From his earliest years, Michael Donaroma could not help but be
aware of the bipolar, us and them, have and have not division of
Martha's Vineyard society.

"My father left when I was two," the Edgartown
businessman and selectman recalled this week, on the eve of the 30th
anniversary of the nursery business which has carried him across to the
have side of that social divide.

Emily Bramhall had already replaced the incandescent light bulbs at home and in her store with low-watt fluoresecents, helped her daughter buy a hybrid car and taken other steps to reduce her carbon footprint. Now she wanted to go further, and start making her own electricity.

But, as Kermit the Frog once sang, it’s not that easy being green, and Ms. Bramhall’s plan to install a wind turbine on her Chilmark property met some resistance before the town zoning board of appeals this week.

The back of the T-shirt read: “Burn Crew 2007. Burning landscapes near you.” Under those words was the equivalent of a band’s performance schedule, a dozen locales across six states.

And even though the wearer of the shirt and eight other members of her group were sitting around in a circle in a weedy clearing in the woods in firefighting gear on Wednesday, it was very like the atmosphere at the sound check before a music gig.

More than 3,200 written submissions have been received in response to the draft environmental impact statement on the Cape Wind project, and the federal Minerals Management Service has been forced to extend the deadline for comment by a month so yet more can be made.

The original 60-day period for comment was to have ended on March 20, but now will run until April 21.

Cape Wind has proposed building 130 wind turbines on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound. The company has said that the wind farm could generate up to 420 megawatts of power.