From Harbor to Gulf: Lessons Learned from Changing Tides
- Evan Paris
- Mar 24
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 25
A month into service with the Resilience Corps, Community Science Fellow Evan Paris reflects on how he hopes to apply insight gained from his previous AmeriCorps service with the National Parks of Boston to this year’s efforts in strengthening coastal community resilience. He discusses how reading the landscape can guide conservation efforts and ways to navigate the emotional tides of working alongside a turbulent sea.
Although I grew up in Boston, I never knew there were national parks in my city, let alone three. When I accepted an AmeriCorps service term with the National Parks of Boston last year, I was surprised to find them right in my backyard. Many of Boston’s quintessential historical landmarks make up Boston National Historical Park and Boston African American National Historic Site. And if you look towards the harbor, where colonial revolutionaries once deposited 342 chests of tea in the name of liberty, you’d spot some of the 34 islands and peninsulas that comprise Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park. Turns out, all I had to do was look out the window.
As a member of the Climate Conservation Corps, I had the privilege of deepening my connection with these places, sculpted by glaciers and steeped in history. We would glide through the harbor on boats of various sizes, and while we would meticulously bundle up during the winter so that no more than an inch of skin was exposed to the bitter sea spray, getting splashed during the summer months was a refreshing relief. I loved diving headfirst into the island wilderness, from trudging through salt marsh grasses as the deoxygenated muck tried to steal the waders from my feet to scraping clusters of mollusks off dock underbellies using scientific tools suspiciously resembling the common spatula, to watching my every step during coastal breeding bird season to avoid cleverly camouflaged killdeer nests as protective parents circled overhead, poised to dive at my first misstep.
Though island exploration was a fun adventure, the underlying tone was always as bittersweet as the invasive oriental bittersweet we’d pull from the meadow on Grape Island. Our job was to elucidate the climate hazards threatening the island ecosystems and devise ways to help. And unfortunately, as I explored more and more islands, the severity of the threat facing these communities grew clearer.
On many of the islands’ shorelines, towering cliffs of sand loom over the sea. These eroding bluffs are battle scars imparted to the islands from the relentless battering of waves, a process that will only intensify as climate change brings higher tides and heavier storms. The islands are our guardians, protecting the city of Boston from the same fate, but in doing so their boundaries are getting carved away, shrinking the homeland of island life.
As I transition into a new year of service this time with the Resilience Corps, I look forward to exploring a whole new natural landscape and do my part to help it meet the challenges of the climate crisis.
I’ve only been living here for four months now, but it didn’t take long to realize why Maine dons the slogan “Vacationland”. With mighty mountains, boreal forests, and a galaxy of glittering ponds, Maine has it all. The collision of Paleozoic land masses long ago produced jagged rocks on some shorelines, while retreating glaciers polished others into swirling striations. Even driving down the highway offers great views, with vibrant fall foliage flickering like fire.
Separated by only 13 miles of New Hampshire coastline, Massachusetts and Maine face similar climate hazards. Both states sit beside the Gulf of Maine, which is one of the fastest warming bodies of water on Earth [1]. Climate change is driving our sea’s temperatures up and its pH down, throwing the human and non-human life that depend on it into disarray. The ocean is the heart of our planet, circulating seawater through vein-like currents and giving life to a menagerie of magnificent creatures. The disruption of its natural order due to excessive dissolved heat and CO2 will send myriad ripples far and wide throughout both human and non-human systems. Therefore, our response must also be myriad.
Last year in Boston, I focused on ecological sustainability, trying to bolster the resilience of island ecosystems as the ocean carves away their shores. This year, I am shifting my focus towards community sustainability, helping people adapt to a turbulent sea.
If you include our intricate matrix of tidally influenced bays and rivers, Maine has a longer coastline than even California [2]. Many municipalities in Maine take advantage of the ample coastal real estate, enjoying a charming seaside lifestyle. However, these communities are increasingly coming face to face with floods and storms brought by a hungry ocean and angry sky.
This year I am excited to be stationed at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, where I will contribute to the Municipal Climate Action Program’s efforts to bolster the resilience of Maine’s coastal communities. I will be taking the helm from past Resilience Fellows Abigail Long and Morgan Glynn in running the coastal flooding community science project, an initiative that harnesses people power to bridge local knowledge with water level data to better understand the conditions that cause flooding in communities, thereby fortifying emergency preparedness and informing climate decisions. I look forward to building on the conservation skills I developed last year while tackling different challenges created by our changing, churning ocean.
Before my service with AmeriCorps, my thoughts and feelings about climate change were colored by grief. Grief for the species whose environments will turn too hostile, grief for the people who will face natural disasters too relentless, and so on. I know grief matters, but it can paralyze you. Through my service, I am learning how to balance my climate anxiety with climate hope.
One thing that gives me hope is nature’s inherent resilience. Nature is strong but flexible, spontaneous but willful. The principles of evolution propel life through uncertainty with adaptation. If we hope to survive the storms, floods, and fires of climate change, we must learn to embody nature’s spirit.
We can learn from the forest, who rather than cries, lets out a sigh of relief when fire clears her understory of suffocating brambles. We can learn from the trees, who share nutrients with struggling neighbors through their roots and the intricate fungal networks to which they are symbiotically intertwined. And we can learn from the salt marsh, an entire ecosystem who can migrate inland when the tides rise too high.
I am learning that hope is an active process, it is different than just wishing. Hope fuels action which can make you more hopeful and carry you to more action. It is a self-propelling machine, if you let it be. In climate work, there is a place for the swamp of grief, but the breeze of hope is what powers change. Through my years of service, I have been fueling my hope machine, and letting it carry me forward. Nature’s resilience gives me hope, and the people I’ve met who devote their time to innovating climate action strategies give me hope — hope that we can live as a part of nature, not apart from it.
This year I am proud to be joining a Corps named after Resilience, a cohort of 12 passionate individuals deployed throughout Maine, applying our talents to the workforce. I look forward to advancing coastal conservation initiatives, and to continue reading the landscape, listening to, and learning from our one wild and precious planet.
Sources
[1] Rep. Annual Warming Update 2024, 2025. https://gmri.org/stories/2024-gulf-of-maine-warming-update/.
[2] Rep. Shoreline Mileage of the United States, 2025. https://coast.noaa.gov/data/docs/states/shorelines.pdf.
About Evan
Evan is a first-generation Dominican who grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. At the start of his career, Evan aimed to transform his eco-anxiety into action through science, graduating from Vassar College with a degree in biochemistry, then working as a post-baccalaureate researcher in a plant microbiology lab at Stanford University. While passionate about science, Evan found that lab work lacked the direct community impact he sought, leading him to pursue a career in conservation. With experience teaching science lessons at museums and spearheading sustainability projects with the National Parks of Boston, he now aims to integrate art, science, and education to empower communities in mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis, and is thrilled to be doing so this year with the Resilience Corps. Outside of work, you can find Evan climbing trees, hugging trees, making art, or obsessing over the TV show Survivor.
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