I was hooked

By Isabel Mancinelli, Charles Eliot Chair in Ecological Planning, Policy, & Design

Iwas 19 when I became entranced by Mount Desert Island while on vacation with my family. We’d stopped for a couple days on our return trip from Nova Scotia. From our campsite, near Thompson Island, I saw the sun set— rather than rise—over the ocean for the first time. Having been taken by the drama of mountains rising from the sea, the pristine lakes and quiet forests, we returned the following year. It was then, on a ranger-led walk up Beech Mountain, that I learned about forest succession while repeatedly filling a hat with wild blueberries and pouring them into my mouth. A friend attended an experimental new college in Bar Harbor and I attempted, unsuccessfully, to find College of the Atlantic. About seven years later, as I was completing graduate school, I saw an advertisement for the position I now hold. I wanted to apply but my then fiancé was not interested in leaving Boston.

Instead I landed a job, first as an illustrator, then park planner, and eventually a landscape architect at the North Atlantic Regional Office of the National Park Service. My first assignment was drawing the boundary legislation maps for Acadia National Park. Acadia became one of several parks I oversaw and I made frequent trips to Mount Desert Island. I couldn’t believe I was being paid to return to my favorite place.

Once the 1986 boundary legislation passed, the Park Service was committed to completing a general management plan for Acadia. It would be the park’s first. Although Acadia was originally established in 1916, the indeterminate boundary made long-term planning challenging. At that time general management plans were usually the responsibility of the Denver service center. However, due to the contentious nature of the boundary legislation, we convinced the Washington office that in order to ensure acceptance of a plan, local presence was required for the planning team to work closely with the surrounding towns. As team captain, I was duty stationed at Acadia. That planning effort involved numerous, productive collaborations, including working with faculty, students, and recent alumnx of College of the Atlantic to acquire GIS data coverage for MDI, establish a friends’ group, and inventory and access potential impacts to native flora and fauna as well as to the local economy.

As the plan neared completion, professor John Anderson invited me to teach a course about land use planning at COA. During an initial lecture, I presented a project my graduate class had completed for Gunnison, Colorado. The students, including future COA President Darron Collins ’92, wanted to undertake a similar project locally. So I changed my plans for the course and was blown away by the energy, commitment, and creativity those students put into examining and presenting a potential build out scenario for the Route 3 corridor from the head of the island to downtown Bar Harbor. They gave an amazing presentation to Bar Harbor elected officials with huge images graphically illustrating how little protection current zoning provided from the type of sprawl occurring along Route 3 in Ellsworth. It was immensely effective. Their work eventually led to improvements in the land use ordinance and dramatically more thoughtful decisions by major landowners along the corridor. I realized students could have a significant and lasting positive impact on the future of the island I loved.

Shortly thereafter I became a full-time faculty member. At first, I intended to return to the National Park Service once my son reached school age. However, when I attended graduation in my fourth year of teaching, and witnessed students I had started working with as first years walk onto that stage having metamorphosed into such confident, capable adults, and knowing I had contributed to that process, I was hooked. COA attracts exceptional students and I have spent 30 years never ceasing to be amazed by their thoughtfulness, dedication, and creativity. I will miss them, and hope many will continue to keep me informed of their lives after COA. Now I’m looking forward to having time to pursue my creativity—painting the beauty that surrounds me on this island.

Feldman in discussion about their experiences with activism at COA and beyond. Sillari says it felt especially beneficial to consider changemaking within the human-ecological framework that “guides us and affects how we approach different types of work.”

Identity-based affinity groups offered space for new students to process their thoughts with classmates who may have had shared experiences. According to the facilitation guide, authored by the team with help from other DEIWG members, they also aimed to “normalize discussions around race and identity while maintaining a culture of honest, open conversations that uplift marginalized voices in the incoming student body,” and provide space for students to “explore their own identitiesinsafe and non-prescriptive ways.” Figuring out how to do this proved challenging and uncomfortable. “There was something a bit uncomfortable about… [even] defining… what groups [one] could join, knowing it was impossible to encapsulate the full complexities of people’s identities,” Sillari says. After numerous revisions and adjustments, they met with student and alumnx facilitators to discuss the guidelines. While encouraging facilitators to let participants lead conversations, the team talked through potential issues and stressed “prioritizing marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort.”

Feng says that recognizing the fear of defining identities on others’ behalf better prepared them “to frame our conversations in the affinity groups… than if we had just assumed the categories would be enough.” “We had the urge to give people as many choices as possible,” Lee says, but the team recognized in retrospect that the categories, which could never be a perfect fit, didn’t matter as much as they had initially thought. Having 10 affinity groups made scheduling and effective publicity difficult, resulting in a lower turnout than hoped. But, Sillari writes about the group she co-facilitated, “It was great to have… an opportunity for all of us to reflect on how our own communities, whether that be our families, friends, or previous schooling experiences, talked, or didn’t talk, about issues related to DEI and anti-racism.”

Between the pandemic, police brutality, Black Lives Matter protests, Zoom fatigue, and time differences, the team understood that they couldn’t evaluate their work by turnout alone. They drafted a survey to collect feedback from participants. Some responses offered suggestions for making orientation more inclusive, safe, and engaging in the future, and others indicated that the vocabulary and information about microaggressions, as well as current manifestations of structural racism, were new to many of the incoming students. Lee says,

“We’ve heard from a few people that they now have a name for the thing that they’d been dealing with.”

The weekend following the first week of classes, Lee, Feng, and Sillari got together on campus to write thank-you cards to the panelists and presenters. “That was the first time the three of us met in person,” Lee says, appearing both amused and amazed. “We had this intense experience over several weeks, entirely on Zoom, email, and WhatsApp… and we learned to work together.” “I drew strength from the experience working over the summer together,” Feng notes. “It helped me to engage with [DEI work] outside COA as well.” Sillari acknowledges, “I have just as much to learn from everything we organized as those who participated. I think we are all in this learning process.”

The team stresses that their efforts were only a starting point. “We now have all the documentation, the facilitation guide we wrote, the survey and the survey results, the budget, the scheduling,” Lee explains. “It’s all there for anyone who wants to learn from what we did.” Sillari hopes there will be a deeper institutional commitment in the future. One example is the need to establish a processforaddressingmicroaggressionsandracism. Lee says, “We think that because we’re a community, we can just talk, listen, and be kind and open-minded.” Initiating conversation is necessary, but the college also needs to invest in structural solutions if it wants to make anti-racism central to both human ecology and our community. This sentiment is echoed by Sillari. “We planned to plant some seeds for further growth and change within the community. It’s not just about making this statement at the beginning of the year that the college is committed to anti-racism and DEI work.”

Lee, Feng, and Sillari are eager to see what changes will emerge at COA from the experiences these incoming students shared.