Adopt a Solution

Options for the future of the Island’s animal shelter will be presented next week to the all-Island selectmen and to Dukes County officials. A dedicated group of animal control officers, selectmen and their representatives, veterinarians and others have been studying costs and different scenarios for the shelter since the MSPCA revealed they would cease operations here as of May 1.

Harbingers Ring in Spring

A Light in the Gloom

President Obama this week presented his first budget in Washington, D.C., a spending plan crafted to address not only the nation’s economic crisis but also its yawning inequality. Here on the Vineyard — where we have as bipolar an economy as you’re likely to find — we were presented with good news about closer-to-home efforts to bridge the gaps between us.

Foremost of these was the announcement that construction will begin next month on a long-awaited community YMCA.

Closing the Gap

Such is the unpredictability of the season: last Saturday’s sunshine prompted a Tisbury man to shed his shirt and go bare-chested at the task at hand: shovelling snow from the sidewalk. The season’s economic climate has been likewise unpredictable, the only regularity being bad news piling up in drifts. Between the diving Dow and the rising unemployment lines, most of us on the Island try simply to forge ahead as steadily as we can, trying to keep the shirts on our backs.

The Legend of Moshup is an ancient creation story from the Wampanoag oral tradition. It tells of the giant Moshup, the personification of the immense forces of nature, deciding to settle here after a long journey, and dragging his foot to separate Martha’s Vineyard from the mainland and plow up the Cliffs of Gay Head. Scraps from his dinner table are the fossilized bones and teeth of ancient life forms found there.

The town of Oak Bluffs is proud to be “StormSmart.”

Or rather, the town is on its way to gaining said smartness. Being StormSmart has to do with one of those scary, invisible truths that no one wants to think about: sea level rise. And the debate is over. No matter how well the human race conserves energy from here on in, the sea around us will rise. Conservative estimates show the sea rising at least three feet over the course of this century, not including the impact of the planet’s rapidly melting glaciers.