Thinking Forward

On Sunday the Vineyard Conservation Society held the last of its winter walk series at Pilot Hill Farm on Lambert’s Cove. The theme of the walks this year was education around the local impacts of global climate change. For the past few months those attending the walks have trod on ground already affected by the changes due to the warming of the planet.

Vanishing shoreline as the ocean rises is the most noticeable of these changes. More subtle, and yet still pronounced, are the alterations in the flora and fauna of our region. Even the Vineyard’s planting designation, determined by a place’s latitude and the typical temperature there, has changed.

The walk at Pilot Hill Farm was not solely about the future and the efforts needed to protect the Island’s resources, though. It was also a nod to the past.

That the area, almost two hundred acres in all, would remain largely wild was not a foregone conclusion in the early Nineteen-Seventies. A developer’s bid then to put in more than a hundred dwellings almost put an end to this scenic beauty. However the owners of the property, the extended Iselan family, with help from the then-newly created Vineyard Open Land Foundation, chose instead to designate the area as one of limited development.

Much of what we enjoy about the Island today, but perhaps also take for granted, was secured by the conservation movement of the early seventies. Islanders such as the Iselan family and the recently deceased Edwin Woods are revered for the unselfish way in which they protected the land for future generations.

In a parallel movement, Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway, the setting for the documentary that will open the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival tonight, is housed in an area that was on course, again in the seventies, to become a McDonalds until a group of Islanders came together to turn the tide of history.

Change is inevitable, and to simply try and stop the evolution that time and its forward momentum guarantee is unwise. But to ignore that change is coming and not plan accordingly is foolhardy.

But planning is a murky business in which answers are not always clear cut. Another film showing in the film festival, called Windfall, depicts the struggle of a small rural area in New York and the citizens’ efforts there first to bring windpower to their community and then, in an about-face, to try and stop it.

There is no crystal ball to tell us exactly what time will bring, and it is this uncertainty that often leads to bitter arguments and standoffs over how to prepare, or even whether to prepare, for the future.

However, even amidst the clamor, one look at what has been saved by the forward thinking of our Island’s past stewards should be enough to bring about the consensus that in the end, conservation is good for everyone.