A Cautionary Tale
Key West and Bar Harbor are 2 islands separated by 20 degrees latitude, yet have much in common in their ongoing struggle for local control of cruise ship visitation.
Key West, a vibrant community of 25,600 residents, voted in 3 referendums in 2020 to limit cruise ship disembarkation to 1500 passengers a day. All 3 referendums overwhelmingly passed by 60%. However, citizen control was short-lived. The cruise lines funded a disinformation campaign, sending out ominous mailers to Key West residents. They touted the disastrous economic effect that a loss of cruise ship passengers would have on the community. Mark Walsh (owner of Pier B in Key West and owner of Harbor Place and 55 West St. in Bar Harbor) through several of his companies donated nearly 1 million dollars to the campaign fund “Friends of Ron DeSantis”. In 2021, Ron DeSantis signed legislation that reversed the local vote putting limits on cruise ship traffic.
Local News
A current compilation of articles and commentary related to the ongoing issue of cruise ship control and traffic in the Town of Bar Harbor.
Charles Sidman interview with Chris Popper -
October 27, 2024
"Chapter 50 takes away our democratic right. By contract, it dismantles Democracy and Home Rule in the state of Maine, which I don't know about you, but I'm very fond of."
Global News
Cruise Ship News around the world.
"Marine ports are a crucial piece of the global economy, and shipping traffic in New England is surging. Increasingly, public health experts and community activists are speaking out about the health costs — asthma, heart disease and even cancer. Those costs are paid by the people who live nearby, overwhelmingly people of color and lower-income residents."
Friends of the Earth Cruise Ship Report Card
Our Cruise Ship Report Card is renewed every year to hold the cruise industry accountable. The goal is to shine a light on each cruise line and cruise ship to see where they fail — not just for the environment and the climate, but also for public health, coastal communities, passengers and crew, and marine ecosystems.
Each cruise line is ranked on their environmental footprint. We start by taking a deeper look into the cruise ships that are part of the fleets of the major cruise lines. We consider the following for the more than 200 cruise ships on our report card:
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Total people on board (including travelers and staff)
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Destinations
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Sewage Treatment
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Air Pollution Reduction
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Water Quality Compliance
After those are all considered, the cruise lines themselves are also looked as a whole to review how transparent they are and how they behave in many of the destinations they travel to. All in all, we stack all the data up and give each cruise line a grade between A and F. Sadly, the harsh truth is that a large chunk of these cruise lines continue to fail year after year!
