Maine to Greenland ─ Exploring the Maritime Far Northeast

A rich photographic and text exploration of the history, climate, geography, native peoples, and lifestyles along the northwest Atlantic corridor.

Maine to Greenland is a testament to one of the world's great - and little acknowledged - geographic regions: the Maritime Far Northeast. The authors' essays and Wilfred Richard's photography documenting their research and personal odysseys of more than three decades provide a dramatic explication of the power of the far northeast concept. We learn about the history, environments, and cultures of the region, and the idea of how small-scale societies have adapted to rather than changed their environments, as people further south tended to do.

The book has a strong message about the impacts of climate change in the north and the need for appropriate technology and adaptation. It promotes understanding about a part of the world--the northwest Atlantic coastal region--that once was well-known to Europeans and Americans, but which sank into obscurity at the close of the great schooner fisheries and WWII, and which now is re-emerging as a result of climate change, the political emergence of Native people, and the opening of the Arctic Ocean.

WILFRED RICHARD holds a PhD in geography from the University of Waterloo, Faculty of Environmental Studies of Ontario, Canada, and an MA in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has studied nature photography with Jim Blair, Gary Braasch, Andre Gallant, David Middleton, Freeman Patterson, and Brenda Tharp. Richard is a Registered Maine Guide, with licenses in general recreation (hiking, skiing, canoeing) and in sea kayaking. WILLIAM FITZHUGH is the director of the Arctic Studies Center and curator in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Fitzhugh conducts Basque and Inuit archaeological research in Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.