Reflections is written by Island Institute Fellows, recent grads of college and master’s programs who do community service work on Maine islands and in coastal communities through Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront.
As I enjoy my first summer on Islesboro, I’m struck by the blossoms and lush greenery returning after a quiet winter. They remind me of a word that has become a regular part of my vocabulary: resilience.
We use “resilience” to describe how an entity recovers or adjusts after a change or challenge. This is certainly a buzzword in the fields of energy work and sustainable development, where I spend much of my time as a fellow. It’s easy to see why: who wouldn’t want to recover quickly from adversity? Still, resilience is a more complex process than blooms pushing back up winter after winter. We do not simply become resilient communities by default, but rather through concentrated efforts to transform our past and present challenges into a future that feels attainable and secure.
I often talk with my host organizations, the Islesboro Energy Committee and the Islesboro Community Center, about energy resilience—how we can supply power when outages occur, and how we can ensure islanders have reliable, affordable power for years to come. Our island is connected to the mainland’s electrical grid via underground cable, meaning that any electrical disruptions across Penobscot Bay can limit access to power on the island. During my first nine months on Islesboro, fallen trees and winter storms have both triggered outages directly on the island and caused mainland outages that affected us “down the line.” Generally speaking, the plan for outages like these is to wait it out until reconnection.
It’s no small task for an island community to make backup plans and share resources for outages that can span hours or even days. Backup generators and designated resource hubs, like the Community Center, can build resilience amidst challenging circumstances, but they have also come to be the way our community chugs along, business as usual.
So, what if we could plan to allocate resources so that outages lasted for only a few moments rather than stretching out and prolonging everyone’s frustration? On Islesboro, we are redefining our approach to energy resilience by exploring the development of microgrids, which are energy systems designed to offer a more reliable backup option. Once tailored to the needs of its community, a microgrid can help an island weather electrical grid outages by seamlessly switching over to energy that’s generated and stored on the island.
While these types of resilience conversations can get quite technical, I also find the same threads of strength and persistence when I get to work with kids at the Community Center. This spring, I led a program with our young islanders called “the Trashion Show,” in which students repurposed materials such as bubble wrap, fabric scraps, cardboard, plastic bags, bottle caps, and other functional forms of garbage into runway-ready masterpieces. Perhaps to an outside perspective, the stakes were lower for this show than technical conversations about a sustainable energy future. However, if you stepped into our “Trashion Tuesdays” workshop space, you’d know that wasn’t the case. In fact, most town planners would get a run for their money from the pure determination and adaptability of six- to 13-year-olds designing garments from discarded materials.
Planning an energy-resilient island is a careful balancing act between local demands, storage capacity, and generation potential that must consider the needs of residents and businesses. Planning a resilient trashion outfit is a problem-solving relay involving materials that were perhaps never anticipated to be wearable.
Yet both struggles represent the way we can build a resilient island. Energy plans and art projects need to have a clear vision coupled with a willingness to continuously adjust to the inevitable snags ahead. And so, holding technical expertise in one hand and creativity in the other, I look forward to watching Islesboro’s resilient future bloom.
Elizabeth Dyer supports Islesboro’s energy committee with home and municipal projects and engages local youth around energy and other environmental science and sustainability topics at the Islesboro Community Center.
