I woke up at 1 a.m. wondering how many people you could fit on Martha’s Vineyard.

So I calculated it at two people per square foot. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre — so multiply by two and you get 87,120.

Then there are 640 acres in a square mile, so that gives you 55,756,800 people you could squeeze into a square mile.

Now there are 87.48 square miles on Martha’s Vineyard, so if you squeezed people into every square inch, the number would be 4,877,604,864.

Or in other words — equivalent to the approximate total population of the world in 1987.

Mathematically, if you project current population growth rates to continue on the rate of projection that we have been following, and if there were no energy or food constraints, we would eventually cram people into every square foot on the planet. This is obviously not sustainable and the population will start to decrease as we reach our resource limits and as climate change begins to affect our low-lying planetary population centers, causing not only remediation, buttressing, and withdrawal, but an awareness that population must be controlled.

It seems pretty obvious that we should not be planning for increased tourism, but rather to decrease or at least keep it at the same levels. This is at odds with the Steamship Authority, business community, selectmen and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission — all of whom are planning for greater and greater tourism. If only because as we plan for an ever-increasing revenue base to support the expenditures we plan, there will at some point be a reversal in the rate of taxable revenue and passenger and vehicle revenues for the Steamship Authority and this will be financially unsustainable.

In addition, if we choose the alternative to ever-increasing tourism and decide to become a more exclusive tourist destination based on limitations of what we perceive, then would it be wise to start considering widening the roads, taking land by eminent domain, as any legal shared user path along our roadways would necessitate? A smart idea, or would we be left with yet another anachronism?

Frank Brunelle
Vineyard Haven