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Every other week, Bluedot Living will share stories about local changemakers, Islanders’ sustainable homes and yards, planet-healthy
recipes and tips, along with advice from Dear Dot. Did your friend send you this? Sign up for yourself here. Not interested? No problem — click here to be removed from Bluedot Living emails.
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SIMPLE / SMART / SUSTAINABLE / STORIES
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Sam Moore, who writes regularly for Bluedot Living, took this photo several years ago for a story he wrote for MV Arts & Ideas Magazine. We loved the stillness of the once-beating wing and decided to use it in “What.On.Earth. — This One’s for the Birds” in our recent print issue. Can you guess what percent of the world’s bird species are songbirds? (The answer is here.)
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Quick Links
Tired of scrolling? Here's what you'll find in this edition of the Bluedot Newsletter:
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Think Global, Act Local
Climate change and environmental challenges are global, but the stories of impacts, and the stories of people doing something about them, are often local. How to educate people about biodiversity and habitat preservation is a big, global concern. Here on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass
Audubon/Felix Neck has been teaching children about exactly this for almost 60 summers during their “Fern and Feather” nature camp. Kids start as young as age 2, and Felix Neck provides more than $30,000 in scholarships a year so Vineyard families can send their children to the camp (and a preschool!). Read more about what Felix Neck is doing in the Field Note their crew wrote for us here.
Juneteenth is today. Most of us will acknowledge that environmental justice intersects starkly
with racial justice. In an interview recently, one of our favorite environmentalists, Ayanna Johnson (check out the podcast she launched), described a future where we “get it right,” and might “run to it with joy;” she quoted the poet Ayisha Siddaqa, whose advocacy focuses on climate and racial justice. Here are some lines from her
poem, “On Another Panel About Climate, They Ask Me to Sell the Future and All I’ve Got Is a Love Poem:”
The earth remembers everything,
our bodies are the color of the earth and we
are nobodies.
Been born from so many
apocalypses, what’s one more?
Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.
But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again.
Gamble on humanity one hundred times over
We hope you’ll take this sentiment with
you into the week ahead. —Jamie Kageleiry
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Climate Quick Tip
Jessica Mason had a big idea: Takeout without the trash. You pick up your food in a stainless-steel bowl, and return it at any of the five restaurants in her pilot program. Her company, Island Eats, will wash the bowls and return them to the restaurants. Though Island Eats has sold out of bowls for now, keep an eye on them here for the next round of responsible takeout.
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Here's a great story we just posted to our national website, bluedotliving.com: Slab City is an off-grid California desert community that offers refuge for the overlooked, misunderstood, and disenfranchised. It’s located in Imperial County, one of the hottest regions in California, where the temperature exceeds 100 degrees on an average of 122 days per year. As summer approaches and deadly heat becomes more frequent, will residents find ways to adapt, or will they be forced to leave the only place that many of them have ever felt at home? Lily Olsen reports from this desert outpost just in time for the summer solstice.
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If Father’s Day (Happy day to all you dad figures out there!) makes you think of neckties, check out the cool headgear Gareth Brown made from discarded silk ties (so long, office culture). We love what she said about her new company: “You have to come up with new ideas that make you feel more morally responsible.”
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Dear Dot,
We used to be able to take plastic bags to Stop and Shop [to recycle]. Is there any other option locally? Stop and Shop stopped taking them.
—Jana Bertkau
Dear Jana,
Stop and Shop’s plastic bag recycling program was a popular initiative, and its absence is keenly felt. Dot’s ears have been filled more than once with lament from those who miss it. Our friends at Earth911 tell us that recycling a ton of plastic bags (about 450,000) saves 11 barrels of oil. When bags are recycled, they are turned into pellets and typically used in products like Trex decking.
Stop and Shop stopped collecting plastic bags when COVID hit, the manager at the Edgartown location told me. If you recall, there was much confusion and concern about transmission in those early COVID days, and most were playing it safe rather than sorry. The policy remains in place though the manager is currently investigating if and when it might be reinstated — so stay tuned.
But one of the most important recycling rules is
to do what we can to avoid single-use plastics in the first place...
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One of contributing editor Catherine Walthers’ favorite soups, this ramen noodle soup uses shiitakes straight out of Chilmark: Martha’s Vineyard Mycological’s mythically marvelous mushrooms. Check it out (or better yet, slurp it up).
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The burning of fossil fuels is the single largest contributor to the warming planet. “The fossil fuel industry, which earned $2.1 trillion in 2021, has no plans to stop drilling,” Lily Olsen writes. Read more here about the student activists pressuring their schools to divest their endowments.
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Bluedot Living magazine and marthasvineyard.bluedotliving.com are published quarterly by Bluedot, LLC, 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.
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.
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