Transition Martha's Vineyard

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Comment by Katrina Nevin on November 1, 2012 at 10:37am

My report on the State of the Island (and nation) post Sandy:

We had heavy winds here on Martha's Vineyard, three or four sustained bouts of power outage, the longest being from 2:30 to 8pm but with candles and home made music we weathered that stretch of darkness. The trees did drop some larger limbs, but most of the damage was along the south shore. Throughout the day I checked facebook for upd

ates and saw some pretty unbelievable photos from friends who were out and about the Island. Both of our north shore ferry terminal towns (Vineyard Haven and Oak Bluffs) had vital shoreline roads under water, the docks were submerged and parks washed out. I saw photos of submerged docks and sidewalks in our own down-town a five minute walk away, so after the moon and stars broke out and the wind died down we all went for a peaceful moonlit stroll. The yacht club was knee deep, the side walks were awash, Chappy ferry was underwater and there was seaweed strewn 100 feet up main street to the bank. 
Today I went on a drive up island and looked at four of the south shore beaches, the ones with clay cliffs and dunes. Our iconic cliffs were ravaged by this storm. One of my favorite Chilmark beaches "Lucy Vincent" has been eroding steadily over the last 5 years, but this storm carved and clawed away 10 or 15 feet of cliff and left a jagged harrowing new sky line with lines of red and gray clay seeping like blood into the waves. There was no sand left on the beach, just jutting protrusions of peat and clay. The foam was piled into giant heaps along the shore and little children (out of school for the second day) screamed and threw handfuls of scurf at each other. 
Further up the shore at Squibnocket beach I found this summers freshly paved parking lot ripped to shreds with giant sheets of pavement thrown into the dunes. I met a real estate friend there with his binoculars. He was anxiously looking along the coast and he showed me a series of his clients cliff-top homes which had lost their 40 or 50 feet of front lawn and were now perched precariously, sometimes with porches dangling over the cliffs edge. 
I'm glad we live at the scant altitude we do, and have fields and woods and town streets between us and the storms edge.
I was attending our regional Bioneers conference this weekend, a global gathering of social and environmental activists, business owners, non profit organizations, entrepreneurs, economists, scientists and native people. After three days of rousing talks and workshops focused on averting disaster, creating new modes of living and organizing our society around a new age on a warming planet, I found myself catching one of the last ferries home again before the onslaught of what is now being called a Super Storm... one of the largest and most devastating ever. The impact of global warming is now, it's here and it's part of our lives. Here on this island we could so easily be cut off from the mainland, groceries, gas, electricity...but when I think about it, we're actually no more vulnerable than any New Yorker, stranded in their tower apartment, locked in by flooded streets. I believe that we need to reconsider the (rising) costs versus the (shrinking)gains of Fossil fuels. We need to create new localized, source-point power systems using locally generated sustainable energy. I believe we need new community systems which are based on human scale, effective localized leadership, and based on actual needs in order to effectively deal with the increasing global disaster syndrome of the 21st century.
Yeah, that's my report on the state of the nation.