SIERRA • December 11, 2024
Mount Desert Island is a rare place on the Atlantic coast where mountains rise directly above the ocean. Its principal town, Bar Harbor, was originally named Eden. It’s no wonder that Mount Desert Island hosts the Northeast’s sole national park: Acadia. In January 2024, a pair of nor’easters detonated Acadia’s aura of untouchable remoteness when they battered the island with hurricane-force winds. The combination of Acadia’s vulnerability to the rising sea and its rank among the most visited national parks in the country have made it a laboratory for a policy that the National Park Service adopted in 2021 to confront the climate crisis on federally managed lands nationwide. The Resist-Accept-Direct (RAD) framework is named for the three broad strategies that resource managers are being encouraged to use to either rehabilitate damaged park facilities or prepare them for anticipated changes brought on by spiking temperatures, ecosystem destabilization, and coastal erosion.