Opinion
May Days
Perhaps encouraged by the drenching rains this month, Vineyard woods and meadows are blanketed with wildflowers of every description. Bright yellow buttercups and dandelions, white starflowers and fragrant wild lilies of the valley dance along roadsides. Trailing arbutus adorns rutted old roads, wild strawberry flowers are blooming and soon tiny bluets will be studding the fields.
Our Changing Island
Anchors Aw eigh
From Art Railton’s Just a Thought, May 20, 1994:
Susan Desmarais recently retired as a Vineyard outreach worker. As a social worker, she is cognizant of privacy issues regarding confidentiality of her clients. What follows are her views on Alzheimer’s disease.
Beyond War
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
A question was recently sent to the Martha’s Vineyard Peace Council: “Are there going to be any more protests at Five Corners like there were when Bush was in office?” The writer had previously expressed his criticisms more directly, so I had an idea what he meant. My answer was a laconic, “There might be, but we’re also taking other actions that promise to be more effective.”
Climate change is complicated; sea level rise is not. We live on an Island — a glorified sandbar — and the sea is closing in on us. It is rising much faster than anticipated. In the last century sea level rose by about a foot. In this century, due to human-induced global warming, it is expected to rise at least five feet, according to a new report by the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.