Khalil Wilkinson

As climate activists begin to navigate the Trump administration’s new federal environmental policies, Bowdoin’s Office of Sustainability hosted a panel discussion on local climate action with Director of the Schiller Coastal Studies Center Holly Parker and Visiting Lecturer in Environmental Studies at Bates College Kate Olson last night in the Roux Center for the Environment.

Olson, an environmental sociologist, initially focused on Southeast Asia but turned her work to Maine about a decade ago to study the communities she is a part of. One aspect of Maine that stands out to Olson is the connections people have with the environment, and she believes this should inform the state’s climate action plan.

“People have deep relationships with land and with sea, they have a lot of knowledge and centering their knowledge in any process is really important,” Olson said. “Let’s broaden our idea of what climate action is: Who in our community is working with those who are most vulnerable in our community, and how can we connect with them?”

Parker, who joined the Coastal Studies Center two and a half years ago, is similarly interested in the role connections play in local climate action, especially as it relates to how climate change divides communities.

“Maine has a very rich and frankly stubborn heritage of local control,” Parker said. “There’s a history of community engagement in these spaces, but these communities are actually changing at a pretty rapid pace, and that’s causing some tension within these communities.”

Parker shared the ways the staff at the Coastal Studies Center immerse themselves in Harpswell as much as possible by attending town meetings and fishermen’s forums among other community events.

As a testament to the deepening trust between the Coastal Studies Center and the working waterfront, Parker shared the story of a Harpswell fisherman who, while lobstering, caught a blue crab, a species of crab that has crept north into the warming waters of the Gulf of Maine. Instead of keeping the crab to eat, the fisherman called Parker and asked if the Coastal Studies Center would like the crab for research purposes. Parker immediately said yes, and the fisherman has since brought blue crabs he accidentally captured to the center.

Parker noted this as one of many examples in which the center is working to expand its outreach to the working waterfront and welcome people into the space.

“We try to bust out of [the Bowdoin bubble] a little bit [by] … just meeting some people who are really outside the space. They also are curious about what’s going on inside the space, and they have some assumptions about what’s going on in here, too, so it’s a really nice way for us to break down some of these assumptions,” Parker said.

Olson agreed that nurturing these relationships helps bolster the strength of local communities in working together to address climate change.

“Building community is also climate action, because as all of these changes unfold, we need each other in our places. We need to take care of each other and depend on one another,” Olson said.

Olson and Parker also both spoke to the importance of environmental justice in community climate action, explaining that environmental justice is multifaceted and informs viewpoints that may be shaped by privilege.

“Justice is a very subjective word, and so what I think of as climate justice, or environmental justice, may be very different from a guy down the road who is looking at a Gulf of Maine wind farm very differently than I am,” Parker said. “Privilege isn’t a bad thing. It’s just knowing, understanding it that’s important.”

Attendee and first-year Eco Rep Asha Adiga-Biro ’28 was inspired by how Olson and Parker zoomed in on community-oriented climate action and the value of relating to others, regardless of their views.

“Vulnerability, empathy and human connection are so much more crucial and are so important when dealing with climate change,” Adiga-Biro said. “It really goes down to the one-on-one connections that we’re making, the way we listen to each other.”

As a parting piece of advice to students interested in climate action careers, Olson and Parker encouraged students to consider work on the state and local levels and to follow their passions.

“If you are passionate about a place and doing research in that place, get to know people, even if you don’t know what the project is, get to know people. Make yourself and your skill set available,” Parker said. “Think about relationship building in communities as part of your job, because that’s going to have you do better projects and better science in the long run.”