August E-News 2026

Artwork by Ed Nolde, Sierra Club Maine Volunteer

August 2026

In this issue:

• A Message From Our Chapter Director
• Defend Our Health Press Release on PFAs
• Registration OPEN for the Annual Celebration!
• Alert: Jonesport Aquaculture Facility Permits Under Review
• Get Certified as a Chapter Outings Leader
• Sustainable Business Highlight: Evergreen Home Performance
• Volunteer at the Common Ground Country Fair
• It's Make a Will Month! 
• Green Tip of the Month
• The Month Ahead
• Volunteer With Sierra Club Maine

A Message from Our Chapter Director

By  Jane Brekke

Hello everyone,

Last month, we found ourselves grieving in more ways than one as Mainers. We witnessed the cruel and unnecessary death of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Our hearts go out to Johan’s family, friends, and the Biddeford community.  Our Executive Director Loren Blakford responded in a message to staff:

“...These instances of state violence are painful reminders that immigration enforcement is not an abstract political or policy debate, but impacts real people, families, and entire communities, including many of our own members, neighbors, and friends.

…Our environmental mission relies on the democratic underpinnings that protect our communities and our ability to achieve our mission. Our voices continue to join together in demanding change, accountability, and for our elected leaders to take the action necessary to protect our rights.”

We are also facing one of the most important election seasons in our history, and Maine has been in the spotlight. After many months of a powerful grassroots campaign that many of you were involved in and felt energized by, Graham Platner submitted notice early this month to formally withdraw as the Democratic nominee for Maine’s upcoming Senate race. Last week, the Maine Democratic Party through over 600 Convention delegates decisively nominated Troy Jackson to replace Platner as the U.S. Senate Candidate. If you would like to stay engaged and get involved in this critical election, be sure to either renew your membership or become a Sierra Club member today! .(join here).

We are only halfway through the year, and while it has been one of the hardest on record for our country, as a Chapter we have still accomplished so much - and we still have a lot more to do!  Highlights for the rest of the year include an outdoor leadership training in the White Mountains, the Common Ground Fair (let us know if you'd like to volunteer to help us at the table!), preparations for the 133rd Maine Legislature, our Annual Celebration, community conversations, and, of course, the November election!  No rest for the weary when you are a Maine Sierran.

Thank you all so much for continuing to be a part of the Club.  Getting through these hard times together only strengthens our bonds and resilience.  I am always so grateful to be a thread in this web of life with you all.  

With gratitude,

Jane Brekke

Defend Our Health Press Release on PFAs

By Sergio Cahueque, Defend Our Health

Registration is OPEN for the Annual Celebration!

By Corrine Adamowicz

SAVE THE DATE: Sunday, October 11

TIME: 12:00-3:00pm

LOCATION: Wolfe’s Neck Smith Center in Freeport  

You will not want to miss our celebration this year, featuring Maine band GoldenOak!  We’re returning to Wolfe’s Neck Smith Center for a family-friendly party centered on great food, local live music, and community building!  We’ll begin with a delicious catered lunch from Brunswick-based Wild Oats Bakery & Cafe, before a special presentation from the Chapter Director to highlight our successes from the past year and honor our award recipients. Relax and enjoy the complimentary beer garden, courtesy of Maine Beer Company, while listening to live music from the GoldenOak trio. Enjoy children’s activities and games for the whole family, including a pre-event hayride, animal barn, and craft corner!  

Register

Alert: Jonesport Aquaculture Facility Permits Under Review

By Ashley Nye

Aquaculture is quickly becoming one of the world's hottest topics in sustainability. Over 40% of the world's population relies on seafood for at least 20% of their daily protein needs, but overfishing, warming waters, and habitat loss have contributed to catastrophically declining wild populations. There are many who see fish farming as a solution both to close the gap on suffering wild supply, and a remedy to land intensive, methane producing land animal agriculture.  

But like any new, developing industry, aquaculture brings it's own unique set of challenges when it comes to balancing productivity with environmental health, and some operations are safer than others. Open net farming operations are becoming more common in bays, fjords, and even on the open ocean. These developments house dense populations of farmed fish in nets below the surface of the water, and carry high rates of disease transmission and pose concerns for animal welfare. These facilities also pose high risk of breach, leaving the surrounding waters open to waste nutrient overload and even animal escape, which can expose wild populations of wild fish to genetic and viral diseases that can persist through generations. 

The alternative to open net farming is land-based closed loop facilities. Closed cycle operations are still new, but carry far less risk when held to high standards. While fish farming is certainly not a perfect solution, when adequately regulated and monitored it can prove beneficial to the market and surrounding communities. Furthermore, by making space for sustainable aquacultural development on our coastlines, we begin to address the risks and emissions of global transportation.

So what does this have to do with Maine? In the next 30 days or so, the Department of Environmental Protection will release a copy of the renewal discharge for Netherlands-based Kingfish Aquaculture permit for public comment. The interests of the fishermen in this area of downeast Maine must come to the forefront. There is a need to call for denial or suspension of this permit and an effort on the part of the permittee to make changes before renewal.

Get Certified as a Chapter Outings Leader!

By  Ashley Nye

Sustainable Business Highlight: Evergreen Home Performance

By  Lauren Strohmeier

Sustainable Business Highlight: How Evergreen Home Performance Improves Home Efficiency and Comfort

Featuring: Richard Burbank

In this interview, Richard Burbank reveals how Evergreen Home Performance helps homeowners reduce energy consumption, lower carbon emissions, and improve indoor comfort through high-performance building solutions. By combining building science expertise with energy-efficient technologies and thoughtful craftsmanship, Evergreen Home Performance creates lasting improvements that benefit both its customers and the planet. From reducing energy waste through high-performance insulation and air sealing to recommending solutions that lower carbon emissions and utility costs, every project is designed with long-term environmental impact in mind. Its dedication to sustainable practices reflects a broader mission to build stronger communities, conserve natural resources, and contribute to a more resilient future for generations to come.

• How does sustainability influence your company’s mission and decision-making?

That’s a great question. Number one, Evergreen Home Performance is an energy efficiency business. By its very nature, its service offering has to do with sustainability. We enable Maine homeowners to make their homes more sustainable. We act as sustainability coaches who are improving home efficiency. 

We improve home efficiency by insulating homes, solving problems like basement water proofing while making spaces radon safe. A house works like a system. To use health as an analogy, a medical professional doesn’t want to cure someone’s illness by causing another one. Similarly, when in the process of insulating a home, sometimes there are existing issues like radon or moisture in the basement that can cause damage to the home. We diagnose the problem and apply solutions that improve the home. Our role in sustainability is one in which we’re enabling our customers to achieve their sustainability goals.

Secondly, as a business, we have choices we can make to be sustainable beyond our services. These choices can include reducing our carbon footprint, making decisions that are friendly to the Earth, and using sustainable products. We conduct our business in an environmentally friendly way.

There’s a third element. We feel a calling to provide more opportunities for more Maine homeowners to take advantage of our services and Efficiency Maine rebates. Evergreen Home Performance is the top vendor for Efficiency Maine insulation rebates. 

Our goal is to grow sustainably because Maine needs us. We could stay small and boutique. Or we could stick our neck out, train more people, and grow as a business. 

Over three hundred and fifty clients in 2025, the highest number of any vendor with Efficiency Maine, come to us for their home insulation projects. Our goal is to grow that number. We can be half the size and easier to run. However, we’re willing to grow to make it possible for homeowners in our service area, from Belfast to York, to have access to our services and take advantage of Efficiency Maine rebates.

• What long-term sustainability vision guides your company?

The challenge for the Maine housing stock is that the state is very dependent on oil for its heating. With climate change, there are even more issues relating to being comfortable during the summer. It seems like every year, there are hotter summers.

Our goal is to continue to grow in a sustainable way, hire more people, and provide more of our services to help homeowners take advantage of home efficiency opportunities. 

Maine has ambitious goals regarding the weatherization of homes. We want to help the state achieve those goals.

Additionally, we want to help support the transition to heat pumps. Our goal is to ensure home insulation interacts with heat pumps in an optimal way.

All in all, we’re dealing with all the challenges that come with an older house. If you want to preserve the historical character of an older house, but the basement underneath the house is impacting the air quality or causing rot, mold, or radon issues, we’re taking on those issues to enable the house’s transformation.

We’re not daunted by the work that needs to be done. We’re going to continue for as long as Maine needs us. It’s a lot of work, but we’re excited that building codes tend to be getting better results for energy efficiency for the newer housing stock. However, there’s still a surprising number of homes, which were built after year 2000, that have issues with air leakage, insulation, or air quality. 

As we grow, we can provide solutions for homeowners, who want to make those investments to make their homes more efficient, and help them unlock any available rebates.

• Are you investing in renewable energy or other sustainable technologies?

We will potentially be a business user of renewable energy in the future. That’s where the business challenge comes into play.

As a small business with about 36-40 employees, we must decide where to invest our resources. 

For example, one of our aspirations is to electrify our fleet. However, there’s the issue of having places to plug in vehicles at the headquarters. From what we can find in the marketplace, most commercial spaces don’t have space to plug in electric vehicles. Thus, we’re hoping to navigate ways to find locations that have access to electric power for vehicle charging, so that renewable sources power our fleet. 

We’re aspirational regarding sourcing our power from solar. We do own one of our buildings, so perhaps solar panels can go on the roof there. 

Most of our resources are going into hiring and training new people. For a business in this climate, we have discovered that providing more services for homeowners is an easier way for us to make an impact.

However, we look forward to the time when the headquarters we’re leasing has plugs so we can have electric vehicles. Our largest footprint comes from transportation, so we have goals to reduce our footprint in that area.

• What actions are you taking to reduce your company’s carbon footprint?

To do our work, we go out to people’s homes. To reduce our company’s footprint, we’re trying to do our work more efficiently, so that we complete projects in fewer days.

If we’re driving twenty minutes to go to a job site with a crew of three people, and we can accomplish that project in three or four days instead of five days, we’ve made significant strides there. In that way, each individual project that we serve as a lower carbon footprint.

As I mentioned, we have the goal of electrifying our fleet but are encountering roadblocks regarding finding commercial spaces that have plugs for electric vehicles. We’re trying to address these issues and are hopeful we’ll be able to find a solution.

The primary way we reduce our company’s carbon footprint is to complete our work more efficiently so that we have fewer driving days for each project.

• Are your products designed for durability or recyclability?

The improvements we make to homes are designed to last for a long time. Specifically, these improvements last the life of the home. We transform homes so they’re in good shape for another fifty plus years. 

The recycled material that we use most often is cellulose, a highly effective, eco-friendly, loose-fill material made from ~80% recycled paper products. 

One of the most wonderful aspects of using a carbon-based insulation material is that we can sequester that carbon within a home. When we use a product that’s been recycled, which could have otherwise been in a landfill, we’re instead using that material as the method that we’re using to reduce energy usage. Simultaneously, it stores carbon safely in people’s attics, roofs, or side walls.

• How do you track and report progress toward sustainability goals?

We measure the impact we have when helping our customers reduce their energy usage. Our team is really energized during our quarterly meetings when we show how many equivalent trucks we’ve taken off the road that deliver oil to homes. 

The most significant way we make an impact is how we help our customers. We save each of our four to five hundred customers from consuming one hundred gallons of oil year after year, a fact that motivates and inspires us.

This is our twentieth year in business. When we were smaller, we consisted of one crew of three or four people. Now, we have six crews of three or four people. Our growth and success have helped our customers unlock the reduction of their energy usage.

Regarding tracking our sustainability goals, we don’t do it officially. However, we track it for internal purposes to communicate how we’re living our mission of being respectful to the planet and helping homeowners reduce their carbon footprint.

• What new technologies or practices are you exploring to improve sustainability?

What we’re doing is not high tech. It’s person to person. The weatherization industry isn’t advanced by dramatic technical changes. The weatherization industry has to do with people. 

You might be able to get technology that is manufactured in another state or country and install it in a home. For example, a heat pump is like that. However, we don’t manufacture heat pumps. We’re not installing boxes of technical gadgets.

Rather, we’re providing medicine for homes. We diagnose problems by determining how we can resolve comfort and efficiency issues. We train people to come to the rescue. Those are the ways we improve sustainability.

• How does your company support environmental advocacy or conservation efforts?

Evergreen Home Performance supports environmental advocacy or conservation efforts by partnering with environmental organizations for various initiatives throughout the year. 

For example, we advocate for impactful programs through Efficiency Maine, better building codes, and energy coach programs. We partner with Sierra Club and Natural Resources Council of Maine. We’re thankful for Sierra Club because it has led a lot of these initiatives. 

The energy coach program is becoming popular in Maine now due to recent legislation. I believe that is due to Sierra Club’s efforts piloting this a decade ago with the Green Sneakers program. We partnered with Sierra Club and provided training that focused on climate action for some of their volunteers during that Green Sneakers program. We’re always trying to stay engaged with environmental organizations. 

Every business needs to market their services. We have a choice in how we spend our marketing dollars. We choose to promote our company by maximizing our investments in the local community. 

Marketing tools such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and others cost a lot of money. Some of the benefits of partnering with local organizations are that I can reduce Google and Meta in our advertising budget and redirect those dollars to sponsorships. We can achieve great results through our local sponsorships of environmental organizations.

That’s how we support Sierra Club, Maine Conservation Voters, and other organizations like Maine Public and WERU community radio.

• How does your company engage with and give back to your local community?

Our company engages with and gives back to the local community through sponsorships. Additionally, our employees engage with the community in impactful ways. For example, we have sponsored a local soccer team to support the community’s soccer matches. In this way, we can help a community that needs extra resources and create opportunities for people to come together. This also gives us an opportunity to meet potential people who want to start new careers at Evergreen Home Performance.

My co-owners have also supported local fundraisers for deserving organizations. We’ve also sponsored the Strand Theatre, which is a community theater in Rockland. Specifically, we helped the theater get more energy efficient windows. 

• What is Evergreen Home Performance doing differently than other businesses?

The team at Evergreen Home Performance really values relationships with customers and employees. 

Commerce can be quite confrontational. The market can lack heart at times whether you’re an employer or employee. 

Metaphorically speaking, you can sit on opposite sides of the table. Or you can sit on the same side of the table. We try to sit on the same side of the table as our staff, we try to sit on the same side of the table as our customers, and provide win-win experiences. That’s been our strength throughout the years.

I believe that’s what so many of our employees have been with us for a long time. This is our twentieth year in business since we were founded in 2006. We have many employees, about twenty-five percent, who have been with us for ten years or more. 

Evergreen Home Performance cultivates a family-like, respectful relationship internally that really unlocks human potential. If employees are stressed out at work, or feel underappreciated, it’s hard to serve customers well. Thus, we have an employee-first mindset in which we empower employees to feel good in their roles and their ability to serve customers.

We also provide exceptional experiences for our customers. It can be an ugly situation having contractors in your house, going up in your attic.

If you look at our reviews, I believe homeowners are delighted when it’s a positive experience. No one wants to have major surgery in the middle of their house. However, our customers are thrilled to experience the respect, connection, and diversity of our services. 

Additionally, we have women in our contracting workforce as well as on our energy auditing teams. A lot of our customers are happy to see women represented in our workforce.

Our Google reviews show our customers’ surprise and delight. It’s their most positive contractor experience ever even though that involves invasive work in attics accessed through bedroom closets.

That’s what’s different about Evergreen Home Performance.

Volunteer at the Common Ground Fair's 50th Anniversary!

By  Corrine Adamowicz

Have you ever attended MOFGA’s Common Ground Country Fair?  If yes, you don’t want to miss it this year - and if not, you definitely don’t want to miss it as it’s the 50th anniversary!  The 2026 Common Ground Country Fair in Unity is held from Friday, September 25th through Sunday, September 27th, 2026!

If you've never been to the fair, it's a wonderful experience!  There's great food, live music, animal exhibitions, speakers, an organic farmer's market, sustainable living vendors from across the state, and so much more. Check out the Common Ground Country Fair info.  

As a volunteer, you may choose to receive a free entry ticket (a $25 value) good for the entire day for working a 2 or 3-hour shift.  

There is free camping at the fair with showers/restrooms.  For campers, we are offering a new benefit this year – an admission ticket for the day before or after you volunteer so you may enjoy the fair at your leisure!  

Please email Corrine at maine.chapter@sierraclub.org to advise you will be staying overnight and would like a second free admission ticket.

SIGN UP HERE

Thanks so much for your help with this wonderful opportunity to connect with the public in a meaningful way at an event that is one of the highlights of living in Maine.

It's Make a Will Month!

By  Sierra Club Maine

Did you know August is Make a Will Month? 

If the Maine Chapter made a list of what we want to leave the next generation, it might look something like this: 

• Healthy communities with clean air and safe drinking water.
• A fossil fuel-free economy that supports resilient and diverse ecosystems, stabilizing our changing climate.
• The ability for everyone to access and enjoy the outdoors, from a backyard in Portland all the way to Quoddy Head. 

We want to make sure everyone has the opportunity to create an estate plan that reflects their wishes, too. That’s why we want to share a free estate planning tool from Sierra Club.

Giving Docs is a simple, secure way to create your will and other important estate planning documents online. It’s free for Sierra Club supporters, and it only takes a few minutes to get started.

If you’re interested in making a big impact on our work without any effect on your budget now, Giving Docs also makes it easy to include a gift to the chapter in your estate plan. The tool is completely free to use no matter what. Planned gifts have no impact on your budget now, but mean that the Maine Chapter will keep up its important work long into the future. 

Green Tip of the Month

Do you have a green tip that you would like to have included in a future newsletter? Please share it with us here 

The Month Ahead

Here are some of the meetings and events we have coming up. Hope to see you soon!

• Events Team Meetings - All events are listed on the main page of our Chapter website; please scroll down to see the Events Calendar. Help us organize events to educate and engage Mainers across the state.

  • 8/13 at 12pm
  • 8/27 at 12pm

• 8/12 at 12pm:  Volunteer Orientation

  • Learn how you can help protect Maine’s environment

• 8/26 Club Chat
  • An opportunity for you to get updates from our Chapter staff team, to have your questions answered, and to offer your feedback and ideas. 

See Our Full Events Calendar

VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES

Interested in helping to protect Maine's environment? Join us at our next volunteer orientation! No matter your background, we have a role for you--no experience necessary.

 

SUBMISSIONS

 

Submit a photo, article, or event for us to include in our next newsletter!