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.
Systems > Education
EDUCATION
Educational infrastructure on the Gulf of Maine includes schools, zoos, arboreta, botanical gardens, planetariums, observatories, galleries, museums, libraries, and archives. These institutions serve children, young adults, adults, and seniors across a variety of programs, events, and classes.
Schools serve students from Pre-Kindergarten to university programs across public, private, and charter schools across the Gulf of Maine. These schools range in enrollment, size, and grades served from Monhegan Island School, which serves 50 students from elementary to high school ten miles off the coast of Maine, to Lowell High School, which enrolls over 2,500 students in northern Massachusetts.
While the challenges facing schools differ depending on context, deferred maintenance and decreasing federal and state education budgets are shared issues, as well as structural problems like removing lead and installing air conditioning in places facing higher temperatures. 1 In rural and remote areas, including the Gulf’s islands, schools often serve as the central institutions for community life while facing pressures to consolidate. 2
In the Gulf’s cities and on its islands, education is not limited to institutions. The Gulf of Maine Council has identified a “broad-based understanding of the ecological and economic values of the Gulf [as] essential for the improved stewardship of the Gulf,” and recommend public education about the watershed to be shared in public education and public participation programs. 3
1 See American Society of Engineers, “A Comprehensive Assessment of America’s Infrastructure,” Infrastructure Report Card (New York, N.Y.: American Society of Engineers, 2025).
2 Philip W. Conkling writes that “community-based school projects reinforce the unique sense of place that is ultimately a strength of island life,” noting that in the past, when schools on islands like Criehaven, one of the most remote islands in the Gulf of Maine, have not been able to find teachers or staff, year-round islands can depopulate. Philip W. Conkling, Islands in Time: A Natural and Cultural History of the Islands of Maine, 3rd ed. (Rockland, ME: Island Institute, 2011): 192-193.
3 Katrina Van Dusen and Anne C. Johnson Hayden, “The Gulf of Maine: Sustaining Our Common Heritage” (Augusta: Maine State Planning Office, November 1989), www.digitalmaine.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=gulf_of_maine_council_docs.