Philip Austin is a novelist and journalist who lives in Waldoboro.

This is an open letter to Graham Platner.

I don’t say this enough, Graham: Thank you for your service. I don’t just mean the time you spent in your military service, sweating it out on the yellow desert sands of some violent, faraway battlefield. I protested against that same war. Many of us did.

After 9/11, a lot of young men like yourself enlisted and joined the hunt for bin Laden, to take down our president’s nefarious “axis of evil.” At that time, I was around the same age you are now, my early 40s.

After 9/11, America took a hard right turn, and that felt only natural. Those screaming jetliners, weaponized by shadowy terrorists, collapsing our great twin towers of commerce. We watched, horrified, as all those innocents died, caught in a violent global jihad.

Our national obsession for revenge ignited a firestorm of patriotism that quickly sent a generation off to fight. For those of us who had endured another war, in the 1960s, whether it was dying in the jungles of Southeast Asia, or protesting on the streets of Chicago, we became more wary and advised caution before action.

At 18, like you, I was a heartbeat away from a plane ride toward combat and an uncertain future. I’d just passed my draft physical and life felt preordained. But that’s another story. Life is a very circular thing. What goes around comes around. We all have our own dates with destiny.

Often people think they know you; just as often they’re wrong. I’ve heard some of your story. Let me tell you some of mine.

At 41, my own fledgling political career began with the death of my two beloved pups. The first to die was Oreo, a black Lab mix with a smidge of German shorthaired pointer. He developed cancer, mysterious tumors that appeared on his hind end. At the time I was building houses on a well-known island in Massachusetts, a bustling tourist town chock full of millionaires dreaming of being billionaires.

You know the type. I built a lot of houses for these same people, lovely summer shacks with a hundred bedrooms and a hundred bathrooms, with vast putting greens for lawns, often a stone’s throw from the pristine inner harbor waters, full of undulant eel grass and sumptuous island bay scallops.

For hundreds of years, generations of island men had hauled these same perfect scallops from the perfect harbor, supported their families and built a vibrant fishery economy. Sometime in the late 1980s, to name a decade, island shell-fishermen began noticing subtle changes in the harbor. Smaller scallops, smaller catches, then algae blooms and eel grass die-offs.

Biologists came, dipped their vials and took water samples. They offered educated guesses. Some blamed failing outboard motors, old-style marine engines that emitted noxious smoke and dripped oil slicks. Some blamed land-based pollution. Storm drains and sump pumps that piped detritus and effluent from a thousand streets and basements directly into the harbor. Some even hypothesized it was acid rain and ozone depletion from the jetliners crisscrossing the skies that was fouling the water.

Finally it dawned on us. Glyphosate, an isopropylamine salt that inhibits plant amino acid synthesis, found in many landscaping products like Roundup. Essentially, a chemical weed-killer, used by the landscaping industry in truckloads, was slowly but surely poisoning our pristine harbor. This was to meet the demands of wealthy shorefront homeowners, who all dreamed of flawless, emerald green pool tables for lawns.

You can imagine our shock, Graham, the minority of us who quickly become believers, local ecowarriors with no political agenda other than to view this as nothing less than a looming environmental apocalypse. As a waterman yourself, you understand how vital a clean harbor can be.

Amazingly, not everyone was a believer. I wasn’t a fisherman, not exactly. I’d tried my hand one winter, bought a 17-footer and some dredges, but the backbreaking effort and the brutally frigid winter winds became overwhelming. I returned to carpentry in the spring. I kept hearing about the algae blooms, Kryptonite green tidal water lapping at the beaches in the upper harbor, which had now become a dead zone.

The millionaires I was building houses for were the same millionaires who were ordering the dumping of truckloads of toxic weedkillers into the water. Surprise, surprise.

I became an activist. I began by first writing letters to the editor. I talked with people at the lumberyard. I knew all the landscapers, I knew their clients. The symptoms of a sick ecosystem badly out of balance were unmistakable, but their cause remained, amazingly, still political, still debatable.

Then my first pup, Oreo, became mortally ill. He was 14, had spent a lifetime hanging out on those emerald putting greens, alternately chasing tennis balls and napping in the sun. Eventually, the final trip to the vet, for the needle and the Big Sleep.

A year later, my second pup died. Nestle was a fearless half-Lab/Chesapeake retriever of a crazy man. Same tumors, same cancer, same outcome. Prognosis: Death by weed-killer.

Simultaneously grieving and pissed, I decided to act in the only way I knew how. By writing. With help from friendly marine biologists and office staff of the local Conservation Commission, I drafted a warrant article for the next town meeting. Its purpose was unambiguous and non-negotiable: an island-wide prohibition of chemical fertilizers, explicitly naming Roundup and any other products that contained glyphosates.

That felt good, to actually do something tangible to help the island that I loved. But, surprise, surprise, public backlash was immediate and virulent. It came mostly from landscapers, whose bread-and-butter income derived from treating and maintaining all those beautiful emerald lawns.

They even formed a union and threatened legal action. The real estate industry was next. Their primary clientele was the same cadre of wealthy homeowners who hired the landscapers. The building industry came next. I became a toxic pariah at the lumberyard, shunned by other construction types who saw their cash-cow threatened by unfair regulations.

Through all of this, I kept an image of my two beloved pups, staring into their limpid brown eyes as they took their last breath.

Needless to say, the warrant article failed. I vividly recall one brief encounter right after the vote, in the high school auditorium. The vice chairman of the town’s Finance Committee stuck an angry, quivering finger into my face and snarled, “You f-in’ people …” Meaning exactly what? Meaning I had identified a problem and, instead of going along to get along, had instead run toward the flames.

Which leads us back to you, my friend. Again, I, we, thank you for your service. All of it. Fast forward to today’s news, and you are in each shifting headline.

Here’s my take: Whether you retreat gracefully, and return to a life on the sea hauling oysters and building a simpler life with your lovely partner Amy, or you press on, toward the flames, into the dark, ugly maw of the political jungle, despite overwhelming odds, that’s up to you and your family. Nobody else.

People will pretend to know you. They will pontificate and thunder and smugly declare they understand your story. Unless it’s you doing the telling, they will be wrong. However it all goes down, please know this. Whichever path you choose, back toward the sea or into the fire, I for one am grateful to have once met you and shaken your hand. Your courage and perseverance continue to inspire me. I’m not alone. You are not alone.

Sincerely yours, I remain allied in spirit. Just an old lefty (probably not a Democrat for much longer, though) on the Midcoast. As the ancestors say, “Aho.”