years – leaving behind its vast buildings.

And then there was the cumulative effect of the 7.7 million gallons of effluent per day that Nordic would have dumped into Belfast Bay.

For fully seven years the Nordic project stalked Belfast, propped up by a craven town government and DINO Maine Governor Janet Mills, who never saw an industrial project she didn’t want to ram down the throat of a reluctant........

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