Linking Students Over Rising Atlantic Waters

I was out on Nantucket, Mass., over the weekend for the first “Living on the Edge” conference exploring how coastal communities can build resilience in the face of rising sea levels.

While there, I met three intrepid young Britons who have spent more than a year traversing Atlantic Ocean shorelines to work with, and link up, students in communities facing eroding coasts in a warming world. their project is called Atlantic Rising. (To keep their greenhouse gas emissions down, they’ve hitched rides across the ocean on container ships.)

.on Saturday afternoon, I watched (and videotaped) as Tim Bromfield, Will Lorimer and Lynn Morris recruited kids visiting the Brant Point lighthouse on a spit at the entrance to the island’s legendary harbor. They created measuring teams who, with the aid of a local surveyor, ringed the lighthouse with yellow “caution” tape along a line roughly 1 meter above today’s mean high tide level. a meter rise in sea levels is well within the range of what’s possible by 2100, according to a host of studies.

I was impressed with the trio’s straightforward, un-spun approach. as they worked with elementary and middle school kids in Nantucket, there was no scary talk or preachy message – simply an exercise in trying to step out of now and look forward to what coasts could look like when today’s children are elders.

I’m also impressed by the way they’re helping create Skype-based relationships between an ocean-spanning array of schools in places as different, yet related, as Scotland, Ghana, Guyana and Nantucket.

The more of this the better.

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