The Fifty-Year Plan

Islanders, we have a plan.

Of course, even the planners — in this case the Martha’s Vineyard Commission — took pains to call the Island Plan, adopted last Thursday, “a dynamic living document . . . for guidance and inspiration.”

Because it seems incongruous that to safeguard the essence of the Island we have to approach it like mainlanders. The rough stereotype of the real Vineyard goes something like this: it is a remote Yankee community full of individuals, each unwilling to conform, all farming, fishing, hunting and hiking, purposefully cut off from the rest of America. It’s no more accurate than the Vineyard stereotype generally held by the rest of the world — that we’re a toney, coastal, continual cocktail party indistinguishable from tourist destinations such as the Hamptons.

There may have been a time when the first image was more real — and this newspaper has long written indictments of all that might despoil, in the name of progress, this small Island’s unique character and traditions. Editorial wars on indiscriminate development do not stop growth, of course. And neither is status quo in the best interests of our children or our precious piece of land. The challenges of balancing conservation as well as growth require thoughtfulness and deliberateness. Maybe even a plan.

The Island Plan is more than its two hundred and one jargon-laced strategies, “business initiatives, educational efforts, incentives, projects and regulations . . . many of these initiatives already underway.” No, the most satisfying aspect of it is not its business-school soup of “implementation strategies.” Rather, the plan is at its best as a portrait of who we really are now, not in our myths or our memories.

Taken with its many supporting resource reports, the Island Plan is a reference book, a compilation of data that should be dry but instead illuminates the amazing layers of our human endeavours, our natural and bricks-and-mortar environment. Did you know that we use energy each year equivalent to about three-quarters of a thousand-foot-long supertanker of oil? That most of the cordwood we burn for heat comes from off-Island? That well under half the houses on the Island are occupied year-round?

Tremendous work has gone into the Island Plan. There are excellent specific ideas, and broader strokes that promise plenty of debate yet ahead. But in between its lines is stitched the fabric of the Vineyard. It is infused with hope and shows that, to paraphrase Paul Hawken, working for the earth, at least our small rock of it, is probably not a way to get rich, but it is a way to be rich. Though it may be cheaper to exploit the place, plenty of people here have worked, most for no pay, to ensure that we are planning to do better than that.