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Riparian OwnersJuly 19, 2008 "Think globally, act locally." I've liked that slogan ever since I first heard it, but it's got an important corollary that I can't yet distill into something pithy. The more diffuse version goes something like this: "Living and acting locally makes it easier to think globally without being overwhelmed." The global situation is overwhelming. Hell, the national situation is pretty overwhelming, and the symptoms of overwhelm are all around us. The death-grip that some of us have on our religions and conspiracy theories. The tendency to mistake political candidates for saviors -- and to desert them as soon as they set a foot wrong. The impulse to hide our heads in the sand, or under the pillow, or in front of the TV set. In small doses none of these things are bad: if we didn't control the input to our brains somehow, we would go crazy. Expecting a political candidate to keep his or her promises is reasonable. Expecting him or her to walk across the water and singlehandedly save you from drowning is not. My theory is that living and acting locally is our best hope to keep from getting overwhelmed by the huge-scale stuff. Case in point: This morning I went to the annual meeting of the Riparian Owners of Tisbury Great Pond. The organization comprises those who own property along the shore of the pond; it is mandated by the commonwealth to safeguard the shellfish and other life in Tisbury Great Pond by maintaining the requisite salinity. This is accomplished by breaching the barrier beach that separates the pond from the ocean and allowing an exchange of saltwater and fresh. This is generally done three or four times a year. Three elected sewers monitor the height and salinity of the pond; they decide when the pond should be opened. Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn't it? It isn't. Nearly all of the riparian owners, who in the most recent treasurer's report number 110, take their responsibilities seriously enough to pay dues to the organization; only 3 are seriously in arrears. (The dues pay for the openings.) A considerably smaller number show up at the annual meeting (maybe a quarter of the properties are represented), and even fewer put serious time in by serving as officers or sewers or taking on ad hoc tasks. So we're talking about two dozen people coming together to oversee the carrying out of a specific task. This morning we devoted most of a two-hour meeting to deciding how this task should be carried out. Why? Two reasons: 1. No surefire formula tells when the pond should be opened. The decision depends on several factors, chief among them salinity, the height of the pond, anticipated weather, and tides. After a successful opening, the water in the channel runs hard out to sea on a falling tide, and over the years a few unwary (to put it politely) beachgoers have jumped in and been swept half a mile out and had to be rescued by people in boats. For this reason every effort is made to avoid opening the pond in July and August, when the idiots (to put it less politely) are more numerous. These factors can be balanced in different ways, and the sewers don't always agree on how best to do it. The disagreements can get, to put it mildly, somewhat heated. 2. Tisbury Great Pond is a large enough body of water that different conditions prevail in different parts of it. One's perspective on the various factors is generally influenced by the location of one's property. As long as I can remember, there's been a high-pond faction and a low-pond faction: the former wants the pond to get to a certain height before it's opened, because high-pond openings tend to be more successful (i.e., they stay open long enough to accomplish the tidal exchange) than lower-pond openings. The low-pond faction pushes for openings at levels that aren't really low, but are lower than high. Often the factors that incline one toward the low- or high-pond camp have less to do with the health of the pond (everyone is for that) than with practical considerations, e.g., at high water you've got saltwater intrusion in your well, so you want the pond opened while you can still drink your well water. At the moment the big high/low-pond issue is erosion. Erosion is worst on the eastern side of the pond. Erosion in itself doesn't affect the health of the pond -- but it has a disproportionate effect on the properties of a few riparian owners. You see where I'm going with this? Everyone has the same overall goal, but their ideas about how best to achieve that goal are strongly influenced by their particular circumstances. To make it even more interesting, one of the three sewers -- the ones who decide when the pond should be opened -- owns land that is being adversely affected by erosion. It's not hard to understand why it took us more than an hour to come up with a motion that encouraged the sewers to take erosion into account when deciding when to open the pond. The encourage part was important: the erosion-affected people wanted a word like direct. (I argued for encourage or recommend, saying that I didn't think we as an organization should be micromanaging the sewers, whom we had elected to collect the data and make the decision. The really unusual, and encouraging, thing was that the youngest sewer called me at home later to thank me for speaking out.) So how does this wrangling over pond openings on Tisbury Great Pond make me a better world citizen? I won't deny that the discussion was often tedious, or that there were some people I wanted to either throttle or tell to shut up, and I can't claim that the motion I spoke for is going to save the world, or even the pond. But it did remind me that situations that look cut-and-dried to outsiders can be complicated and contentious when you're in the middle of them, and that the skills you develop and exercise in working this stuff out are vital. Chunk the big picture down small enough and you'll find a way to have an effect on it, and when you think about millions of other people doing their bit in their own very small pictures, you might even dare to believe that we're not washing ourselves out to sea.
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