The Gulf of Maine is an international watershed in the North Atlantic stretching north from Provincetown at the tip of Massachusetts Bay in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to Cape Sable on the Bay of Fundy in the province of Nova Scotia in Canada. For over 13,000 years, the Gulf has been developed around access to the coast for fishing, trading, and recreation. Today, these coastal development patterns put the cultural landscapes, economies, communities, and aging infrastructure systems along the Gulf at risk.
Climate Futures on the Gulf of Maine uses place-based scenario planning to illustrate the risks, vulnerabilities, and plausible futures for ten infrastructure systems along the rim of the Gulf. Place-based scenario planning is a method of long-term strategic planning that creates representations of multiple, plausible futures that are used to inform decision-making in the present. While complementary to probabilistic models used to forecast future vulnerabilities, scenario-based planning shifts emphasis from statistical probability to ways of thinking about the future. The goal of place-based scenario planning is not to predict the most likely outcome, but to reveal biases and blind spots in complex and non-linear situations.
Climate Futures uses the medium of landscape representation to surface the cultural value systems embedded in existing infrastructural systems, and position landscape as a driver when evaluating design from individual infrastructures to the Gulf of Maine watershed.
Infrastructure > Education
LUBEC CONSOLIDATED SCHOOL
44 South Street
Lubec, ME 04652
The Lubec Consolidated School serves students from preschool to eighth grade in the easternmost municipality in the United States in the contiguous United States on land unceded by the Passamaquoddy People. 1
While the population in Maine has doubled over the past century, this growth has taken place in the southern part of the state. In Lubec, the population has declined since the 1920s, meaning that the Town’s development patterns remain tightly clustered around the shoreline, which provided access to the Town’s primary industries: shellfishing, sardine canning, fishing, and trading across the U.S.-Canadian border.
In the 1950s, centralized public water, sewer, electrical and education systems were built to serve the existing population. While these systems were built to serve a larger population 2 and therefore should have excess capacity to serve a more dense, infilled community, they do not function at their full capacity due to significant issues with deferred maintenance and a lack of consistent investment. 3 The Lubec Consolidated School is an excellent example of this trend.
The Lubec Consolidated School serves 89 students from preschool to eighth grade. After Lubec High School closed in 2010, graduating students attend the high school of their choice within fifty miles of Lubec. The closing of the high school represents a trend in Lubec and other rural areas toward consolidation, leading to a declining number of social service jobs including health care, social assistance, and education. 4 5 6
Today, the preschool, kindergarten, elementary, and middle schoolers share a single brick building in Lubec overlooking Lubec Bay. The building previously housed the high school before it was closed and replaced with the Lubec Community Outreach Center, which leases the former high school space and provides a food pantry and other services. The school building’s roof and heating systems have failed and were replaced in recent years, prompting an evaluation of other deferred maintenance projects, including new windows, siding, and brickwork. 7
The elementary school was constructed on South Street in 1953, a gymnasium with an arched roof was built in 1955, and the high school was designed by William O. and Robert E. Armitage Architects in 1974 and built in 1976. 8 The school was built upland of the Mowry Beach Preserve and recreation area in the southeastern corner of Lubec. 9 Mowry Beach Preserve is a wetland that provides critical shorebird and shellfish habitat, and faces increasing coastal erosion, as well as sea level rise and storm surge. 10 Despite the area’s habitat value, Lubec’s limited land use regulations mean that this low-lying area could be further developed for residential uses as the population grows, which ultimately may allow for a high school and other social services and employment opportunities to return to the community. 11
The need to provide equitable access to education despite a declining population provides an opportunity to evaluate facility-level adaptation measures including building elevations and stormwater infrastructure on site, as well as infill development to revitalize the downtown area.
Scenario 0: Storm of the Century 2030
The first floor of the school is flooded by a wave that overtops the saturated ground after an unusually wet autumn. In the aftermath of the storm, trailers are set up for students, who cannot return to the building due to mold found growing in the water-logged basement.
Scenario 1: Fortified Systems
The Consolidated School and adjacent Community Outreach Center are elevated with five feet of freeboard. During storms, water passes under the building.
Scenario 2: Catchment Commons
The School is moved on a flatbed truck and relocated to higher ground in West Lubec, and South Street is depaved. The area is planted with a coastal buffer of salt-tolerant trees and shrubs.
International Watershed | Gulf of Maine | Hydrologic Unit Code |
Region (HUC-2) | New England | HUC 01 |
Subregion (HUC-4) | Maine Coastal | HUC 0105 |
Basin (HUC-6) | Maine Coastal | HUC 010500 |
Subbasin (HUC-8) | Passamaquoddy Bay-Bay of Fundy | HUC 01050004 |
Watershed (HUC-10) | Grand Manan Channel-Frontal Atlantic Ocean | HUC 0105000409 |
Subwatershed (HUC-12) | Wiggins Brook-Frontal Grand Manan Channel | HUC 010500040902 |
The Waponahki Museum Resource Center is dedicated to preserving Passamaquoddy Tribal Culture and passing on the language spoken in the region since the retreat of the Laurentide Glacier. “Welcome,” Sipayik Tribal Government, accessed June 10, 2025, www.wabanaki.com.
Town of Lubec, “Town of Lubec Maine Comprehensive Plan 2024” (Lubec, ME: Town of Lubec, 2024): 9-10, www.maine.gov/dacf/municipalplanning/comp_plans/Lubec_2024.pdf.
The Lubec stormwater management system, for example, “has a number of issues including broken or collapsed pipes, inadequate capacity to handle flash flooding, and seawater being forced back up into the system during high tides. Climate change will only exacerbate these problems.” Town of Lubec, “Town of Lubec Maine Comprehensive Plan 2024” (Lubec, ME: Town of Lubec, 2024): 94, www.maine.gov/dacf/municipalplanning/comp_plans/Lubec_2024.pdf.
Scholars studying rural consolidation note that it is both an educational and political phenomenon that tends to occur in waves. At the time of consolidation, concerns tend to focus on the immediate economic needs of communities and administrative concerns like transporting students to school. After consolidation, concerns and research focuses on the community-based repercussions of consolidation, including the way that schools shape rural identity and sense of place, which can be lost during consolidation phases. Additionally, there are concerns that consolidation can increase inequity across rural and urban school districts, as students in smaller schools tend to perform better, while consolidated classes tend to be larger, and students are required to travel further to receive an education. See Heather Perry, The Economics of School Closure in Rural Maine (Portland: University of Southern Maine, 2020) and Luke LaRosa, Local Schools, Rural Communities: Consolidation and Community in Central Vermont (Storrs: University of Connecticut, 2013).
Town of Lubec, “Town of Lubec Maine Comprehensive Plan 2024” (Lubec, ME: Town of Lubec, 2024): 55, www.maine.gov/dacf/municipalplanning/comp_plans/Lubec_2024.pdf.
Author Gigi Georges writes a non-fictional portrait of the lives of five young women attending high school in Washington County, Maine in Downeast: Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America (New York: Harper, 2021).
Town of Lubec, “Town of Lubec Maine Comprehensive Plan 2024” (Lubec, ME: Town of Lubec, 2024):92, www.maine.gov/dacf/municipalplanning/comp_plans/Lubec_2024.pdf.
High School Drawing, Lubec, ca. 1974, 1974, Architectural Drawing, 11.8 cm x 27.0 cm, 1974, Lubec Historical Society, www.mainememory.net/record/28264.
Historic images in the Lubec Historic Society archives show the elementary school as a lone building on an extension of South Street in 1963, surrounded by bog land. Carroll Peacock, Aerial View, Lubec, ca. 1963, 1963, Photograph, 28.7 cm x 34.7 cm, 1963, Lubec Historical Society, www.mainememory.net/record/28446.
Town of Lubec, “Town of Lubec Maine Comprehensive Plan 2024” (Lubec, ME: Town of Lubec, 2024): 155, www.maine.gov/dacf/municipalplanning/comp_plans/Lubec_2024.pdf.
Mowry Beach has several natural communities that are imperiled, including Maritime Slope Bog, dune grassland, tall grass meadow, a coastal plateau bog ecosystem, Downeast Maritime Shrubland, maritime huckleberry bog, and salt-hay saltmarsh. Town of Lubec, “Town of Lubec Maine Comprehensive Plan 2024” (Lubec, ME: Town of Lubec, 2024): 24, 117, www.maine.gov/dacf/municipalplanning/comp_plans/Lubec_2024.pdf.
