Yesterday morning Mas Kimball of Oak Bluffs packed his bags for a three-day trip to New York. Specifically, Zucotti Park. It’s his fourth trip since October.
“You get the criticism, oh you’re just being idealistic,” he said one day earlier. “We love the way children are free-spirited and idealistic but then it’s beaten out of us as we get older. Luckily I’m 62 years old and it still hasn’t been beaten out of me.”
For nearly a decade, the town of Tisbury has served as the reluctant steward of a 45-foot sailboat, rotting behind the Department of Public Works building and deserted by an owner who has been almost impossible to track down.
The town has been unable to move or destroy the boat, but that may soon change.
In 1976 Thomas Goethals opened an institute of higher learning on North William street in Vineyard Haven, vowing to bring to the Island the same sort of cultural self-reliance that was enjoyed in so many other areas. For more than two decades the Nathan Mayhew Seminars served that purpose, offering world-class lectures and partnerships with leading universities. But in recent years the organization has sputtered; its board has aged; its modest campus has fallen into disrepair. Now, two Islanders hope to revive the nonprofit.
The final Massachusetts Estuaries Project report on the health of Lagoon Pond was unveiled this week in Oak Bluffs, and the blunt diagnosis was summed up in two words: “significantly impaired.”
Dr. Brian Howes, technical director for the project, a joint venture of the state Department of Environmental Protection and the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said that almost all of the 89 estuaries in southeastern Massachusetts are impaired. Lagoon Pond is no exception.
On Tuesday night there is a conversation at Offshore Ale in Oak Bluffs that rises above the workaday Amber-Ale-fired chatter about the big game or the latest political gaffe. Next to the bar, pianist Jeremy Berlin and guitarist Eric Johnson are carrying on what is undoubtedly the most interesting conversation of the night. Both are fluent in jazz.
Nutrient loading in coastal ponds has inevitably led town planners all across the Cape and Islands to the prospect of increased sewering. At a presentation on the Vineyard this week, Earle Barnhardt and Hilde Maingay of the Citizens for Economic and Ecological Sustainability of Falmouth offered a different vision. Rather than a centralized municipal solution, they offered a modular, personalized one.
In short, they were spreading the good news of composting toilets.
