Dislocation and Restoration
By Mara Scallon
Nineteen of us occupied several rows within the classroom, seated in every other lecture hall seat, with colorful hiking packs jammed into the seats in between. This was a Wilderness First Responder recertification course, and many of us were wearing layers of outdoor gear, broken-in hiking boots, and well-loved brimmed hats. We were here to recertify our ability to practice basic wilderness medicine in the backcountry. This was my third recertification and like many of my classmates, I was here to maintain my certification for professional requirements and personal peace-of-mind during my own adventures.
Clad in two different types of plaid, our instructor C. paced in front of the class, describing several curriculum updates that the training school had issued: “…and earlier this year, we at [the training school] decided to remove jaw dislocations from the curriculum since we looked at the data and found that hardly anybody was actually encountering them, and if they did, the dislocated jaw was unlikely to be the biggest problem facing the patient…But we are keeping those shoulder dislocations, those finger and toe dislocations, all that good stuff—we’re keeping that in the course. Questions? Well, I have one and my question is—has anyone actually reduced a dislocation in the backcountry? I’ve done it just once and I’ve been practicing wilderness medicine for decades!”
While our discussion was focused very much on the corporeal experience of misaligned body parts being treated through the techniques of “reduction” (putting the joint back into alignment), I thought more deeply about the all-encompassing experience of being dislocated from a place: this is not surprising as I was just a few short weeks into living in a new place. I had left central Maine, where I had been living and working for the past three years, and relocated to Utah for graduate school. Despite physically driving the several thousand miles that separated my former and new homes, the change still seemed sudden and disconcerting. Here I was, on the campus of my new university, talking about misaligned fingers and shoulders, but thinking instead about displaced perspectives and disrupted narratives.
These topics had been an ongoing source of reflection for me during my time in Maine. I moved to Maine to work as a wild blueberry research assistant, and throughout my time in that role, I repeatedly heard from blueberry growers, researchers, and consumers about how much had changed within the industry over the past few years. My first growing season in Maine was in 2021, and it was characterized by hot and humid conditions punctuated by a startlingly wet July (Calderwood, Scallon, and Tooley 2023), but then the 2022 season was more uniformly hot and droughty (Calderwood, Scallon, and Tooley 2023). After I had stopped working in wild blueberries in 2023, that growing season was cool and extraordinarily rainy (Calderwood and Parks 2024), giving way to a record-breaking, hot 2024 season with drought and flood conditions alike (NOAA 2024). Though my sampling window is short, the dramatic differences between the years makes it difficult for me to generalize as to what the wild blueberry growing season in the state is “usually” like.
There are ample data available to climate scientists who calculate and articulate the many ways that Maine’s climate is changing, and these folks make clinical predictions about how these will impact Mainers’ routines, livelihoods, and ways of living. But it is those who are not using just numbers and models to describe the changes, who can teach us the most about what these changes actually mean: our neighbors and friends can tell us stories in a more personal and relevant way.
Wild blueberry growers who have farmed for decades know that their growing season is longer, with the season having grown by fourteen days in the last twenty years alone (Calderwood and Parks 2024). They know that as Downeast Maine changes from having frequent, gentler rains to the furious deluges now more common, the elevated runoff scours the sandy soils from their fields and leaves the plants to desiccate between storm events. The growers know that the blueberry plants are beginning to flower and fruit at different times than they historically have, creating a mismatch between when the plants have open flowers and when their pollinators are active and searching for flowers. Wild blueberry growers know that the warmer winters are not quite killing off the fungal and insect pests that devour their plants in the warmer months. The growers know all this because they’re witnessing it day after day and season after season. They’re seeing the impact in reduced harvest yields and in smaller incomes.
Agriculture is a field reliant on knowing in different forms, and there is particular emphasis placed on the knowledge that comes from experience, whether it is one grower’s personal experience or an experience had by another member of the local growing community. We are now in an era when past lived experiences cannot adequately inform our assumptions about the future, and this reality is deeply unsettling for those who have historically had success in using their experiences to shape their management decisions. Wild blueberry growers familiar with implementing particular management practices on specific days now find themselves redesigning their management timelines and using new technology and tools to do so. Instead of applying a pesticide treatment on May 15, for instance, they may now be applying a pesticide treatment one month after buds appear, which may be well before May 15.
Wild blueberry growers are a self-sufficient and creative community, so adopting new tools and increasing flexibility in management practices will enable them to adjust to the disruptions associated with climate change, and in fact, the industry is already starting to do this. But even with this adaptability, it is probable that the growers will feel slightly unmoored, particularly for those individuals who have worked in the industry for decades. This mental disarrangement, this dislocation, arises from the temporal displacement of well-established routines and traditions, from the physical displacement of unpredictable weather events and climate patterns, and from the cultural displacement of new routines, traditions, and technologies altering what it means to be a wild blueberry grower.
The cultural landscape of those affiliated with the wild blueberry industry is being changed alongside the climate. Celebrations of completed harvests and other milestones must now occur weeks before they once used to—and these changes can be significantly disruptive. Communities develop group identity from shared events and traditions, and many of these events are anchored temporally: celebrating the completion of the wild blueberry harvest with a regional festival in late June would seriously disrupt the linkage of wild blueberry harvests to the regionally- and culturally-defined end of summer. If this celebration is moved ahead five weeks, what event replaces the early August event so as to provide a marking of the end of summer and an opportunity for the entire community to come together? Dislocations of events like these change the narrative that individual growers have which situates them within the larger legacy of wild blueberry growers in Maine, while also altering the narrative of how the community in, say, Downeast Maine, defines the passage of seasons and the occurrence of local cultural events.
Consumers of wild blueberries are subject to all of these same dislocations, especially those who live near blueberry barrens, hand-harvest their berries (on a farm or in secret locales), and/or pilgrimage to certain farm stands to buy the in-season bounty. Participants in all of these activities may use them to construct their own identities and narratives around time, and deviations from the expected narrative can cause confusion. Recently, a married pair of my friends was discussing the annual joy of hand-raking berries but could not agree on when they typically went raking with their two sons. As they thought back over the dozen years they’ve gone hand-raking, they could not determine whether they hand-raked at different times of the summer because of the joyful turbulence of raising children, or because the ripening time for the berries had been changing over the years. Though this is just one anecdote, intergenerational conversations about a range of events will likely show a similar confusion about when and how events are situated within our personal and collective histories; we can expect this confusion to continue into the future as the climate continues to change.
Maine’s challenges due to the changing climate extend far beyond its wild blueberry industry. The horrendous coastal flooding of December 2023/January 2024 is not the last flooding that will be suffered. Changes in the timing and severity of precipitation events will impact the safety of Maine’s lobster fishing industry. Warmer temperatures may stress Maine’s beloved potatoes so they grow more slowly or are more subject to disease. Outside of industry, changes in climate mean less predictable conditions for ice fishing and snowmobiling, canoeing and hunting, camping and cycling. In short, climate change is already impacting every part of the state, in most professions, and most pastimes.
Coupling the dislocations of climate change in our work with our personal lives creates an even stronger cognitive confusion that is so potent because we cannot escape the impacts of climate change. We may not readily blame the changing climate, but we might be disappointed that we cannot participate in our favorite seasonal sport, we might be afraid that we will suffer property damage or loss during frightening storm events, or we might be terrified of decreasing economic returns in our jobs. When considering the many impacts of climate change, our cognitive and community health must be included in discussions of financial, environmental, and infrastructural health and climate readiness. Emerging research on this topic is providing more tools for discussing these challenges and generating techniques communities and individuals can use to fortify their mental health and improve community resiliency.
If we consider that the treatment for a shoulder dislocation is to “reduce” the misalignment by guiding the joint back into place, the way it was before, we might think that the treatment for a climate change-induced cognitive dislocation is to disengage from the issues and attempt to restore the system to the way it was before. This is impossible—we cannot restore the climate to pre-industrial conditions, although dramatic action now can prevent the worst future scenarios from coming to pass. But knowing that one of the definitions of “reduce” is “restore,” we can then recall that restore means “to renew; to set up or bring into existence again; to re-establish” (Oxford English Dictionary 2024). Rather than hope that the impacts of a changing climate will pass us by or not be quite as severe as the varied models predict, we can actively work to reinstate our sense of self, rediscover our lost sense of belonging, and reconnect our interrupted sense of continuity by shoring up community and individual resiliency (Clayton et al. 2021). Having open and honest conversations about the professional and personal challenges caused by a changing climate, encouraging local through international governments to take seriously the risks of climate change on mental health, and participating in community events and traditions are all tangible ways to reduce our current dislocations. We can imagine a future of strong communities, resilient people, and adaptable legacies; now we are tasked with bringing into existence those futures.
Works Cited
Calderwood, Lily, and Jordan Parks. 2024. “Wild Blueberry Phenology: Tracking Prune and Crop Plant Development through the Season.” In 2023 Wild Blueberry Research and Extension Report. Orono, Maine: University of Maine. https://extension.umaine.edu/blueberries/wp-content/uploads/sites/41/2024/07/2023-Annual-Wild-Blueberry-Report.pdf.
Calderwood, Lily, Mara Scallon, and Brogan Tooley. 2023. “Wild Blueberry Phenology: Tracking Prune and Crop Plant Development through the Season.” In 2022 Wild Blueberry Research and Extension Reports. Orono, Maine: University of Maine. https://extension.umaine.edu/blueberries/wp-content/uploads/sites/41/2023/02/2022-Wild-Blueberry-Research-and-Extension-Reports-compressed.pdf.
———. 2022. “Wild Blueberry Phenology.” In 2021 Wild Blueberry Research and Extension Reports. Orono, Maine: University of Maine. https://extension.umaine.edu/blueberries/wp-content/uploads/sites/41/2022/02/2021GrowerReport_Final.pdf.
Clayton, Susan, Christie Manning, Meighen Speiser, and Allison Nicole Hill. 2021. “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate.” Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/mental-health-climate-change.pdf.
NOAA. 2024. “Quarterly Climate Impacts and Outlook – Gulf of Maine Region – September 2024.” Drought.gov. https://www.drought.gov/sites/default/files/2024-09/Gulf%20Maine%20Summer%202024.pdf.
Oxford English Dictionary. 2024. “Restore, v.1, Sense III.6.a.” Oxford University Press. Oxford English Dictionary. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6658393033.