Acadia Partners’ Mission - Part 3: Learning to Care and Respect
This is the last of a series of three short writings that talk about Acadia Partners’ mission. The first piece focused on the place where Acadia Partners is located, since Acadia Partners’ mission is rooted in the importance of place. The second installment looked at the question of who we have to thank for preserving this place and keeping it available to the public. This final segment looks at Acadia Partners’ role in continuing the work, started over 100 years ago, to protect this place for future generations.
Thinking back on the history of this place helps me realize how lucky we are to have it at all. In hindsight, it is just short of amazing that the Park on Schoodic is still relatively undeveloped and available to the public. We can enjoy the Park on the Schoodic Peninsula today thanks to the energies–and the passions–of people who came before us who cared about this place.
Acadia Partners for Science and Learning enjoys the advantage of having a board of directors with diverse backgrounds and broad capabilities. But, despite this diversity, the one characteristic shared by every one of these board members is a passion for the Schoodic Peninsula. In their work as board members at Acadia Partners, these people have taken on the truly unique challenge–and opportunity–to use the assets of a decommissioned Navy base for the betterment of the National Park and of this place that we love.
How do we do that?
In some ways, the answer is very simple. We use the physical assets given to Acadia National Park by the Navy to support and stimulate research and education related to natural resource issues. These issues are at the heart of our ability to continue to protect the Schoodic Peninsula and Acadia National Park as a whole.
But in other ways, the answer is complex. Our situation at Schoodic has grown much more difficult and tangled than it was in the 1890s, when Charles Eliot, the son and landscape architect, recommended "preserving chosen parts" of the Maine coast. Dorr, Eliot, Rockefeller, Moore, and others acquired and preserved important, beautiful areas, creating a legacy of protected areas for us to build on. But, moving forward, the solution cannot be, as it was 100 years ago, simply to buy all the land that is important to the health of the natural systems here.
One thing that has changed over the last 100 years is that we have expanded our understanding of ecology–of the connections between the different parts of a natural system. Charles Eliot’s focus, and the focus of the Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, was on "scenery." The goal was to protect what was most beautiful.
Today we understand that our goals must be more ambitious. We need to not only preserve scenery, but we also need to ensure that the natural systems in this beautiful area remain healthy. Using an example from the morning walks that Molly and I take, she and I have seen, over months of walking, pileated woodpeckers, moose, deer, eagles, spruce grouse, foxes, hares, and other wildlife that depend on the natural systems on and around Schoodic. The actual National Park at Schoodic is at the tip of a peninsula. If it were not for the relatively undeveloped character of the lands extending north from the Park, up across the peninsula, through Winter Harbor, Gouldsboro and Franklin, up to Schoodic Mountain and beyond, the National Park would only be a small protected island, isolated from the rest of the Union River watershed. If Schoodic were cut off from the land around it, it would be too small to support such an abundance of wildlife. This beautiful place depends on natural systems extending over a much larger area.
There is, undoubtedly, still important work to be done through acquiring and preserving property. But one consequence of our gaining a better understanding of natural systems–looking beyond the scenery–is that we can see that solutions to conservation problems will need to involve more than purchasing property.
As a simple example of what I am talking about, consider the view from on top Schoodic Head, where Molly and I stop for coffee. Most of what we see is land that is privately held. How will this land be developed over the next 20 years? Will there continue to be areas open to public use? Will there continue to be areas open to movement of wildlife? In short, what decisions will communities make as the area’s value as investment property continues to grow?
These questions and this focus on decisions returns us to Acadia Partners’ mission. This organization was created to use the assets of the former Navy base in the service of Acadia National Park’s mission. The broad purpose, like that of the original Hancock County Trustees of Public Reservations, is to preserve this beautiful place. What is different is that now, at the start of the 21st century, we cannot just act unilaterally, but must focus on how the communities around the Park and up the coast will make natural resource decisions.
In particular, Acadia Partners understands that protecting this beautiful place requires that:
- Communities must have access to good, complete information about the consequences of the decisions they are making.
- There must be learning processes and decision processes in place to ensure that issues are explored thoroughly as towns, state government, and local community organizations make natural resource decisions.
- We encourage people to engage this place, so that they care about it.
The first two points in this list are easy to understand. As people shape the future of the lands surrounding the protected areas in the National Park, they need good information in order to make good decisions, and they need decision processes that ensure that the good information gets used. These parts of the mission are incorporated in our organization’s name: Acadia Partners for Science and Learning, where "learning" is understood as cognitive activity, dealing with facts.
But, as Aldo Leopold argued so well in his famous essay, "The Land Ethic," there is more to conservation than just careful consideration of the issues and a totaling up of the numbers. Ultimately, conservation depends on seeing land and "place" as more than an economic good, as more than investment and return. Caring for the land requires moving beyond seeing it just a property, toward understanding the land as something that deserves respect, in its own right.
Part of what makes Acadia National Park at Schoodic so important is that this place makes a strong claim on such respect. When Molly and I walk through this place in the morning, it speaks to us. Schoodic’s ability to speak, compared to other places, is a strong one, which means that its claim for respect is easily heard by people who can only spend just a few days here. They can hear and understand without having to walk the place for days and months.
This is a different sense of "learning," but is also part of Acadia Partners’ mission. It is learning by listening and seeing. The listening and the seeing–sitting and watching on Schoodic Head or at the foot of the ravine on the Schoodic Head trail–is a way of understanding that this place deserves respect. It is not just property. We live with this place, not simply on it.
Our mission at Acadia Partners is to use the gift of the decommissioned Navy Base at Schoodic Point to help people listen and see so that they can develop their own land ethic and sense of respect. Given that, and then supported by good information and good decision making processes, the people in the communities surrounding this beautiful place will continue to care for it.
Supporting that mechanism to protect this place into the future is what Acadia Partners is all about.