Little to Fight About

It began with an idea, a concept really, followed by a fight, the ordinary course of doing business on the Vineyard, where good things are rarely accomplished without a fight.

And the launch of the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank was no exception to this rule. There was a rousing fight over it — first about whether it was a good idea at all to tax real estate sales and use the money to buy conservation land. And once that was settled there was another fight over how the money would be spent: on a town-by-town or Islandwide basis?

In the end there was of course compromise and the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank began, modeled on the Nantucket Land Bank that had formed a few years prior. Twenty-five years ago this month the state Senate passed the Vineyard land bank bill; a paragraph from a Gazette editorial that year appears in the Gazette Chronicle column on this page. It took another year before the land bank was finally ratified by the six Island towns. And a new experiment was begun.

Today it might be hard to remember that it was in fact an experiment or what the fight was all about, given that the land bank has been one of the Vineyard’s greatest success stories. To know that, you have only to walk at Waskosim’s Rock off North Road in Chilmark where the tawny grasses in the native fields are brushed with russet and silver after a first light frost touched down this week. Or ride a mountain bike around the long loop out onto the salt marsh at Poucha Pond Preserve on Chappaquiddick where you can stand at the edge of the world and perhaps better comprehend the wild theories of the Middle Ages when people believed the earth was flat. Or launch a kayak into the Tisbury Great Pond at Sepiessa Reservation in West Tisbury and paddle into one of the long coves there.

At this writing the land bank has participated in the purchase of nearly three thousand acres on the Island, most of it public conservation land. Of course property purchases by the land bank have waxed and waned along with the changing real estate market, and the latest downward trend in sales has meant a slow year. But just this week the land bank announced a new purchase in the form of a conservation restriction placed on seven acres of rolling sheep fields along State Road in West Tisbury. That’s one more pastoral view forever unchanged on this constantly changing Island.

Unsung, unadvertised, unpretentious and unbelievably beautiful, the land bank’s many properties are the Island’s own quiet gift, an unmatched set of jewels in its so-called emerald necklace of conservation properties from shore to shore.

And as a quiet silver anniversary approaches for the land bank next year, it is indeed hard to recall what the fight was really all about.