Living on the Edge

Every week brings new facts to support what our senses already know. The natural environment around us is changing, and the pace of change is quickening.

We listen as we walk and no longer hear the familiar whistle of the northern bobwhite. We gaze on the water and rarely see the quicksilver flash of schooling mackerel. Shore fishermen say the bass are increasingly scarce these days.

Great swathes of beaches and dunes we loved as children are washing away.

Coastal New England denizens, used to the lash of storms and extremes of weather, we accept that this lovely chunk of land we call home won’t always stay the same. And it is often not easy to separate the root cause of the many changes we hear and feel and see into neat categories called acts of God, and acts of man.

In the latest installment in a New York Times series on climate change this week, journalist Justin Gillis highlights the decline of forestlands and its long-term negative effects on the environment. Two commentaries in this week’s Gazette, one by columnist and naturalist Susan Whiting on dramatically changing — and in some cases — declining bird populations and one by Elizabeth Durkee on the health effects of temperature change and ozone pollution, remind us what we have lost and what is still left to lose if we don’t collectively take stock and take steps to lessen our footprint.

That human activities are affecting our environment is no longer debatable, and perhaps because we live so close to nature on the Island, the so-called debate that still roils nationally over climate change seems to be more settled here.

All over the Island, we see people who are thinking and working and collaborating on issues of sustainability, which is to say how to create a way of life that does not simply consume resources. The crowd drawn to the Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury by the Living Local Harvest Festival was evidence that people resonate with the goals of the organizers, summed up this way by Vineyard Conservation Society board member Tad Crawford:

“The basic philosophy has been to motivate individuals in their own lives and in their lives as members of the community to focus more and more on how to reduce their carbon footprint, how to become more self-sufficient, and how to think globally while acting locally,” he said.

In Oak Bluffs last weekend, another grassroots effort to call attention to climate change was born. The Island Climate Action Network (ICAN), started by Matt Coffey, a designer at South Mountain Co. and a Martha’s Vineyard Vision Fellow, wants to educate the Island about climate issues and ultimately help shape Island policy.

Maybe we are just a bunch of idealistic liberals living on a small Island off the Massachusetts coast.

But maybe, like the canary in the coal mine, we are feeling the early effects of something that will take others longer to feel. Let’s not forget to keep speaking up.