Building relevancy in the climate conversation. Raney Bench, Executive Director of Mount Desert Island Historical Society

In this episode, we continue to dig into the theme of cultural institutions becoming part of the climate conversation. 

Maine's Mount Desert Island Historical Society has traditionally served as an agent of preservation for historical records concerning the island. But when Executive Director Raney Bench began perusing the 140 year old data records of climate, ocean and animal life on the island, she began to rethink the breadth of her organization's mission. After all, doesn’t historical preservation offer a unique opportunity to collect and share climate data? 

Raney’s out of the box thinking launched the wee three-staff-member organization squarely in the middle of the climate movement with a whole new set of collaborators including Gulf of Maine Research Institute and the Universities of Maine and Rhode Island. Ultimately Raney launched Landscape of Change a project combining history and science to document and communicate the scope, speed, and scale of climate change on MDI. 

To listen, tune into Happy Planet on Apple, Spotify, our website, or pretty much anywhere you listen to podcasts. 

Transcript

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Abigail 0:06

Welcome to the podcast where we celebrate innovation for our happy planet. I am your host, Abigail Carroll. In this episode, we continue to dig into the theme of cultural institutions becoming part of the climate conversation. The Mount Desert Island Historical Society in Maine has traditionally served as an agent of preservation for historical records concerning the island. But when the executive director Rainey Bench began perusing the hundred and forty-year-old data records concerning climate, ocean, and animal life on the island, she began to rethink the breadth of her organization's mission. After all, doesn't historical preservation offer a unique opportunity to collect and share climate data? Rainey's out-of-the-box thinking launched the tiny three staff member Mount Desert Island organization squarely in the middle of the climate movement with a whole new set of collaborators, including Gulf of Maine Research Institute and the universities of Maine and Rhode Island. Ultimately, Rainey launched Landscape of Change, a project combining history and science to document and communicate the scope, speed, and scale of climate change on Mount Desert Island. But let's hear it from Rainey Good mor- welcome to the podcast, Rainey.

Raney 1:34

Thank you. I'm really excited to be here

Abigail 1:37

It's a delight. You are with the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, which interestingly is doing a lot of work in climate. Why is a historical society engaging in issues related to climate change?

Raney 1:53

Yeah, it's a great question, and it's not the normal work that a typical historical society might do. But we found that, we care for these incredible archives and collections, and there's so much relevant information in those different documents that it just depends on the lens that you use when you look at them on the kinds of things that you can pull out. And so one of the questions that I had with some of the material we were caring for is whether or not it's relevant to scientists today to look at how the culture and the ecosystem surrounding the island of Mount Desert has changed over time. And so the answer was a resounding yes. The longer a data set scientists have access to, the more they can understand and change over time, and the stronger their predictions will be as they look towards forecasting for change in the future. And so we started by looking at records from the 1880s, collected over every single summer for a decade by a specific group of people called the Champlain Society, who were students from Harvard. And we looked at the data that they were collecting, which wouldn't necessarily hold up to scientific rigor today, but it's still really meaningful data that we can use. And scientists started analyzing that and adding it to climate records, weather records, bird, pollinator, all sorts of different things, and found that they could have a better understanding of change happening on the island, thanks to being able to extend those data sets. And so rather than just make the archive available to scientists, the historical society felt it was important to play an active role in how we as interpreters share that information with the public, that these collections are relevant to the things happening around us today in these important ways. And so it helps to activate the archive and bring additional attention to it and allows the historical society to have a, important role in supporting our community as we experience and understand change.

Abigail 3:59

So interesting. First of all, I did go on your website where I had the privilege of seeing some of these Champlain Society archives, and boy do I need a class in penmanship. They are beautiful. The penmanship is just out of this world. They are like art projects. So can you tell me a little bit more about this group of young Harvard students that came up to Mount Desert Island and took an interest in, recording climate?

Raney 4:28

So in the 1880s, Mount Desert Island was becoming increasingly popular for summer residents who wanted to come up and spend the entire season here. These were predominantly wealthy people from Boston and Philadelphia, among other places, and they were returning year after year. And so among those families was Charles W. Eliot, who was president of Harvard at the time, and he was bringing his young family up year after year. And one year he and his wife decided not to come to the island, and so his sons, who were students at Harvard, said, "Can we come to the island and use the boat to get up the yacht Sunshine to come up from Massachusetts and spend the summer here?" And Charles Eliot said, "Sure, but you have to do something meaningful with your time. You can't just come up and play." And so Charles Eliot, the younger, and his brother Sam took up that challenge and formed this group of peers called the Champlain Society. And they were coming to the island, and they were camping, which was highly unusual at the time. And they decided that the thing they could do that would be useful work was to observe the environment of the island and record that. And so at the time, natural science and natural history were not... They were gentlemen's hobbies. They were not careers that you went to school for. You couldn't get a degree. They were all getting degrees in law and seminary and very different kinds of futures that they would hold professionally. But personally and passionately, they cared for the environments of the island. And so there were about, any time-- they did this every summer for 10 years, from 1880 to 1890, and the group of students changed, and the number of students changed, but there were about a dozen or so every year. And they broke up into departments, and so one group of students would study the botany and take collections of plants and record, and they actually created the first detailed catalog of plants published about the island in 1894 as a result of their work. We had others that were measuring the heights of mountains, that were taking climate observations. And they wrote all this down in sort of these master logbooks, which are you can see them on our website. And then they also wrote their sort of discipline area reports, and those are in the collection of Harvard. So when they got back to school over the winter, they would reflect on their findings, they would write them up, and those reports are in the archive at Harvard. But it's created this incredible wealth of information related to ornithology and botany, certainly changes to the landscape that have happened deliberately and also over time. Climate records, we added 40 years of climate data to the state of Maine's climate records. Seawater temperature, we've been able to add a, amounts of data to sea temperature and also rise. And then that was the launching off point to say "Oh my gosh, there's all this incredible information in the archive." And so what can we pull at various times to be able to continue to add detail to those data sets so that scientists have more and more information to draw from?

Abigail 7:27

So who are the scientists that are interested? Is this something that's working on a national scale, or are they primarily Maine or New England-based scientists? Who is this helping?

Raney 7:38

So it's a variety. It started initially with Schoodic Institute. Mount Desert Island is also home to Acadia National Park, which is about 75% of the land base on the island is park land, whether private conservation organizations or the national park. And Schoodic Institute is the National Park Service partner in science and education. So Schoodic has been a huge partner for us in doing this work, and so the scientists that they have coming through working for the National Park Service are among the scientists accessing that data. But in addition to that, we've partnered with Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which extends all along the coast of Maine and into southern portions of New England. We've been working with the University of Rhode Island on sea level rise University of Maine related to climate change. And then a lot of community or citizen-sourced science, so people who are out on the landscape right now taking observations with their phones or using apps eBird and iNaturalist to be able to document what they're seeing on the landscape today. And so those source materials are all put into public source databases like Anecdata, and so then other scientists have access to that whether they're on the island or not. They can look at those source material in the public access space and be able to do different types of studies. The certainly the most extensive outside of our immediate geography is related to sea level rise with partnerships with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Rhode Island, and University of Maine.

Abigail 9:05

That's certainly an issue that is on the minds of most people living on the coast in the world at this point. It's not just Maine. Has there been some sort of processing of this information where we can tell, what the difference between a low tide in 1880 or a high tide in 1880 or a king tide in 1880 and today

Raney 9:27

Yeah. So the generative prediction maps and models that change over time are primarily being produced by Gulf of Maine Research Institute in their collaborative partnerships. And so tiny. only have two full-time staff and this is the project that I work on extensively. So we at the Historical Society don't have the resources to really do that sort of material. We do partner with College of the Atlantic, where we've done some work with students to be able to analyze data specifically related to bird populations and pollinators, less so with sea level rise. But the information that we've collected for sea level rise we've worked with high school students to be able to analyze the pictures and put the data out there for Gulf of Maine Research Institute, and then they create the predictive models that we use. And so what we've learned from Gulf of Maine Research Institute, GMRI, is that when they do their predictive models initially in any different, environment, they don't really know what the underwater landscape looks like and where water is gonna run into different barriers, or it will things underwater that will change its course. And so there's only so much a prediction can do without ground testing that model. And so by getting out onto the landscape and actually taking pictures at king tides, which are the predictive high tides of the year, highest high tides of the year, or storm tides or blue sky flooding, we can actually then show and return those pictures and say, "Okay. You did not think this portion would flood, but we have documents of flooding here, and this is what the tide was, and this is height of tide, and this is where the water went." And so then they're changing those models as a result. And so it just strengthens the predictions. And sea level rise is incredibly difficult to predict because it's accelerating so quickly that the baseline to measure your acceleration is always shifting. So these really photographs and people actually out on the landscape documenting is really important to scientists to be able to improve their information.

Abigail 12:01

How long has the Mount Desert Historical Society been working?

Raney 12:08

So we've been an organization since, we were founded in 1931, so we're coming up on our centennial. But we've been doing this climate work since 2020. And,

Abigail 12:19

that change? Yeah, what-- that's what I wanna know. What... was this something that Mountain Desert Islands, I'm sure, what are they called? Mount Desertians?

Raney 12:29

MDIers? I don't know.

Abigail 12:30

MDI-ers were asking for, or was this something that you realized that you were holding onto? What prompted it?

Raney 12:39

Yeah. So we, our organization specifically was not being looked to as a climate resource, but we publish a journal every year called "Chebacco," which is the name of a style of boat, and it has different articles related to new scholarship about island history every year. And in 2020, we had a special edition that focused on the Champlain Society records that were held in the collection, and I inherited that project. I had started as the executive director while that was already in process. And the editor for that, Catherine Schmidt, works at Schoodic Institute. And so as I was sitting with Catherine Schmidt, we were having a national reckoning, right? We were in the midst of COVID at this point in 2020. We had George Floyd's murder, which was calling attention to the stories that we privilege and how we talk about different types of privilege within our society today. And Mount Desert Island has a lot of privilege. We have a very wealthy summer population that comes back here year after year. And so I wondered if that edition of Chebacco was tone deaf, and why are we privileging these voices from Harvard of these white students from 1880s in this climate and this environment? And so in asking that and having that conversation with Catherine, we really drilled into the science of what those students were recording, and that's the important part of what those logbooks can contribute. So the relevancy, which is the MDI Historical Society cares deeply about the relevance of history, and that's what I was seeking, was what is the relevance? And then it just blew up with this climate change oh my gosh, there's so much that we could pull forward from the archives. And every year the project, it's under an umbrella title called Landscape of Change, and every year we focus on something different. And so where that has come into our community relations is that we're listening and watching what our community is caring about or is worried about or experiencing, and then we're using this collaboration to add additional information and resources that people can use to make informed decisions about, whatever that is, development, preservation, conservation resiliency in the face of sea level rise, et cetera, et cetera.

Abigail 14:52

It just seems like you're asking the really the right questions. how can you stay relevant? And I just think it's so interesting. Maybe serendipitous because you happen to have these Champlain society recordings. But but it does seem like climate is this issue that is on the forefront of everybody's mind, especially if you're an island dweller

Raney 15:13

Yes. And we're not gonna stop sea level rise, right? that's not gonna happen. But we have to be prepared for it, and we have to be thinking about how do we, You can't manage water, right? My favorite saying is, "Water has memory." So if water's been there once, it's gonna be there again. And how do we use that information to make better and informed decisions about how we respond as a community? 'Cause we're not gonna drown, but we're also not gonna stop it. So how do we make intelligent, thoughtful plans where we're not doing things like building a bunch of sea walls which end up hurting the adjoining properties, right? So we have to think like an island, and we have to respond like an island. And so history helps be able to strengthen that understanding and that deep connection to a sense of place, but it also takes away a little bit of the sense of urgency, right? There is an urgency to climate change and making these decisions, but it's also a long game. And so if we can look at these longer data sets and say "Okay," we can take a minute and be thoughtful about what we wanna do. We don't have to make these really... you don't make good decisions in an emergency. You make decisions that take care of the emergency, and then you make informed, thoughtful, educated decisions in between the emergencies. So what we're trying to do is create the foundation for making those informed and thoughtful decisions in between. So the island is 108 square miles. There's four municipalities. Climate change does not care about municipal boundaries. And so what the strength of a partnership like Landscape of Change offers is that we're not municipal. We can extend beyond municipal lines and create island-wide consensus of what are the challenges that we face and what opportunities do all the municipalities have to work together to be able to overcome our challenges in the future.

Abigail 17:08

Are you gathering new data now?

Raney 17:10

We are

Abigail 17:11

so tell me a little bit about that

Raney 17:14

Yeah, so we're always adding to the archives. And so as I mentioned, Landscape of Change as a part of the umbrella project, every year we focus on something different. So eBird and iNaturalist data is generative of MDI, and so that goes onto these big mapping sites that we have access to and that we try to take timestamps of and archive. Digital data, born digital data is harder, for a historical society like us that's small to be able to keep records of, but we're trying. And then we're also asking for people to send us journals, logbooks, diaries, letters, those kinds of things related to when does the first robin come? When did you get ice out on your pond? did you see this king tide come into a space you haven't seen happen before? And then this for sea level rise specifically, we had these two really massive storms along the East Coast in 2024. All of us were pretty impacted by that. But the height of that storm surge, at least here on Mount Desert Island, is the average high tide predicted for 2100. And so we have a-- a chance to look at oh my gosh, what's coming? So we were asking for crowdsourced photos and information and stories of where people were seeing water lines so that we can add that to the archive and have that available for the future. So that's both a digital resource, but it's also a permanent resource within the collections of the historical society.

Abigail 18:38

Really very interesting. So tell me a little bit about your background

Raney 18:43

Yeah, so I am a museum nerd through and through. My only career has been in small, very deliberately chosen small or history organizations. I'm from the West and California, and my background is federal Indian law and policy. And then I went to museum school for my master's degree and have been working within small museums in New England ever since. I was in Vermont at the St. Johnsbury Museum the Fairbanks Museum Planetarium, and then I moved to Mount Desert Island about 20 years ago and have been working in small museums here.

Abigail 19:15

You were at a planetarium, so you have showed some interest in science and the environment,

Raney 19:22

Yeah, certainly. But I think, what tapped that interest was not so much my professional museum background, but just as a parent and a concerned citizen watching change unfold at an increasingly rapid rate, and an ability within our communities to deny the science and to deny what we're seeing with our own eyes of what the impacts of climate change are. And so I wanted to think about what can I do as an individual, right? I'm-- we're not gonna recycle our way out of this problem. I have an electric car and I have solar, but I'm not gonna solve this. So what platform do I have as a citizen to be able to add to solutions or to contribute to some sense of trying to generate community-based solutions? And that was my platform at the Historical Society, was to be able to say "There's really valuable information in here that can benefit our community," and so I have a responsibility professionally to make that available, and I have a passion personally to be able to say "This is something we can do as individuals."

Abigail 20:23

Just curious again, I know you're not doing all the synthesis, but are there other kind of shifts since we had those Champlain recorders and now that your organization is aware of, in the birds or, just with temperature or some other significant landmark shifts that, that would be interesting?

Raney 20:45

Yeah. So we did an analysis which is summarized in a report that was done after the first year of this project, where we looked specifically at birds, pollinators sea water temperature, and climate. And Maine as a state, the University of Maine's climate department put out a 2020 climate report that showed the different trends of various things happening within the state of Maine. So we actually modeled that report, but did it specifically related to MDI, to Mount Desert Island. And so we looked at precipitation, and so we looked at the increase in precipitation statewide, and then we modeled MDI's precipitation over that. And we did the same with climate and and sea water temperature. And what we found is The conditions on the island are changing at a faster rate than the conditions in the state, which makes sense when you think about where we are. We're what's in, known as Down East Maine, where Maine's elbow juts out to the east, and this is right on the border of temperate and boreal ecosystems. And so we have the same climate gradient in our 108 square miles as the entire state of California does. And so it's this microcosm of all these different environments that you can study and observe much more readily because it's in such a small space. And so measuring the change of the boreal ecosystems and the influx of temperate ecosystems is observable, and the records that we keep help to understand what those observations are. So for the birds, for example, we know that in 1880 to 1890, the Champlain Society was recording the presence of all of these different species. And so now, based on bird records that people are taking today, we can map which species are missing today that used to be here in the 1880s, what species are here now that were not here in the 1880s, and what species are holding steady. So we can't necessarily predict or understand population dynamics of those species, so we can't say the health of this bird in the 1880s, but we can say that it was here, and it was on the landscape, and whether or not that's changed. So that's a powerful tool. So that's just one example of sort of the kinds of outcomes that we're able to look at. And then the other thing that's happened on the island that's really interesting and actually is gonna be our next focus for landscape of change is the way that we as humans reframe our relationship with place. And so if you start to look at the way Wabanaki and Indigenous communities have worked with the island or the coastal resources, for the past 13,000 years since the glaciers receded, that's one frame, and that's a shifting frame related to colonialism and settlement. And then you have another shift as the first coastal settlers are coming along and it changes as everybody's relationship with place changes. So for a period of time, resource procurement was, like, the most important thing here, and that would've started along the waterways, but then it moved to trees, clearing land for farming and sheep. And so we have these huge open meadows that almost the entire island was logged at one point. But if you look at it now, there's virtually no open meadowland left on the island. It's almost all reforested. And so that cycle of resource use has impacted how species interact and thrive or don't on the island, and those are all human decisions. So whether we cut the forest down and cleared and shipped the wood and made access for for fields, for farms, certain plants and birds thrive in those ecosystems. And then when the National Park Service came in and decided that they were not gonna maintain the open lands but allow reforestation, those species are lost. But that's a management decision. And so then now we have another species that comes in and or expands its territory. And so again, the historical society has the ability to piece together that whole longer picture of human impact to the island so that we can make better informed decisions moving forward. Do we wanna keep open meadow lands that are here, be, preserve those now intentionally, or is the reforestation the goal?

Abigail 25:08

And do you have an opinion on that?

Raney 25:12

I don't. I do think the cultural landscape history is important to understanding place and identity. And so I think it would be a shame if we lost some of those historic farmscapes for a variety of reasons. And settlement-- Wabanaki people were burning, right? They were controlling the landscape too. And so by not doing that, species who have been here for centuries are losing their landscape and their ecosystems and territories, even though those landscapes are humanly managed, so are forests. Personally, I think, I guess I would like to see a balance of being able to acknowledge that history of open land and farmscapes in in the same sense as we manage wild lands.

Abigail 26:35

It's really interesting. And I think it also really renders home this question of what's native and what's not? We have this idea about what's a native species and what's not, but there have been natural and human impacts on these areas that have changed that. And so I think it's kinda hard to say what's native and what's not. And are the newly native things that are coming our way because it's getting warmer, are those native or are they not native? They're interesting questions, I think.

Raney 27:07

Yeah. And we absolutely struggle with that as part of these conversations too and there's no easy answers, I don't think. But I do think, the strength of having a historical society involved in some of these questions really can it changes the nature of what you are thinking about because you're forced to think beyond the boundaries of what's currently in front of you and to be able to understand that role of humans in whatever environment you're looking at has long been an evolving experience, and it's created evolving change. And I think it's unusual that a historical society, especially one our size, has a leadership role in these conversations in the way that we are and the way that we've continued to be. But it's really rewarding, and it does, it reaches totally different audiences because people who are not necessarily inclined or predisposed to be involved in the deep scientific discussions or data-driven discussions come to us from a totally different background, and we're experts at interpreting. So I'm not a climate expert, but I'm an expert at interpreting really complicated information for the general public, and so that's a tool that I can bring to this. And then another really important partner in our project has been artist Jennifer Steenboor, which is another aspect of art evokes an emotional response to data and to science, and so it also attracts a totally different audience. And so bringing her into these projects helps create these really powerful front-facing experiences that draw people into conversation with us and look at the, to have access to the science of climate change in a way that they wouldn't without the art.

Abigail 28:52

Can you give me an example of how are people experiencing this art?

Raney 28:57

So there's a few different things we've done. The first was a series that Jen did called We Change With Then, and she took six populations that she has communities that she has seen change in her lifetime that has been attributed to climate change. And for example, the influx of brown tail moths and ticks were two different studies she did. The loss of shrimp, wild shrimp populations in the Gulf of Maine, and the increase in squid the influx of green crabs, the loss of our clams, mussels influx of oysters. So she took all these different things, and she really dug into the data of what is happening in these different places that is demonstrating change. And then she took that, and she made these really beautiful pieces of artwork that showed whatever the population dynamic was, so it was like shrimp and squid. And then layered behind that are the graphs that show increases in precipitation, which creates nutrient-rich runoff that clogs the ocean and kills phytoplankton that the shrimp need to rely on, and then an increasing temperatures allows squid to move in, which is their natural predator. So it's a super complex story, but she's got it all layered in there. But you don't see it until you really start looking at the artwork. And so we made these into these big traveling banners. They're like eight feet tall, and they compact, they just roll up like window slides. And we take them out onto the landscape, and we pull them out, and we just talk to people about what they're seeing, and we talk about the science that's embedded in the artwork. We also created traditional museum panels that hang on the wall, and we hung those in the lobby of the local pizza parlor or out at the oceanarium. And so it was like drawing conversation for people who are normally just milling around and doing something that they wouldn't-- that was unaffiliated, not necessarily with the art, and they're watching it and talking about it and debating it. And so we've been trying to find ways to get into different conversations in that way. And then the next project we did with her was Coastlines, which is the sea level rise project, where she did an illustration on a stencil that looks like the profile of the mountains of the island, which are very iconic sinking into the ocean. And so we've taken that stencil, and we've been marking the landscape, which a lot of places mark the predictive high tides, with some sort of indication of where this is going. But what's different in our project is we're training our population to do that math themselves. And so they can borrow the stencil and get a set of instructions, so they can go out onto the landscape and measure where the future high tides are gonna be and on their own property or property that they care about, and then be able to install this piece of artwork that then is a message to people of "It's coming, and this is where it's gonna be."

Abigail 31:50

I love I love to think of art as being relevant and as a such an important means of communication. You also give a lecture that I love the title of it, "Wicked Pissa: Storm-" "Wicked Pissa: Storm Survival and Sea Level Rise." Tell me about this and how that's been helping you tell your story.

Raney 32:18

Yeah, I love that talk. It's so much fun. I'm a huge weather nerd. If I didn't do the museum nerd thing, I would've probably gone into climatology 'cause I love storms. And, Maine is known for especially our winter storms and nor'easters. But but we have, long histories of storms and occasional and increasing risks for hurricanes with the Gulf of Maine warming as the fastest warming body of saltwater in the in the world. And so I wanted to take that history of and in some ways the ego of Mainers being the hubris of "Storms, we're fine. We can handle storms," and look at what have we experienced in the past? What are the big storms that made the records, right? And it's really interesting when you look back because you didn't have storm prediction abilities, and most of our papers here were weekly. What I thought I was gonna find when I was starting my research was all these winter storm discussions because Mainers love to talk about winter storms, and they're virtually absent from our archival records. Nobody writes about them. So there's a couple of things, right? Is that they can't predict them, so they don't write about them in advance. And then they hit, and unless it was really damaging or stopped the ability of commerce, they don't write about them after the fact either. And I had to look up storms that I knew hit all of New England and were really damaging, and then find those dates and look locally in the papers, and still I very infrequently found reference to winter storms. But what did make the records were hurricanes and storms that were considered outside of the normal range of what a Mainer could anticipate or experience. And so in that way, we were able to really look at the historic record of, So right now, one of the challenges we're facing is as this, the ocean currents are shifting between the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream, our weather patterns are shifting. And so in 2024, some of what was so damaging about those storms is they came in not from the nor'easter direction, but from a sou'easter. And so our island is not built for sou'easters. And so there was all these sort of challenges, and so then it's looking back and saying, "Okay, how often does that happen? Is this something we could expect is gonna happen more frequently?" And so that program, Wicked Pissa, is an ability to look at all those historic storms and the way that we've weathered them and come together as community. But then we partner with the Gulf of Maine Research Institute to say, "Okay, here's the science behind the shifting nature of our storms and precipitation and sea level and storm surge, and where is that going? And then how do we, how are we gonna have to survive this in the future?" 'Cause the answer is not just first of all, it's not building back what we had, and it's certainly not building back to infrastructure at a certain set point. It's has to be a change in how we think about resiliency and that we are building back resiliency in the plan. So the plan is flexibility. The plan is to be we have to be able to to respond, not just to recreate. So one of our partners is the Oceanarium, for example, and they're on a marsh, and they knew that they were gonna be experiencing some sea level rise issues within that, the space of the marsh, but it's happening faster than they anticipated, and it's one of the sites that we use a lot for community engagement. And they had a foot of storm surge during the 2024 storms. then they even on king tides now they're seeing six inches sometimes in some of their buildings. So they instead they're "Okay, so what do we do? Do we move back? We don't have that much land. Do we move up, so we build all our buildings on stilts and let the water free flow underneath them?" But what they've decided to do instead for the short term is to build the structures to flood. They know they're gonna flood, and so all of the bottom four feet of every building is made to be replaced. So there's no electrical at the floor level. There's no pink insulation or whatever in the drywall. So it's all stuff that they can pull out really fast and reinstall as it floods. And that's the way for now they're dealing with it. So it's this model of how do we think about that for our housing and for historic structures that are oftentimes right along the waterline?

Abigail 36:27

You've mentioned so many organizations. It really seems like MDI Historical Society is becoming really an aggregator in some way of information and and also a dispatcher to all of these different organizations. How is that working with all of these other organizations? Is that hard? Is that challenging? Is it easy? Is it are you building a coalition? Like-

Raney 36:53

Yeah. We have a bunch of other collaborative projects we do, but this is, in my mind, by far the most rewarding because it's the easiest to coordinate. It's every organization that comes to the table, and I think we've had 18 I've counted, at various points in the project, they all come with this incredibly committed passion to working collaboratively and to ultimately serving community. And those foundational values that unite us have allowed us to think really creatively about the strengths that we bring to the collaboration and how we can maximize those and really leverage what-- I could never do anything like this on the Historical Society by itself, right? And but we bring certain skills to the table that other organizations don't have. And so by recognizing and honoring the different strengths and how that diversity really allows us to... First of all, I think it increases our credibility with our audiences because all these places are working together, and we are all, we all have a slightly different community that trusts us. And so now all of a sudden, all these communities come together and build this new sense of trust cross-discipline and across organizations. So that's been incredibly rewarding for every partner. I know that's been important to them. And then, beyond that is the ability to maximize the work, right? So it's like we couldn't reach here, we wouldn't be able to do this, but we can now. So like Gulf of Maine Research Institute strengthen their partnership with the schools or the municipalities because they're working with us to crowdsource photos and to get students out on the landscape and, doing the work to document high tides. It's not to say Gulf of Maine couldn't do that by themselves, but they were able to do it better because they worked in partnership with us. So you're not recreating the wheel over and over again.

Abigail 38:45

No, I think it's great. And I, and as I step back and I'm looking at this wee organization up in Mount Desert Islands, which in 2020 when you started the climate work, had been in existence for 90 years. And I'm thinking also, there is something called cultural climate change, and I think you are just, you mentioned you have this-- You're obsessed with weather. You're a weather nerd. are just the right person at the right time to take this organization in a really interesting new direction. I'm sure you're still, maintaining the other work as well, for sure. But but I think there was just a nice opportunity here that you really you seem to feel like you, you've got good trend analysis, as you said, or

Raney 39:32

and it's interesting you mentioned the cultural climate change. We know that's been especially notable in the last two years since the Trump administration has been focused on eliminating resources for climate change and then removing climate change language out of federal agencies. So as I mentioned, most of the island is Acadia National Park. They were forced to take down all of their climate information within the park. So as partners, we don't have to do that. I don't get federal dollars, and so I can still talk about that, and I can I will say our donors, when that, when those signs came down in the park in-- last fall, we had donors specifically reaching out to us and saying: "What are you doing?" They knew and felt we had an obligation to act, and they wanted to know and hear from us. What are you doing to document that, and what are you doing to counteract the lack of information present in the park outside of park boundaries? And so we had to be accountable to our community in that moment, and we still are, and it's still, it's gonna be ongoing, loss within federal landscapes for a while. But it doesn't mean that the science has gone away or that

Abigail 40:44

Problem's not disappearing

Raney 40:46

Which is certainly not. It's probably gonna be exacerbated, unfortunately. And so yeah, our opportunity and obligation is to make sure that we're picking up that, that mantle or the banner or whatever it is and we're carrying it forward while our partners can't. So we have, more burden of responsibility in some ways than we had coming into this.

Abigail 41:08

It's very interesting you say that because I feel like there's been, we are a We podcast with a very specific, or especially at the beginning, with a very specific focus on startups, and we're broadening a little bit our purview because others are shutting down. And we're seeing a little uptick in interest. We're not gonna become the number one podcast on Spotify anytime soon, but I do feel a bit of a responsibility to keep the story going, and because so many others either... And I'm not sure why. I think some people just decided it wasn't in vogue anymore. They're the people that kind of were riding the wave. And so I think we're gonna try to play this long and and keep going 'cause I think telling these stories is more important now than it has been in a long time.

Raney 41:59

I think that's right. And it needs to come from every sector in every direction, right? It can't just be the burden of science because it's not gonna work. We all have to see our space in it

Abigail 42:11

Yeah. So I ask everybody-- first of all, does-- is there anything that I didn't ask you that you'd like to talk about or you'd like me to ask you?

Raney 42:22

No, I don't think so specifically. I think we've covered really the breadth, the partnerships and collaborations, the desire to be-- the biggest thing that I think what we've learned as we as me, especially as a museum professional, have looked across the field, and this model has been featured more and is gaining attention, is that archives don't have to be passive partners of just research available to scientists or authors or scholars or whatever. We can activate those archives to become really meaningful. And I think that's really inspiring and that this tendency to think it's big or climate mission organizations are responsible for this we're the anecdote to that. We're tiny, and we're a historical society, and I can say that we have found the most meaningful community engagement through this work. And anyone can and should find whatever their avenue is to be able to talk about this and to bring it forward as a community and not to be scared. So what, I've been doing this for six years now as not a scientist or a climate person, and I've never gotten into a fight with anyone. No one's ever called me onto the table and been, like, confronting me for talking about human-driven climate change. So that fear that we all inherently have of confrontation or the the unease that someone is gonna argue with us about it has not played out for us. We don't, we're not experiencing that. And so I think that can also gives us more confidence to keep doing the work, especially as it's being pulled from federal spaces.

Abigail 43:55

Yeah, of course. Given that And given all that you're seeing, on the positive side, I'm gonna ask you the question I ask all people on the podcast, but are you optimistic that we're moving towards a, happier planet? Climatically speaking. I share the pessimism. I, it's honest. We're looking for truth here. We're not looking for soundbites

Raney 44:27

Say that, 'cause-- two answers, okay, right? So the optimistic answer is that I feel like that in my community, right? So the places that I affect change, I feel positive and optimistic, and I feel effective in improving the cultural and landscape ecosystems in which I have influence. When I think beyond the island, I am not optimistic at all. I drive through Massachusetts traffic bumper-to-bumper, six rows of gas cars, and I'm "Oh, we're not... That's not happening." And so so that can get overwhelming and feel like really just discouraging and Not even discouraging doesn't even capture it, right? It's just disheartening, and it makes you sometimes wanna give up, or me sometimes wanna give up. But then I come home, and it's okay, I can affect change locally, and so that's all I can do. And so rather than looking at those six lanes of traffic and feeling impotent, I can come home and look at the artwork that we've installed or the measurements or the conversations taking place at every town sustainability committee now and be "Okay, I helped bring that forward."

Abigail 45:44

Congratulations, and thank you for bringing it forward. What a fun surprise to discover the Mount Desert Island Historical Society and all that you're doing in the climate space.

Raney 45:54

Thank you. Thanks for having me and for featuring our project