Where Memories and Mapping Meet: Understanding Coastal Climate Change on Big Island, Nova Scotia

This paper examines how we, as historic preservation professionals, can use both oral history (place-based) and geospatial data (historical and contemporary aerial photography, historic maps, and LiDAR) to determine how tangible and intangible heritage is being affected by climate change. Big Island, with its tight-knit community and robust local environmental knowledge, is a place where this documentation approach fits perfectly.

From 2017 – 2018, the Nova Scotia Museum funded an oral history project on the island, in which interviewees spoke about local economy (lobster fishing, farming, and tourism), community identity (Scottish diaspora), and historical events and locations (original homesteads, farmhouses, barns, main wharf, lobster cannery, archaeological sites, etc.). The interviewees also drew “memory maps” of historic assets, landmarks, place-names, and associations. A photographic survey of the Island’s built heritage and geography was also conducted, highlighting cultural landscape and Islanders’ relationship to it. This research aimed to define “islandness” as it relates to heritage, identity, place attachment, and resilience in the face of coastal climate change.

With the place-based oral history complete, Phase II of the project is currently underway (2019 – present), which will further explore the relationship between climate change and the historic environment. Because of its unique reliance on a paved natural sandbar causeway, Big Island is on the front lines of coastal change. While oral history could indicate only the fact that changes are happening (shore erosion, causeway washing out), this new phase will turn the vague into the specific. Using GIS, it will draw on historical aerial photography, primary source maps, current drone photography, and LiDAR to compare the Big Island landscape past and present.

Combining what seem like disparate documentation approaches – oral history and geospatial analysis – gives us the best chance to understand at a local level the changes that are happening and to protect coastal communities like Big Island. By uniting quantitative and qualitative data, historic preservationists can help prevent these unique places from becoming lost places.