A few weeks ago three Alaskans visited the
Island Institute to pick our brains about how the Island Institute operates. One, Denby Lloyd, is Alaska’s Director of Commercial Fisheries who, among other duties, oversees the state’s salmon hatcheries program, critical to the economies of hundreds of fishing communities. The other two visitors, Duncan Fields and Sam Cotton, are retired fishermen, both of whom run island organizations focused on sustaining isolated island communities along different parts of Alaska’s immense coastline. They wanted to hear about our successes and failures during the past 23 years, and what lessons we had learned from them.
It’s not often you get asked to reflect back over half a lifetime — on what has worked and what has not and to draw, if not universal conclusions, at least some principles that might apply to island life across a continental divide.
The first lesson we learned about island work, we said, is that everything on islands is connected to everything else. For instance, we started an island schools program during our second year of operation because we recognized that schools are the key island community institution. However, if an island community wants to improve its school to attract new families to balance the inevitable losses that occur when others “remove” or pass away, the community must have available and affordable housing to support new islanders. There also have to be jobs available, either in fisheries or other areas on-island, or on the mainland for those communities within commuting distance. Fish, shellfish and aquaculture jobs depend on the quality of the marine environment, so we had to try to understand and monitor its changes. Jobs also depend on transportation networks, ferries, mail boats and air service. The cost of living on islands is always higher than on the mainland, so property taxes become crucial, especially as more and more of the waterfront is owned by seasonal residents, driving up valuations for everyone. We knew that we did not want to say to islanders, “the issue you are concerned is not an area that we can help you with.” But we also knew that we could not hope to support staff expertise for all these inter-related issues. However, we could track down information from other knowledgeable organizations and adapt what we collected to the particular circumstances of island life.
The second lesson we learned is that we could be effective to the extent that the organization acted as a convener, a forum and a clearing house for information. As outsiders, we are clearly not decision-makers, although islanders, skeptical to the end, are always cautious of a hidden agenda. We can bring resources from the mainland or “from away” only insofar as we can minimize the perception of an off-island agenda that can grow quickly rampant in the fertile soils of the imagination.
A third lesson is that island culture is a real source of pride and inspiration to all islanders. Although solving island problems requires carefully structured approaches that will be peculiar to the circumstances at hand, nevertheless, islanders are an enormous resource for other islanders. Islanders love to hear from other islanders about how they approach a given problem–solid waste removal for instance, not because there is one cookie cutter approach that will work for all islands, but the process of figuring out all the little idiosyncratic illustrates how to confront problems. Thus all islands are different from one another, but they can profitably share information about approaches to the common challenges they face.
Another lesson: the Island Institute can play a crucial role by providing access to elected officials in Augusta or Washington. Representatives might seem a world away in the state or nation’s capital, but they are actually happy to help island communities. We have provided some useful advice over the years on how islanders might shape their cases in order to approach their representatives successfully. Representatives would much rather hear from islanders directly than from the Island Institute, but we can be effective coaches and cheerleaders. As islanders and others associated with working waterfronts have begun to collaborate with each other in broad-based coalitions, their influence and significance in the legislative process has increased exponentially.
For years, the Island Institute was bedeviled in its effectiveness trying to overcome the crippling logistics of island life. There are only 15 year-round island communities off the Maine coast. If a staff member wanted to visit each community once a month — hardly an impressive show of face time — he or she could simply not do it in that time. Any island visit almost by definition requires an overnight stay, which amounts to one and a half or two days per island, so you run out of calendar days before you make one rotation — and you don’t get to have a family life. When we hit on the concept of residentially based island fellows, the Institute crossed the Rubicon. Instead of the face of the Island Institute being some stranger on the mainland in Rockland, the Institute was a bright-eyed person working with your children in the school or library or giving music lessons or performing in the annual Christmas pageant or whatever. Island fellows were a turning point for the organization.
In summary, although our initial roots as an organization began with a focus on natural resource and environmental issues, we quickly learned that all resource conservation ultimately is about people and access to resources of all kinds. As we broadened our focus beyond natural resources, fisheries and otherwise, to encompass the great trove of human resources across the archipelago, we began to be more effective in helping sustain island life.
Our new Alaskan island friends left after a very productive discussion. They repeatedly emphasized that all of our “lessons learned” resonated directly with their island experiences half a world away. It reminded us again that island culture is universal. And several staff members volunteered for an exchange program with them this summer.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.