An island of extraordinary beauty and deep belonging — held honestly, tended carefully, loved in full knowledge of what is coming.
43°N · 65°W · Southwest Nova Biosphere Reserve
This place holds two truths simultaneously. It is a place of extraordinary beauty — the Adaptation Island property on McNutt's Island, a 9.7-square-kilometre island off Shelburne on Nova Scotia's South Shore, within the Southwest Nova Biosphere Reserve, where bald eagles ride thermals above Acadian spruce, chanterelles push through the duff in August, and the lobster boats run out through the same channel they have worked for generations.
It is also a place bearing witness to its own slow loss. Sea levels are rising. Ocean chemistry is shifting. The forests that have knit this island together for ten thousand years are entering conditions they have never faced. These truths are not in conflict. They are the same story — and this site is an attempt to hold both without flinching.
The island will likely outlast our lifetimes. That long horizon is not comfort exactly — it is a kind of gift. It makes this place a proving ground rather than a eulogy. Come, bear witness, and find new ways to tend what you love.
The Island's StoryMi'kmaq homeland. Loyalist land grants. Pirates, lighthouse keepers, WWII gun batteries. A working lobster fishery.
A proving ground for new ways of living with land.
Wild blueberries. Chanterelles. Bald eagles. The Acadian forest in all its beauty and fragility.
Sea level rise projections. Ocean acidification. The long record of what is happening here.
Camp here. Join the work. Gather around a threatened place and care for it anyway.
Hike, forage, paddle, fish, run, bird. Each activity a way of learning a place.
The ~200-acre property at the heart of this site is not a private retreat. It is an active experiment in off-grid living, land stewardship, and new models of human relationship with a landscape under pressure. The cabin is the heart. The meadows and trails and root cellars are the working parts. The whole thing is an ongoing inquiry: what does it look like to live lightly on land you love?
We do not choose between celebrating this island and mourning it. We do both, at the same time, without sentimentality. The blueberries are extraordinary. The chanterelles in August are reason enough to exist. The osprey fishing the channel in the early morning is grace. And the ocean is warming. The lobster shells are thinning. The fires of 2023 came close enough to smell. These facts do not cancel each other out.
This site's animating call is not despair but witness. Come and see. Understand what is here, what has been here, and what is at risk. Be moved by it. Then find new ways to live — on this island, in your own place, in the world. The tending community this site aims to build is not a nostalgia club or a grief circle. It is a group of people who looked clearly at a threatened place and decided to show up for it anyway.
The Mi'kmaq were here for ten thousand years before the Europeans arrived. The Black Loyalists came in 1783, displaced and beginning again. The lighthouse has been lit since 1839. The WWII gun battery is concrete and quiet now, birds nesting in the embrasures, the threat it was aimed at long gone — replaced by one that cannot be bombed. This island holds all of these layers. We move through them when we walk its trails.
Camp on the property. Walk the trails. Learn what lives here. Join the tending community. This island is asking something of the people who love it.