VO 1 (DESCRIPTION): Released on September 12th,, the city of Boston was given the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness grant, worth $330,500, which is intended to advance coastal resilience and its strategies along Bennington Street, Frederick’s Park, and Belle Isle Marsh Reservation. It is meant to reinforce the 2022 Coastal Resilience Solutions for East Boston and Charlestown (Phase II) plan, which assists vulnerable coastal property that is open and accessible to the public. It also plans to further regional studies along Bennington Street in East Boston, Frederick’s Park in Revere, and Belle Isle Marsh. Belle Isle Marsh Reservation is one of the last salt marshes in the city of Boston, well-known for its 130-acres of land and that it provides a home for over 250 species of birds. However, it also provides a place within an urban area for the public, a chance to immerse yourself in nature.

VO 2: Lena Champlin, a recent graduate of Boston University, whose intention is to do fieldwork at Belle Isle Marsh, notes how vital marshes are to the environment, more specifically their work in naturally absorbing carbon.

CHAMPLIN SOT 1: “They’re really important for sort of protecting and buffering the land. So when there’s like a big storm that will come through, it helps kind of just stop that surge of that storm from flooding as much of our communities… My work is about how they sequester carbon. So, they’re actually taking the carbon dioxide that’s in the atmosphere that’s causing climate change and they’re storing it within the layers of earth that are underneath, which is really cool. So, they’re kind of like something that’s actually working against climate change.”

VO 3: When walking into the reserve, it is an immediate breath of fresh air from the usual urban environment of downtown Boston. Met with the crackles of rocks underfoot and the soothing sounds of the natural world, the experience is different for everyone when visiting the marsh, whether it’s their first or 20th time visiting. Charlie Combs (COO-mbs), Lena Champlin (LEE-nah Shamp-lin) and Bharat Reddy (Bah-raut Ready) share their experiences.

COMBS SOT 2: “I live in Winthrop, which is like right there. So I usually come here just for dog walks, basically. But it’s nice. I tried to come here and there on my off days where’s there's not a lot of people. It’s kind of tranquil, like the marsh in the open area next to you.”

CHAMPLIN SOT 3: “So, this is my first time coming. And I feel like I just pulled into the parking lot and was just like really excited to see the green space. And like, I felt like you know, I just drove from the airport. So it was busy and crowded and stuff. But then like, I feel like I just took a deep breath of fresh air when I arrived here.”

REDDY SOT 4: “Yeah, it’s typically very nice. There’s somebody who’s often scheduled bird watching trips, I think, every Saturday or SUnday morning. We’ve been on that a couple of times and the bird watching here’s fantastic. And see some Ospreys out on the marsh, egrets. It’s really stupendous, if you get out early enough.”

VO 4: Nature is a force that defines any individual’s either day-to-day routine or a visit that helps reinforce the make-up of experiences in the world. It inherently affects how we interact with the outside world and its effect on our perspective of life itself. That influence is different for each person, and each person, including Champlin, Combs, and Reddy, has a different story to tell from that experience.

CHAMPLIN SOT 5: “There’s a lot of ways in which changes that are happening in our environment are harming our mental health, right, it’s really anxiety provoking to hear about how much our world is changing and everything and that like, connecting more with nature is something that we can use to kind of combat that to be like, there are these beautiful, existing natural species that help lower anxiety surrounding the changes that are happening on an environmental level.”

COMBS SOT 6: “Yeah, I mean, I moved to Winthrop to get out of the city. So, it’s like out of the city but you’re only 20 minutes away from some overlooking bridge… So, it’s nice to be able to kind of connect with nature like that again where it’s like having this so close to the city. It feels like two totally different worlds.”

REDDY SOT 7: “My day to day life would not change. That being said, I think that we’re all the poorer for not having spaces like this. There are people who likely come here daily, and there are people who live close by who interact with this in a really meaningful way. And I come from 20 miles, 15 miles away. So for me, it’s less of a day to day impact. But I think when we lose urban green areas, everybody gets poorer. And protecting it should be of the utmost importance to everybody.”

VO 5: Even though this grant is affecting many areas along Boston’s coast line, the individuals on the trail did not know about the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness grant. However, their hope for the improvements this grant may provide shone through. All three individuals believe that the marsh would not need many improvements as it is, although there is still room for the reservation to grow.

COMBS SOT 8: “You can’t really improve on the view, or like it’s pretty clean. You know, it’s nice whenever I come, everything is always nicely landscaped and taken care of some things, and the only way it could improve is basically like, maybe upgrading some stuff or making some like family friendly things, maybe doing like a playground or something like upgrading the bridge.”

REDDY SOT 9: “I was not aware that any sort of grants had been made. I am curious to understand how they would deploy the funds. I think that, generally speaking, our experience has been phenomenal. You know, it does seem to be reasonably well maintained. There’s usually plenty of parking. And it does seem like the docks and the things that they go out onto the marsh are reasonably safe. I would assume that they’d make it more accessible.”

COMBS SOT 10: “No, it’s nice to like, I work as a graphic designer. So I sit in my office a lot. So I’m always in front of the computer. And it’s nice to just have a time of day where I’m like, ‘You know aht, I’m just gonna go outside and get some fresh air and walk around here’. It’s like it’s a nice change of pace from your apartment. And having this only literally five minutes away is nice.”

VO 6: There may not have been many immediate, prominently visual changes to the Marsh, but there was still note on how the Marsh could have changed in ways that are unseen to the naked eye.

REDDY SOT 11: “I don’t have enough of a longitudinal vision to be able to speak to that. But salt marshes tend to be very sensitive to climate change. So I would hypothesize that some of the groundskeepers here and some of the people associated with the parks department have seen a meaningful change over time, both in terms of the number of species that are here as well as the types of organisms that are here. So the idea that there is going tobe something that will help improve the environment but maybe clean it up which is wonderful.”

VO 7: With hope for the future of coastal resilience, there are obvious steps that are being taken to improve the surrounding landscape, however the future is still uncertain with how climate change may affect the area that is either right in your backyard, or the area that you travel to in order to get that much needed reset in nature. In the meantime, make sure to step outside and enjoy the ‘great outdoors’ while it is still preserved as we know it.

CHAMPLIN SOT 12: “So I think it’s so important to have those green spaces in cities. And it really, I think, when kids are growing up and like learning about environmental science or ecology, that getting to see animals and plants and those kinds of natural things is really important. And I think that we have so many of them in an urban space. And I think we often overlook things like what we have right in front of us in order to learn about the environment.”

VO 8: For You Are Here, I’m Birdi Diehl.