LEWISTON — The ongoing global debate over how much and how quickly the planet’s climate is changing and who’s to blame is often fraught with either the complexities of heady atmospheric science or the mind-numbing politics of those in perpetual disagreement on the topic.

But a recently completed May-term project by a group of 12 Bates College students took an up-close-and-personal look at how climate change is being experienced and is viewed by Maine people: farmers, fishermen and longtime residents who live not far from the campus of the liberal arts school.

Going into the project, sophomore Eileen O’Shea said she knew people have really different opinions about climate change.

“It’s hard to handle when you are in an environment like Bates because you are used to people being pretty liberal and having one opinion about it and that’s not the case in the real world,” O’Shea said during a presentation on the project Wednesday.

While she understands the science of climate change, the issue has been so politicized, it can be terribly frustrating at times to talk about it, O’Shea said.

But Brenda Cummings, president of the Phippsburg Land Trust and one of the people whom O’Shea interviewed, shared a philosophy that O’Shea said resonated with her. O’Shea said Cummings’ words were “really powerful.”

O’Shea read an excerpt from her interview with Cummings: 

“I don’t need to specifically argue with climate-change deniers; I don’t need to say ‘climate change’ or ‘human produced’ in order to work together on taking care of the land we love,” Cummings said in the interview. “It is valuable to use another person’s context and language to stress the importance of the changing environment; I may not call it ‘climate change’ when I talk to a fisherman or clam digger, but we both care about whether the ocean can support fishing and whether acidification or pollution has shut down the clam flats.

“We may not agree on whether climate change or normal weather patterns created this or that event, but anyone who goes outdoors is affected by ticks, which never used to be able to survive in Maine,” she said. “The people who live here love Phippsburg, and we all seek to protect the places we love — that love is the means we can use to encourage others to be aware and change the way we treat our world.”

Other students in the project interviewed lobstermen, farmers, those who work in the cross-country ski business, a Passamaquoddy tribal leader, lifelong residents of Maine and even a local bird-watching enthusiast. 

The project, led by instructor Elizabeth Mueller, an Andrew Mellon Fellow in Pedagogical Innovation in the college’s English Department, uses an online mapping system to plot the stories the students collected, along with audio clips from their subjects and essays on their findings in a unique online presentation that is designed to grow with additional stories and information into the future. To that end, the project will remain a living and growing entity online.

“The goal is to really think about how do you start to tell individual stories in a way that they can all be presented together as being a kind of chorus,” Mueller said. “What happens when we take all of these really important personal experiences and put them together in one space — this digital space — online?”

Mueller describes the effort as “an immersive online archive” and “a spatially tagged narrative form of journalism.”

The presentation online allows the reader to figuratively roam from place to place and listen to or read the stories and view the information that was collected.

Mueller said the project offered surprising results for those who participated.

One of those surprises, she said, was how adaptable people were.

“One of the key components of this map and this project is to think about, in a way, how do you rebrand climate change, so that it’s not just a catastrophe, so it’s not just a cataclysm?” Mueller asked.

“But how can we tell a story around climate change that might lead to people being less likely to be terrified of it and have a kind of impact and think about ways people are already making really profound adaptations to climate change that is happening in their communities?”

You can view the project online at www.bates.edu/climatechange.

sthistle@sunjournal.com

You can view the Bates College Climate Project online at www.bates.edu/climatechange.