Melding Art and Science to Strengthen Resilience in the Damariscotta River Estuary

Story by Sonja Heyck-Merlin

In 2023, Heather Leslie stepped onto California’s Santa Catalina Island with a well-developed literary goal. She’d long wanted to write a book about her decades of studying the interconnectedness of humans and nature within small-scale Mexican fisheries. Leslie is University of Maine professor of marine sciences and a Mitchell Center faculty fellow.

As part of her sabbatical, Leslie was visiting the island for a week-long intensive called the Wrigley Institute Storymakers program hosted by the University of Southern California. The program’s goal is to train scientists in the art of storytelling.

She stepped off the island a week later with a completely new idea to bring back to Maine.

“I was 48 hours into this week-long activity when I made some offhand comment about creating a play that would bring people together around what’s going on in the Damariscotta River estuary,” Leslie said.

A few days later, when she tried to pitch her book idea, her cohort of science storytellers shook their heads at her. “They said, ‘No, no, no. What about that performance idea? That’s what you said. That’s the brave thing to do,’” Leslie recounted. 

The novel idea that emerged from the Storymakers program — to use performing arts and storytelling to share the diverse perspectives of people and nature within the estuary— was an opportunity for Leslie to explore alternatives to standard scientific approaches to generating and sharing ecosystem data. It also seemed like a chance to give herself and the community with whom she is collaborating a chance to use art to unite around the estuary so many hold near and dear.

A Tidal Ecosystem Many Call Home

Damariscotta is a Wabanaki word for “river of many fishes.” While the 19-mile tidal section stretching from the Great Salt Bay to the Atlantic Ocean has historically been called the Damariscotta River, ecologists like Leslie, refer to it as the Damariscotta River estuary because this is an area of the ocean where freshwater and marine environments mix, thanks in large part to the twice-a-day-influence of the tides.

The Damariscotta is a dynamic ecosystem. In addition to the influence of tides and the changing seasons on the coastal environment, human interactions with the estuary vary through space and time.

In the summer, tourists crowd the restaurants and shops of the twin villages of Damariscotta and Newcastle which sit on opposite sides of the estuary, connected by a bridge; while in the spring, when the shops are quieter, alewives migrate upriver, and shellfish farmers begin another year of raising oysters, moving large rafts full of tasty bivalves into prime places for growth in the warmer summer months.

And, the attitudes and opinions of these people who rely on the estuary are as varied as the non-human species living here including the bald eagles, marine worms, soft-shell clams, eelgrass, alewives and oysters.

There are also significant challenges facing this complex web of people and nature: a changing climate, ocean acidification, invasive species, conflicts between clammers and oyster farmers, and coastal development.

In 2015, Leslie became one small part of this system when she became the director of the Darling Marine Center, the UMaine marine laboratory located on the edge of the estuary in the village of Walpole.

She’d spent time at the Darling Center in the 1990s when her husband and fellow faculty member, professor Jeremy Rich, conducted his Master’s research in microbiology. Leslie and Rich developed a strong bond with this place, marrying not far from the mouth of the estuary, at Pemaquid Point. Now, they live close to the river with their two teenage children. 

After almost ten years of living and collaborating on community-engaged research within the estuary, Leslie and her research team have collected a trove of social and ecological data. Leslie has engaged as a community member as well as a scientist in this course of this work.

For example, as a member of the Damariscotta-Newcastle Joint Shellfish Conservation Committee, Leslie listened carefully as shellfish harvesters discussed their declining harvests and observations of ecosystem change. Leslie’s response, with the help of her graduate students, was to develop studies of both the ecological and human dimensions of the shellfish fishery.

First, graduate student Kara Pellowe served as a consultant for the committee, and helped obtain a grant from the Maine Shellfish Restoration and Resilience Fund.This initial grant enabled the collaborative group to pilot both ecological and social science data collection in 2019. Pellowe worked closely with members of the shellfish committee to identify possible study sites and hone the research questions.

Building on what was learned that first year, graduate students Sarah Risley and Melissa Britsch led a study documenting the local knowledge of fishermen and other local experts. Risley went on to create a series of ecological surveys that the students and other volunteers used to assess the abundance of shellfish of interest to the committee, particularly soft-shell clams and wild American oysters. This information has been used by the committee to help inform decisions about how many shellfish licenses should be issued.

High school students from nearby Lincoln Academy joined UMaine students on the mudflats, to assist with the ecological surveys. Risley, who is now pursuing her doctorate in ecology and environmental science at UMaine and also based at the Darling Marine Center, received a grant from the Mitchell Center to work with these high school students.  

“Lincoln Academy is just uphill from the river, so it’s basically a giant laboratory in their backyard. It was pretty cool to take advantage of that,” Risley said.

The research team also has conducted focus groups which created space for different people in the community connected to the estuary to share their understanding and connections to this place, be it economic, educational or spiritual.

Taking an Arts-based Approach to Storytelling

Leslie, Risley and their research team brought what they had learned back to the community. In addition to authoring peer-reviewed papers, they interpreted data with the shellfish committee, presented to the select boards and wrote technical reports and press releases for the local paper. 

But they weren’t satisfied with their efforts to engage the community; they knew there were people with important stories and knowledge to share who weren’t showing up at the standard municipal meetings. They wondered if there were other ways to connect the community to the river.

After almost two years of preparation, Leslie was finally ready to make the leap that her colleagues on Santa Catalina Island had encouraged. Believing that performing arts could be a compelling way to share stories and knowledge of the river and to build community, Leslie collaborated with Risley and Hillary Smith, a research assistant professor of marine policy, to write a proposal for a Mitchell Center grant titled River Stories: Voices of the Damariscotta River Estuary. They were awarded the grant in early 2025.

“With this new phase of our work, we’re seeking to bring arts-based methods, including the performing arts, into the project,” said Leslie, who in 2023 transitioned from her role as director to a full-time teaching and research position at the Darling Marine Center.

The grant includes funding for a full-time graduate student.

“This is a really unique opportunity to bring a graduate student on, to work on a highly interdisciplinary project with direct connections to the community. When I’ve looked around and thought about how else to initiate this project, it has been hard to figure out how to start. Thanks to the Mitchell Center, we can get started,” Leslie said.

The plans for the two-year grant are coming together as the team seeks input from their partners, Lincoln Academy and the towns of Damariscotta and Newcastle, as well as other community organizations.

Using performing arts to share stories and perspectives and to cast light on the complex relationship between humans and nature isn’t a completely novel idea, but Leslie has had to cast a wide net to find relevant examples. She’s been in touch with researchers in South Africa and Seattle and has been reading scripts and watching documentary theater and other applied theater productions on YouTube as part of the project development process.

“I’ve participated in workshops in storytelling and playwriting in the last couple of years and can see that both could be great ways to share the richness of people’s connections to the river,” she reflected. “We’ll see what sticks. Over the coming months, we’ll be working with our community partners to identify the best ways to share our stories and to learn from them, as we think about ways we can be better stewards of this estuary and our community more broadly.”

While the sequencing of the grant activities are still in flux, the goals are clear — to bring together the myriad of voices of those who call the estuary home and to use performing arts to lean into contributing to community transformation and resilience building.

Time will tell whether a budding actor from Lincoln Academy will play the role of an eagle soaring above the estuary’s incoming tide or a clam harvester will share a tale of a day clamming with their grandfather.

Leslie, a self-proclaimed impatient person, has come to understand that this type of work is a slow undertaking. Learning about the resilience of the estuary’s social and ecological systems and including the perspectives and voices of its inhabitants (human and non) takes time. In fact, Leslie hopes to spend the rest of her life working to enhance the well-being of the community and the estuary.

She is cultivating patience and is grateful to the Mitchell Center for an opportunity to explore new ways to contribute to her community’s resilience to change.

“I think the Mitchell Center has a really unique role to play because of the center’s sustained commitment to community-engaged research and attention to what community members and other partners beyond the university are interested in and need. That continued commitment to doing engaged research is unique,” Leslie said.