Introduction
America Adapts, the Climate Change Podcast and its host, Doug Parsons, visited Schoodic Institute to learn more about our conservation science. Over the next several months, we’ll be sharing with you edited interviews (click to listen) from the podcast; find the full podcast episode here.
We are continuing this month with Mount Desert Island Historical Society Executive Director Raney Bench.
Interview with Raney
Doug Parsons (DP): Can you tell us a little bit about the Mount Desert Island Historical Society and the kind of work you do there?
Raney Bench (RB): Sure. We were founded in 1931 as a historical society dedicated to talking about the history of the whole island. There are four different towns on Mount Desert Island, and each one has its own historical society dedicated to their local history. But we find ways to connect all the different communities throughout time here on the island.
DP: At the big picture level, what does climate change mean to the society and why is it important for your organization to grapple with it?
RB: I think climate change affects everyone, no matter what kind of work you do or what kind of community that you live in. And for me, trying to look through historical documents and records to understand what the past can tell us about our current situation and how we are living and the different ways that our environment has changed over time can give us better information about how to make decisions today and also to form more resilient communities in the future. We use the archive at the Historical Society to help understand changes in sea level or sea temperature, changes in precipitation and climate, variations within bird populations—all sorts of historical recordings through journals, photography, or scientific studies that might be in our collections really can help us understand how the environment and climate are changing over time. And whether those things are accelerating or whether they’re kinds of measures that we can use to create more resilient communities.
DP: I think this is a really cool story. What is the Champlain Society or what were they? And what does it have to do with the climate work you’re doing?
RB: Yeah, so the Champlain Society really was the inspiration for the climate work that we’ve embarked on with Schoodic Institute and other organizations on the island. They were a group of students from Harvard who started coming here in 1880, really just for like summer vacation. But one of the founders’ family members said, “if you’re gonna come to the island, you have to do some sort of meaningful work” and in the 1880s, natural science and environmental science were gentlemen’s hobbies. They were not something that you went to school and got a degree in. And so as the students came up every summer, actually between 1880 and 1890, they were taking observations of the natural environment as their contribution or meaningful work. They would break into small departments and study birds or plants. They recorded the first list of MDI plants and wrote the first publication or catalog of plants in 1894. They have really extensive records of climate. They were tramping all over the place exploring, and they kept a logbook every single day of where they went, what they did, and the different species or climate experiences that they had. And those records are in the Historical Society for the general use. We had them transcribed a few years ago. And that prompted me to ask a question to Catherine Schmitt at Schoodic [who helped with transcription] about the value of those records. And she said that they are incredibly valuable to scientists today to help them understand change over time. And so that really launched this collaborative effort that we call Landscape of Change, where we’re using those historical records to understand the changes that are taking place around us.
DP: Let’s dig into that a bit, though. The Landscape of Change program, what does that, like on a specific level, what does that do?
RB: Landscape of Change looks at measuring and communicating the different factors that we see taking place in terms of community impact on the island. For example, we started by looking at the changes that we’ve seen in precipitation or in sea temperature. We know the Gulf of Maine is rapidly warming, one of the fastest warming bodies of saltwater in the world. But really looking at historic records helps us understand how fast that is warming and the impact that could have on different aquatic populations, including mussels or with the invasive species coming in like green crabs or ribbon worms. We also use those historical records to measure bird populations and pollinators so that we could see the way that those populations have changed over time. Which species were present on the landscape in 1880 or 1940 that are no longer present? And why might that be? Is it because of development? Is it because with the establishment of Acadia National Park, a lot of open farmland has been reverted back into forest land? Or are there climate change impacts that we can look at as well? And so each year, the partnership changes and adapts, although Schoodic Institute has been a core partner from the very beginning. As we look at different aspects of climate change and how we communicate those things to our community, partners will come and go. We’ve had artists on board who have used the scientific data and made that into artwork so that we can reach new audiences in new ways and that artwork has a tendency to evoke a more emotional response than might be true for just a traditional presentation or scientific graph. We’ve also done a series of exhibitions, public programs. We work with high school students and each town on the island has its own resiliency committee and our sustainability committee and so we work with them as well to help give information and tools for communicating really complicated information to the general public. In the last few years, the work has focused on sea level rise. This has become increasingly apparent on the island as we’ve faced a number of severe storms that have really pushed into new places where we haven’t experienced storm damage before. And I love the phrase, water has memory. And so wherever water has been, it will be again. And so we need to use this information to be able to make good decisions about how we invest in our communities moving forward. And so this partnership has been able to provide resources and information, but also community engagement and education.
DP: Okay, you touched upon a lot there. I just want to dig into that partnership with Schoodic Institute a little bit more. You would think that they’re into these hard sciences, but they’ve been a good partner focusing on social science, too.
RB: Yeah, I wouldn’t even necessarily define it as social science, but the fact that they understand and respect that people’s observations have merit and value, whether those were 150 years ago or today. And so maybe some of the rigor that we expect in science today in terms of geolocating different species or the precision of our measurements, we can’t find in the historic record. But the fact is, we’re looking at an island, which is 108 square miles. And so the scientists at Schoodic Institute have been incredibly open to looking at historic records that can talk about the different species, whether we find it in the village of Northeast Harbor or Southwest Harbor, is relatively unimportant, being as that we know the species was here in general. And the same with change over time. We may not have the precision and climate measurements, but we know what people were experiencing, that they had ice in dates or ice out dates of the different lakes, or we know when the clam flats were frozen and clammers couldn’t go out and harvest. And those tell us the dates of different climate activities that we can see changing over time. And so their ability to be really open to what you can get out of the historic record rather than just shutting down and saying it’s not perfect data and therefore it’s useless is one of the things that I think makes this partnership particularly inspiring. And it’s helped it win national leadership awards and be a model for other partnerships that might pair unlikely groups together.
DP: What’s your favorite spot in Acadia National Park?
RB: I love the Schoodic Peninsula. Honestly, it’s quieter than it is over here. And so I love that part of it. And I love it faces more of the drama of the open ocean. Mount Desert Island has a tendency to be a little bit more protected with the outer islands.
DP: Last question. And I can’t resist. Tell us about the Society’s Community Baked Bean Supper. How does something so traditional connect to the bigger story of community engagement and resilience?
RB: We do host a community baked bean supper every January, and it draws people from all over the island. We usually get between 150 and 175 people, about 30 or 40 different dishes of baked beans and all the different varieties that one could imagine, and also cakes and pies, which are super important to have in the winter in Maine. January is dark and cold, and it can be a little lonely, especially for people who are older or who are here on the island without an extended family. So the baked bean supper provides an opportunity for people to come together over food, which is always a space where you are disarmed and fosters a stronger sense of community. They share memories, they share recipes, they share excitement about food, and they just connect with one another in these really important ways. And these suppers have been a tradition on the Island for a couple of centuries. And so we’ve been doing our baked bean supper for about 12 years now. And it’s always an event that everyone really looks forward to.