I was appalled by the recent front page article in the Boston Globe regarding an 8,300-square-foot house on Chappaquiddick.

As a grandmother, and I specify grandmother rather than mother, it saddens me to my core to know that our grandchildren are living in a world where just another horrific event has occurred. As we grew up in the 1940s and beyond, never did we witness violence to the degree it is happening today.

The Chilmark board of health would like to pay tribute to the long and dedicated service of Mike Renahan, who served on the board from 1995 until his untimely death in October 2012. Throughout these years, Mike’s vast experience in the building trades, his intimate knowledge of the town and its citizens and his devotion to their welfare marked his tenure on the Chilmark board of health.

Our thorniest national problems — climate change, environmental degradation and an economy in which one per cent of the population holds more than 90 per cent of all assets — are the result of the empowerment of individuals to abuse the commons we all share.

The average house size in America in the 1960s was 1,200 square feet. Two thousand square feet of house is big, 5,000 square feet is huge, yet 10,000 and bigger is becoming commonplace. If everyone builds out to zoning capacity not only will the bird and other animal populations dwindle because of habitat destruction but the middle class would get priced out too (not to mention the drain on natural resources).

Next Monday night voters in Chilmark will have the opportunity to decide whether the town should better protect the community’s character by regulating the size of new residential construction.