Session 10 – Rural Health, Wellbeing and Sustainability

COVID-19 Protocols – As the main conference organizer, the Mitchell Center is required to have conference attendees follow University of Maine System COVID-19 protocols. Please go to the COVID-19 page for more information.

Afternoon Session: 1:30PM-4:00PM

Cumberland Room (First Floor)

Session Chairs:
Vanessa Levesque, Environmental Science and Policy, University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME
Kathleen Bell, School of Economics, University of Maine, Orono, ME
Eileen Johnson, Environmental Studies Program, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME

Community resilience can be viewed as the ability of a community to withstand, respond to, and recover from stressors and adverse events. The COVID-19 pandemic presented us with an adverse event, and community responses to and outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic offer many insights about the important interactions between rural health, wellbeing, and sustainability. This session highlights research that explores Maine’s rural community resilience in light of challenges such as COVID-19, municipal government capacity, stressors to tourism, and economic well-being. Presentations also highlight best practices and provide suggestions to help Maine communities strengthen their resilience to challenges.

Presenters are indicated in bold font.

1:30PM – 1:55PM
On COVID-19 and Tourism: Drivers of Travel Behavior and Place-based Appeal of Maine Rural Destinations

Sarah Jackson1, Sandra De Urioste-Stone1, John Daigle1, Karen Beeftink2, Linda Silka3, Allison Gardner4, Brandon Lieberthal4, Lucy Martin (student)1

  1. School of Forest Resources, University of Maine
  2. Recreation & Tourism Management Program, University of Maine at Machias
  3. Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, University of Maine
  4. School of Biology and Ecology, University of Maine

A PowerPoint slide presentation is available for this talk

Tourism is an important industry, contributing to the vitality and economic development of rural communities in Maine. In 2019 alone, the industry generated $6.5 billion in tourism spending and supported 116,000 jobs. The uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the multiple policies to reduce transmission, and the changes in outdoor recreation behavior had a significant impact on rural tourism destinations and management of protected spaces. This research aims to determine 1) what factors influence out-of-state visitation decisions and travel behaviors, and 2) which place attributes attract or deter from visiting Maine during the pandemic. An online survey conducted in fall 2021 measured travel behavior, health risk perceptions, knowledge and experience with COVID-19, and evaluation of destination attributes by visitors who traveled to Maine between January 2020 and October 2021. A total of 410 visitors completed the questionnaire. The majority of respondents were repeat visitors, with 30% being seasonal residents or owning property in Maine. Over 25% of respondents reported visiting Maine in both 2020 and 2021. Preliminary results suggest respondents believe that traveling to nature-based destinations (such as parks), to areas that implement COVID-19 precautions (such as mask wearing in restaurants), or to rural destinations make them feel safe during the pandemic. The majority of respondents perceive that getting sick with COVID-19 can be serious. Results from this survey could inform future rural destination management and public health policies to help reduce negative socioeconomic, health and environmental impacts of pandemic-derived changes in travel and outdoor recreation behavior.

2:00PM – 2:25PM
Economic and Political Drivers of COVID-19 Policy in 2020

Brandon Lieberthal, Allison Gardner, Sandra De Urioste-Stone
University of Maine, Orono, ME

A PowerPoint slide presentation is available for this talk

In early 2020, when COVID-19 was first introduced to the United States, state and local governments enacted a variety of policies intended to mitigate the virulence of the epidemic. In the absence of vaccines or treatments, the most effective measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 included stay-at-home orders, closing of nonessential businesses, social distancing, and the use of masks. In this presentation we utilize fine-scale incidence and demographic data study the complex relationship between local economic and political concerns, COVID-19 mitigation measures, and the subsequent severity of local outbreaks. Although it was well known that regions with high population density, busy airports, and cold climates were at the highest risk for disease spread, our research shows that policy decisions at the state level were instead motivated by other concerns. Specifically, rural counties that are economically reliant on tourism were incentivized to enact fewer precautions against COVID-19. In this presentation we demonstrate a novel statistical model that tracks the spatial distribution and temporal evolution of the disease reproduction rate throughout the continental United States. We use this model to tell a narrative, that in the early days of the epidemic, urban and densely population counties showed the highest growth in cases. In the summer, however, these counties enforced strict mitigation measures while other counties opted not to interfere with their tourism industry. As a result, counties that were expected to be less susceptible to disease outbreaks were instead hardest hit, and this pattern persists throughout the rest of the year.

2:30PM – 3:00PM
Afternoon Break (auditorium)

3:00PM – 3:25PM
The differential capacity of Maine municipalities to respond to COVID-19

Vanessa R. Levesque1, Eileen Johnson2, Kathleen Bell3, Annie Coburn (student)1, Benjamin Cotton (student)3, Asrai Brainerd (student)3, Kasey Cunningham (student)2

  1. University of Southern Maine
  2. Bowdoin College
  3. University of Maine

A PowerPoint slide presentation is available for this talk

COVID-19 is a ‘wicked problem’ that is complex, global, difficult to address, and urgent. While national level responses to COVID-19 are essential, municipal scale actions can be tailored to local contexts and geared to addressing pressing local problems. Initial studies of municipal response to COVID-19 have tended to focus on larger cities. There is very little analysis of the resilience of smaller, more rural municipalities to challenges like COVID-19. In this study, we explore the digital communication response to COVID-19 of 100 small municipalities in Maine (population range: 26 to 36,097). We scraped data from the town websites, social media and newsletters, conducted a social network analysis of the organizations that each town is linked to, and analyzed the characteristics of towns that applied for and received COVID-19 grant funding. We found that while smaller, more rural municipalities may have fewer resources, many showed a larger-than-expected capacity to pivot quickly and rally together to respond to COVID-19 and communicate about that response. However, we also found that within our sample of 100 small municipalities, those that were larger and closer to the coast were more likely to have more robust responses as characterized by denser information networks, greater number of communication platforms, development of social capital, and greater chance of receiving COVID-19 grant funds. We discuss how this research addresses gaps in the literature related to rural municipal capacities and how COVID-19 shines a light on the degree to which small communities are prepared for and resilient to global challenges.

3:30PM – 3:55PM
The resilience of natural resource dependent communities

Joseph Reed (Student)1, Adam Daigneault2, Kathleen Bell1, Andrew Crawley1

  1. School of Economics, University of Maine
  2. School of Forest Resources, University of Maine

A PowerPoint slide presentation is available for this talk

Since the Great Recession in 2008, interest in economic resilience research in the United States has increased steadily. Some regions especially rural ones are much more susceptible to economic shocks due to many factors. However, the majority of resilience research is done at a county level due to the frequency at which data is posted. This leads to rural natural resource dependent communities who are often the most susceptible to economic shock, being overlooked by county level data that does not represent them. The goal of this presentation is to take a community level approach to resilience indicators (factors that are predicted to be correlated with resilience) to measure resilience in NRDCs. These indicators will be drawn from common resilience literatures and will be developed to give communities in our sample a resilience score. Research so far has shown a stark difference between resilience in places with large dependencies on natural resources such as forests, agriculture, fisheries, and mining in comparison with other communities. Future research will focus on how these community resilience scores change overtime. This will give insight into how well the resilience index actually predicts resilience to a variety shocks. This research will give NRDC policy makers across the United States the tools to analyze where their community is vulnerable to economic shocks to strengthen their community’s resilience. Leading to less unemployment and increased economic productivity during recessionary periods.