FARMINGTON – Author Colin Woodard is interested in transitions. His most recent book, “The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier,” focuses on the changes that have shaped Maine and its residents, particularly along the coast. His writing projects have taken him, literally, to the ends of the earth.

Woodard, a graduate of Mt. Abram High School in Salem, has a piece of the Berlin Wall, which he obtained when he arrived in Berlin shortly after the wall fell in 1989.

“I arrived in East Berlin a few days after the wall fell, made my way through crowds of rejoicing East Germans on their way to see West Berlin for the first time, and was handed a chisel by a West Berliner,” he said in a recent e-mail. “I chipped off my own piece of the wall,” he wrote.

He was heading to Budapest, Hungary, to participate in a semester abroad program through Tufts University at the time.

“It was really riveting,” he said about the experience.

After graduating with a degree in Eastern European history in 1991, he returned to Eastern Europe to witness the unstable region’s transition “from despots to independence,” he said. His return offered Woodard opportunities to write about the metamorphosis taking place there. He started writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education and has since covered the region for the Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications.

Woodard returned to the States to attend graduate school, receiving a master’s degree in international studies. In 1996, he re-established himself as a freelance journalist covering the Balkans from Zagreb, Croatia.

In 1997 Woodard moved to Washington, leaving frequently to visit Belize, Antarctica, Newfoundland and the central Pacific to research his first book. After several years, “Ocean’s End: Travels Through Endangered Seas,” was published. It is a travelogue that chronicles the ongoing destruction of the world’s oceans. The book takes readers from coral reefs to collapsing ice shelves to witness how people’s lives are affected by the impoverishment the planet’s waters, according to Woodard’s Web site.

His most recent book is a nonfiction account of the development of the state of Maine, its natives and settlers.

Now living in Portland, Woodard attributes his understanding of “what Maine is really about,” to his having lived away from Maine.

“The Maine coast is under threat by mindless gentrification,” he said at a recent talk at Devaney Doak and Garrett Booksellers in Farmington. “The place is under enormous pressure,” he continued.

In his newest book, he chronicles the struggles of Maine’s earliest settlers, predating the Pilgrims. He ties this early history to the nature of the state and its residents. An attempt to create a feudal system by Ferdinando Gorges, a genocidal war against the Indians, and a violent war between Maine settlers and the commonwealth of Massachusetts that ruled the state until 1820, all affected the state’s character.

In its first two fledgling decades, the state was a center of commerce providing ice, timber, granite and salt fish to consumers across the ocean and nearby. The advent of steel-hulled steamships, the change from granite to concrete as a building material, and consumer preference for fresh rather than salted fish changed Maine into a backwater in the grip of a depression. Until the 1980s, Woodard says, Maine was one of the nation’s poorest states.

But artists and the wealthy found in Maine a place that has not been corrupted by modern industrialization. In fact, he says, Maine has been de-industrialized.

Woodard said he wanted to write “The Lobster Coast” because Maine is unique and poorly understood.

“Newcomers know very little (about Maine’s history) but they need to if Maine is to retain its soul,” he said.