Bluedot Living 2022 Early Summer

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M A R T H A’S VI N EYARD / E A R LY SUMMER 2022

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S I M P L E / S M A RT / S U STA I N A B L E / STOR I E S E A R LY S U M M E R 2 0 2 2

ARE GMO'S ALL BAD?

(Dare we say no?)

CRUISING WITH CURRIER

S I M P L E / S M A RT / S U STA I N A B L E / STOR I E S

Catching up with Jed Katch in his Nissan Leaf

WOODWELL IN WOODS HOLE

Masters of Carbon at the Climate Research Center

HOW SWEET IT IS Brent Brown and family keep the honey bizzzz local

MVM's Sublime Shiitakes · Local Hero: Julie Pringle · Planting for Pollinators · Buy Less/Buy Better TM

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ENJOY MORE TIME OUTSIDE!

“

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home.

On it everyone you love .” –Carl Sagan

Publisher and Co-founder Victoria Riskin Editors Leslie Garrett, Jamie Kageleiry editor@bluedotliving.com

Digital Projects Manager Kelsey Perrett Associate Editor/Reporter Lily Olsen Digital Production Intern Julia Cooper Contributing Editors Mollie Doyle, Catherine Walthers Creative Director Tara Kenny Design/Production Sophie Petkus Proofreader Irene Ziebarth Ad Sales Jenna Lambert adsales@mvtimes.com Anne Kelley anne@bluedotliving.com

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DEER, TICK & MOSQUITO CONTROL! (508)627-2928 | MV@oh-DEER.com oh-DEER.com/locations/MV

Digital Media Consultants Eric Hellweg, Ray Pearce Contributors, this issue Randi Baird, Geoff Currier, Mollie Doyle, Jeremy Driesen, Sheny Leon, Angela Luckey, Gwyn McAllister, Sam Moore, Catherine Walthers

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CALL US! 508.627.2928 • SAFE FOR YOU, YOUR FAMILY & PETS! • KILLS TICKS & MOSQUITOS ON CONTACT. • AN EFFECTIVE ‘GREEN’ ALTERNATIVE TO PESTICIDES & CHEMICALS

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ohDEER offers you and your family a proven and safe solution to control ticks and mosquitoes so that you can enjoy your yard.

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EDITORS' LETTER

Dear Bluedot Living Readers,

A

few weeks ago, co-editor Jamie Kageleiry and I moderated a panel about climate journalism at the New England Newspaper and Press Association (NENPA) awards convention.

Alongside us were David Abel, climate reporter at the Boston Globe; Frank Mungeam, Chief Innovation Officer for the Local Media Association; and Sadie Babits, president of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

When we opened up to questions, a young journalist asked how we remain determined and hopeful in the face of so much frightening data, dangerously ignorant policy, and, well, bad news.

We at Bluedot live with this question everyday. We know that more than 70% of Americans are “very” or “somewhat” worried about climate change, according to data from Yale University. We know that most Americans don’t think the media is covering climate enough.

People want more information. And they want specific information, focused on solutions.

You’ll find solutions in these pages: in Gwyn McAllister’s story about a family determined to boost bees while creating something delicious; in Sam Moore’s profile of the scientists at Woodwell Climate Research Institute, quietly doing important work.

Meet the two fellows growing wildly delicious mushrooms on logs at Martha’s Vineyard Mycological.

Meet Jessica Mason, who launched MV Island Eats to transform disposable take-out containers; and Julie Pringle, a champion of the Island’s great ponds.

When you have a minute, check out our new national website at bluedotliving.com, where we feature changemakers from all over the country — locals making a difference as they do here (our MV site is marthasvineyard.bluedotliving. com). You can sign up for newsletters for each site.

One thing that’s certain during these uncertain times is that action creates hope. We’re grateful for all of you who use this information to take action in your own lives, and for the advertisers and non-profits who support our work.

And finally, an apology to Skip Finley. In our Late Winter 2022 What.On.Earth. column, we stated that the number of Black whaling captains on the Vineyard was five.

In fact, Finley had written, there were five “men of color,” including an Indigenous man who was lost at sea before he was able to captain the ship he was expected to; and “a mulatto, the last living captain with Native American ancestry.” Further, we cited The Atlantic Black Box Project as the source for some of our data, but it was first published in the Vineyard Gazette by Finley. Bluedot regrets the error.

–Leslie Garrett (and Jamie Kageleiry)

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CONTENTS Upfront 4 Editors' Letter 8 What.On.Earth This one’s for the birds 9 In a Word: ‘Soft Fascination’

10 Buy Better: Rooey Knots,

Helayne Cohen bowls, and Original Cyn jewelry

11 Local: Reimagining take-out containers 12 Good News from All Over

Departments

14 Dear Dot Our eco-advice columnist

responds: Is there an eco-friendly way to keep my yard tick-free?

30 Good Food: Turning Wood Into Food

By Catherine Walthers

Martha’s Vineyard Mycological cultivates worldclass mushrooms. Plus recipes to use them!

36 Room for Change: The Kitchen

By Mollie Doyle

You don't need all that gear! Create a clutter-free, planet-friendly kitchen.

22 Cruising with Currier

Features

Ride along in a Nissan Leaf EV with Island activist Jed Katch.

16 Ginny Bee Honey Keeps It Local

By Gwyn McAllister

This family operation is generating quite the buzz.

20 Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs): What’s So Bad About Them, Anyway?

By Leslie Garrett

Do the benefits outweigh the potential dangers?

25 Accounting for Carbon

By Sam Moore

How Woods Hole’s Woodwell Climate Research Center became a hub for climate research and policy.

at marthasvineyard.bluedotliving.com Field Note: The Felix Neck Crew catches us up Field Note: IGI plants for the birds

By Angela Luckey

P lant your yard to roll out the welcome mat for pollinators and wildlife.

46 The 'Keep This' Handbook

Your eco-guide to composting, recycling, volunteering, activism, and more.

47 Field Note: SMF'S Adam Moore plants chestnut trees 48 Local Heroes: We nominate Great Pond protector Julie Pringle

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PHOTO BY SHENY LEON

ONLINE

44 Garden: Making Room for the Birds and the Bees

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What.

On.Earth.

This one’s for the birds…

1. Percent of the world’s bird species that are songbirds: ~50 2. Percent of songbird species in which the females sing: 66

each drop breaking

3. Percent decrease in volume of Sparrows’ song during the early pandemic when noise pollution was down: 35

without breaking into

4. Number of acorns that Acorn woodpeckers store individually in holes in trees, fence posts, utility poles, and buildings: up to 50,000

the next, describes the unrelenting, syncopated mind. Not unlike

5. Percent of North American bird species that feed insects to their young: 96 6. Number of species of butterflies/moths supported in North America by native oaks: ~550

the hummingbirds

7. Number of caterpillars a clutch of Carolina Chickadee chicks eat in the 16 days between hatching and fledging: 9,000

imagining their wings

8. Number of songs Sparrows sing: ~10

to be their heart, and swallows

9. Number of songs Brown Thrashers sing: ~2,000

believing the horizon

10. Distance north that seven North American Warbler species have shifted in past quarter century: 65 miles

to be a line they lift

11. Distance south that 35 North American Warblers have shifted: 0 Miles

and drop.

12. Number of bird species that have gone extinct in past five centuries: 150

–Excerpt from ‘Mind’ from The Dream of The Unified Field

by Martha’s Vineyard poet Jorie Graham

13. Number of bird species protected from extinction by stabilizing carbon emissions and holding warming to 1.5 degrees C: 150 14. Percent increase in sightings of Wood Thrushes, Eastern Towhees, Veeries, and Scarlet Tanagers (all species of conservation concern) in yards with native plantings as compared with yards landscaped with typical alien ornamentals: 800

1/2: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology; 3: Eos; 4: Allaboutbirds.org; 5/6/7: Audubon; 8/9: The New York Times; 10/11: Nature Canada; 12: Our World in Data; 13: Audubon; 14. Allaboutbirds.org.

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PHOTO SAM MOORE

The slow overture of rain,

in a word

W

hen Spencer Kelly was in grade five, his teacher became exasperated by what she called his “daydreaming.” While the other kids had turned to the appropriate page in their textbooks, Kelly would be staring out the window. When his classmates were turning in their assignments, Kelly was still sketching in the margins. Helicopters, which were a fascination of his. Sharks.

His parents joked they could send him to his room to retrieve his shoes, only to discover him, 45 minutes later, still shoeless but having constructed a Lego Blackhawk.

Unlike those around him, Kelly saw no problem with his daydreaming.

Neither, increasingly, do some researchers who have coined different terms for it. Attention Restoration

IN A WORD

Soft Fascination /sôft/ /,fasə'nāSH(ə)n/

Theory, for instance, uses the term “soft fascination,” and holds that, according to New York Times columnist Lisa Damour, “soft fascination relieves stress by helping us close those mental browser tabs; unhurried reflection lets us sift through mental clutter, quiet internal noise, and come up with fresh, useful solutions.” Soft fascination is the opposite of our productivity-obsessed culture. It isn’t about achievement at all.

Not surprisingly, we often experience soft fascination in nature, where stress is relieved, our ability to focus is restored, and little that our society values is accomplished.

Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus, discovered soft fascination, which he called mind wandering, when, exhausted from what he described as fattening himself up

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on information “like some sort of foie gras goose,” he began walking in nature. “I came back from these long walks feeling so alive and mentally fertile,” he told podcaster Ezra Klein. “And I started building in loads of space for mind-wandering. I started to see connections between things I hadn’t thought about before, I started processing things in my past, I started creating visions for the future.”

It is likely only a matter of time until our culture commodifies soft fascination, giving us goals and strategies to achieve it. But the joke’s on them. All it takes is an aimless walk in the woods or, if that’s impossible, the willingness to do nothing more than stare out a window and let your mind do the wandering.

–Leslie Garrett

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BUY LESS/BUY BETTER • UPFRONT

Buy Less, but Buy

Better

By Gwyn McAllister Photos Courtesy of the Artists

Rooey Knots

Even prior to the rise in work-from-home culture, men had pretty much eschewed neckties for a more casual look.

According to fashion forecasters, ties are on their way out, which is just fine with the majority of men, who are happy to release themselves from the windpipe restricting accessory.

This is also good news for Gareth Brown of Rooey Knots whose cottage industry is based on repurposing discarded silk neckties, which she picks up at second-hand stores, to create colorful women's headwear.

Each Rooey Knots' creation incorporates two or more ties, either twisted into a half-and-half design, knotted into a fun flapper style band with a front bow, or woven together into a multi-patterned

headband. Brown also constructs more elaborate designs like a flower crown with a ring of roses made entirely from sculpted ties.

The neckties provide wonderful patterns and colors that the designer mixes and matches to complement each other. The unique beauty of each is enhanced by the pairings.

More recently, Brown has started making little crossbody bags with stripes of patterned tie material, backed with reclaimed denim or leather, and embellished with a leather fringe. She also twists necktie material into bracelets and necklaces.

Generally Brown limits her designs to silk ties, but if she finds a particularly eye-catching pattern in a man-made fabric, she will incorporate it into one of the small bags.

Rooey Knots served as the launching pad for Brown's fashion line, which currently includes dresses, blouses, dusters, and jumpsuits, all made from remnant fabrics — another way that the designer focuses on using surplus or other materials destined for the landfill in her various lines.

Continued on page 41

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LOCAL • REUSABLE CONTAINER PROGRAM

JESSICA MASON TACKLES TAKE-OUT TRASH A new pilot program urges you to take away, don't throw away.

Y

By Gwyn McAllister Photos Courtesy Island Eats

ou may not realize this but, even with all of the current recycling initiatives in place, most plastic is still never recycled. According to Jessica Mason, founder of the pilot program Island Eats MV, a whopping 91% ends up in landfills, including plastics that are produced to be recyclable, and even those that conscientious consumers throw in recycling cans and bins.

“When you start to dive into the depths of it [recycling], it’s an incredibly complex system,” says Mason. “When we put something in the recycling bin, we think we’ve done our job. It’s not that easy. Recycling isn’t the panacea that we thought it might be.”

Although many Island restaurants are now opting for plastic alternatives, Mason notes that even those are not a foolproof solution. In a press release, she writes, “ Those so-called 'biodegradable’ and 'plant-based’ containers? Most are really a combination of plant-produced starch and … plastic. And even ‘compostable’ containers are just regular trash piling up in landfill unless we can ensure they actually make it to a commercial facility.”

Apparently, even under the best of circumstances, much recyclable material actually ends up as regular trash.

To address this problem, Mason launched the initiative Island Eats MV, a closed-loop reusable takeout container system. The program, started in May with a trial run through September, will provide a workable solution to the problem of the landfill-bound waste created by restaurant to-go containers.

By providing consumers with the option

token back when you return the bowl to any of the participating businesses.”

Island Eats will collect the bowls from the businesses and wash them at Kitchen Porch’s commercial kitchen facility before returning them to the restaurants.

For the pilot program, five local businesses have signed up — MV Salads, Bobby B’s, Black Sheep, Pawnee House, and the Katama General Store.

Mason notes that a number of other Island businesses were interested in jumping on board but she had determined that the trial program needed to be capped at five. Mason, a Chilmark resident and executive director of a national nonprofit that helps launch cooperative businesses, hopes that one day Island Eats will become self-reliant.

“The goal is for it to be a restaurantowned cooperative. The businesses would share the governance and profit with the community.”

Mason notes that similar reusable takeout container programs have proven successful in US cities and places in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. She had anticipated that the system would work well here and, so far, the program has been met with enthusiasm by both consumers and business owners. She has had to put some local restaurants and consumers on a waiting list for the future, when, hopefully a more full-scale program will follow the pilot.

“I think we have a community here that is largely conscious of how we are impacted by the climate and environmental issues,” says Mason. “We live so closely to the land. We feel it more strongly than other folks do. The landfill is a really important issue on the Island.”

LOCAL of a reusable 75%-recycled stainless-steel container system, Mason aims to help cut back on plastic and other forms of landfill bound waste.

“Think of it as all our favorite takeout without the heart-wrenching waste,” says Mason.

She explains how the model works.

“You purchase a wooden token, which entitles you to use one reusable container at a time. When the restaurant gives you the [stainless-steel] bowl for your takeout you give them your token. You get the

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GOOD NEWS • UP FRONT

good news F R O M A L L OV E R

By Lily Ireland Olsen

Green Living Gives Back A lot of hesitance around adopting more environmentally friendly habits comes from a fear that the sacrifices mean settling for an unsatisfactory lifestyle. A swath of recent research, however, indicates that greener lifestyles are linked to higher levels of happiness. Taking actions that benefit others and align with one’s values lead to psychological benefits.

One study in particular found that a positive correlation between environmentally beneficial lifestyles and happiness exists whether or not someone lives in a rich or poor country.

The study evaluated 7,000 people across seven countries.

Many green habits provide benefits other than merely psychological ones. Low-carbon diets tend to be healthier, for example, and riding your bike instead of driving allows you to get more exercise. So, if you’re looking to make the switch to greener habits but are worried about leading a more mundane or complicated life, fear not. If anything, you’ll likely be healthier and happier.

Massachusetts Moves Forward on Climate Policy A new bill offers sweeping upgrades to Massachusetts’ green practices. In early April several senators introduced the bill called the Act Driving Climate Policy Forward, according to WBUR. The bill would bring change to a number of sectors.

In transportation, the bill would decrease the cost of electric vehicles and provide funding for better charging infrastructure. It would also ban the sale of internal combustion engines by 2035 and mandate an all-electric bus fleet by 2028. In energy, the bill would offer a $100 million investment fund for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and provide flexibility on project costs for offshore wind development. The bill also aims to change solar regulations by allowing homeowners to place solar panels in more than one place on their properties and allow farmers to put solar panels where they raise livestock or grow food. Lastly, when it comes to building codes, this bill promises to bring in environmental groups and the public to plan for the future

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UP FRONT • GOOD NEWS

of natural gas in the state, diminishing the power that utility companies have long had over the process. These and many other policy changes could broadly improve environmental practices in the state if the bill is passed.

The choices we make as an Island community over the next few years will shape the fate of our waters for generations.

Boston is Shining a Light on Clean Energy Boston’s centuries-old street lamps may soon be revamped as part of the city’s efforts to limit its environmental footprint, The Boston Globe reports. The 2,800 colonial street lamps, which line streets from the Back Bay to Charlestown, are currently gas-powered and stay lit 24/7. These lamps contribute 5,000 metric tons of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere each year. In March, however, city officials began replacing the lights with energy-efficient LEDs, which simulate flames.

If implemented on a broader scale, this switch could preserve the ambience of historic Boston while also cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.

The Grist Report: Hope for Wind Energy A lease for offshore wind development went for a record-breaking bid in February, reports Grist, signaling that investors and developers see potential in offshore wind. When the Biden administration leased almost half a million acres of the AtlanREPORT tic Ocean for offshore wind development, fourteen companies drove up the bid to a closing price of $4.37 billion. The largest tract went to Bight Wind Withholdings for $1.1 billion.

TM

This per-acre lease price is nine times what companies paid in the last U.S. offshore wind auction. This comes as state and federal policy support for the industry has grown.

This latest sale may be a building block toward Biden’s goal of developing enough offshore wind power to supply 10 million homes with energy by 2030.

Please join the Great Pond FoundationTM in our efforts to restore the

ecological health of our coastal ponds through scientifically informed management, public education, and community collaboration.

· Water Quality · Pond Biodiversity · Pond Opening Info · Eelgrass Ecosystems · Blue Carbon & Climate Change TM

Stay informed and engaged by visiting greatpondfoundation.org MV CYANOTM is a collaborative initiative among Island Boards of Health and Great Pond Foundation to monitor cyanobacteria on Martha’s Vineyard.

New York City Oysters Guard Against Storms New York City restaurant-goers can now protect the city from

storms by feasting on oysters. Thanks to the Billion Oyster Project, restaurants can donate oyster shells for use in building breakwaters, reports The Guardian.

The organization is building nearly a half-mile of partially submerged breakwaters covered in oyster shell reefs. These reefs are aimed at minimizing erosion and flooding. They will also provide habitat for sea creatures.

Oysters are a particularly useful tool for green infrastructure, as the bivalves are resilient to ocean currents and crashing waves when they’re attached to rocks. They also act as water filters, with each oyster able to filter up to 50 gallons of water per day, removing pollutants and improving water quality.

The project is mutually beneficial too — oyster populations are revived as these creatures protect human populations.

Cyanobacteria, a.k.a. blue-green algae, are a group of microorganisms found in all Vineyard waters. When cyanobacteria bloom, they can produce cyanotoxins, which when concentrated, can cause adverse health effects in humans, pets, or livestock who wade in or ingest blooming waters.

See current conditions by visiting greatpondfoundation.org/mvcyano

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HEADLINE FOR STORY • FEATURE

dot DEAR

Illustration Elissa Turnbull Dot tackles your thorniest questions from a perch on her porch

Dear Dot: Is there something I can

put on my lawn that doesn’t harm wildlife, including my pets or grandchildren, but that deters ticks?

—Rose, Vineyard Haven

Dear Rose,

I know I’m supposed to love all bugs because they play a part in the ecosystem and blah blah blah but c’mon … Ticks? Ugh. While most of us go out of our way to avoid ticks, Island biologist Dick Johnson seeks them out. Johnson is the tick guy on the Island, spending his days hunting these tiny terrorists to better understand where they are and what they’re doing. The Lone Star nymphs (such a glorious name for such a nasty creature) are already out by early April. The deer tick nymphs emerge a bit later — mid to late May, says Johnson — and are dangerous because they’re so tiny at that stage. Be vigilant. If you, your kids and grandkids, or pets have been outside, follow up with a tick-check. Because the deer tick 14

nymphs are the size of poppy seeds, and like to nestle into our bodies’ warm humid crevices (armpits or groin, for example), Johnson recommends that we feel for them when we shower. If there’s a tiny bump that wasn’t there yesterday, it’s likely a tick nymph.

A tick “bite” is something of a misnomer, says Johnson. What ticks actually do sounds like something from a horror movie. With their barbed “hands,” ticks essentially breaststroke into your skin, then jam in a mouth part called a hypostome — Johnson says it acts like a straw. Except that this straw also has hooks akin to a miniscule chainsaw. Compounds in the ticks’ saliva make our blood pool beneath the skin and the tick begins to sip, a delicate feast that can last three to ten days. “If [ticks] were the size of a cow, they’d be really scary,” Johnson tells me, ensuring that I will begin to have nightmares of cow-sized ticks.

What can we do to prevent these blood-thirsty, chainsaw-wielding noncow-sized-but-still-horrible ticks?

The first step is in your yard, Johnson says. If you’re in a tick-prone area, get rid of leaf litter and pine needles that offers the damp shady conditions that ticks love.

I’m reminded, however, that eco-gardening experts urge us to leave that stuff for precisely the reason that it’s ideal habitat for so many of the other insects we love.

At minimum, if your yard abuts a wooded area, create a three-foot wide strip of gravel or large wood chips to act as a barrier to ticks. This can also serve as a visual reminder to you that beyond is tick territory.

Ticks aren’t typically on lawns (more

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on that later) but they will seek out certain plants. Rhododendron is a popular tick hangout, as are the invasive plants, Russian olive and bittersweet, giving us yet another reason to banish those from our yards.

Unfortunately, keeping Lone Star ticks at bay isn’t so simple. Johnson calls them the “cheetahs” of the tick world because they move so fast. “For years, we’ve been telling people they don’t need to worry [about ticks] on their lawns,” says Johnson, but Lone Star ticks react to carbon dioxide. So if you’re breathing or sweating on your lawn, he says, “they will come after you, across the lawn from the woods, and seek you out and bite you.” Yes, that’s right: Lone Star ticks will seek you out and hunt you down like micro-assassins. If you have a major tick problem, or if Lone Stars have moved into your territory, there are a few options available to you to reduce their numbers.

Keep your grass short, no taller than 3 to 3 ½ inches.

Encourage birds in your yard.

Ground-feeders like sparrows, that pick about in leaf litter, feast on ticks.

Johnson is leery about the impact of larger birds, such as turkeys and quail, which he says some people are employing to tackle ticks: “That's making me very nervous because Lone Star ticks in particular feed on birds so they may be eating some of the ticks but at the same time, you're feeding a whole bunch of ticks.” A dead turkey that Johnson recently examined had five Lone Star ticks attached to it.

“Most ticks die from not getting a meat blood meal,” he explains. “Between the different stages as they hatch, they have to get a blood meal to become a nymph, which I call the teenagers. Teenagers have to get a meal before they become an adult so they have to feed twice and most ticks don't make it — they either get eaten or just don't ever get the blood meal they need to live. When you put out a quail or something like that, you may just be keeping more ticks alive. So the question is how many ticks does the quail eat versus how many ticks feed on it and increase the population?”

For really difficult tick problems, Johnson says, you might want to pull out the big gun, a chemical called permethrin.

DEAR DOT

“It’s actually a type of plant, a relative of the chrysanthemum,” he said, though in North American it’s been reconfigured as a synthetic pesticide. Johnson says it’s considered safe for children and dogs (permethrin is highly toxic to cats), though Consumer Reports noted that permethrin is an endocrine disruptor so use should be careful and judicious and a last resort. Another problem is that permethrin is indiscriminate — killing our beloved pollinators as effectively as it does the dastardly ticks.

Still, it’s hard to argue with its effectiveness. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Medical Entomology determined that clothing treated with permethrin was 58% more effective at protecting the wearer than non-treated clothing. You can purchase permethrintreated clothing from manufacturers (including L.L.Bean) or purchase a permethrin spray and apply it to your clothes, being careful to follow instructions.

If you do find a tick has chosen you as its next blood meal, remove it by using tweezers

as close to the skin as possible and pulling straight up. It takes 24 to 48 hours for a deer tick to begin transmitting Lyme disease so sooner is better than later to check your body for ticks. If you are bitten, get doxycycline as a prophylactic, Johnson says. “There's a good study in The New England Journal of Medicine that showed an 85% reduction in incidence of Lyme disease with people who were treated within the first couple of days with a dose of doxycycline,” he says.

Of course, it isn’t just Lyme disease that’s of concern. Though less prevalent, ticks can also carry babesiosis and ehrlichiosis. Lone Stars can carry tularemia and anaplasmosis, two illnesses that can lead to death.

Johnson is optimistic that a new vaccine against Lyme disease (already available to our dogs) will be available in three to five years.

In the meantime, let’s review our options: a gravel or mulch barrier, removal of plants where ticks like to congregate, encouraging ground-feeding birds

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such as sparrows and discouraging larger birds like turkeys and quail, and donning permethrin-treated clothing when spending time in tick territory.

But let’s not overlook some simple steps: When you’re gardening or hiking, wear long pants, socks, and a long-sleeved shirt at minimum. Do a daily tick check of yourself and others for ticks, including their favorite bodily hideouts. Johnson himself is well covered in permethrin-treated clothing that he sends to Insect Shield, a company that will treat your clothes and return them to you (clothes remain treated through roughly 60 launderings) and even though he’s logged many hours in tick habitat intentionally handling thousands of ticks, “we don’t get bitten,” he says.

May we all be so lucky.

Avoidantly, Dot Read more at bit.ly/DEAR-DOT

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SWEET DREAMS • FEATURE

Brent and Lisa Brown with (from left) Harrison, Maybeline, and Eleanor.

Story By Gwyn McAllister Photos by Sheny Leon

SWEET DREAMS: Ginny Bee Honey Keeps it Local This family operation is getting quite the buzz.

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B

rent Brown has found the perfect way to realize his dreams of farming the land. Rather than raising crops or animals, Brown tends much smaller livestock — honeybees.

“I’ve always dreamt of having a big farm and growing all kinds of vegetables,” says Brown, who eventually had to accept the reality that the price of real estate on Martha’s Vineyard made that dream prohibitive. Instead, he decided to farm bees. “It’s a happy medium,” he says. “You don’t have to have a lot of property or even have your own property at all. They fly wherever they need to go.”

Currently Brown operates a small apiary on the grounds of the Norton Farm on the Vineyard Haven/Edgartown Road. There he has set up a number of hives from which he extracts honey to sell at the farm’s produce and baked goods store.

Ginny Bee honey is all natural, unlike commercial honey which can contain glucose and fructose, among other additives and, best of all, it’s all the product of Island flowers. Brown notes that aside from giving you some immunity to local types of pollen, buying Vineyard honey helps sustain our local environment.

“Eating local honey is supporting your local beekeeper and also helping support the local bee population, which is in decline worldwide because of habitat loss,” says Brown. “You’re supporting the honeybees being out there and cross pollinating and producing our food. Bees do a wonderful job of pollinating our crops.”

It’s said that one of every three bites of food is brought to you by honeybees.

While he takes his beekeeping very seriously, Brown notes that he’s able to work full time as project coordinator for Rosbeck Builders while pursuing his hobby after hours and on weekends.

Aside from frequent hive inspections, the bulk of the work takes place in the spring and early summer months, when he can sustainably collect the honey.

“I only harvest honey from the bees in May, June and July,” says Brown.

“What they make in the summer is

FEATURE • SWEET DREAMS

Brent is able to pursue the beekeeping after work and on spring and early summer weekends.

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SWEET DREAMS • FEATURE

“Eating local honey is supporting your local beekeeper and also helping support the local bee population, which is in decline worldwide because of habitat loss,” Brent Brown says. excess. When the flowers are out again in the fall, I leave that honey in the hive for the bees to eat during the winter months. I’m very cautious not to take too much honey.”

Brown notes that not all honey producers are as scrupulous as he is. “There are plenty of beekeepers out there who will take every ounce of honey that the bees make and replace it with a sugar water solution. There’s a lot more to honey than sugar.”

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Brown prioritizes maintaining large, healthy thriving colonies that will yield as much honey as possible, while keeping the Island’s bee population up. He notes that his hives house from 40,000 to 60,000 bees in the summer, with the population decreasing to around 10,000 in the winter (much like the Vineyard’s seasonal human population differential, but not as drastic).

Along with the Norton Farm hives (which number from 10 to 20 depending on the season), Brown also keeps bees on other properties around the Island but he doesn’t harvest the honey from these smaller hives, which need whatever they can produce.

It doesn’t take much in the way of equipment to harvest and process honey. Brown explains the extraction process: “I take home the wooden frames that the bees create the honeycomb on and I use a knife to cut off the wax. I put the frame in a spinner that uses centrifugal force to pull the honey from the frame. I filter it once and then bottle it. What you eat is straight honey, no additives.”

Born and raised in Colorado, Brown had never considered beekeeping as a hobby until after he moved to the Vineyard in 2016. “Seven years ago I decided

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to take the plunge. I purchased the equipment and the hives and watched a lot of YouTube videos.” Trial and error played a big part in Brown’s education.

“Experience is a good teacher,” he says.

“I learned from my mistakes.”

Brown credits his move to the Island as inspiration for his apiary aspirations.

“I fell in love with nature and the beautiful landscaping and uncultivated areas all around us. I work in the office all day long. Beekeeping is a nice break for me.

It gets me out in nature.”

Another incentive for Brown was finding a venture that he could share with his three children. “I really created it for my kids,” he says, “to help them learn

FEATURE • SWEET DREAMS

The Browns’ bees number close to 60,000 in summer.

Brent credits his move to the Island for his apiary aspirations.

You can buy the honey at the Norton Farm.

about business and nature. Any profit we’re trying to save for college.”

The Brown kids – ages six, nine, and eleven – all help out with the bottling and preparation of the all-natural beeswax lip balm, which is also available at the Norton farm stand. Brown’s wife, Lisa, does the photography, among other things. “Everyone in the family has a little part in this,” says Brown.

He also makes it a part of his mission to educate others. During the summer months, Brown hosts tours of the Norton Farm apiary where he talks about the lifecycle of bees and their important role in the environment. Guests then don bee suits for a hive inspection. He will open up a hive so that visitors can see the inner workings and even hold a frame full of thousands of bees if they choose to. The tour concludes with a taste test comparison between Ginny Bee and commercially produced honey.

“In doing something they’ve never

done before, people can better understand the process and maybe overcome some of the apprehension they have about honeybees,” says Brown. “Being in the apiary and finding out that the bee’s primary goal is to collect nectar and pollen goes a long way towards

W H AT YOU CA N D O As for encouraging others to take up beekeeping, Brown notes that it’s not something that one can experiment with and then give up on when the novelty has worn off. “It’s not like buying a bicycle and then putting it away when you’re over it,” he says. “You have a responsibility to a colony of living creatures.”

Instead, he has a suggestion for those who want to do their part in sustaining the Island bee population.

“People can plant a variety of different types of flowers that bees are attracted to,” he says. (See our Attracting the

understanding the importance of bees in our ecological system.”

Gwyn McAllister writes frequently about local eco-friendly products for Bluedot Living. She is also a regular contributor to Edible Vineyard.

Birds and Bees story on page 44.)

“You should be aware of planting flowers that have blooms throughout the year. That way the bees will have something to constantly forage from.

In the spring and summer the bees have plenty to choose from but, come September, it’s critical for them to build up their honey supply for the winter.”

If you really have your heart set on starting your own apiary, Brown has some practical advice. “It can be a great hobby as long as you do all your research first. But don’t do it for the cheap honey. It will be the most expensive pound of honey you’ve ever purchased.”

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GENETIC MODIFICATION • FEATURE

A woman harvests rice in Bangladesh.

Genetically modified Golden Rice has considerable health benefits and may soon be on people's plates there.

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FEATURE • GENETIC MODIFICATION

W H AT ’ S S O B A D A B O U T

GENETIC MODIFICATION? Story by Leslie Garrett

From “Frankenfood” to eradicating disease, GMOs have been regarded as both peril and promise. But one thing’s for sure: They’re here to stay.

W

hen we cross the border from Canada en route to the Vineyard, my husband and I typically stop to refuel in upstate New York where we always buy a bag of Chex Mix. Chex is an American thing for us, hard to find in Canada. My doctor thinks my inability to get Chex regularly is a good thing, noting my rising cholesterol.

At his urging, I’m more carefully reading food labels, which is why I recently noticed this on the Chex bag: “Contains Bioengineered [BE] Ingredients.”

Or, put another way, “You are eating genetically modified food.”

Ask anyone about genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, or bioengineered ingredients (all terms for the same process) and you will typically hear strongly held opinions. As a supporter of local organic farms, where I buy my family’s weekly meat and produce, and as an environmental journalist, I myself have held a few strong opinions. While I hesitated to believe genetically modified food to be “Frankenfood,” an evocative and catchy term coined by GMO opponents, I didn’t want GMOs in my food, or more to the point, my children’s.

I settled on being a strong proponent of labeling, the so-called Right to Know: We all deserve the right to avoid GMOs, if we chose.nto ponds and rivers and lakes and oceans.

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GENETIC MODIFICATION • FEATURE

I

settled on being a strong proponent of labeling, the so-called Right to Know: We all deserve the right to avoid GMOs, if we chose.

There were — are! — a lot of us.

Enough that the Obama administration passed a law — mandatory as of January 1, 2022 — that food manufacturers, importers, and others that label food for retail sale must designate products that contain bioengineered ingredients as such.

Hence, the label on my bag of Chex Mix. But a funny thing happened between my “Right to Know” stage and gleefully scarfing Chex Mix clearly labeled as containing BE ingredients. I stopped fearing GMOs. Because, obliviously or not, I’d been consuming them in some form or another since roughly the mid-90s. Indeed, most of us had.

And while there’s no denying that GMOs have problems, safety doesn’t seem to be one of them.

Executive Director of Project Drawdown Dr. Jonathan Foley put it this way in an article he wrote for his GlobalEcoGuy site: “My concern about GMOs is that they are being used very poorly right now, and without larger social and environmental consequences in mind.” He notes that even “the more enlightened proponents” of genetic modification are being cavalier about long-term impacts.

The focus at Island Grown Initiative has been less about GMO resistance, says Noli Taylor. “It starts with the seed … and represents the values of the work we do in the community, which is about equity, access, regenerative systems, community care, care for the people, care for the land … all of that can be embodied in the seed system.”

To-may-to, to-mah-to

Food that is genetically modified has either itself been altered through a process called recombinant DNT (or gene splicing) to create a desirable trait — or it contains ingredients whose genetic makeup has undergone that process.

Genetically engineered foods differ from non-GE foods in that they contain one or more new genes and usually make a new protein.

Let’s look at the one that started it all: the Flavr Savr tomato (the greater assault might be on literacy!). The Flavr Savr was modified to stay firm after harvest and was the first genetically altered food product to be approved by the FDA. It Before she moved to Martha's Vineyard, Noli Taylor made her home in Hawaii, which is where she first saw the community impact of GMOs up close.

JEREMY DRIESEN

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was put on the market in 1994.

Unfortunately, according to a 2016 story in Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, Flavr Savr didn’t live up to its hype — hype that consumers at the time largely embraced or, at least, accepted. Calgene, the California-based company that launched the Flavr Savr, was spending more than it was making, even with the tomatoes priced higher than the conventional ones. When agri-tech giant Monsanto bought Calgene, it retired the Flavr Savr. But, of course, Monsanto had plenty more genetically engineered products up its sleeves, including Posilac —bovine somatotropin (bST), a growth hormone that increases output of milk from dairy cows; and Roundup Ready versions of corn, cotton, canola, and soybeans, primarily used in animal feed, high-fructose corn syrup, and corn ethanol.

Both changed the game. Roundup Ready crops were impervious to Roundup, the glyphosate-based weed killer, so farmers could liberally spray their crops.

But glyphosate was known, even then, to be harmful to human health, notes the Sierra Club, citing “decades of research [that] connected the weed killer to cancer.”

Monsanto became the face of GMOs, an easy enemy to those of us suspicious, not only of the technology, but who controlled it and how.

Fear of something new has always been an easy sell. “The easiest message to convey to people is that, well, we’re tinkering around with things that we don’t fully understand so how can we possibly know all of the consequences,” says Jon McPhetres, an assistant professor of psychology at the U.K.’s Durham University who studies why

we sometimes reject science. It’s a message that resonated. And while McPhetres does think there are potential problems with GMOs, he told me, “The one that people are scared about is the biological one, which I think is probably misguided.”

Before she moved to Martha’s Vineyard, Noli Taylor made her home in Hawaii, which is where she first saw the community impact of GMOs up close. The Hawaiian government had given considerable farmland to agricultural companies in an attempt to save the papaya industry, which was collapsing due to the papaya ringspot virus. But though many credit the “rainbow papaya,” a genetically modified papaya created by a Cornell scientist, with saving the key crop, there’s no arguing with how quickly the GM version eclipsed the conventional one, leaving even those who wanted organic (non-GMO) papayas with no choice, due to spread.

What’s more, says Taylor, Senior Director, Programs, at Island Grown Initiative, there was considerable division between those who blamed the pesticides being sprayed on the rainbow papayas for making people sick and those who saw the GM version as saving their industry.

To Taylor, it offered an argument for the type of farming that she and IGI espouse.

“Our focus has been less about GMO resistance and more on creating these pathways for different approaches to how we grow seeds, how we connect with the community around foods.” For Taylor, “It starts with the seed … and represents the values of the work we do in the community, which is about equity, access, regenerative systems, community care, care for the people, care for the land…all of that can be embodied in the seed system.”

Golden opportunity?

Much of the pushback against GMOs has fallen along the same lines as Noli Taylor’s desire to see food and the control of it remain in the hands of people, not corporations.

This, at least in part, led to the backlash against so-called Golden Rice, a rice that was genetically modified to have beta-carotene in the edible part of the rice. Millions of people primarily in Asia, including an estimated 250 million preschool children, who rely on rice as a staple food suffer from

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Safe is not the same as harmless

The genetically modified rainbow papaya divided a community.

Vitamin A deficiency, which can lead to blindness and premature death.

The pushback to Golden Rice was swift and severe. Promises from the company that produced it that it would always be given to qualifying farmers free of charge were challenged. Opponents argued that it was better to encourage and strengthen local farming communities. Some maintained that a public health initiative aimed at providing nutritional supplements was preferable to promoting a GM crop. But proponents pointed to a technological advance created for humanitarian use and available free of charge to those who needed it (and who could save their seeds) and that it could improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

A combination of things, including the considerable regulations required, sidelined Golden Rice’s promise though it seems poised to be on people’s plates in the Philippines and Bangladesh sometime soon. It will be too soon for those opposed and not soon enough for those — including more than 150 Nobel Laureates who in 2016 signed an open letter to the UN, governments of the world, and Greenpeace — urging a more balanced approach to Golden Rice.

Can education open minds?

The story of Golden Rice underscores important considerations around GMOs, including that there must continue to be robust vigilance and testing before crops are put on the market. Currently, governments around the world implement strict protocols, including laboratory and field testing spanning many years, according to a release

from the Cornell Alliance for Science, adding “The resulting plants and foods are far more tested than their conventional counterparts.”

Which begs another question. Are the two approaches fundamentally incompatible? Or is there a way to incorporate GMOs while strengthening organic farming communities and ensuring that they don’t lose control of their products?

Jon McPhetres believes education can play a key role in shifting people’s understanding of GMOs. “There’s a lot of good evidence for simply teaching people basic scientific facts,” he says. “It’s not about completely reversing people’s opinion … but I think we can shift people to being slightly more positive, or at least less negative towards [GMOs].” He has noticed a similar shift in people’s opinions around nuclear energy, vaccines, and, yes, GMOs when people’s level of knowledge is increased. He admits that the rise of anti-vax sentiment is disheartening. He would like to see scientists do a better job of communicating with the public. “Science is really about change and changing your mind and changing your mind a lot, whereas people think that science is about finding the answer quickly and then never changing your mind from that.” We should change our minds, he says, when we learn something new.

McPhetres himself is fascinated by gene editing though he says he can “understand why people might be scared of it.” The answer, he insists, is talking about it, talking about safety, and realistic outcomes.

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GENETIC MODIFICATION • FEATURE

Realistic outcomes are hard to hold onto when proposals seem like a combination of wishful thinking and science fiction.

Take the Vineyard and Nantucket mice, for instance.

Kevin Esvelt, a biologist, associate professor, and one of the founders of the Mice Against Ticks project at MIT as well as an MIT PhD candidate and the project’s research director, Joanna Buchtal (who lives part-time in Menemsha), were tired of worrying about their children contracting Lyme disease. Ticks are a huge problem on the Cape and Islands, and so the project was created to harness the promise of CRISPR technology to alter the genetic code of the mice that ticks frequently use as their first host.

CRISPR, while often referred to in the same breath as genetic engineering, differs in that, while genetic engineering involves the introduction of foreign genetic material from a different organism (transgenic) or from the same organism (cisgenic), CRISPR involves changing or altering original base pair arrangements within the genome of an organism — there are no introductions.

Subject to CRISPR technology, these white-footed mice would create antibodies to kill the bacteria that carries Lyme disease, an immunity that would be passed down through generations. With fewer mice able to transmit Lyme to the ticks, fewer ticks will transmit Lyme to people, or so the thinking goes.

“We won’t be impacting the population with Mice Against Ticks,” explains Sam Telford, a professor of infectious diseases and global health at Tufts University who has dedicated his career to eradicating tickspread diseases. “We’ll simply be making that population less likely to have [Lyme] infection.”

“It’s not a new idea per se,” explains Telford. “After all, genetically modified mosquitoes are being deployed to try and reduce the risk of certain viral infections transmitted by mosquitoes, and there’s a big push to use genetically modified mosquitoes to combat malaria in Africa. It’s really the wave of the future.”

But if people are uncomfortable with scientists tinkering with tomatoes, one can imagine the hesitation with bioengineering hundreds of thousands of mice and then releasing them into the wild.

Proponents of genetically modified Golden Rice tout its health benefits, specifically to combat Vitamin A deficiency.

But opposition has been fierce.

Or … wait.

Despite legitimate questions about potential problems of the ‘how would we ever put the genie back in the bottle,’ type, a variety of bioengineered Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have already been released in the Florida Keys in hopes of eradicating the diseases — Zika, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever — that this type of mosquito carries.

And the Mice Against Ticks project, though not a slam dunk, is being greeted by many on Nantucket with open-mindedness, according to a recent Boston Globe story, not least because ticks themselves have become an overwhelming concern.

Similarly, Martha’s Vineyard has been the site of info sessions over the past few years about this initiative.

Telford calls the Mice Against Ticks project simply “another tool”, alongside habitat modification, insecticides, and reducing the number of deer, another favorite host of ticks.

And he, along with Esvelt and Buchtal, are clear-eyed about what they are asking people to approve. They insist that even after the considerable vetting required by local, state, and federal regulators, the project won’t go ahead without the support of both the Island communities — Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard — where the experiment will be undertaken.

mently opposed to GMOs in principle.

“The real problem is that large-scale industrial monocultures are simply a bad idea — for the food system, for the environment and for us long-term,” wrote Dr. Jonathan Foley. GMOs, he continued, are part and parcel of this type of farming, perpetuating the problems. His concern is that GMOs are primarily driven by profit, without larger social and environmental consequences in mind.

Noli Taylor agrees. “Food shouldn’t be in the hands of a few big companies,” she says. “It should be in the hands of the people and the community. We should have the right and the ability to feed ourselves and help make sure that our neighbors have enough to eat and that all begins with the seed,” she says.

Jon McPhetres is also notably leery about the role that big agriculture companies play. “People can patent these kinds of seeds and they can take away people’s livelihoods,” he says. “This is a really different kind of issue. I think that’s the real issue.”

Chex mate

Ultimately, genetic modification is a new technology that isn’t, inherently, good or bad. Like any technology, it can be employed to solve problems or, used irresponsibly or corruptly, it can create problems, or worsen them.

But GMOs have become part of our So what’s the real issue? food system and that isn’t going to change.

Opening ourselves to the promise of gene We can, indeed must, ensure that oversight editing, however, doesn’t mean we should remains robust and principled. And though swallow the GM story whole. Much of I personally haven’t made complete peace what proponents want us to believe — that GMOs will help us feed the world, that they with genetic modification, for now, I am happy, as I dip my hand into a bag of Chex will always boost yield — has been credibly mix, to eat it. challenged, even by those who aren’t vehe-

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Genes creep in on tiny mice feet

FEATURE • ACCOUNTING FOR CARBON

AC C O U N T I N G

FOR

6

C Carbon 12.011

By Sam Moore Photos by courtesy Woodwell Climate Research Center

L

ooking at the stately Woodwell Climate Research Center, which sits on a hill off the road leading to Woods Hole, you might not guess that the renowned institution began in one man’s basement. That man is George Woodwell, and since 1985, the center he founded has been deeply involved in climate research and policy at home and abroad. Today, it employs nearly

SAM MOORE

How a littleknown center in Woods Hole became a hub for climate research and policy.

George Woodwell at his home in Woods Hole.

The Woodwell Climate Research Center on Woods Hole Road got its start in George's basement.

100 scientists and staff, whose work on everything from permafrost to wildfires is shaping our understanding of the world we live in — and what we’re doing to it.

The Center’s scientists have been lead or contributing authors at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since the outset, and in recent years its leaders, including John Holdren and Philip B. Duffy, have been science advisors to the Obama and Biden administrations.

How did these scientists all wind up here, in this hamlet on Cape Cod, which also boasts the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the National Marine Fisheries Service? Perhaps because Woods Hole attracts migrating scientists like a duck decoy — many arrive for a stopover, and some get bagged. “It could be, some say, that this is the place to be for a scientist in summer,” the New York Times gushed in 1997.

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ACCOUNTING FOR CARBON • FEATURE

It's a hotbed of scientific opinion, and George Woodwell’s take is: “The accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere presents a serious worldwide problem that threatens the stability of climates within the lifetimes of people now living,” and “the time to take steps to mitigate those problems is now.” It’s pretty conventional wisdom — but these words are from 1979. And for Woodwell, it was old news then.

and to the scientists who worked to understand relationships between Earth and life at the planetary scale.

George Woodwell graduated from Dartmouth College in 1950 and joined the Navy, sailing aboard an oceanographic survey vessel in the North Atlantic. His ship ran back and forth across the newly discovered Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and its crew watched with deep-sounding sonar as the undersea

George Woodwell is a bridge between the origins of the modern American environmental movement and its future, from the now-textbook cases of nuclear radiation and DDT to the ongoing reckoning with climate change.

“From my standpoint, we should have just gone hammer and tongs to reduce the buildup of CO₂ in the atmosphere and cool the Earth,” Woodwell, now 93, told me when I visited him at home in April. “And we should be doing that now.”

Woodwell first began worrying about carbon dioxide when it was present in the atmosphere at around 320 parts per million. Today, that number is somewhere around 420 parts per million, and global temperatures have risen by almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the long-term average.

Our observations have improved, but the forecast has not, Woodwell says.

The center he founded, and the work it continues to do, are at the heart of how climate science plays out in the public sphere.

Masters of Carbon

The origins of the Woodwell Climate Research Center can be traced to the early days of ecology,

mountain range rose up to meet them.

Off the boat, Woodwell got a doctorate in botany at Duke under groundbreaking ecologist Henry J. Oosting, one of the “old boys of the subversive science” as Woodwell once affectionately called them. After a few years at the University of Maine, he moved to the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, where his wide-ranging research laid the groundwork for his move to Woods Hole and all that followed.

Right away, Woodwell embroiled himself in red hot issues like pesticide exposure and nuclear radiation as he set out to understand their effects at an ecosystem scale. He’d begun studying DDT in Maine, collecting soil samples after aerial spraying. In the 1960s, he continued his investigations at Brookhaven, joined by Charles F. Wurster, a young chemist with a keen interest in ornithology.

“We spent a summer collecting birds and fish and mud from the bottom and sediments in the salt marsh,” Woodwell

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recalled. “We got a spectacular set of data showing not only the DDT in the soils and the fact that DDT was everywhere, but also showing that DDT was accumulating in the living systems of the place.”

Though their findings were published in the rarefied pages of the journal Science, it was Woodwell’s participation in a ramshackle lawsuit brought by a small group of volunteers that stopped the spraying of DDT in Suffolk County.

In 1967, on the heels of their successful injunction against the Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission, Woodwell, Wurster, and a handful of fellow Long Island “troublemakers” met in a conference room at Brookhaven, where they signed the founding documents of the Environmental Defense Fund. Their work, and the legal strategy the EDF pursued, led to a federal ban of the substance in 1972.

“George was the most respected scientist in the room, and he was always the strongest advocate for maintaining our scientific integrity,” Wurster wrote in his memoir of that time.

But Brookhaven was an atomic energy laboratory, after all, so Woodwell also set up experiments to study the ecological effects of nuclear contamination.

Winching a piece of Cesium-137 up and down from a safe distance away, he exposed a forest of pitch pine and oak to ionizing radiation, and observed as the effects rippled out from the source.

Detailed measurements from this “gamma forest” showed zones where all higher plants had been killed, and those where only sedges, then shrubs, then oaks, and furthest out, the sensitive pitch pines, were able to persist. Whether from war, accident, or energy, these were the new risks of the nuclear age.

Woodwell wrote in 1962 that this forest and other models “provide at least an understanding of what is happening to the environment, if not the wisdom to control it.”

Woodwell remembers his stint at Brookhaven fondly for his freedom to design and conduct basic research along-

FEATURE • ACCOUNTING FOR CARBON

side supportive colleagues and administrators. “We had a wonderful Institute of Ecology, we could do anything, I could build anything, I could design anything,” he recalled. And so he designed all kinds of ways to measure the dynamics of the ecosystem around him, and also to measure carbon dioxide.

“We built all kinds of equipment for measuring the metabolism of a forest,” Woodwell said. Their new equipment took precise readings of photosynthesis and respiration from leaves, branches, stems, bark, and roots. “So that was very exciting, to be able to take what we called an ecosystem apart, and watch it through a whole day or a month or a year or longer.”

Woodwell said, “That was when the issue of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was first beginning to appear on the front pages of newspapers, and also appear in the scientific literature, as Dave Keeling at Scripps built up a record showing the year-by-year accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a beautiful record which was his life's work.”

Richard A. Houghton, a scientist who spent his career working alongside Woodwell from their days at Brookhaven through retirement from the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told me, “George had the foresight to really think that climate was going to be an issue because we were putting a lot into the atmosphere.”

Most of the people doing global carbon math at the time were oceanographers and atmospheric scientists, Houghton said, “and they had no idea what land was doing.” As ecologists with a particular interest in botany and terrestrial systems, Woodwell and his colleagues at Brookhaven began trying to detail the carbon absorbed and released in the biosphere.

And not just in forests. They drew detailed diagrams of how carbon moves around in Long Island marshes, tracking the flow of organic matter among

the cascading relationships of life in the tidal world. It was carbon accounting, a set of equations they could extrapolate to a planetary scale: this much in, this much out.

processes of a living, breathing Earth — the cycles of photosynthesis and respiration that balance the global atmosphere, and the human activities that can tip the scales.

Woodwell has worked cheek to jowl with many others at the leading edge of ecology and its real world implications. He’s worked with people who re-classified the kingdoms of life, discovered acid rain, and established the world’s longest running study of atmospheric CO₂, and with those who founded, in addition to the EDF, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute. In this way, George Woodwell is a bridge between the origins of the modern American environmental movement and its future, from the now-textbook cases of nuclear radiation and DDT to the ongoing reckoning with climate change.

Woodwell and his colleagues tasked themselves with an accounting of anthropogenic change at a planetary scale. Half a century later, their work has left us with an alarmingly detailed balance sheet.

“We were masters of carbon,” Woodwell said.

In 1972, Brookhaven hosted a hundred scientists for an appraisal of carbon in the biosphere. The proceedings of this conference, edited by Woodwell, began with a stark premise: “The change that man is making in the world carbon budget is among the most abrupt and fundamental changes that the biosphere has experienced in all of world history.

The change is in the stuff of life itself and is by now common knowledge.”

Tasked with describing the consequences of this change, and armed with only an inkling of the processes at work, the scientists asked: “Why has the change not been more? Or less? Where does the carbon go? What does the future hold?”

Their efforts began to diagram the

A New Center for Ecology

Eventually, George Woodwell said, “I did think that it was time to move on and do something different.” He talked about leaving Brookhaven with his wife, Katharine, “whose famous response was, ‘yes, George, you can go wherever you'd like to go. As long as it’s within fifty feet of salt water.’”

They found that proximity in Woods Hole, where Woodwell was recruited to start the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory, which opened its doors in 1975. Houghton followed him there, and with other staff members they sharpened their focus on carbon dioxide and global change.

In global carbon equations, the work of solving for difference continued.

Houghton said, “We've just been lucky in a sense, because both oceans and land

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ACCOUNTING FOR CARBON • FEATURE

have so far responded by taking up a little more than half of the emissions every year. There’s no reason why that should go on forever.”

In the mid-1980s, Woodwell again moved on, this time to start the Woods Hole Research Center, the institution to which he would devote the rest of his career (it was renamed in his honor in 2020).

Woodwell’s daughter, Jane, said “He had a year’s sabbatical from the MBL and we set up his office in the basement just to raise money that first year.” Home for the summer, Jane helped to write letters.

“When a foundation said no, we wrote them back and told them, ‘you’re wrong, you need to say yes,’” Jane said.

“And they would say yes.”

“That's almost literally true,” George said, laughing. “You can't take no from a foundation.”

ing into a carbon-neutral campus in 2003.

The new building’s net zero design was ahead of its time, although not as far ahead as its founder, who installed a homemade bank of solar panels at his house in the 1970s. The center is built with recycled materials and designed for maximum efficiency with thick insulation, triple-glazed windows, and lots of natural light.

For the energy it does use, a bank of solar panels and a wind turbine sit steps away from the front porch.

“The goal was to be, if not off the grid, then carbon neutral over the course of a year,” said Houghton. “So in the summer months, we’d make a lot. And in the winter months, we’d use some of that. That would have worked, except that we had our own computers running, and they consume.”

The computers weren’t just running

Woodwell map of carbon stored in global forests.

When Jane returned to college, her mother, Katharine, reluctantly “came down into the basement and did my job.

And way more. I mean, she and Dad did the Center together from there.”

Soon enough, Houghton left the MBL to join the Center. Others bolstered the ranks, like I. Foster Brown, an environmental geochemist who specializes in the Amazon basin and now coordinates the Center’s presence in Brazil.

They grew from a basement, to a church building, to a network of several more buildings until finally consolidat-

office programs — they were crunching through high resolution satellite imagery.

“So we were using more energy to cool our computers than we were to heat our place in Massachusetts,” Houghton said.

Science in the Arena

Susan Natali, an Arctic ecologist who’s worked at Woodwell since 2012, is a project lead for “Permafrost Pathways,” an ambitious new effort to study the warming Arctic, factor its melting permafrost into climate models, and work with Indigenous communities

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to adapt to and mitigate the changes that threaten their ways of life.

She’s a typical scientist in some ways.

“When I go for a walk, I'm usually thinking about carbon,” she told me.

In other ways, though, she is an embodiment of the mission-oriented zeal that characterizes Woodwell. She said, “When I got out of college I was like: Do I want to do science? Or do I want to do something that can have an impact? One of the things I really love about Woodwell, and why I stayed, is because I can do both of these things.”

The Center and its founder have never been afraid to wade into the fray.

On DDT, nuclear war, and then climate change — catastrophic human interventions in the finely-tuned workings of the biosphere — George Woodwell took what he knew straight to the people he thought should hear it.

Houghton told me, “We landed in Woods Hole talking about climate change. I remember standing in a meeting in Washington, DC, somewhere in those days and saying, ‘climate is going to be a big one.’ And the response from the agencies was, ‘Well, come on. We’re worried about acid rain, don't just give us a new problem.’ That was really it. ‘We're full. We’ve got problems. Don’t give us a new one.’”

In the 1970s, as the country reeled from oil shocks, the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations scrambled to find oil alternatives and to conserve energy. At the same time, a growing concern about fossil fuel emissions drew Woodwell into an effort among scientists, government officials, environmentalists, and oil companies to reckon with greenhouse gasses and recommend solutions for dealing with them.

In 1979, at the request of James Gustave Speth at the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, Woodwell authored a report with leading climate scientists Charles Keeling, Roger Revelle, and Gordon Macdonald, called “The Carbon Dioxide Problem.” They described serious changes to come, and warned that “enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes, but the time for im-

FEATURE • ACCOUNTING FOR CARBON

plementing the policies is fast passing.”

Alarmed, government officials asked for a follow up from the National Academy of Sciences. This ad-hoc investigation became the Charney report, which is now seen as a major milestone in climate science. It largely confirmed the earlier research, and predicted global warming of between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees celsius if CO₂ doubled — remarkably consistent with modern scenarios. Its warning: “A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late.”

In the 1980s, Woodwell continued to work with policymakers on climate change, testifying before congress several times and contributing to influential reports.

Speaking before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 1980, Woodwell acknowledged that scientists might disagree on the details of global warming, but that “such disagreements are an intrinsic part of the search for knowledge and their existence cannot be taken as a reason for ignoring, neglecting, or failing to act on the central issues.”

“The series of problems associated with the carbon dioxide problem will become major issues in the next century whether we address them at the moment or not,” Woodwell told the committee.

Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, the committee’s chair, jokingly retorted, “but the primaries will be over by then.”

“This set of primaries may be,” Woodwell replied. Later in his testimony, he expressed his confidence that “these are problems that well-governed, wise nations are capable of addressing successfully.”

“When you find one, let me know,” Tsongas said.

In congressional hearings, where Woodwell often testified alongside other well-known climate scientists, such as NASA's James Hansen, his role was often to fill in the details of terrestrial ecology — the interactions of the living Earth with the chemical, atmospheric, and oceanic circumstances described by others.

He called attention to the delicate

balance between photosynthesis and respiration, and the limits of scientific knowledge about how climate change will affect these processes. He warned that we were flying blind when it came to landscape change, that “it is madness not to have data flowing in regularly, monitored on a year-by-year basis, telling us what is happening to forests around the world.”

nies like Exxon were funding climate research, including at Woodwell’s Center. By the late 1980s, efforts to alleviate other atmospheric pollutants were paying off, and it seemed like the greenhouse gas issue would be resolved the same way.

But Woodwell was right in the thick of things as what began as a team effort splintered into a contentious fracas.

“I did think that it was time to move on and do something different,” Woodwell said.

He talked with his wife, Katharine, “whose famous response was, ‘yes, George, you can go wherever you’d like to go. As long as it’s within fifty feet of salt water.’”

Woodwell, like many prolific scientists, was sometimes crunched for time.

At one hearing, Rhode Island Senator John Chafee sensed a rush and asked, “Dr. Woodwell, what is your problem?”

“An airplane at 12 o’clock,” Woodwell replied.

“You have got more than a problem,” Chafee said. “You have got a disaster.”

But the committee bumped Woodwell’s testimony forward, and he proceeded to lay out the risk of carbon feedback loops, of methane being released from soils, of species not migrating fast enough to keep up with climate — plus the urgent need to get off fossil fuels, halt deforestation, and set up a monitoring system for understanding land cover change by satellite.

“Dr. Woodwell,” Chafee said, “if we are going to get a couple questions in and you are going to catch that plane, why don’t you wind it up fairly soon?”

He wound it up, but not before saying, “I think we know enough about this topic, and we have known enough about it for at least a decade to move toward alleviating the problem.”

In the early days, even compa-

Small splinters, like when Reagan took the solar panels off the White House and appointed a dentist to head the Department of Energy, and large ones, like when the department axed funding for CO₂ research, and when, starting in the late 1980s, a coordinated campaign of climate denial forestalled significant action for decades to come.

In 1983, Woodwell wrote a portion of the National Academy of Sciences’ Changing Climate report, whose lackluster reception Nathaniel Rich, in his book Losing Earth, cites as a turn for the worse. Although the report said things like “we may get into trouble in ways that we have barely imagined,” its findings were downplayed by the Reagan administration and largely misinterpreted by the press.

Speth, reflecting on Woodwell’s 1979 carbon dioxide report, wrote, “​​In the 1970s and early 1980s, environmental issues were fresh, we environmentalists were constantly sought out by reporters. But the novelty faded, and so did editors’ interest.”

By the time Woodwell found himself

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SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS

Turning Wood into Food Miracles at Martha’s Vineyard Mycological

FEATURE • TURNING WOOD INTO FOOD

Recipes and Story by Catherine Walthers Photos Randi Baird

T

he New York Times recently named mushrooms “Ingredient of the Year” for 2022 and an essential food for the plant-based movement.

The woodsy “umami” or savory flavor of mushrooms make them a natural and satisfying substitute for red meat, and demand has been growing. Most commercial mushrooms are grown indoors, but those being grown in operations outside in woods and forests are being hailed as both nutritionally superior and with even fewer impacts on the environment.

Here on the Island, we have one of the largest and most successful log operations in New England and, possibly, the country.

When you walk around Martha’s Vineyard Mycological farm in the woods of Chilmark, you know it’s a different kind of agriculture. MVM grows shiitake mushrooms — a prized Japanese mushroom known for its medicinal qualities and flavor — on hundreds of four-foot

“Mushrooms are absolutely the protein source with the lightest ecological footprint,” Gabriel says. He has taught thousands about the ways farming and forestry can be combined to both benefit the ecology and economies of small farms.

Continued on page 26

Truman French (left) and Tucker Pforzheimer met in a mycology class at Harvard. They didn't expect their future would involve stockpiling wood and delivering mushrooms.

oak boughs in row after row, leaning upright against rails under a large shade canopy. They don’t require irrigation or soil, fertilizer or feed — making these mushrooms significantly less environmentally impactful than animal proteins.

“The Vineyard’s unique ecology makes our mushrooms the most efficient form of local protein both in land and water use,” says Truman French, who started the farm

in 2015 with Tucker Pforzheimer after the pair met in a mycology class at Harvard University. Both were studying something different, and did not expect their futures would involve a farm of stockpiled wood and deliveries of mushrooms to dozens of chefs and markets. They utilize only three outdoor acres to produce thousands of pounds of protein per season.

“We have everything we need to

MVM uses only three outdoor acres to produce thousands of pounds of protein each year. "Shiitake" means "oak mushroom" in Japanese and is the second most produced mushroom in the world. French and Pforzheimer draw on the authentic Japanese growing methods on natural oak logs.

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TURNING WOOD INTO FOOD • FEATURE

produce this here; it makes sense to have this be an Island food, like venison, scallops, or lobster,” says Pforzheimer.

“We were passionate about creating an elegant business that fits its location.”

Shiitake, meaning “oak mushrooms” in Japanese, is the second most produced mushroom in the world, following the common button mushroom. French and Pforzheimer draw on the authentic Japanese growing methods on natural oak logs, where the mushrooms feed on the minerals and complex sugars in the oak itself, increasing nutrients, fiber, protein — and the flavor as well.

mane, oyster, and wine cap can be grown successfully outdoors, says Mudge, but only log-grown shiitakes can be grown consistently enough to supply the market.

This is due to the unique ability shiitake logs have to be soaked or “forced” to fruit by being immersed in water for 12 to 24 hours, which stimulates fruit production.

Mudge wrote the groundbreaking Farming the Woods about growing food and medicinals in forests with co-author Steve Gabriel, a mushroom educator at the Cornell Small Farms Program and a mushroom grower himself at Wellspring Forest Farm in New York. Gabriel grows

Ten to fifteen years ago, there were no mushroom farmers in the area, he says, and now he knows of about 100 other mushroom farms in the state of New York, where he lives, and a good number in Vermont. Most have 1,000 to 2,000 logs in production. “I think it’s still an emerging field,” he said. “People are still learning how to do it well.”

Mudge says it’s important to him that mushroom log production allows forest landowners an additional way to make money off their forest and thereby sustain the land. But this type of farming is labor intensive, he notes. “It’s a superior product

When you walk around Martha’s Vineyard Mycological farm in the woods of Chilmark, you know it’s a different kind of agriculture.

MVM grows shiitake mushrooms — a prized Japanese mushroom known for its medicinal qualities and flavor — on hundreds of four-foot oak boughs in row after row, leaning upright against rails under a large shade canopy.

MVM has 45,000 logs producing mushrooms. They work with Island businesses and construction companies to salvage Island oaks.

Shiitakes have been grown this way in Japan traditionally for generations and command a good price on the market, says Dr. Ken Mudge, a professor emeritus of horticulture at Cornell University, who researches and teaches courses on forest farming and mushrooms. A few years back, Mudge led a project in conjunction with the Center for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Vermont to train forest owners in shiitake production that drew nearly 100 participants. Other specialty mushrooms, such as lion’s

lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms at his farm in a solar-powered greenhouse and shiitakes outside on logs, and offers a mushroom CSA. “Mushrooms are absolutely the protein source with the lightest ecological footprint,” Gabriel says.

He has taught thousands about the ways farming and forestry can be combined to both benefit the ecology and economies of small farms. The pair has helped establish a mushroom resource center at Cornell to provide research, training, support, and online training for both mushroom enthusiasts and those who are considering a business. Cornell also maintains a food forest farm on campus.

“The trends are skyrocketing; there’s a ton of interest in it,” Gabriel says.

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and an opportunity for people to put a wood lot to good use, but it’s a lot of work, a lot of lifting. You have to be very serious.”

MVM knows this well, with 45,000 logs in production producing about 15,000 pounds of mushrooms yearly. MVM works with Island businesses and construction companies to salvage Island oak and cuts limbs into specified four to five-foot lengths. A recent tree-clearing project here in partnership with Mass Heritage restoring a sandplain habitat supplied the farm with three years’ worth of logs. The crew — four employees including Tucker’s two brothers Ross and Jack — hand-inoculates each log in multiple spots with one of several strains of heirloom mycelium, propagated specifically for log cultivation.

FEATURE • TURNING WOOD INTO FOOD

The inoculated logs sit stockpiled for at least a year while the strain colonizes the wood sufficiently. When they are ready to go, the crew removes a section of logs, soaks them overnight in water to stimulate the fruit production, and sets them out in the shade tents, leaning upright.

In six days, mushrooms begin bursting through the bark of the oak, ready for harvesting. The crew hand cuts up to 200 pounds a day. They then rotate out those logs to maintain a continuous production May through November. After being used multiple times, the spent logs are left to fully decay back into topsoil. “This constant rotation is significantly more labor intensive than leaving the logs in stacks to fruit on their own,” says Pforzheimer, “but allows for the consistent production that restaurants and consumers need to plan out their dishes and shopping trips.”

This contrasts with today’s commercial mushrooms being grown indoors in vast rooms on sterilized manure, sawdust, or a composted mix of ingredients like corn cobs or cottonseed hulls. Commercial shiitake growers specifically pack sterilized oak sawdust into plastic hulled man-made “logs” placed in environmentally controlled rooms that produce shiitakes in about four months compared to two to four years.

Even still, the Mushroom Council, which represents commercial growers, points to energy savings in growing mushrooms, especially when compared with raising cattle. In “The Mushroom Sustainability Story,” the Council calculated one acre of land can produce one MVM's shiitakes are the best she's ever tasted, chef/writer Catherine Walthers says.

million pounds of mushrooms. Mushroom beds stacked vertically in growing facilities allow a high volume of mushrooms to be grown in relatively small spaces, while using a limited amount of water and a “soil” made of composted materials.

According to Professor Mudge, independent blind taste tests have found forestor log-grown shiitakes to be superior in flavor, freshness, and nutrition compared to these sawdust-grown shiitake mushrooms commonly found in supermarkets.

MVM mushrooms contain double the fiber than those commercially produced and a significant 1/2 gram of protein per cap. That may be less than the concentrated 45-50 grams of protein found in an eight-ounce steak (with 10-16 grams of fat), but Pforzheimer finds “gram for gram, shiitakes are a healthier, more sustainable source.”

Shiitakes additionally offer B6, B12, selenium, potassium, zinc, and vitamin D from the sun. Shiitakes are also rich in lentinan, a substance shown in studies to bolster the immune system and aid in fighting cancer. Lentinan also gives the shiitake that woodsy umami — like wild mushrooms — with a hint of garlic.

Chefs love the MVM mushrooms.

One told me they’re “the best mushroom product in the country” and another, a top chef in Boston, said “they are the best shiitake mushrooms I’ve ever had.”

As a chef myself, I couldn’t agree more.

They are the best mushrooms I have ever tasted, hands down. It’s tough to go back to the commercial store versions; the

flavor is bland; I miss that meaty denseness the MVM mushrooms get from feeding on real wood, along with a creamy smoothness characteristic of shiitakes.

On the Island, Chris Stam of Alchemy combined fresh and dried MVM mushrooms for a very popular mushroom Bolognese served last season. The team at Noman’s decided to create a delicious mushroom taco using MVM’s mushrooms as a non-meat option.

“This is extremely gratifying for me since being the center-of-plate protein option is always ideal,” says Pforzheimer.

“Our goal is to help people move away from animal protein without feeling they need to compromise on enjoyment.”

This season, you can find MVM mushrooms each Wednesday and Saturday at the West Tisbury Farmers Market or at Cronig’s Market and these farms: Morning Glory, Beetlebung, the Grey Barn, North Tabor, Ghost Island, Whippoorwill, and North Tisbury Market; when you’re off-Island, get them here: mvmycological.com/

In Our Next Issue Mycelium — the threadlike root structure of mushrooms — is a new frontier for innovative tech companies looking to turn it into products from biodegradable packaging to building products to consumer goods. Wall Street has dubbed this wave “mushroom tech.” In our next issue, out at the end of July, look for our interview and story about one of these companies at the forefront, Ecovative, with Chilmark resident Jessica Harris.

SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS • RECIPES

2 Tbsp. dark sesame oil, coconut or olive oil, divided 1 whole leek, cut in half lengthwise, rinsed and sliced 1 ½ cups fresh shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, sliced 2-3 tsp. fresh grated ginger; a microplane grater works nicely 7 cups chicken stock or homemade mushroom stock,*

or water 1 carrot peeled, thinly sliced into diagonal slices and cut into matchsticks 2 cups kale or baby kale, stemmed and thinly sliced 1 cup tofu, cut into small cubes 1 (6 to 8 oz.) package of noodles – fresh Chinese noodles, ramen, udon or your favorite Asian noodle 2 Tbsp. soy sauce, or more to taste ½ tsp. sriracha or other hot sauce 2 limes, quartered

1. In a soup pot, sauté leek and mushrooms in 1 tablespoon of the oil, stirring often. After 3 to 4 minutes, add ginger.

2. When ginger is fragrant, add mushrooms, chicken stock or water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, add the carrots, kale and tofu, if using, and cook for 10 minutes.

RAMEN NOODLE SOUP WITH SHIITAKES Serves 4 to 6

CATHERINE WALTHERS

This is a favorite soup, good anytime of the year, and comes together very quickly. The ramen, or whatever pasta you choose, keeps best when cooked on the side and drizzled with sesame oil to keep strands from sticking. Try this dish with meaty and flavorful MVM shiitake mushrooms.

3. Meanwhile, cook the noodles al dente in a large pot of salted water according to package directions. Drain, and shake strainer until all the steam has been released so noodles don’t continue to cook or get sticky. Drizzle with the other 1 tablespoon dark sesame (or other) oil to help flavor and keep them separate. Set aside.

4. After 10 minutes or when vegetables are cooked, season the soup with the soy sauce and sriracha to taste. Place the noodles into bowls and ladle the soup over the noodles. Place wedges of lime on a plate and pass around the table to squeeze into the soup. *Note: To make mushroom stock: Soak 1/4 to 1/2 cup of dried MVM shiitake or porcini mushrooms in 7 cups of boiled water to flavor. Strain liquid. You can finely chop some of the mushrooms to use in the soup, along with the fresh mushrooms.

SHIITAKE AND CHERRY TOMATO PASTA Serves 2 to 3

Another easy summer meal, the sauce comes together quickly as the pasta is cooking.

This was created with MVM mushrooms, which are very flavorful.

8-12 oz. pasta 3 cups fresh shiitake mushrooms, stems removed and sliced 2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil 2 garlic cloves, minced 2 tsp. fresh oregano, optional, if you have it growing 1 pint cherry tomatoes (about 2 cups), cut in half

1 cup chicken or mushroom stock or pasta water 1 Tbsp. butter 2 Tbsp. fresh herbs, parsley or basil, or both 2 Tbsp. Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, and more to taste

RECIPES • SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS

MUSHROOM AND VEGETABLE STIR FRY Serves 2 to 3

This classic stir fry becomes a healthy weeknight dinner treat with protein-packed and medicinal MVM mushrooms. You can also add sautéed tofu or tempeh, if desired, or substitute other seasonal veggies like napa cabbage or baby bok choy. My game plan: I make the sauce and rice first, then stir fry the vegetables.

Stir Fry Sauce 1 clove garlic, minced 1 Tbsp. fresh ginger, peeled and minced on a microplane

or ginger grater 3 Tbsp. soy sauce ½ cup water 2 tsp. cornstarch 1 Tbsp. mirin or rice cooking wine 2 Tbsp. packed brown sugar ½ tsp. gochujang, sriracha, or hot sauce 1 Tbsp. dark sesame oil

Vegetables for the Stir fry 1 Tbsp. sesame, coconut, or olive oil, or more if needed ½ head broccoli, about 4 cups, cut into small florets that will cook quickly 1 red or yellow pepper, very thinly sliced 1 cup snap peas, strings removed and tough ends clipped 1 carrot, peeled and cut into matchsticks 2 cups (or more) fresh shiitake mushrooms, stems removed, sliced

1. Heat your largest, thick skillet or wok on medium high heat.

Add the oil, broccoli, pepper, snap peas, carrot and mushrooms, and using tongs, constantly move the veggies - stir fry - until the vegetables are crisp tender, 5 to 7 minutes. If the heat seems too high, reduce. Mix in the sauce and serve over rice.

NOTE: To Make Coconut Jasmine Rice: Combine 1 cup Jasmine rice with 2 cups water in a medium saucepan with two pinches of salt. Bring to a boil, reduce to low, cover and cook 10 to 12 minutes. Let sit 5 minutes. Mix in a little butter and coconut oil to taste using a fork to break up any clumps of rice.

1. Put the minced garlic and grated ginger in a small bowl and set aside. In another small bowl, whisk together the soy sauce, water, cornstarch, mirin or rice cooking wine, brown sugar, and something spicy hot. Set aside. In a small or medium saucepan, heat the oil on low and add the garlic and ginger and sauté for less than a minute. Add the liquid ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and mix occasionally until thickened, 4 to 5 minutes. If it’s too thick, simply add a bit more water. Set aside while you stir fry vegetables.

1. Bring water to boil for the pasta.

2. Sauté the shiitake mushrooms in olive oil until cooked, 8 to 10 minutes. Season with salt. Add the garlic and sauté about a minute or until fragrant. Add the tomato halves and fresh oregano, if using and continue to sauté until tomatoes start to soften, about 5 minutes.

Before falling apart, stir in the chicken stock or pasta water and butter, and stir until butter is melted.

3. When the pasta is done, add to the sauce along with the parsley, basil, and cheese. Gently mix and serve hot. Garnish with additional cheese.

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Room For Change:

Create a kitchen free of clutter — with just the right tools to make great meals.

RANDI BAIRD

By Mollie Doyle Photos by Randi Baird and Tina Miller

F

or most, the kitchen is truly the heart of the house. It is used every day, more often than not many times a day. Sometimes all day. Cooking. Eating.

Homework. Ours has also been used for bike repairs, housing baby chicks, plant repotting, a stage for some really uncomfortable political arguments with friends, and science projects. Most of our approaches to kitchens are as messy, unique, and complicated as the lives of the people who live in them.

Kitchens should be personal for this reason. But unfortunately for most of us, our essential cooking style is concealed and obstructed by crowded drawers and countertops lined with unnecessary stuff.

It’s a fact: we Americans tend to overbuy and overstock our kitchens. But I have

observed that the less pots and knives and tools I use, the better my food gets. And I have noticed the best food I’ve eaten has also come from the simplest, most streamlined kitchens.

I had my ideas about what kind of kitchen tools are essential, but I wanted to talk to four chefs to hear about theirs so that I could find some consensus about the best and most sustainable choices for outfitting a kitchen. Gavin Smith, Cathy Walthers, Tina Miller, and Gail Arnold are some of the Island’s most experienced and amazing private chefs around. These four cooks have used every kitchen tool imaginable and have refined systems that work well for them and the excellent food they prepare.

The first rule that all four agree upon is the fundamental rule of all our Room

36 M A R T H A ’ S V I N E Y A R D / E A R L Y S U M M E R 2 0 2 2

For Change pieces: Less is more. In other words, you do not need to buy the $2,299.95 All Clad D-5 Stainless-Steel 24-piece cookware set. According to all four chefs, no-one does. Nor do you need to buy the $1,282 Shun Classic 9-Piece Knife Block Set. Cathy Walthers uses one chef ’s knife. Tina Miller uses an 8” Shun chef ’s knife, a 6” Shun chef ’s knife, a paring knife, a serrated paring knife, and a bread knife. Gavin Smith uses handmade carbon knives, including a chef ’s knife, a paring knife, an oyster knife, and fine knives for boning fish. Besides a bread knife, Gail Arnold uses four knives, including a 8” chef ’s knife, 6” chef ’s knife, a special Japanese 4” chef ’s knife, and a paring knife. “I love my 4” knife. I use it for everything, she says.

“I can filet fish with it and use it for fine vegetable work.”

FEATURE • CREATE A CLUTTER FREE KITCHEN

The second rule that pairs well with the first is: Buy only what you will use.

Gavin Smith has a seriously tiny home kitchen and has compiled an amazing traveling kitchen for work. “As a private chef, I essentially bring everything with me — from food to pots and pans. And I have found that I can execute a very sophisticated meal with minimal tools.”

His kit includes a knife roll, a Kuhn Rikon vegetable peeler, microplane for zesting, fish spatula, a Rig-Tig thermometer, colorful metal spoons for tasting (colorful so they don’t get confused with his client’s spoons), Band-Aids, an offset spatula, a few sheet pans, unbleached parchment paper, stainless-steel mixing bowls, a really heavy de Buyer carbon steel pan, a Lodge enamel cast-iron dutch oven or skillet (he loves the evaporation on these more than Le Creuset and Staub), a digital scale, a Vitamix immersion blender (he keeps a Vitamix 5200 at home), silicone pads, scissors, a mandolin (only sometimes), Tovolo rubber spatulas, something to hold food waste for compost, stainless-steel strainers, a wine opener, dish towels, and stainless-steel tongs. At home, he also has a juicer, stand mixer, and two grills: a Green Egg and a gas grill. Because his home kitchen is so tiny, he has really learned the art of using less to make anything.

Cathy Walthers, Tina Miller, and Gail Arnold agree with Gavin Smith. And

RANDI BAIRD

Cathy Walthers, who spends six to seven hours in a kitchen most days says, “Having the right tools in the kitchen is the same as having the right tools when you are doing carpentry.” they too have their own lists for what is essential. Cathy, who spends six to seven hours in a kitchen most days says, “Having the right tools in the kitchen is the same as having the right tools when you are doing carpentry. I don’t buy gadgets for things I can do myself. Nor do I buy small appliances unless I am going to use them at least once or twice a week. I bought an ice cream maker and used it once.” How many of us can say that about an ice cream

TINA MILLER

maker? I sure can. “But things like a Soda Stream are fantastic because they make something and produce less waste.” Cathy also researches her tools because good products last. She has had a Kuhn Rikon garlic press for 20 years. “I look for things that make my job easier.” She too uses heavy sheet pans and metal mixing bowls because they are effective and easy to wash.

And loves her salad spinner. “I like the ones with the pull cords because they get more water out.” As someone who regularly teaches knife skills, she says, “I tell everyone to buy their knives in person. Not on the internet. You need to hold it in your hand. See how it feels. It is the first part of defining your food.”

What appliances should populate our counters? Tina Miller chuckles, “It’s unbelievable how crowded some counters are.

Most appliances just sit there and collect dust. And so many kitchens are filled with junk — dozens of plastic cooking tools, crappy aluminum pans.”

She loves her new Breville toaster oven, which she uses instead of her oven to roast chicken. “It is so efficient. It takes five minutes to preheat and uses so much less energy than an entire oven.” Her other favorite appliances are an electric teapot and a Cuisinart that her son uses to make his “fake parmesan.” In her drawers and cupboards are stainless-steel tongs, wooden spoons, a slotted spatula, a colander,

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CREATE A CLUTTER FREE KITCHEN • FEATURE

stainless strainers, French torchon kitchen towels, two All Clad sauce pots, a pasta pot, a Le Creuset dutch oven, and a BK black steel carbon skillet that her cousin Erika Miller gave her. “The carbon steel pan is a game changer.” Tina says. And, most chefs do agree these days that carbon is the best for super hot, even heat. She confesses that her “only bad habit is paper towels. I use too many.”

Gail laughs and agrees with Tina that she too uses too many paper towels. “It’s such a bad habit.” She asks more about my conversions with the other chefs and the key tools that Gavin, Cathy, and Tina must have. She agrees and uses many of their same choices – from the Vitamix to a scale to wooden spoons and tongs to sheet pans. “I love the Dutch ovens. They are so versatile and they can move from the stove to the oven to the table.” She loves that efficiency and the efficiency of her kitchen, “Everything I use is within an arm’s reach and I never have to search for anything. I’m not sure Livingston [her husband] would say the same.” She laughs.

Gail generally uses one big heavy pan, her

TINA MILLER

More Tips From Our Top Chefs • Electric tea kettles are far more energy efficient than stove top versions. The National Energy Lab estimates that an electric tea pot is 80% more efficient than using a gas stove. Gail says, “I never use a stove to boil water.

If I need to add boiling water to a soup or something, I use our electric tea kettle.”

• Composting your food waste makes an enormous difference.

According to Energy Shrink, the average household produces 2 tons of municipal solid waste per year.

“Of this, 69.5%, or 2,880 lbs. (1300 kg) is compostable.”

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• Using non-toxic pans reduces exposure to harmful chemicals for everyone – from the people manufacturing them to the people using them.

• Use cloth kitchen towels in place of paper towels as much as possible.

But, as Gavin said, “Sometimes paper ones are just necessary.” In that case, look for 100% recycled.

• Use small appliances more than big ones. Per Tina’s point, a toaster oven can roast a chicken as well as an oven and uses far less energy.

• Use coffee equipment that does not create waste. In other words, please ditch the pod machine.

FEATURE • CREATE A CLUTTER FREE KITCHEN

Dutch oven, a soup pot, and a few sauce pans. “People have given me a few copper pots, which are great for braising. And I have Trudy’s [Taylor] big chowder pot that I use when I’m making a brisket or chowder for 24 people. ” The last rule for building a sustainable kitchen is: Buy better. I love that Gavin and Cathy do so much research and really think about their tools. I love that Tina thinks about appliances that will be efficient and effective. And Gail doesn’t always buy new, instead heading to yard sales, Chicken Alley, and the Dumptique for kitchen supplies. Thanks to this, she says, “I have a huge collection of Pyrex, which is great for food that needs to be dropped off or stored.”

After talking to everyone, I reflect on the evolution of my own kitchen. I, like Gail, thrive on the efficiency of the space, which has become even more honed since what I’ll call Covid cooking, which often means cooking three meals a day and for many people. And I, too, have a system down to using just a couple of knives, a Dutch oven, cast-iron pan, sauce pot, soup

• Zap the microwave. In 2018, the University of Manchester in England conducted a study on microwaves and carbon emissions. Their conclusion: “Microwaves could be as bad for the environment as millions of cars.” It turns out that “Microwaves emit 7.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year in the EU. This is equivalent to the annual emissions of 6.8 million cars.”

Part of the issue with microwaves is that people throw theirs out before they need to, which adds to our human waste problem. So not only do they use a tremendous amount of energy, but they also increase our trash problem, which again, points to the idea of buying better and holding on to what you have longer.

pot, and a few key tools. The only thing we really have too many of these days are cutting boards that my husband made, many years ago. But I can’t throw them out or give them away. They are too beautiful.

Gail was recently gifted what she calls a

“display cutting board” from her nephew Isaac Taylor. “It’s from an old Sycamore in their yard,” she told me. We both sighed.

Maybe because having a piece of nature and keeping nature in mind for our kitchens just feels so right.

[These chefs] do so much research and really think about their tools, about appliances that will be efficient and effective, [and don’t] always buy new, instead heading to yard sales, Chicken Alley, and the Dumptique for kitchen supplies.

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ACCOUNTING FOR CARBON • FEATURE

Continued from page 29

on William F. Buckley’s TV show, “Firing Line,” in 1997, he had been invited there to argue against the premise that “the environmentalists have gone too far too fast,” and had to contend with the misstatements of fact and endlessly recycled “gotcha” questions that have come to characterize climate denial.

“Do you give up your airplane ticket tonight, and walk home?” asked Utah Senator Larry Craig.

“We have to live in the context of our time, we all have to do that,” Woodwell replied. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t change the context.

We have to change the context.”

Moving Forward

International climate negotiations have been proceeding at a somewhat steadier rate than domestic ones, and the Woodwell Center has been involved in those since the beginning.

can say with certainty getting stronger.”

Heather Goldstone, Woodwell’s chief communications officer and former host of WGBH’s Living Lab Radio, told me that attention on the Center’s research has picked back up in a big way, to the appreciation of those who work there.

Although, she admits, the interest “would have been nice ten years ago.”

Although Woodwell and Houghton are both retired, the Center continues its tradition of science and advocacy. Its staff is involved in the nitty-gritty research and in scientific meetings at the highest levels, as authors of IPCC reports, and leaders of long running international research projects. Its leadership continues to hammer away at influencing policy, and increasingly, business.

Natali, the Arctic ecologist, said, “When you say ‘we want to get this into policy,’ unless you’re actually talking with policymakers, it’s not going to happen.’”

At times, she’s found herself in the

Woodwell’s proposal has been for decades a vast reforestation and restoration of natural ecosystems, what have now come to be known as natural climate solutions.

In the 1970s, George Woodwell wrote reports for the United Nations Environment Program, and in 1987 helped organize key workshops in Austria and Italy, where scientists translated their consensus on climate change into temperature and emissions targets in the format that we often see today.

And he was by no means alone.

Kilaparti Ramakrishna, who joined the Center in 1987, helped to draft the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and has been deeply involved in international negotiations ever since.

Houghton, who has been a lead or contributing author on several IPCC reports, said: “You can see the evolution of what we

same boat as Woodwell and Houghton did decades earlier, this time on the subject of permafrost. On a trip to D.C. just a few years ago, “I remember talking to Arctic policy experts, and that they weren't thinking about permafrost, I really was kind of surprised,” she said.

Like with many things, George Woodwell had been ringing the bell on permafrost for a while. “George is an inspiration,” said Natali. “He was one of the early people talking about this.”

Goldstone summarized George Woodwell’s approach this way: “Science is how we understand real world problems.

And not in a way that's detached from daily life, he really sees it as being integral.

This is about people. It’s about poverty,

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it’s about justice, just as much as it’s about trees, and forests, and ecosystems. And so in that regard, it needs to be really integrated into societal decision making, not something that’s separate.”

Reflecting on the progress or lack thereof during his lifetime, Woodwell says, “It’s been consistently not enough.

Settling on how much we can allow the Earth to warm is a total loser, because warming the Earth in any degree dumps more carbon into the atmosphere.

You’ve got to turn it around and cool the Earth now.”

Woodwell’s proposal has been for decades a vast reforestation and restoration of natural ecosystems, what have now come to be known as natural climate solutions. “The biggest, most effective way of getting carbon out of the atmosphere is photosynthesis,” he maintains.

“It comes free. It works. And it works in all sorts of circumstances.”

Houghton told me, “the ecologist in me just says, ‘which has the longer track record? Are we going to let nature work for us, or are we going to replace nature?’ I think there are some people who think we should be able to do better than nature, and maybe we can do better than nature, but I just think you have to be careful.”

The Center has expanded its quest to understand the carbon budget and recommend climate solutions via Earth’s forests, soils, and wetlands. It continues the uphill climb of translating climate risk into policy action, and much of its recent focus has been on making science concrete and available for communities on the front lines of climate change.

From their modest base in Woods Hole, researchers at Woodwell show us, with increasingly fine resolution, what’s happening to the planet. Their suggestions are firm. The question left up to the rest of us is: Will that be enough?

What You Can Do Check out the visuals on the Woodwell site: woodwellclimate.org/stories/; read this story about the trip to Brazil: woodwellclimate.org/chasing-fire/

UPFRONT • BUY LESS/BUY BETTER

Continued from page 10

“I felt like, when I was studying fashion design, I had a slight hesitation to go into an industry that was very consumer based,” says Brown. “Fast fashion, throwaway culture was on the rise when I was in college. My mom always had this non-wasteful attitude. It felt like fashion was wasteful. When I’m using ties, I’m recycling, and when I use scrap material I’m not adding to the production cycle.

Brown has also discovered that, for her, a focus on repurposing has proved to be the mother of invention. “It forces a little bit of creativity,” she says. “You have to come up with new ideas that make you feel more morally responsible.”

Rooey Knots headbands and other designs by Gareth Brown can be found at Kin, 12 North Water Street, Edgartown or purchased through the designer's website.

Helayne Cohen's Treasure Bowls and Wishing Stones For many years Helayne Cohen has been working with ceramics, creating attractive and functional dishes, vases, and more under the brand Birdsong Ceramics. A few years back, she started an offshoot business designing colorful beaded barrettes. Now Cohen has combined both talents with a new line of hand-sculpted keepsake bowls and wishing stones.

them and repurpose them. I love beading and this combines my love for beads and clay and also allows me to reuse something that would otherwise get overlooked.”

Helayne Cohen’s Treasure Bowls and Wishing Stones can be found exclusively at the Stefanie Wolf Design Store, 37 Circuit Ave, Oak Bluffs. Cohen sells her beaded barrettes and other ceramic items at the Vineyard Artisans Festivals.

Original Cyn In admiring Cynthia McGrath's latest collection of jewelry, one would never guess the source of the colorful agate-like material she uses to craft necklaces and rings. What appear to be intricately patterned gemstones are actually carved and polished pieces of the built-up residue left behind in car painting facilities — a byproduct called Fordite.

As McGrath writes in her Etsy shop description, “During the mid 1900s, cars were painted in paint booths with sprayers. Over time, overspray would build up on the walls and drains in these facilities. After a while, this overspray would need to be cut and removed.

There can be thousands of layers of paint that make up a single Fordite stone.”

After completing a very involved process of cutting and shaping the raw material, McGrath mounts the Fordite “stones” in silver to variously serve as pendants and rings.

McGrath also uses another recently popularized recycled material in her designs. As the name implies, Surfite is a byproduct of surfboard production. In a fashion similar to the Fordite gathering process, Surfite is made from the resin waste left over during the surfboard glassing process.

Each Fordite or Surfite piece is unique, featuring a variety of colorful swirls, striations, and bullseyes. Not only is the jewelry attractive, the pendants and rings also make for great conversation starters.

McGrath has been recycling and repurposing a variety of materials for years. On her website she writes, “I love using found objects, organics, and reclaimed materials.” These can include natural elements like sea glass and sharks’ teeth — foraged during her frequent beach walks, and unlikely refuse items like old computer boards, discarded license plates, and vinyl records. For McGrath, other people's trash is her treasure.

Cynthia McGrath’s Original Cyn designs can be purchased through Etsy at OriginalCynMV.

Cohen works for designer Stefanie Wolf, making jewelry and managing quality control of the imported beads that Wolf uses in her designs. Rather than discard the imperfect beads that are not up to Wolf ’s standards, Cohen and Wolf collaborated on a project, in which the ceramicist melts beads onto pottery pieces to add a splash of color to tiny Treasure Bowls and oyster-shaped “sensory objects”.

The bowls, sculpted in either a round or a heart shape, are imprinted with the outline of the Vineyard. The melted Czech glass beads add an eye-popping touch of blue or green to the design. They can be used to stash jewelry, wrapped candies, beach pebbles, bits of sea glass, or other tiny treasures. The ceramic wishing stones, crafted from a mold made from an actual oyster shell, feature a splash of color from the melted beads. And they make perfect stress relievers.

“In my role managing quality control, I find the beads that can't be used in the jewelry for one reason or another,” says Cohen. “I collect

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CRUISING WITH CURRIER

Cruising with Currier

FEATURING JED KATCH AND HIS 2016 NISSAN LEAF

F

or this month’s ‘Cruising with Currier,’ I went for a ride with Jed Katch of Chilmark. Katch came to the Island with his wife, Jane, about eight years ago and was hired by the Chilmark School as an enrichment teacher where he could work with kids who needed extra help over and above what was being taught in school, especially in math, the sciences, or languages. He picked up German when he lived in Germany teaching at a U.S. Army Base and he picked up Spanish by talking to kids on the streets of Chicago. “Kids wanted extra help in various subjects and I was glad I could provide it,” Katch said.

Katch is involved with various environmental causes both on the Island and off. Locally he’s been involved with The Island Climate Action Network (ICAN) and the Chilmark Energy Committee. He’s also involved with Biodiversity for a Livable Climate

Story by Geoff Currier Photos by Jeremy Driesen

(bio4climate.org) located in Cambridge and the D.C. area. He’s the only representative on the Island and he credits the group with providing him with his recent education on climate issues.

“I see this as a pivotal moment for EV manufacturers like Subaru, GM, and Honda who, along with many other brands, plan to switch over to electric in the near future,” Jed Katch says.

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Katch drives a Nissan Leaf, which he bought new in 2016 and he is very happy with the car. “It just makes so much sense,” he said, “both for the environment and economically. I was an early adapter to electric cars back in 2016 so there weren’t that many other cars around to compare mine to.” Katch’s 2016 Leaf gets about 110 miles per charge, which is fine on the Island, but for driving off-Island he has a non-electric 2021 Honda CR-V. But as EVs become more efficient, charges of well over 200 miles are not uncommon. Charging stations are becoming even more widespread throughout the country. Tesla plans to open up their charging stations to non-Teslas as well. And so Katch can see himself switching over to a new EV sometime soon, a car he can use both on and off-Island. “Eventually I don’t want to drive a fuel burning car at all,” he said.

When I asked Katch if the cost of electricity ever outweighed the savings of driving an electric vehicle, he told me

CRUISING WITH CURRIER

that they have solar panels at their home so they’re not paying a lot for electricity at all. “In fact, we usually make more electricity than we use,” he said. “I see this as a pivotal moment for EV manufacturers like Subaru, GM, and Honda who, along with many other brands, plan to switch over to electric in the near future.”

When I asked Katch if he wanted to go for a “Cruise,” he jumped at the chance and said that a typical cruise for him on the Island might be the several mile jaunt he takes most every day from his home off Tea Lane in Chilmark to Lucy Vincent Beach, where he takes his white lab, also named Lucy, for a run. And that’s exactly what we did on a brisk and overcast afternoon in April where there couldn’t have been more than a half-dozen people and a couple of other dogs on the beach.

We went for an invigorating walk, which gave Katch a chance to expound, not only on his thoughts about EVs but on his thoughts on global warming and what might be done about it.

Katch is a huge proponent of electric vehicles but while walking together on the beach we talked about how they are just a part of the big picture.

“We’ve been treating the Earth as if it were something to take from, and not something to work with,” Katch said. “We have to understand how interconnected we are with nature.”

Katch points out that there are myriad ways we can work with nature and looks to the work of Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, for some innovative examples.

In her book, “Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest,” Simard writes that the trees in a forest are often linked to each other via an older tree she calls a “Mother Tree” that uses a special kind of fungus — called a mycorrhizal fungus — to reach out and communicate with other trees. What’s more, she writes, we can use this fungus to identify the Mother Trees so we’ll know not to destroy them, which can help to perpetuate the health of the forest.

This is something we’ve known for centuries, Katch says, “It was common knowledge to Indigenous people in

North America.” The point of talking about such things as Mother Trees is to encourage people to seek out new and alternative ways to combat global warming, no matter how on the fringe the ideas may, at first, seem to be.

“A friend of mine once told me how impressed he was that so many students were engaged in the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties,” Katch says, “and he regretted that we don’t

have a cause like that going on now, and I said ‘We certainly do’. Our younger generation realizes we’ve got to do something about the climate because our lives literally depend on it,” Katch says. “And there’s a willingness to do whatever it takes to address the problem.”

“If that means driving electric vehicles … or communicating with Mother Trees, any and all solutions are on the table. And that,” Katch says, “gives me hope.”

“Our younger generation realizes we’ve got to do something about the climate because our lives literally depend on it,” Katch says.

“And there’s a willingness to do whatever it takes to address the problem.”

Katch and Currier (and dog Lucy) caught at Lucy Vincent Beach in early spring after a cruise in Katch's Nissan Leaf.

PLANTING FOR POLLINATORS • GARDEN

Making Room for the Birds and the Bees How to plant for the pollinators.

Story by Angela Luckey Photos by Susan Safford

Pitch Pine

Winterberry

Witch Hazel

hile the Island is fortunate to have an abundance of conservation land, these designated areas are not enough to support the unique flora and fauna that contribute to the charm and vitality of Martha’s Vineyard. It took me nearly a decade of gardening to come to the realization that my garden could be so much more than simply a space of beauty, finally discovering its potential as a foundational piece to the backyard ecosystem. We can each play a part in connecting ecologically significant tracts of land to overcome fragmentation and provide vital habitat.

If you create suitable habitat that fits the surrounding natural landscape, you will be amazed by the abundance and richness of plants and animals that ap-

preciate the hospitality and become your neighbors. In return, they will provide essential services that sustain life, such as pollination, clean air and water, soil formation, climate resilience, and social enrichment.

Here are a few tips to help you along the way in promoting biodiversity. Focus your efforts on “The Three Needs”: diversity of native plants, water, and cover.

productive genus, and it is easy to take oaks for granted. In addition to oaks, many other native trees help increase biodiversity in your backyard.

W

Diversity of Native Plants

Not all plants are equal in their utility within an ecosystem. Plant more oaks and other native tree species. Oaks are a keystone of Vineyard ecosystems, supporting more than 500 caterpillar species, which in turn are integral to the diet of nestling birds. We are so fortunate to be surrounded by this highly

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TOP NATIVE TREE SPECIES Oaks (Quercus) – white oak, black oak, post oak, scrub oak, dwarf chinquapin oak Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) Birch (Betula) Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana) Red Maple (Acer rubrum) Pitch Pine (Pinus rigida) American Holly (Ilex opaca)

Appreciate the natural understory. Having a productive canopy is not enough. The shrub layer is particularly important for water infiltration and providing the physical structure necessary

GARDEN • PLANTING FOR POLLINATORS

for the completion of many life cycles.

To wildlife, brushcutting the understory is analogous to stripping away all the amenities of your home. Try planting some of these native shrubs to provide the requisite resources to bolster diversity.

TOP NATIVE SHRUB SPECIES Blueberry (Vaccinium) Beach Plum (Prunus maritima) Hazelnut (Corylus) Winterberry and Inkberry (Ilex verticillata and Ilex glabra) Arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum) Spicebush (Lindera benzoin) Chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa) Serviceberry/Shad (Amelanchier) Willow (Salix) Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana)

Reduce lawn space where you are not actively using it. We’re urged to create manicured lawns, watering them daily, mowing them weekly, and regularly fertilizing to maintain a monoculture of turf grass. What a chore it is working against nature! Instead, entertain the idea of directing your energy and resources toward creating dynamic gardens and supporting the Island’s local flora and fauna. Nature will do much of the work for you for the nominal price of not destroying habitat.

Let areas go unmown and don’t fret the bare spots. Bare spots are perfect nesting sites for solitary ground nesting bees that are primary pollinators.

Create pocket meadows or plant gardens with native shrubs and perennials that cover an extended bloom period from spring through fall.

TOP PERENNIALS Bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi) Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) Pearly Everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea) Joe-pye Weed (Eutrochium dubium) Tall White Aster (Doellingeria umbellata) Goldenrods (Solidago/Euthamia) Hyssop-leaved Thoroughwort (Eupatorium hyssopifolium) White Wood Aster (Eurybia divaricata) Native Grasses: Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum); Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), Wavy Hair Grass (Deschampsia flexuosa)

Add a pond, but keep the fish separate. Fish are consumers of other aquatic species. Constructing a pond without fish will promote greater diversity and serve as a refuge for amphibians and beneficial insects. The pond suggestion comes with a caveat. Not all properties are suitable for this kind of water feature. Creating a pond in a highly fragmented area could be catastrophic for animals drawn to the water.

Cover

Increased habitat loss and fragmentation have reduced available cover for birds, bats, reptiles, and amphibians.

Retain dead trees on your property.

This is an easy way to provide nesting cavities for birds. If that dead tree poses a risk, consider just removing the top limbs and leave some of the trunk standing. If it must come down, consider laying it on the forest floor. Doing Water is a key attribute of the backyard so will benefit the local ecology and habitat. recycle nutrients to support future Incorporate a year-round water feature. plant communities.

You will be amazed by what creatures Construct brush piles or wood piles. are attracted to a regularly replenished Brush piles provide shelter from inclemwater dish, particularly in the winter. ent weather and potential predators.

Going the extra step of installing a Manmade structures. Manufacture heated birdbath may even lead to some cover sources by building and mounting unique visitors. Add features that create nest boxes and bat houses, or establish movement in the water to attract more an overwintering site for snakes with a birds and other wildlife. Place a birdbath hibernaculum. Snakes are a wonderful in the vicinity of shrub cover to offer an asset in natural pest control. It is imescape from predators, but not so close portant, though, to know the appropriate that an outdoor cat can utilize that cover locations and predator protections for for hunting purposes. Be sure to regularly these constructions, otherwise you may refresh your birdbath and practice proper inadvertently create an ecological trap. hygiene to protect visiting fauna and mitigate mosquito breeding.

Angela Luckey is a biologist working for BiodiversityWorks on Martha’s Vineyard.

Water

We can each play a part in connecting ecologically significant tracts of land to overcome fragmentation and provide vital habitat.

Interested in applying these actions but still not entirely sure where to start?

You can sign up for a free consultation with the Natural Neighbors program and receive customized management suggestions tailored to your property. Natural Neighbors works with property owners to develop a stewardship plan that is compatible with their time and resources to help wildlife and plants move, mate, pollinate, and thrive. To learn more, email angelal@ biodiversityworksmv.org

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‘KEEP-THIS’ SIMPLE, SMART, SUSTAINABLE HANDBOOK

The ‘KEEP-THIS’ Simple, Smart, Sustainable Handbook Recycle, compost, volunteer, write your rep, buy secondhand.

RULES: Empty, clean, wash; no caps or lids • Metal cans • Plastic containers (bottles, jars, jugs, and tubs) • Glass containers (bottles and jars; NO ceramics OR window panes) • Paper and paperboard, corrugated cardboard (empty and flatten, remove packing tape) Includes office paper, junk mail, newspapers, magazines, paperboard boxes; NO shredded paper, pizza boxes, waxed boxes, or books with bindings)

Bruno’s and ABC’s Pick-up Recycling Rules • Single bin, don’t need to separate materials West Tisbury (local drop off) Recycling Shed (a.k.a. the 'Dumptique' ): • Clothing, clean and usable • Shoes and boots • Books • Small household Items — NO furniture or appliances • NO childrens’ toys or clothes Not sure?

If you’re unsure about whether something is or is not recyclable, you can ask an attendant. If there isn’t anyone to ask, it’s better to throw it out. If recycling bins are contaminated with too many nonrecyclable materials, the entire bin will be thrown out.

WHAT YOU CAN’T RECYCLE

COMPOSTING

RECYCLING

All 6 towns have the same rules for what can and can’t be recycled.

WHAT YOU CAN RECYCLE

• Recyclables in a garbage bag • Garbage • Plastic bags or plastic wrap • Food or liquid • Styrofoam items or packaging materials • Clothing or linens • Tanglers (hoses, wires, chains, electronics)

Compost buckets available for free at IGI’s offices in West Tisbury or at town transfer stations. To request a bucket, email office@igimv.org or call 508-687-9062.

Drop-off locations (currently free or for small fee) • Transfer stations in all towns except Aquinnah • Chappy ferry dock • IGI’s farm • Bonus! Bring eggshells and coffee grounds only to North Tabor Farm Aquinnah, Chilmark, Edgartown, and Wise Owl Farm West Tisbury The best way to reduce food waste is Dual sorting system: to shop and cook mindfully, repurpose • Cardboard and paper go together foods that are not so fresh (smoothies!

• Plastic containers, tin cans, aluminum soup!), and reorganize your fridge so cans and glass go together you are more aware of perishable items.

Oak Bluffs and Tisbury (local drop off): ACCEPTED ITEMS Dual sorting system: • All meat and fish (including bones, • Cardboard, newspaper and paper go together lobster shells, and egg shells) • Everything else single stream • All dairy Oak Bluffs Bruno’s Drop-off • Grains, nuts, seeds, flour Dual sorting system products • Separate cardboard • Fruits and vegetables • Everything else single stream • Tea bags (staples removed)

TRANSFER STATION RULES

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• Coffee grounds and coffee filters • All flowers • Paper napkins and paper towels (unless they were used with toxic products that won’t break down under high heat)

UNACCEPTABLE ITEMS • Large amounts of oyster, clam, littleneck, mussel shells — Contact the M.V. Shellfish Group: mvshellfishgroup.org) • Fat/oil/grease (small amounts from leftover food is fine) • Plastic or trash of any kind

BATTERIES AND ELECTRONICS Martha’s Vineyard Refuse District offers four drop-off locations in Edgartown, West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah with a special container at each of these facilities to leave rechargeable batteries. Martha’s Vineyard Refuse District does not offer recycling services for non-rechargeable alkaline and zinc carbon batteries. But they do not contain hazardous material and can be disposed of in trash.

SEED LIBRARY MV Community Seed Library: A collaborative project of the West Tisbury Library, Island Grown Schools, Polly Hill Arboretum, Whippoorwill Farm, and local home gardeners, the Seed Library brings the knowledge of how to save seeds back to our Island community while creating a central space where seeds can be freely shared.

For more info on events, follow the @mvseedlibrary Facebook page.

To learn more about recycling, sustainability best practices, and opportunities, consult our full handbook online.

FIELD NOTE

FIELDNote To: Bluedot Living From: Adam Moore, Executive Director, Sheriff ’s Meadow Foundation Subject: Planting an American Chestnut Germplasm Conservation Orchard

“I

t’s like planting KitKats,” said Kendra Collins of the American Chestnut Foundation, speaking at the March 22, 2022 annual conference of the New England Society of American Foresters, in South Portland, Maine.

American chestnuts are delectable. Ms. Collins was describing the care that must be taken to protect the planted nuts from every hungry rabbit, deer, and squirrel.

I had been warned. On my drive back to the Island from this conference, I puzzled over how best to protect the nuts from the countless cottontail rabbits that scurry over the plains of Quansoo. I arrived home to find, in my refrigerator, what I had spent months awaiting: a box of chestnuts.

These were not just any chestnuts, though. They were American chestnuts, Castanaea dentata, and they had been sent to me by the American Chestnut Foundation. The American Chestnut Foundation sent them to Sheriff ’s Meadow Foundation because Sheriff ’s Meadow has committed to establishing a “germplasm conservation orchard” at Quansoo Farm.

Once the most important timber tree of eastern North America, the American chestnut now rarely grows taller than a shrub. Throughout its range, the American chestnut suffers from the chestnut blight. A fungal pathogen, the chestnut blight lives in the soil, and causes cankers on the stems of American chestnuts. These cankers spread around the stem, and ultimately girdle the tree, killing it. Once killed, an American chestnut will resprout from the stump, but the tree finds itself locked into a cycle of sprouting and dying, sprouting and dying.

However, there are a few mature American chestnuts that do appear to display a natural resistance to the blight.

These trees have been mapped and identified by the American Chestnut Foundation. Foundation volunteers go out in the fall to collect the nuts from these resistant trees. The Foundation also seeks landowners with a long-term outlook and an ability to care for land to create and

tend an orchard of these naturally blightresistant trees, known as a germplasm conservation orchard. Knowing that Sheriff ’s Meadow Foundation could meet these criteria, and knowing that Quansoo had the acidic soil and open sun that chestnuts need, I signed us up.

In the box were three bags containing a dozen nuts each. Each bag was labeled to indicate the name and location of the mother tree.

My nuts came from trees in Fall River, Huck Moore Canton, and helps with the Northborough. chestnuts.

Instructions provided to me recommended that the trees be planted at 10foot spacing, and that rows from different trees be separated by a gap of 20 feet.

With a compass, stake, and a tape measure, I set forth on a beautiful Saturday morning to lay out the orchard. I laid out the orchard with two rows of six trees for each group of trees, with a 20-foot gap between the groups of trees. With a mallet, I tapped a stake into the ground at each planting location.

Then came the hard work of breaking the sod and preparing for planting.

For this, I enlisted the help of my children, Isabel, Ingrid, and Huck. Around each stake, we delineated a circle three feet in diameter. Within this circle, we used a hoe and a shovel and a pick-mattock to remove the sod and prepare a hole.

Next, I needed to create a shelter to protect the delectable nut from rabbits. Liz Loucks and Noah Froh from the Sheriff ’s Meadow Foundation staff joined in to help

create the shelters. For this task, we cut a section of chicken wire fencing, rolled it into a cylinder, and stapled this cylinder to a hardwood stake. We buried the bottom foot of this shelter in the planting hole, and then filled in the rest of the hole with earth, with some potting soil in the center.

With the shelter in place, it was time to plant the nuts. To begin, I reached into the Fall River bag, and plucked out a beautiful brown chestnut. The root had already begun to grow.

I planted the nut about an inch deep, covered the top with soil, and watered it with a watering can. Liz, Noah, and Huck helped to plant all the trees. When finished, we had planted 34 trees total, as the bags contained 12 nuts from Fall River, 12 from Canton, and 10 from Northborough.

Now, I wait. I check each day, waiting to see these young trees emerge from the soil. If I have done the planting correctly, I hope that, by Arbor Day, we will have successfully established the first American Chestnut Germplasm Conservation Orchard on Martha’s Vineyard.

See more Field Notes — From IGI, and from the crew at Felix Neck — at this link: bit.ly/MV-Field-Notes

What You Can Do:

Find out more about the American Chestnut Foundation: acf.org/

Donate to the Sheriff ’s Meadow Foundation: sheriffsmeadow.org/support-us/donate-online/

marthasvineyard.

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LOCAL HEROES

Julie Pringle

Story By Sam Moore Photos Courtesy Julie Pringle

biodiversity, because that’s the ultimate measure of how healthy that ecosystem is.”

Thanks to a grant from the Martha’s Vineyard Community Foundation, Pringle and her colleagues are now able to sample more widely in the ponds’ web of life. A 30-foot beach seine nets fish along the shoreline, and two smaller, finely meshed nets can catch phytoplankton and zooplankton. “It’s a really exciting way to connect how water quality is impacting the species that actually live in the pond,” Pringle said.

In her days on the water, one sight in particular has emerged as Pringle’s favorite. “I love it when I see a healthy eelgrass meadow,” she said. “Just because it’s so beautiful. And you always see other species there.”

Pringle dreams of an Island where these aquatic meadows abound. “It’s such an important species because it’s a habitat for fish, shellfish, and all sorts of species that are really economically important to the Vineyard,” she said. Eelgrass is also “blue carbon” meaning it absorbs CO₂ and sequesters it in sediment.

The species is sensitive to both excess nutrients and warming temperatures, conditions that are increasingly common in the great ponds.

Pringle’s job is to understand how and why these changes are occurring.

A big piece of the picture is nitrogen, especially from septic runoff. “If the Island her master’s in biological oceanography from community were able to work together to lower the University of Connecticut Avery Point. the amount of nitrogen in the watershed for all “I was always just drawn to the water. I did ponds, that would be huge,” Pringle said. a lot of sailing. I was at Sail MV. I worked for In the meantime, she goes on sampling the Harbormaster Department in Vineyard — with fluorometers, nets, microscopes, and Haven growing up,” Pringle said. “There was handheld water quality meters. She spends her one school vacation where I went home, I went summers on the water and her winters making for a walk on the beach and spreadsheets and graphs for each pond’s annual I realized that this is what I ecosystem monitoring report. She’s helped want to do. I want to have by her colleague, David Bouck, and a cast of a career where I can be summer staff and interns. outside and not limited to “The Island really has such an incredible doing lab work every single day.” scientific community, and that’s partially why Pringle joined the Great Pond Foundation I’ve stayed here,” Pringle said. The conservation on Earth Day, 2019, soon ethic of the community is after completing her also a factor. “The whole As a little Island kid, master’s thesis. “When Island is supportive of the always enjoying I started, we were only work and really wants to the water. looking at water quality see not just our coastal parameters,” Pringle said. ponds, but all our ecosys“Those are the chemical tems thrive.” and physical qualities of the water itself. We Want to know more weren't looking at any about nitrogen in our of the biological aspects ponds? See our story “What’s of ecosystem health. I So Bad About Nitrogen?” was really interested in bit.ly/so-bad-nitrogen

Scientific Program Director at the Great Pond Foundation

O

n a typical day, Julie Pringle starts collecting water samples at sunrise. From the Edgartown Great Pond and Crackatuxet Cove, to the great ponds of Tisbury and Chilmark, she gathers data from May through October — top to bottom, shore to shore, and week to HERO week. “Dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity, turbidity, lots of different parameters that we can then use to assess the health of the pond,” Pringle said.

Pringle, 30, is the Scientific Program Director at the Great Pond Foundation, where she runs the ecosystem monitoring program. Her mission is to connect indicators of water quality to the wellbeing of the creatures and people that depend on the Edgartown Great Pond, and other Island ponds.

An Islander who attended the Tisbury School and the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, Pringle studied biology at Tufts University, worked for a few years at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and then got

LOCAL

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