“We all help each other burn each other’s property,” says Bob Bale, the Nature Conservancy’s Southeast Massachusetts chapter fire manager. It may sound like an insurance fraud pact among pyromaniacs, but Mr. Bale is describing the efforts of the Martha’s Vineyard Prescribed Fire Partnership, a group that includes the Nature Conservancy, Mass Audubon’s Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, The Trustees of Reservations, the Polly Hill Arboretum and the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation.

Twenty-seven-year-old Danielle Ewart has always been an Island girl, whether patrolling beaches and managing aquaculture programs for Oak Bluffs or studying in Honolulu for a year, learning about Hawaiian culture and history. Equally at home on the Atlantic or Pacific, she still holds on to her Hawaiian language textbooks. Last month Tisbury selectmen offered her a warm “aloha” as the new constable of the Tisbury shellfish department.

There were two competing lively scenes at Offshore Ale Company’s fifth annual brewery open tour on Saturday. While Good Night Louise carried patrons to the tipsy twilight hours with jam band standards, upstairs an even wilder party raged within the walls of the brewery’s fermentation tanks. Here yeast organisms were reproducing, by the hundreds of millions, gorging themselves on sugars and excreting carbon dioxide and alcohol. And though the brewery tour only lasted until the early evening this party will last for weeks.

The police officers’ prayer Chaplain David Berube offers his colleagues at the Oak Bluffs police department begins with the words: “Lord, I ask for courage . . . courage to take me where others will not go.”

As Island residents go kicking and screaming into the future, the Martha’s Vineyard Museum has always served as a refuge in turbulent times. Here the centuries mingle and Island life never changes. In one room, romantic maritime tableaus etched by idling seamen in the jawbones of sperm whales recall the glory of Martha’s Vineyard’s seafaring past, while in the next gallery the indelible 20th century folk art of Stanley Murphy revels in the workaday triumphs of a rural Island community.

A sparsely furnished three-room building in West Tisbury marks the unassuming home of Vineyard Power. The organization has two full-time employees: Richard Andre and his assistant, Kerry Downing. All in all it’s a humble arrangement. There is nothing modest, however, about the organization’s ambition. Vineyard Power, the Island’s first energy cooperative, plans to raise and manage nearly $200 million in federal and private investments in wind power and make the Island energy independent within five years.