08.14.22: Ponds, Pavement, and Pivotal Climate Legislation

Martha's Vineyard's great ponds are living stories of constant change — water coming and going, changing the shores, the colors, the species that inhabit them. We love the slight feeling of menace, a storm brewing, in Alison Shaw’s 2017 “Tisbury Great Pond” photograph. We celebrate Islanders’ efforts to capture the beauty of our ponds, our most distinctive landscape features, and those who work to preserve our treasures, in Sam Moore’s story about the ponds, and in “The Art of the Great Ponds,” an online exhibit sponsored by Martha’s Vineyard Bank.

Summer Issue is Here!

When we saw Hannah Moore’s “After the Rain” watercolor, with its Eden-like pond busy with birds who call MV home, we knew we had our summer cover. “This painting is inspired by that moment after a much needed rain storm,” Hannah told us, “when the sun shines through the last of the mist and everything feels activated and lush. It features a snowy egret, least flycatchers, and a ruby-throated hummingbird.”

See Hannah’s work (and her father Andrew’s) at the Moore Family Gallery in Harthaven this summer.

Those grins on our faces? All because the cleverly named Inflation Reduction Act (which includes the most ambitious climate legislation ever enacted in the United States) passed in the House on Friday and we are expecting to see President Biden sign the legislation in the coming days. Getting to this point has been a whirlwind and the stakes couldn’t be greater, something so many of those you see in the pages of Bluedot Living know well. People like this issue’s Local Heroes, Tess Bramhall and Pam Goff, who’ve dedicated much time and energy to preserving land on the Vineyard. (In a classic Vineyard “two degrees of separation,” Local Hero Pam Goff is the grandmother of cover artist Hannah Moore.) Like all the artists and scientists who render the Great Ponds in their different but vital ways and who are featured in writer Sam Moore’s incredible story on what, exactly, makes these ponds so great. People like all of you, who continue to care deeply about what happens here and elsewhere, and who routinely aim to do better, buy better, live better.

For now, let us bask in the momentum of this groundbreaking legislation. There is much work to be done but our toolbox just got a whole lot bigger.
Want to help the Great Ponds and also get more Bluedot recipes, tips, and dispatches/good news from all over? Sign up for our new newsletter, The Hub, and we’ll donate 50 cents for every sign up to the Great Pond Foundation. You’ll also be entered in a raffle for a $200 dinner at Atria.

Please check out Martha’s Vineyard Bank’s “Art of the Great Ponds” exhibit, up at their Chilmark Branch until Sept.1, curated from the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital’s permanent art collection by Monina von Opel. –Leslie Garrett and Jamie Kageleiry

The road ahead — it’s so inviting, isn’t it? It can be easy to forget the actual pavement beneath our feet and our vehicles. But reimagining our paved spaces can go a long way toward not only reducing urban heat but also creating community and restoring justice. Innovations include a new type of pavement that keeps its cool. And a movement to “depave” parts of towns and cities is taking things even further — to replace pavement with green space that combats the UHI effect and contributes to the social health of a community.

Dear Dot,
I want to put a deck on my home to have a place to enjoy the views and wildlife. I’ve read that composite decking is environmentally friendly because it is made from recycled materials and doesn’t require chopping down trees. However, I’m skeptical of any materials containing plastics or chemicals. Are composites as eco-friendly as they seem?
–Sam, Massachusetts

Dear Sam,
Oh, how I long for the simple questions. Alas, it seems my fate (or, at the least, my job) to wade through the not-so-simple, to parse the rhetoric soaked in eco-friendly promises, to bear the weight of your and my consumer choices.
But perhaps we complicate things unnecessarily. I’m reminded, for instance, of a line from Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, a groundbreaking book published in 2002, that boldly urges us, when considering design and materials, to “stop trying to be less bad and … start figuring out how to be good.”
So, Sam, let us determine how that applies to your desired wildlife-viewing platform...

HANDBOOK

Sure, we get a bit strident in our insistence that we all should be planting native species in our yards. But when Polly Hill Arboretum makes it so easy, what’s stopping us? There’s still loads of time to find our perfect plant companion at Polly Hill’s Native Plant Sale, which continues into October. Not sure which native suits your yard? Polly Hill’s site offers a host of possibilities. For more on MV’s eco offerings, consult Bluedot Living’s Ultimate Simple, Smart, Sustainable Handbook to Martha’s Vineyard.

Bluedot Living magazine and bluedotliving.com are published by Bluedot, Inc., and distributed by The Martha’s Vineyard Times. Visit the MV Bluedot Living website here: marthasvineyard.bluedotliving.com, and our new national site here: bluedotliving.com.

Subscribe to this newsletter here.
Subscribe to our new newsletter, The Hub, here.

To opt out of all Bluedot newsletters, please click here.

The Martha's Vineyard Times, 30 Beach Road, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568, United States

To unsubscribe from all Martha's Vineyard Times communications, click here .