Castaways

The Island has a steady stream of yard sales, random roadside “freecycling,” thrift stores, consignment stores, and a beloved Dumptique. Reusable bags have become a shopping staple, libraries have toner cartridge recycling boxes and used book sales, there’s even at least one car that runs on old cooking oil. We care. Still we ship more than thirty-three tons of trash off-Island each year, accounting for fifteen per cent of the Steamship Authority’s freight traffic, or one in seven freight trips. Clearly we have a ways to go in dealing with waste here.

Among the Island Plan recommendations on the subject of waste were big ideas — constructing a recycling and composting facility, creating a sort of supermarket for used building materials, and that old chestnut of an Islandwide system of waste management — as well as more esoteric ideas — reducing the amount of potential waste brought to the Island in the first place. Much of the plan called for plain old education, just getting people to think about how they reduce, reuse, recycle, regift or repurpose all that stuff.

The tricky thing is communicating that this unconsumption can be as satisfying as getting new stuff in the first place. Now along comes the annual scarecrow festival. Of course it’s not about waste education at all, it’s a tidy fundraiser for the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School; businesses make a donation, and school families make the business a scarecrow to display. But the scarecrow-making, coming as it does along with the making of fresh Halloween costumes (they’re almost always more fun than the store-bought costumes), shows us all just how fun castoffs can become.

This creative showcase of cleverly used junk, also known as the scarecrow festival, brings a lift to the community as the days shorten and cool. But along the way, perhaps the youngsters who make them absorb that old stuff ought to have a new life. Perhaps the rest of us, too, can just take that lesson as we enjoy their scarecrows and all the homemade Halloween costumes that will parade before us in the coming week.

Otherwise the future for the Island, now generating waste at a rate faster than our population is growing, is really spooky.