Next, Angus King, the junior senator from Maine, made some significant moves. With Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, he founded and co-chairs the Senate’s Arctic Caucus. And, in 2016, when the United States took its turn as the rotating chair of the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum for Arctic governance made up of the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia as members and indigenous groups as permanent participants, Senator King successfully lobbied for Portland to host the Senior Arctic Officials meeting, the first time the United States had hosted outside Alaska or Washington, D.C. Senator King seems especially keen on the long-term possibilities of an Arctic connection, which he likened to discovering the Mediterranean. After learning about the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice in the past few decades, “it didn’t take me long to realize that if you’re bringing a shipment of goods from Asia to the U.S., it’s a lot shorter to go [through the Northwest Passage, an Arctic route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans passing through the Canadian Arctic archipelago] and end up in Maine,” he said, adding that he is also a passionate advocate for climate-change mitigation. According to Jon Nass, the CEO of the Maine Port Authority, Portland (and Maine’s two other ports, Eastport and Searsport) will likely stay “niche ports,” and not destinations for mega cargo ships, such as the ones China might send to New York or Long Beach, California.

Read: The U.S. is not ready for a melting Arctic

In response to these changes, state colleges and universities have created Arctic or North Atlantic institutes and exchanges. The Maine Maritime Academy has begun a polar-operations course with federal funding; in 2017, the Crystal Serenity, a luxury cruise ship, made a stop in Bar Harbor during a journey that traveled the Northwest Passage.

Almost everyone I spoke with in Maine who’s involved with the Arctic told me that Mainers have more in common with people from Iceland and Norway than they do with people from New York or California—they all live in relatively small communities with fairly extreme weather, and mainly depend on the ocean and other natural resources. People spoke glowingly with me about their trips to Iceland, how popular Maine craft beer is in the North Atlantic, and how this connection gives the state the chance to be at the beginning of something, rather than the last stop on a line that trails off as it stretches from New York to Boston.

But Arctic sea ice, at least in the summer, has to melt before any of the major industrial developments are realized: before the Northwest Passage sees major cargo-ship or cruise traffic; before Greenland is churned up by mining; before Russia, China, the United States, and others attempt to exploit the massive fossil-fuel reserves up there; before Arctic cod or other species are industrially fished. To be fair, those industrial and commercial developments don’t have much to do with Maine, but when dealing with the Arctic, the impacts of industry and commerce don’t stay in the Arctic.