A central paradox of island life is that each island, whether in Maine or elsewhere, eagerly celebrates its differences from every other community, including other island communities, even though all islands share many common issues and interests. Whether these interests are maintaining small schools, or ferry and mail services, or emergency medical systems, the list of common issues is long.
We hardly need to remind ourselves that Vinalhaven and North Haven, though separated by only a quarter of a mile, are different as night and day. Great and Little Cranberry Islands are actually part of the same town of Cranberry Isles but face vastly different circumstances and challenges-even as they try to plan a common future. Long and Chebeague Islands are close by each other in Casco Bay, but Chebeague is part of the mainland town of Cumberland, while Long Island, once part of Portland, is now an independent municipality.
Even as we recognize an island’s particular micro-culture and situation, we need simultaneously to celebrate the general strengths that island culture brings to the wider world. To do so helps reinforce partnerships and alliances near and far that are important strategies for sustaining island life in an increasingly interconnected world. One obvious means to accomplish this balancing act is through inter-island forums.
Islanders tend to trust the lessons and learning that are developed on other islands more readily than those that come from the mainland. Island educators have been meeting regularly for years for among other purposes to make decisions on $50,000 worth of scholarship awards annually. Island communities have recently begun collaborating in a more active fashion through the Maine Island Coalition with representatives appointed by selectman and town councilors who meet quarterly to discuss issues such as tax reform, working waterfront access and affordable housing.
Island librarians have also begun to meet regularly with each other and to visit one another’s island libraries. Next month on May 5, there will be a Downeast libraries tour for librarians to visit Great and Little Cranberry, Swan’s and Frenchboro libraries. Volunteer island firefighters from the midcoast have convened. And island air service to Matinicus, North Haven and Vinalhaven was saved by a remarkable example of three island communities with very different needs coming together to work out a common solution.
These kinds of forums, though important, have big built-in disadvantages. First, there’s the expense of ferries, followed by long car trips and then meals and occasional lodging costs if you can’t get back to your island. Then there are the weather wild cards that that lay waste to our best-laid plans. These kinds of hassles continuously combine in unpredictable ways to defeat regular forums that can fade away from sheer exhaustion.
Someone clever will someday figure out a way to move island ideas around in bits and bytes more quickly and inexpensively than we can move our physical selves around. Maybe they already have and I don’t know it. This, of course, is the great promise of Internet networking. Kids are IM-ing all over the world, building digital bridges through copper and fiber between summer kids and winter islanders. Imagine an even bigger network where an island student, say, interested in attending college can post a question that another islander who has graduated from that college (or another) could help answer, or a summer resident who works as a professor somewhere might pick up on, or someone else with knowledge of an obscure scholarship source could post in peer-to-peer exchanges. Imagine a world where all the island expatriates who are working for a living somewhere else can get news and information from back home regularly, instantly and cheaply. Where you can be in the gossip. My late departed friend, George Putz, used to remind me that the word “gossip” comes from the Anglo-Saxon, “God’s sip,” “sip” meaning family. To be in the tribal family was to know the local gossip. Gossip is a powerful connector that reinforces a micro-culture and has been a defining human characteristic since we first began gathering around hearths.
The digital networking on the horizon that has the potential to connect islanders across time and space is ultimately a powerful way to reinforce island culture, not, as some fear, to dilute it.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.