Melissa Mcloud

Can a regional history museum serve as a place to think about the future? “If you save the Museum but don’t save the Chesapeake Bay, what’s the point?” -John Roberts, emeritus board member, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum Provoked by this question and facing the challenges confronting history museums in general and outdoor museums in particular, the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum is transforming itself from a regional maritime history museum into a museum that inspires stewardship of the Chesapeake’s cultures, landscapes, and environment. We are using our 18acre campus, exhibitions, programs, collections, staff, membership, and volunteers to foster learning and conversations about the Bay region’s future, based on the perspectives that centuries of living in this place provide. Toward this end, we are partnering with our communities, our members, and other nonprofit and cultural groups. We are also greening our campus and our operations. This is urgently needed on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and Baywide. Today the Chesapeake Bay region faces tremendous pressures to its environment, cultures, and ways of life. The health of the Bay region is now more than ever dependent on human decisions and actions. Environmental and cultural sustainability is certainly not a new goal in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, but the work done thus far by water quality, marine science organizations, and heritage professionals has not succeeded in engaging the region’s broad population. We hope that we can provide experiences and facilities to highlight the enduring human connections to the Bay and the urgent human responsibility to sustain it. During the past year, in dozens of discussions with cultural, advocacy, and scientific leaders in the region, we have heard consistent confirmation that the Museum can play a critical role in providing exhibits, programs, and a site that inspire people to connect with the Bay region as a place and to envision its future. With the renewed legislative and advocacy efforts for Bay stewardship and sustainability on the Eastern Shore and Baywide, this offers the Museum an opportunity to play a much more significant role in its community than it has in the past. Program“A lot of people who live in the watershed are not engaged with the Bay. Stories about the Bay’s recovery are often a set of calculations or backwards looking. The Museum needs to tell the real stories about what the Bay could be and what kind of life that would be.” -Stuart Clarke, current board member We have begun to view our exhibitions, 18-acre site, and interpretive expertise in new ways -- to teach and inspire stewardship. We are talking more explicitly about changes in population, land and resource use, work and play, and their impact on the region’s health and sustainability. We have opened a Living Shoreline along

the Museum’s Miles River waterfront; we host an annual Bay Day; we are revising several permanent exhibits to include messages about the future of Bay communities, fisheries, forests, and land use. With planning grant funds, we have created a multi-disciplinary team of advisors and regional leaders—including many scientists, ecologists, and land use experts that we have never worked with before. Since program partners are critical to our success, we have reached out to regional institutions including Adkins Arboretum, the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, the Bay Hundred Foundation, Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage, University of Maryland’s Horn Point Lab, and Washington College’s Center for Environment and Society. With their advice and guidance we have drafted new interpretive messages that explicitly state that the Bay is facing huge challenges and that the future depends on each of us. These are appearing this summer as new tours, orientation labels, revised website, and print materials. This fall we are hosting a charette with our new partners to develop regionwide programs that will allow the public to select from future Bay scenarios and learn about the choices they will need to make. In the coming year, we will open the exhibit “A Rising Tide in the Heart of the Chesapeake.” With global warming and sea level rise, life along the edge of the Chesapeake Bay will change dramatically over the next century. Low lying areas will surely be inundated, islands will disappear, and the lives of the people who live along the edge shores will be forever altered. This visitor experience project is designed to provoke conversation about the endangered cultures and environments of the Bay’s island communities. We are also planning a traveling (on the water, on the Museum’s historic crab dredging vessel Old Point) exhibit that explores the history of conservation, forestry, living off the water and land, and the future of the Bay region. On board will be a Story Corps-inspired audio kiosk for capturing stories of what people value about the Bay region and their dreams for the future. QuestionsAs we move forward, it is really too soon to tell if we are succeeding, except that we are receiving encouragement through new sources of grant funding and from our new partners. And we have many new questions: How do we sustain the interest of our current audiences and funders who have been connected to the museum because they romanticize the past. Are we losing them as we take our traditional stories up to date? The challenges facing the Chesapeake region are serious and complex. What kinds of programs can we offer that will engage our publics and not turn them off?

More and more newcomers are arriving on the Eastern Shore every day and they cannot see the past stories here. The past here isn’t part of their story. How can we better connect to all these new people who are moving here and have no connection to this place? If we are still going to be the Chesapeake Bay Maritime MUSEUM, there is a notion built into that about the past. Should we change our name? As we redefine the Museum, who are our new stakeholders, which new partners should we be reaching out to? This takes all of us outside of our expertise, so we are uncomfortable. How can we continue to be willing to experiment, to make mistakes?