Doing Complicated Things by David Schindel

Last week’s column was my thirteenth as a weekly contributor to the Spy. Having completed my first quarter (using the business world’s measure of time), I thought it was time to shift gears and focus on a topic relevant to Cambridge and the Mid-Shore.

My columns normally focus on relationships among the components of a particular system or process. Some of these processes are harmonious while others are adversarial. This column, as well as several that I hope will follow, will have elements of both kinds of processes. These will be complex processes with many components.

Consider the Chesapeake Bay in our region. It looks like a complicated place, right? Fed by large and small rivers, there are embayments, peninsulas, islands, creeks, and coves everywhere. The Bay is a beautiful and serene place, but there are complicated processes at work.

Did you know that there’s an impact crater about 400 meters below the Bay’s surface between Norfolk, Virginia, and the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula? It was created by Earth’s collision with an asteroid or comet 3–5 kilometers across about 35 million years ago, long before the Bay existed.

This column sets the stage for what I hope will be a series about two complicated, though related, projects underway nearby.

One is the Poplar Island Ecosystem Restoration Project. The island covered more than 1,000 acres in 1847. Shoreline erosion reduced the island’s area to five acres by the 1990s. The project is a proactive effort to arrest erosion, expand the island’s area, and enable a healthy ecosystem to develop and persist.

The other is the Make Cambridge Resilient Initiative. It’s a reactive project responding to recurrent flooding in the Cambridge neighborhood between Long Wharf and Gerry Boyle Park at Great Marsh.

Both projects involve collaborations among many funders, stakeholders, and organizations responsible for planning and implementation. Scientists from Horn Point Laboratory participate in both. You’ll be learning about them and their work in upcoming columns. The Cambridge project involves the residents of the neighborhood, adding a dimension of complexity that is absent from Poplar Island.

I hope to explain the processes at work along these shorelines and the diverse viewpoints of the stakeholders working to find solutions and implement them.

I promise that the columns to follow will include neither jargon nor math. Please stay tuned.