When Peter Ralston and I-a pair of outsiders (flatlanders, if you like)-started the Island Institute more than 25 years ago, we knew one important thing about island life. The fox is clever and knows many things; but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
The one thing we knew is that we would never presume to speak for islanders. This belief was partly because islanders, famously cranky and independent by nature, speak with a thousand different voices, leading many outsiders to believe incorrectly that islanders can never speak with one voice. At the same time we understood intuitively that one of the means by which islanders define community occurs through a long process of speaking to each other individually, out of which slowly emerges a community point of view. Although outsiders might offer information of a factual nature from time to time, they cannot participate in the process of community decision making, not only because they have no business doing so; but also, as a practical matter, they are not “present” enough to participate in the constant ebb and flow of shaping that opinion. You are either on the island or off; you cannot be both. Through this process of talking with one another, island community life is constantly renewed.
Let’s not put on rosy colored glasses in describing how an island point of view emerges. Often the process of shaping community sentiment is neither polite nor factual. Violence is not unheard of. Personalities matter hugely. Baggage from previous community “dialogs” (a polite term) matters hugely. Gossip, especially mischievous gossip, counts big-time. Individuals from large families with loud voices matter more simply because they can initiate and relay gossip faster than their opponents can lock in and reload. Island opinion may be slow to take hold, but is then unshakeable. And outsiders-even transplants with the best of intentions-are marginal actors, at best.
Matinicus is just beginning a new process of community renewal after a devastating lobster trap war escalated to violent physical confrontations and then guns and bullets that left one lobsterman severely wounded in the neck and another lobsterman and his daughter on trial for their lives as a lobstering family on the island.
When a Knox County jury acquitted the pair of all charges last month, not a word was said publicly by any of the participants in this tragic conflict-nor by other community members. No one offered anything by way of a reaction to the outside world because the outside world can do almost nothing but increase the distress that exists on all sides of the deeply divisive community issue. A dignified silence may not heal the breach, but it beats outrageous innuendo. Outsiders can help most by giving Matinicus islanders the psychic space necessary to begin healing themselves from the inside. You are either on the island or off it; there is no in between.
Fox Islanders on North Haven and Vinalhaven are also in the process of deciding an important community issue. This decision arises from the fact that the three large wind turbines erected last fall on a hill in the interior of Vinalhaven have made the lives of a number of wind farm neighbors intolerable. The issue is further complicated by the fact that other neighbors who are close-or closer-to the turbines are not bothered by the noise at all, while still others have not expressed a point of view publicly. Finally, summer people have not weighed in because they are not there.
The Fox Islands Electric Cooperative board, the elected representatives of all the ratepayers on the two islands, is in the process of deciding what to do. Turn the turbines down to respond to the real distress of certain community members or risk the ire of the very much larger number of ratepayers who are benefiting from reduced electric rates? Wrapped around this issue is the basic problem of determining whether turning down the turbines will make a difference to any of the wind farm neighbors who are upset about the noise.
Gauging the community sentiment has been complicated in Vinalhaven’s case by the influx of statewide media and anti-wind activists eager to pick up on the conflict for their own purposes. Many islanders are unconcerned about the coverage in the state’s newspapers-the Maine Sunday Telegram, Bangor Daily News and Herald Gazette or the coverage on Bangor’s WABI TV 5-all of which extensively quoted the aggrieved neighbors. What matters to most islanders is what is being said on island-islander to islander -not what is being said in big-city papers or on TV. As in all island decision-making, personalities and gossip are the dominant currencies of community information exchange.
Facts matter, of course, but outrageous characterizations can outrun fact, and not just on talk radio. Nevertheless, it is well to remember what the hedgehog knows, which is when one person or a small group of people with a point of view about an island issue appear to be speaking for other islanders, islanders tend to unite in opposition to that unsettling presumption. No one speaks for islanders, until islanders speak with one voice.
Philip Conkling is the president of the Island Institute.