Dawna Blackstone might be forgiven for feeling a little – well, intimidated – after driving nearly two hours to Orono for the first meeting of the 2024 Maine Master Naturalist Program. There, she found herself surrounded by the people who would be her classmates: current and retired professors, lifelong birders, and accomplished outdoor artists.
“I never feel that I know as much as others, even if I do,” Blackstone said, recalling that flicker of doubt amid all her excitement. Did she, an educator from the small town of Shirley (population 251), really belong here?
Of course she did.
Since its first class in 2012, the Maine Master Naturalist Program has offered training to nearly 300 individuals. While most are empty-nesters or retired, students hail from all corners of the state and a diversity of professional backgrounds. After completing the intensive 10-week program, MMNP graduates join what the program website describes as a “nexus of naturalists,” well prepared to share information about Maine’s natural history with others.
Despite her first-day doubts, Blackstone personifies the qualities the program’s founders identified when they designed the first curriculum back in 2011.
First, she holds a deep appreciation for the natural world, having grown up as the daughter of a Maine game warden and an avid gardener. She passed her love of the outdoors along to her own children, spending 25 summers in the Maine Highlands region on a remote shore of Chesuncook, a 22-mile-long lake created by the 1916 construction of the Ripogenus Dam.
Second, she is a lifelong educator and has worked in rural schools and educational programs throughout her professional life. Her interest in becoming a master naturalist was not only to acquire more knowledge, but to share it.
Finally – and most important – she was hungry to learn more. Perhaps she could name a dozen wildflowers, but she knew there were hundreds, or even thousands of plants she couldn’t identify – not yet, anyway. That hunger burned for nearly a decade before she got her chance to learn them through the MMNP training.
“I had a friend who had done the training back in its early phases, and I thought it sounded so cool,” Blackstone said. “But it tended to be offered in places too far away, and being from Shirley and having a family and working, it was just never possible to do that.”
Then in 2023, while working on a teacher-training project, she met a participant who had just completed the Maine Master Naturalist Program. Spark rekindled, Blackstone Googled the program and discovered that the 2024 class would be offered in Orono. That wasn’t exactly next door, but it was drivable, and her kids were all grown, so she decided to give it a go.
“I set my calendar for the first day I could apply,” she said, “And I was so thrilled to be chosen to be part of it.”
Taking Root
In 2011 – the year MMNP was founded – Maine ranked as the country’s most rural state, barely edging out Vermont. More than 6 in 10 state residents lived outside “urban clusters” (the designation the U.S. Census Bureau applies to communities with populations that exceed 2,500), a proportion that had been stable for more than a century. Given this demographic fact, it might seem unlikely that the state needed a master naturalist program. After all, wouldn’t it stand to reason that Mainers already live close to nature and are intimately familiar with the flora and fauna?
While the proportion of rural residents had remained stable, the composition of those residents had changed markedly since the 1980s. Over those three decades, young people who grew up in families with deep roots in Maine left the state in droves. Others remained in Maine, but relocated to cities with stronger economic prospects such as Portland and Lewiston. At the same time, Maine experienced in-migration from other states, predominately by retirees and other older people who were leaving city lives behind. These were people who had questions about the plants and animals they were encountering, about the rock formations they climbed over, the bugs they swatted, and the birds that woke them in the morning.
Susan Hayward, an educator and botanist who splits her time between Mount Desert Island and Brunswick, found herself fielding more and more questions about Maine’s natural world. She sensed a growing need for information about the environment, and when she spoke to her network of professional colleagues around the state, she found she wasn’t alone. In the fall of 2011, she joined self-taught naturalist and author Dorcas Miller and others at a meeting at Miller’s kitchen table in Chelsea. The group discussed the educational challenge and possible responses.
“What we need are more naturalists in this state to help people understand the natural world and where we live and make a difference in their communities,” Hayward said, recalling the consensus around the table. Miller proposed starting a master naturalist program. The others – Hayward, Fred Cichocki, a retired ecology and evolutionary biology professor, and Cloe Chunn, a geologist, outdoors educator, and registered Maine Guide – quickly agreed. As a next step, the group looked for examples of master naturalist programs in other states.
“It turned out that 23 of the 50 states already had programs, so we did have other models to look at and people to talk to,” Hayward explained. “But there was a real independent streak among the four people at that table. We didn’t necessarily gravitate to what was going on in the other states.… They were affiliated with either a college or a university or a cooperative extension or a land trust. In other words, they had sort of institutional support to get going. We decided that we didn’t need that.”
Instead, they bootstrapped an independent 501(c)(3) organization with a $5,000 grant from the Davis Foundation, secured by Miller.
“We used basements, and we used garages and ran around in our cars,” Hayward said of the hectic days that followed. The group designed a curriculum, found volunteer teachers, and recruited the first cohort of students. “Every single student was a guinea pig, and we had no idea really what to do,” she said. “We were all environmental educators and we were good at our work, but it was really flying by the seat of our pants that first year.”
Contrast that origin story with the route chosen by naturalists in the state of California, which launched its initiative in 2012 as a partnership with five institutions. By 2016, the university-based program had a network of 37 affiliated organizations that delivered programming, a full-time staff of five, and an annual budget of $475,000. Of the 43 states that now have master naturalist programs, most have followed the affiliation model, existing under the auspices of a state agency, cooperative extension, or in some cases, existing nongovernmental agencies.
Independent Path
More than a dozen years after the founding of MMNP, the current leadership shows no interest in trading any of the organization’s independence and program focus for a larger budget and the strings that are often attached. There are no program partners or state agencies involved. Since the original Davis Foundation grant, the organization has secured exactly one other grant, used to defray the cost of delivering the class in Calais, which sits on the state’s eastern border with New Brunswick.
“The instructors, mentors, and coordinators would be essentially commuting from somewhere in the Bangor area,” said Ellen Gellerstedt, the current MMNP board president. “So it was going to be more expensive to put that course on and run it, and then also to try to make sure that we could provide some tuition assistance if necessary to a few students.”
With that exception, MMNP operates through individual donations and registration fees. The non-profit minimizes overhead expenses by functioning on a mostly volunteer basis. It has no paid staff or office, and graduates organize and deliver all courses. Given this structure, Gellerstedt said, the work of applying for and administering grants is simply too burdensome.
“It’s up to the graduates really to keep it going,” said Emilie Swenson, a new member of the leadership team from Portland who completed the course in 2019. “While we don’t have to do fundraising, we do have to continue to engage graduates and continually refresh the board so that we have people to help run the organization.”
In addition to volunteering within the organization, graduates agree to volunteer 20 hours of face-to-face teaching in their first year after completing the MMNP training, and 10 hours in subsequent years, usually with schools, land trusts, nature centers, and other nonprofits. They report these hours on the MMNP website. The program also provides advanced seminars and a weekend conference for graduates.
“We have had, on occasion, solicitations from state agencies for a tighter affiliation,” said Janet Myers, another member of the leadership team from Southwest Harbor. “When we get those, there’s immediately a discussion about how close do you want to be? We’ve been really careful to maintain separation, and while we’re very happy to work with entities, we don’t want [our program] to become a subsidiary, either perceived or actual.”
A Strenuous Curriculum
Along with its tradition of independence, the Maine Master Naturalist Program has a reputation for rigor. Completing the training is no small feat.
Beginning with her first class in January 2024, Dawna Blackstone dedicated nearly all her free time during the next 10 months to the program’s strenuous course of study. The MMNP curriculum includes about 100 hours of class time and an additional 150 hours of work outside class time completing assignments. The curriculum covers a broad gamut of topics, including units on amphibians and reptiles, birds, mammals, geology, lichen, fungi, trees, shrubs, and wildflowers. “Class time” is a bit of a misnomer; while 50 of those hours accrue in an actual classroom, the other half involve fieldwork: days spent on nature walks, specimen collection, and demonstrations of tools and techniques.
The homework likewise combines assigned readings with time outside collecting specimens, practicing with identification keys, and drawing. Each student keeps a nature journal and selects a “delimited site” – an area of manageable size such as a plot of forest, a pond, or section of rocky coastline – they visit monthly. There they record observations about natural phenomena, including plant, animal, and other life forms’ responses to seasonal changes.
“Each class goes through a very standardized set of topics with learning goals and homework, so that when someone graduates from this program, we know that they have met a certain level of expertise,” said Gellerstedt, who completed the training in 2020 and has been on the leadership team since 2023. “We never pretend that graduates are the equivalent of an academic in the natural sciences because we’re not – or most of us aren’t. Nonetheless, we have gone through a rigorous program, and it is standardized at this point.”
“It was a lot of work,” said MMNP graduate Robert Milardo, a social scientist retired from University of Maine. “But very worthwhile if you have the interest, and it doesn’t matter if you have a lot of experience or very little in natural history. There were students in our class who had a lot of background – more than me – and some had absolutely none at all. If you have an interest, it’s really very good.”
Like Blackstone, Milardo had been interested in the program long before he applied. But he also held back until both the time and location were right. When he joined the 2024 class, he was impressed by the depth of the coursework.
“I’m a lifelong birder and I’ve been leading bird trips for over 40 years, so I have a lot of experience with that [subject],” he said. “But the class added depth everywhere. It was very humbling that way.… In most classes, we had an expert come in and talk on a new subject. They’re often really, really knowledgeable people, and most of them were really good teachers as well. I mean, that’s just a combination that you don’t find very often. It was really extraordinarily well done.”
Maintaining a Big Vision
On a bright autumn afternoon, Blue Hill Consolidated School art teacher Penny Ricker sat in a coffeeshop with samples of her work, including exquisite bird sketches, she did as a participant in the Maine Master Naturalist Program nearly 10 years ago. She had recently served as a mentor for the Orono MMNP class and said the real strength of the program continues to be how it brings different people together, attracting students with different life experiences and professional backgrounds but a shared passion for the outdoors.
“You realize you have your strengths and someone else has their strengths, but you all have that awe and wonder of an 8-year-old kid,” she said. “As a student, I was really worried about not being knowledgeable enough. You have a lot of people who are educated in the sciences, and I knew a little about the science…but I still don’t like dichotomous keys!”
George Fields, in contrast, does have a professional science background. He came to his MMNP class with a bachelor’s degree in geology, work experience in environmental geophysics, and a management graduate degree. Despite that background, he discovered an unexpected passion for lichen aesthetics.
“I had no knowledge of lichens before I started the program,” he said. “And then just the variability and just the beauty of them – I went whole hog, and I just really loved studying them, drawing them, identifying them out in the field, to the point where I even made a part of my capstone project a lichen map for one of the preserves down on Deer Isle.”
Speaking with both Ricker and Fields, it’s clear that completing the Maine Master Naturalist Program training inspires a lifelong commitment to connecting people with the world around them. Today, Fields serves as the interim director at the Blue Hill Heritage Trust, an organization that preserves and manages more than 10,000 acres of land for wildlife, recreation, scenic beauty, sustainable use, and historical importance. Ricker has incorporated naturalist techniques in her own art classes, and she continues to learn as well. In recent years she’s become more deeply immersed in nature journaling, leading to a recent trip to Tanzania to study with renowned nature artist and journal-keeper John Muir Laws.
And creating such lifelong learners and educators, say program leaders, is the metric that matters.
“One of the program’s goals is that people develop a greater understanding and appreciation for the natural world and then they share that with others,” said Emilie Swenson, the MMNP leadership team member. “Our mission is to enrich nature education. So it’s not just about, ‘Oh, I took this course, and I learned something cool.’ It’s about how you share that out with the world. The link that we hope to make is that more and more people in Maine, or people who are visiting Maine, come to appreciate the natural world and respect it and want to protect it.
“It’s a big vision and it’s hard to measure that, but it’s worth the effort and work to make it happen.”