Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty Malcolm Hill announced that Caitlin Cleaver, former director of science and research at the Hurricane Island Foundation, will become director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area and the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Coastal Center at Shortridge effective Aug. 19.

“Caitlin has extensive experience at the intersection of research, education, and conservation, making her the right leader at the right time for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain and Shortridge,â€� said Hill.

“The work being done at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain and Shortridge by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ researchers and students, as well as our partners in Maine, is important to our understanding of how a changing climate is affecting the coast. I am confident in Caitlin’s ability to carry out the pivotal mission of these two important and invaluable coastal resources.â€�

Caitlin Cleaver, the new director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Coastal Center at Shortridge, poses atop Morse Mountain on Aug. 15, 2019. (Theophil Syslo/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area and Coastal Center at Shortridge are outdoor laboratories offering an incredible backdrop for conducting relevant research and exploring solutions to pressing environmental issues,â€� Cleaver said.

“I am excited to build on the work that has happened in the area and continue to engage ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students in meaningful interdisciplinary research that can make our coastal communities more resilient in the face of change.â€�

Managed by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for research and educational purposes, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area comprises some 600 acres of permanently protected salt marshes and coastal uplands on the Phippsburg peninsula. The Nature Conservancy holds conservation easements on the property, which is owned by the nonprofit ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area Corporation.

Adjacent to the conservation area, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Coastal Center at Shortridge sits on 80 acres of woodlands and wetlands, providing a base for academic programs and extracurricular activities including field research, meetings, retreats, and conferences.

As director, Cleaver will oversee day-to-day operations and long-term strategy; facilitate research and educational activities; and expand educational, environmental, and stewardship partnerships with an array of agencies and organizations. She will also lead efforts to attract new grant funding for the facilities and conservation work, and she will teach a new annual course at Shortridge during the college’s spring Short Term.

“Caitlin not only has extensive and impressive experience on the Maine coast, but she has also secured important grants for the Hurricane Island Foundation, and her positive energy is infectious,� said �slaug �sgeirsdóttir, associate dean of the faculty and professor of politics, who oversees the director position.

Professor of Geology Beverly Johnson uses a sediment elevation table to measure the height of the Sprague River Salt Marsh, part of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area, in August 2018. At right is Claire Enterline, senior planner of the Maine Coastal Mapping Initiative, Maine Coastal Program. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“From teaching a Short Term course to obtaining grants to support the work at BMMCA and Shortridge, Caitlin will carry forward the education, research, and conservation components of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area, and create exciting new opportunities.â€�

A Colby College graduate, Cleaver is a doctoral candidate in ecology and environmental sciences at the University of Maine, where she earned master’s degrees in marine biology and marine policy. She also holds a master’s in public policy from Columbia University. Most recently, she was the marine science lead at FB Environmental Associates in Portland, Maine, where she studied lobster fishing gear and right whale entanglement.

In her four years as director of science and research at Hurricane Island, Cleaver collaborated with local fishermen to understand the effects of fishing-area closures on scallop populations and obtained grant funding for a related five-year monitoring project. To connect the foundation with other field stations, Cleaver co-founded, with former BMMCA–Shortridge director Laura Sewall, the Northeastern Coastal Stations Alliance.

“It is critical to train the next generation of scientists and practitioners in understanding the rigor of the scientific process, but also in being able to communicate the implications of their findings to a range of audiences,� Cleaver said.

Cleaver succeeds Sewall, who served as director of BMMCA and Shortridge for 11 years.

As geology students did faculty-guided fieldwork in and around the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area on Aug. 13, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ photographer Josh Kuckens followed along.

And after a long day looking down at sand, marsh, and water, the young researchers, whose work will inform and guide their senior theses, got a chance to look in a different direction — like up, into the night sky.

9:52 a.m. — Measuring up

At Popham Beach State Park, Nicole Cueli ’16 of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., sets up an a transit, or autolevel, a device used by scientists, builders, and surveyors to measure distances and elevation changes. In the distance at right is Ian Hillenbrand ’17 of Terrace Park, Ohio.

9:53 a.m. — Staff support

Hillenbrand ’17 holds a stadia rod, which is used in tandem with an autolevel to measure the elevation change between two points on the beach.

Geology majors Cueli and Hillenbrand have joined ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ geologist Mike Retelle’s long-term work to monitor and evaluate how the area’s sandy beach systems respond to changes brought about by storms, seasonal wave climate, and rising sea level.

9:54 a.m. — Level best at Popham

Cueli uses the autolevel. In her left hand is the geologist’s trusty companion, a yellow field notebook.

10:20 a.m. — Sooner or ladder

As Dana Cohen-Kaplan ’16, of Newton Mass., steadies the ladder, Retelle downloads weather data and time-lapse images from a unit mounted on the west bath house at Popham Beach.

11:28 a.m. — Break time

Back at the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Coastal Center at Shortridge, adjacent to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-Morse Mountain and Popham Beach State Park, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ researchers break for lunch.

Here, Cueli jokes with Retelle, who is reviewing time-lapse images from the beach, and with  Laura Sewall, who is director of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-Morse Mountain Conservation Area and Shortridge.

1:24 p.m. — You can get there from here, but it’ll take awhile

Geology majors Cailene Gunn ’16 (left) of Granby, Conn., and Dana Cohen-Kaplan ’16 of Newton, Mass., secure benches to the top of Gunn’s car before heading out to do fieldwork at Long Marsh in Harpswell.

The distance from Shortridge to Long Marsh is just 10 miles as the crow flies, but it’s 30 miles (and a 45-minute drive) on roads that follow Maine’s infamously zig-zaggy shoreline.

2:22 p.m. — Waist deep in big muddy

Gunn suddenly finds herself waist deep in Long Marsh. “It happens, but it’s not usually this bad,” she says.

Gunn and Cohen-Kaplan have been working with geology professor Bev Johnson to measure the carbon budget of Maine’s salt marshes.

Specifically, they are measuring the amount of methane released by two different salt marshes, the Sprague River Marsh, part of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-Morse Mountain, and Long Marsh, in Harpswell.

Long Marsh, occupying a long, narrow glacially carved valley at sea level, has experienced restricted tidal flow for decades. As a result, its health has suffered.

3:21 p.m. — Gassing up

In early 2014 a new and wider culvert was installed beneath a road that crosses the marsh.  The wider culvert allows sea water to flood the marsh regularly.

The tactic is working, says Gunn, seen here taking a gas sample from the marsh. “We can actually see the ecosystem beginning to restore itself.�

Taking gas samples is necessary to measure the amount of methane being released from the marsh. Among other things, better tidal flow throughout Long Marsh should help the marsh retain more methane.

While carbon dioxide is the more prevalent greenhouse gas, methane is much more potent as a heat-trapping gas.

3:37 p.m. — Wetlands at work

Tidal marshes are paramount to the overall health of coastal ecosystems. They provide nursery habitat for important fisheries, protect against storm surges, filter out pollutants, and serve as carbon sinks.

Unfortunately, most of Maine’s salt marshes have been anthropogenically altered in some way, and many are in need of restoration to function properly.

7:25 p.m. — Setting the scene

Gunn and Cohen-Kaplan join Adam Auerbach ’16 of Silver Spring, Md., and Nathan Stephansky ’17 of Whitman, Mass., on Hermit Island., about three miles from Shortridge, where they watch the sunset from a spot called the Bath Tub.

The four students, each of whom did fieldwork or related coastal work over the summer, used Shortridge as their home base.

7:43 p.m. — Getting rooted on the rocks

Gunn does some sunset-inspired yoga.

9:16 p.m. — Back to Shortridge

Cohen-Kaplan and Cueli finish off their late supper at Shortridge.

Shortridge was donated to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in the mid-1990s by John and Linda Shortridge, who had built a retirement home on the land. It has facilities for field research while also supporting other ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ activities. Each year, some 25 student groups, representing up to 400 students, use the center.

The center sits on 79 acres of woodlands, wetlands, granite escarpments, and a glacially-scoured pond.

10:03 p.m. — Starry starry night

At night, “the Rock,” an outcropping behind Shortridge that looks out over Meetinghouse Pond, is a dark and spectacular place — a perfect spot to watch the night sky.

I have been sitting at my desk focused on a two-dimensional screen for several hours, concentrating on the effects of climate change. I glance up to rest my weary eyes.

It is a hot and windless day in late August 2010. To my surprise, I see giant waves hitting the nearby beach and remember that a hurricane was forecast. It must be passing by offshore. The waves, I realize, are loud and relentless. With every crash they send white foam airborne, rising above the largest of the sand dunes.

Just before high tide, I kayak into the marsh I know so well. It is flooded beyond recognition. Meanders and hillocks have disappeared below a mirrored expanse surrounded by upland conifers and filled with the cacophony of terns and gulls seeking shelter from the eccentric storm.

Patches of grass tips appear just above the water’s surface, all of them entirely covered with insects. Huge numbers leap into my kayak as I float by. Spiders, flies, ants and grasshoppers quickly cover my arms and legs, and I realize that they are scrambling to higher ground. The future of coastal insects had never before occurred to me.

Photograph by Will Ash

I paddle past a dead duck, its black and white feathers splayed open. The thrust of my paddle spins its limp body, and a graceful whirl of contrasting feathers catches my eye and shifts my mind, and I recall that some 80 percent of migrating shorebird populations are in decline. The least terns are entirely gone from here, the piping plovers nearly so.

Paying for Inattention

While the loss of migratory birds and a changing climate may be the most global indications of environmental collapse, the problems are stacked up and ubiquitous. We currently face failing economies, health care systems and ecosystems. Water supplies are dwindling, agricultural lands are contested and lost, and political systems are as fractured as the landscape.

Given the apparently escalating number of environmental disasters and losses, we may understandably bury ourselves in distractions or hide under the covers. Or we get out of bed, brush our teeth and continue with business as usual. Our collective denial is largely due to the difficulty of dedicating attention to such depressing detail. We commonly speak of “paying� attention.

It’s an accurate turn of phrase: Attention is cognitively demanding. Researchers know that there are costs and benefits associated with directing one’s attention, and paying attention to failing systems is painful.

The capacity to direct, intensify and sustain a focus of attention follows a bell-shaped curve, with world champion chess players and athletes at the highly capacitated end of the curve — it has been said that Ted Williams could focus on the stitching of a baseball as it hurled past home plate at 90 miles an hour.

Today’s screen-centric technology has rendered our brains less able to pick up the detail and depth of the natural world.

However, current discourse suggests that we are slipping toward deficiency in our ability to pay attention, and technology may be the reason. Emergent technologies have always captured our attention, and in the process, changed our minds as well. What’s unique, however, is the scale at which today’s screen-centric technology has captured our attention and, according to some, rendered our brains less able to pick up the detail and depth of the natural world.

Experimental philosopher Jesse Prinz defines “attention� as a group of related cognitive functions that allow sensory representations to pass into working memory. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that the Internet “is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it.� This scrambling of attention refers to a growing inability to sustain one’s focus for any duration, rendering us “shallow,� as little information gets through to working memory.

In fact, experiments show that when our attention jumps from one link or one Web page to the next, our understanding of what has been viewed, browsed or read is significantly minimized. What seems to be lacking is the consolidation of memory as information moves from short-term storage to long-term memory.

Our Internet fixation may also be an example of paying attention to the wrong things. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, has made two claims regarding our behavior under conditions of uncertainty — perhaps not unlike those caused by our tenuous environmental state. Most famously, Kahneman claims a common lack of rational decision-making. More recently, he claims that we generally focus on “the wrong things.�

Photograph by Will Ash

Indeed, our common preoccupation with the Internet — Tweeting, Facebooking and online shopping at all hours — suggests that we suffer two-fold: In the context of looming environmental disasters, we focus on the wrong things, and secondly, our ability to sustain a focus of attention has apparently atrophied.

Our minimized and misdirected attention only deepens our denial of true environmental conditions. How can we begin to fathom the fact that, along with shorebirds, 70 to 90 percent of migratory songbirds have disappeared from the northern spring over the last half century? We do not notice the loss. We do not hear what has become silent.

One Word: Plasticity

It has often been said that our environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. We do not readily see the patterns that would reveal our dependence on the natural world, nor are we commonly aware of the systems within which we are deeply embedded. Yet our brains are remarkably adaptive — meaning that neural networks shift continuously as a function of our experience — and by extension, so shifts our perception.

Quite literally, the degree of synaptic strength, or connectedness between neurons, and consequently the way we process sensory information, changes in response to what has captured and held our attention. Over the last three decades, research has demonstrated a surprising degree of “plasticity� in our visual systems in particular.

A second finding claims that sensory system plasticity — the literal restructuring of neural networks in response to experience — depends on the activation of the neural mechanisms responsible for our ability to pay attention.

It is well-known that our capacity to focus and sustain attention is itself readily trained, as exemplified by the long traditions of meditation and mindfulness, and by the practice of visualization. In addition, the 20-year body of research supporting what is called Attention Restoration Theory claims that images of natural scenes serve to restore our cognitive capacity to focus and sustain our attention.

All of this is good news. However, in the large majority of these studies, subjects are exposed to flat photographs of nature, or views through windows. Because the experimental conditions are so significantly bereft of embodied experience, the results, I believe, are greatly understated. How can photographs come close to duplicating the experience of being in nature?

Instead of gazing at a flat image, imagine being awash in sensations. Imagine the plethora of sensations arising simultaneously from warm sunshine and glimmering surfaces, from pungent soils and salty air, and from the quiet whir of chickadees alighting nearby.

Photograph by Will Ash

Our senses delight in the sensate world. Doing what they evolved to do, they naturally feast on sunsets and clouds streaming by, on the nuances of human expression or the curious behavior of birds. With renewed attention, colors regain vibrancy, patterns pop and what was once barely seen now jumps into view. The world beckons and desires surface as if awakening from slumber.

This is not mere conjecture. It is a tale of subjective experience while doing perception exercises outdoors, for several years, as a visual scientist. Over time, I became convinced that the senses, our bodies and even entire lives can be restored by direct sensory engagement with the still-intact natural world.

But even more significant — because of the collective implications — restoring the power and skill of attention by engaging with the natural world offers us the opportunity to adapt our behavior to changing conditions.

In other words, we gain adaptive value by looking and listening with our attention on full-tilt.

Local Knowledge

I am also a self-proclaimed natural historian of local events. I’ve watched beaches and sand dunes disappear while ragged spines of granite emerge from mountains of sand. Full tides now throw plastic flotsam into upland trees and ice-out on the Kennebec River is many days earlier than in 20th-century Maine. These are observations providing the flesh and bones of climate statistics. They constitute embodied knowledge gained directly through the senses, and in the gut, and they have changed my behavior.

I suggest a forceful shift in one’s focus — consciously looking up and away from that screen — and to the natural world.

Dare I say that this kind of attentive observation is now happening all over the Eastern Seaboard? For example, residents of coastal Norfolk, Va., apparently pay attention to tide tables the way other suburbanites note rush hour traffic. As reported by The New York Times, sea level rise has created chronic flooding, and citizens have lobbied the city council to divert storm drains and raise a small stretch of road by 18 inches, at a cost of $1.25 million.

Photograph by Will Ash

Fueled by economics, the debate between climate skeptics and believers is much amplified, but one quote in the article makes my point: “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.�

In the words of writer Barry Lopez, attentive observers of the natural world have necessarily become more than “custodian[s] of irrelevant knowledge… but a kind of citizen whose involvement in the political process, in the debates of public life, in the evolution of literature and the arts, has become crucial.�

But sincerely attending to the signs of environmental degradation and change is troubling. Uncertainty arises, often with anxiety riding on its heels. Some suggest that we should avoid “eco-anxiety� at all costs, “lest we succumb to an overwhelming grief — a heartache born of our organism’s instinctive empathy with the living land and its cascading losses,� in the words of environmental philosopher David Abram.

Yet we need not succumb. Again, the power of attention matters most.

Beauty and the Brain

I have argued that we must fully absorb the facts of environmental change through direct observation and serious consideration — no matter the emotional disturbance.

I am also advancing the case of natural beauty as a source of restoration: of our capacity to attend, of our sensory bodies and of our hearts. I suggest that we focus both on environmental change and on natural beauty. This requires shifting our attention, fully.

Beauty, more so than degradation, is everywhere to be seen, reminding us that the world is fundamentally coherent, that things “go together� and function well.

Psychologist and author James Hillman claimed that “beauty is the way in which the gods touch our senses, reach the heart and attract us into life.

Beauty, wrote the poet Robinson Jeffers, is why we “fall in love outwards,� our senses provoked and alert.

Frederick Turner, the author of Beauty: The Value of Values, suggests that the perception of beauty has evolutionary value because it offers us the “capacity to organize meaning in very large quantities of ill-defined information…and to perceive harmonies and regularities that add up to a deep unity.â€�

Photograph by Will Ash

My formulation is more pragmatic: Beauty not only seizes our attention, but also links sensations of the aesthetic sort to a reward system buried in the brain. With the repeated firing of particular neurons and networks ensured, a ready appreciation for beauty is easily conditioned. In other words, with beauty before us, our senses are enlivened, attentive and synchronized. Neural substrates are humming and specific synaptic connections become strengthened, thus changing the structure and readiness of neural networks — along with perceptual tendencies and the behavior that follows.

In the case of vision, the result is an aesthetic eye that searches the world for pleasing patterns — for what “goes together.� In this way, the aesthetic response to beauty is a self–organizing principle.

Here, then, is a promising path forward. With attention frequently focused on natural events — on the sun setting, tides spilling, flocks flying north and south, leaves drying, rustling, rotting and composting — our perceptual worlds become more deeply nuanced and vivid, more richly textured, patterned and scented. And, saturated by the generous beauty of the natural order, we “fall in love outward,� perceiving “harmonies and regularities that add up to a deep unity.� We begin to see ecologically, with a relational eye, and to comprehend the depth of our dependence on the natural world. And we begin to care. This changes our behavior.

We begin to see ecologically, with a relational eye, and to comprehend the depth of our dependence on the natural world. And we begin to care. This changes our behavior.

I look up. The wind is dropping now. A broad beam of golden light has just emerged from beneath low clouds, drenching all manner of hill and tree in a golden glow. The sun is quickly disappearing below the horizon, the Earth spinning in silence, and so very fast.

Birds, too, have become silent. Even the grasses are still. It is as if we are holding our breath, all of us as one.

About the Author

Laura Sewall is the director of the Coastal Center at Shortridge and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area, a 600-acre research, education and conservation area on the Maine coast. She earned a doctorate in visual psychology and neuroscience from Brown University, and this essay is adapted from her chapter in Ecopsychology: Science, Totems and the Technological Species (MIT Press, 2012).

‘Between Two Rivers’
The photographs by Will Ash that accompany this essay appear in the photo book Between Two Rivers: A Year at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€“Morse Mountain Conservation Area.