Acadia Partners Blog

“Play that is good for kids, and presented as such–by best selling authors, by teams of experts, by parents–doesn’t strike me as all that playful. It sounds like eating your peas.”

So writes Walter Kirn in an article titled “Boys Gone Mild” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Kirn is responding to the popularity of the recently published Dangerous Book for Boys, a book that encourages boys, and their fathers, to get out and do stuff–stuff ranging from coin tricks and tying knots to hunting and cooking a rabbit.

A majority of scientists studying the changes in species diversity have concluded that we are in the early stages of the sixth “mega-extinction” – a massive die off of species that will radically transform life on earth. Over the last 550 million years, we know of only five other large scale mass extinctions. Evidently, we live in interesting times. The surprising thing is that we don’t seem to know it.

How can we be living through a mass extinction and not be aware of it? Bringing the Biosphere Home is Mitch Thomashow’s exploration of this question and of its implications for education. In this slim but important book, he asks what we can do to provide young people with tools that enable them to perceive global change. In this essay I look at Thomashow’s book as well as its implications for teaching about global change here at Schoodic.

We often make the case for conservation by arguing that conservation brings benefits to mankind. This may be true, but it also takes us away from what may be the real work that needs to be done, which is to develop a “land ethic.” Focusing on the utility of Acadia National Park and of other conserved places reinforces the idea that the Park and the animals and plants that live there are just property and that our relationship to the Park, as Aldo Leopold put it, “is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.” This essay argues for a deeper, more reciprocal relationship with nature, and for a different rationale for conservation.

This summer I am spending part of each day working out of the Research Building at SERC. The Park and Acadia Partners have just opened this building up this year for the summer season, and what is going on here is exciting. The building is the daily workspace of a group of scientists and students doing interesting work that is good for the Park, good for the researchers, and ultimately good for the community. This post takes a look at what is going on and at why it is important.

Resource Acadia is offering a workshop in which participants will learn about and participate in research into rockweed population genetics along the intertidal areas around Schoodic Point.

Yesterday, after we finished our morning walk, Molly the dog and I encountered two young moose. They were surprised to see us and made for the woods. I tend to think of moose as big and ungainly, but their movement, though quick, was graceful as they ran across an open area into the forest. Their disappearance was sudden and complete once they were in the woods. Gone.

Molly has seen moose before, and she is obviously impressed with them. Her response has been the same each time. She moves from standing to sitting and then watches, looking at the spot where the moose were last visible before disappearing.

I am impressed too. There is something thrilling about seeing a big animal in the Park. Part of the thrill, to be sure, is that such sightings are uncommon.. But the thrill reaches deeper than that, to something more basic in my own animal makeup. My guess would be that seeing big animals sharpens my sense that the Park still has some wildness left.

An opportunity to participate in a Saturday morning workshop with a researcher doing leading-edge work in rocky intertidal ecosystem dynamics .

In March Acadia National Park brought together more than 50 scientists in a series of workshops with the goal of identifying important Park research questions. When the scientists were asked what the Park should be doing now in anticipation of future changes and impacts, there was broad consensus that Acadia was likely to be changed in important ways by global warming.

David Olson, a graduate student at the University of Maine, is conducting research on how visitors use different intertidal zones in Acadia National Park. He needs volunteers who can sit, observe, and complete a checklist that describes visitor frequency and activity.

One of the most consistent, striking messages to come from the research opportunity catalog work that took place here at SERC in March was that the Park really does not have a complete inventory of the different species of plants and animals in the Park–and does not have a full understanding of important natural systems. This is not just because funds are short–which they are– but also because of the way that scientific work is valued. It seems to us that the valuation does not reflect the full “market” of information needs and of sources of financial support. It is the kind of problem that Acadia Partners was created to solve.