Carmel Gamble glared at the chain-link fence surrounding the beachfront lot next door to her Vineyard Haven cottage. “This is not the Vineyard Haven I knew,” said Miss Gamble, a veterinary technician and self-described “clown on sabbatical” who returned to Martha’s Vineyard two years ago after five years in Hawaii. “But this ugly steel chain-link fence, I mean, what we love about the Vineyard is that it’s beautiful. That’s why people come here,” she said.

President Clinton shed the defiance that characterized the televised address following his August 17 grand jury testimony for a more humble tone when he spoke about forgiveness to a diverse gathering of more than 500 Vineyard residents and visitors at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs on Friday.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s helped define the way our society thinks and acts today. Since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march on Washington, D.C., 35 years ago, millions of people have viewed their place in America in a different light.

Now, the Vineyard has the chance to experience part of that legacy. Cong. John Lewis visits the Island today to celebrate the anniversary of the movement and reflect on the meaning of acts of service.

A startling new national report that uses computer imaging to flag the effects of global warming on the Massachusetts coast shows that the south shore of the Vineyard will be washed away and downtown Edgartown will be a swamp in 50 years — even if the most conservative projections about rising sea levels are correct.

The report was issued yesterday by the National Environmental Trust (NET), a nonprofit, nonpartisan group based in Washington, D.C.

U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia visits Martha’s Vineyard on Friday, August 28 to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and to introduce Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. One of the “Big Six” leaders of the civil rights movement, John Lewis is the only major speaker at the 1963 March on Washington still living.

Golf courses dominated the discussion following a lecture on the role of environmental mediation in resolving public policy and site disputes last Tuesday evening. Held at the Wakeman Center in Vineyard Haven, the lecture was sponsored by The Nature Conservancy, The Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.