It’s not surprising that Edo Potter’s favorite piece of conservation land is the next one. For decades she has been instrumental in acquiring plot after plot on her beloved Chappaquiddick for public use and enjoyment by future generations. She’s confident about the future of conservation on Martha’s Vineyard because of the health of the Island’s numerous environmental groups and their remarkable track record, both of which owe in large part to her tireless efforts.

“My heart is in conservation,” she said in an interview in her Chappaquiddick home at Pimpneymouse Farm on Wednesday this week.

On Sunday Edith W. Potter will receive a Lifetime Achievement award at the Edgartown Library Foundation’s annual Legacy of Learning summer brunch at noon at the Boathouse Field Club. The event is a fundraiser for the Library Foundation’s annual fund which supports programming and resources at the library such as adult computer classes, music and civic series, a children’s literacy station and a speaker system.

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Recent favorite preserve: 40 acres at Cove meadow. — Ray Ewing

When Mrs. Potter learned about the honor, she reacted with characteristic modesty.

“I said, ‘Oh my Lord, no,’” she said. “But for the sake of the library — and I do care about libraries, this one in particular — I finally said yes. This was in March and I’ve been regretting it ever since.”

Mrs. Potter’s lifetime of achievement has been a physical imprint on the Island in the conservation of hundreds of acres through her work on the Edgartown planning board, conservation commission and board of selectmen, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank and the Chappaquiddick open space committee, which she helped to create 11 years ago. Her dedication to conservation is rooted firmly in her pastoral childhood on the farm which her father created in 1932 and where she still lives nearly 80 years later. As a child, Mrs. Potter lived and worked on the farm — when she wasn’t on the water embarrassing the Island’s male competitive sailors — until her father’s death in 1947. She wrote about the experience in her memoir published last year, The Last Farm on Chappaquiddick.

Her island off the Island has changed in dramatic ways since those long summer days hoeing corn and potatoes, catching perch and exploring every inch of Chappaquiddick (which she may know better than any Vineyarder living).

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She has her finger on Chappaquiddick conservation. — Ray Ewing

“The really amazing thing is that it was absolutely open,” she said of Chappy in the 1930s. “There were no trees, there were sheep farms and it was just totally different, but glorious as far as we were concerned. My mother says that when she first came she could see Poucha Pond from here, which is about a quarter of a mile. When I slept upstairs I could see the Cape Pogue Lighthouse. It was absolutely bare, but beautiful in its bareness.”

Now the view from Pimpneymouse is obstructed on all sides by trees.

“I feel closed in with all these trees but my husband likes them,” she said.

Apart from the past half-century of arboreal growth, Chappaquiddick has retained a remarkable amount of open space, thanks in large part to Mrs. Potter herself. She still serves on the land bank, the conservation commission and the open space committee which raises money independently to make land purchases more attractive to the land bank.

“Oh, it’s fabulous,” she said of the open space committee, which has been lauded as a true neighborhood effort. “I just don’t understand why the rest of the Island doesn’t do something like that.”

Her latest open space project is a fund-raising effort to purchase Cove Meadow, a 40-acre tract on Cape Pogue Pond featuring marshland, a freshwater pond lined with cattails and breathtaking views across the pond. It is, she says, the culmination of the open space committee’s work and she claims her favorite piece of land on the Island. But maybe she is just being a savvy fund-raiser, learning as she did the tricks of the trade from Sheriff’s Meadow founder and late Gazette editor Henry Beetle Hough.

“He said you should send out your requests for money in February or March and I said, ‘But that’s tax time,’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it at all. All those people off-Island in the cold and the snow will think about that lovely, warm Martha’s Vineyard and their pocketbooks will just fly open.’ ”

Mrs. Potter got her start in town politics when in 1970, inspired by her political science background, she rewrote Chappaquiddick’s zoning unbidden.

“When I got it done I took it to the planning board in Edgartown and much to my surprise and delight they accepted it,” she said. “Then they took it to town meeting and it passed.”

Impressed, the town planning board invited Mrs. Potter to fill a vacancy, and from there she went on to serve on the Martha’s Vineyard Commission during the heady and tumultuous days of its founding, and then to a 12-year stint as an Edgartown selectman.

“The years as a selectmen were probably the most wonderful years I had,” she said. Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Potter helped win some major victories for conservation during her time on the board, such as the preservation of Katama Farm.

“You were in a position where you could really affect the outcome of what was going to happen to the town and there were some wonderful people serving the town,” she said. “I think the world of Ted Morgan even though we didn’t always agree. I was lucky to be a selectman then and not now. The thing about those 12 years was that the summer people and the winter people were working together and people really cared about saving the land.”

When asked whether there have been any defeats for conservation on her beloved Chappaquiddick, she hesitated.

“No . . . well, I mean there are some terrible houses which I think are failures, and there’s a rumor that Lady Gaga is coming, if you believe that,” she said, as she rolled her eyes.

And while her view of Poucha Pond may no longer exist, much of the so-called “other island” that she explored as a girl still does.

“We’ve been able to save so much here,” she said.