by Water, Earth, Birds, & Bugs (W.E.B.B.) author Juliet Lamont (with collaborators Alice Cornwell, Nan Lee, Monique Pettit, and Pam MacBrayne)
Climate change is packing a punch in Maine, and on North Haven. This past January, the region experienced back-to-back blows. High winds and storm surges converging with extreme tides and progressing sea level rise, brought extensive flooding and destruction. On the island, damage to buildings, roads, dams, and culverts was shocking, including the flooding of downtown businesses, and the devastating impacts on the beloved J.O. Brown boatyard, a community hub and economic center. The building was knocked off its pilings, and suffered extensive damage to its east side, requiring years of repairs and rebuilding ahead. Governor Janet Mills highlighted the urgency of these trends in her January State of the State speech. “Like other states feeling the brunt of extreme weather events, Maine is not safe from climate change,” she said. “We know more storms will come.” Mills emphasized the need to take “immediate steps – right now – to make our towns, homes, and businesses more resilient to climate change.”
Climate scientists have been predicting these changes and impacts for decades, but we’re now seeing them firsthand. The Gulf of Maine is a global “hotspot” for ocean warming, which brings with it changes in currents and precipitation patterns, extreme temperatures, and more severe storms. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute, which tracks regional temperatures and trends, cites data indicating that the summers of 2021 to 2023 were among the hottest on record (GMRI, Gulf of Maine Warming Updates). Reports from scientists working with Rockland’s Island Institute emphasize that changing storm patterns are bringing more powerful storms from the southeast – the worst direction for our Thorofare – with associated higher winds and waves. Add sea level rise, more water runoff from inland flooding linked to warmer winter temperatures, and potential coupling with high tides, and you have the ingredients not only for “more severe” storms, but the possibility of “super storms” in the future (Island Institute, “Storm Science: Understanding the New Normal,” 1/30/24).
These impacts and the challenges they present are profound. We’ve pushed Nature past her limits, and we’re feeling the results. The Town’s Thorofare Waterfront Project planning process, as well as the environmental priorities outlined by the Town’s Environmental Focus Group, are big steps in moving forward to find feasible, and sustainable solutions to address climate change, and to change our practices to reduce carbon emissions.
Nature can be our greatest mainstay and partner in moving forward – our own superhero! – if we protect and embrace her. Many cities, regions, governments, businesses, and local communities are discovering just this: that working with nature, rather than against it, is the best way to address flooding and sea level rise, and that planting kelp, vegetation, and promoting healthy soils can help us to absorb – or “sequester” – carbon from the atmosphere. Likewise, pollinator and biodiversity restoration for food and habitat is one of our best defenses and strategies for adapting to a climate-changed world.
Wetlands and marshes, seagrass beds, oyster beds, and other natural barriers can be very effective in protecting sensitive coastal sites, by building resilience against sea level rise, storm surges, erosion, and flooding, while at the same time providing carbon reduction benefits. Such “living shorelines” projects have been successfully implemented across the country, and higher levels of federal and state grant funding are being directed towards these nature-based solutions. In Maine, the Town of Machias has proposed restoring salt marshes as part of its plan to protect against sea level rise and downtown flooding. A collaborative effort among ten southern Maine cities, across 381 miles of coastline from Scarborough to Kittery, is focusing on nature-based solutions for priority sites in their “Climate Ready Coast” planning process. And the University of New England just received a state grant to design a living shoreline on its Biddeford campus coastal site, which will center around restoring marshland.
Bigger cities such as Manhattan and Boston are also implementing an array of these techniques to protect their vital harbors and waterfronts. The “Resilient Boston Harbor” plan will encompass the entire shoreline and provide an inland landscape of vegetated waterways, natural parks, wetlands, and floodplains. These natural features will absorb storm surges and provide natural cooling to combat hotter summers, all while providing wonderful recreational and community resources for Boston’s diverse residential and tourist populations. Nature-based strategies can complement engineered solutions, as demonstrated nearby in the cutting-edge design for the new research building on Hurricane Island.
The brilliance of nature-based strategies goes far beyond shorefront resilience. They provide multiple wins across the environment, the economy, and community health. Wetlands filter water to improve water quality, and are often part of the watersheds that provide community drinking water. At the same time, they clean local estuaries and fisheries, thereby benefitting local and regional food economies. As more and more research shows, nature and open space provide places of peace, health, and well-being for all individuals, especially children and the elderly. And the habitat for birds, pollinators, and wildlife gets a boost, too!
Nature-based techniques include a variety of inland and roadway flood control options, such as “fish friendly culverts” that handle larger flows – minimizing flooding on roads – while enhancing fish passage and habitat across vital wetlands and estuaries. North Haven has several sites where forward-thinking, sustainable culvert solutions may be an effective technique for preventing the sinkholes and road damage that the island experienced this past fall, and a defense against the chronic flooding that has happened over decades. In implementing such solutions, we help nature and fish to thrive, provide new habitat for native species, and support a robust food web around which our coastal economy is based.
On an international scale, many countries have seen the economic and environmental sense of these ideas. Many of us grew up reading books with the famous image of a Dutch boy or girl with a finger in a hole of a dike, holding back the roiling waters behind the engineered wall. After a series of devastating floods in the1990s, and calculations of the continuing human and financial costs of damage compounded by climate change, the Netherlands pivoted to a new approach: “to live with the water, rather than struggle to defeat it.” (M. Kimmelman, NY Times, 6/15/17). The government, in collaboration with private companies and local communities, has been removing dikes where it can, and is employing a full array of nature-based designs that build flood and climate resilience across multiple fronts. They’ve let the rivers flood the plains again, protected and replanted forests in river headwaters to slow and capture rainfall, built up marshes and wetlands to absorb water and create natural storm buffers, and restored green shorelines along their urban waterways, all while creating wonderful recreational spaces for people, and new habitat for birds and wildlife.
In the United Kingdom and other places in Europe, farmers are engaging in “rewilding“ their landscapes, including the formation of educational groups such as the “Nature Friendly Farming Network.” Moving from single crops and denuded creek shorelines, they are using native plants and trees to reduce erosion, provide natural flood buffers, improve soil quality, and enhance water capture and storage. A recent article in The Guardian noted that the benefits also extend to critical carbon sequestration and tremendous habitat enhancement, helping the very pollinators essential to the farmers themselves (H. Horton, “The wildlife that has come is phenomenal: the UK farmers holding off floods the natural way,” 12/11/24).
We experienced this first-hand when we implemented our own full creek restoration out here in Berkeley (CA) – in our backyard – which has shown these flood buffer benefits in full. We removed all of the detrimental concrete, culverting and other engineered components that were installed way back in the 1970s, restored natural creek beds and banks, planted trees and willows with vigorous root systems to hold the creek banks in place, while utilizing all-native vegetation that is drought tolerant and wildlife-attracting. It is thriving beyond anything we could have imagined, even in a smaller urban space. And it is literally “abuzz” with bees, butterflies, and birds throughout the year.
While our challenges are daunting, nature gives us hope, if we look for it and open our minds. The global community just signed onto new international agreements that commit to restore nature for climate resilience. As journalist Manuela Andreoni wrote in her summary of these efforts,”nature’s ability to help us…will depend on how much we can protect it.” (“An Ally in the Climate Fight: Nature Itself,” NY Times, 12/15/23).
That starts with us – here, and now.