Mon, Aug 4, MORNING HIKE – BIRDING AND THE BREACH! The Trustees of Reservations, 8:30 a.m. Meet at the entrance to Norton Point Beach – Edgartown Walk begins at the left fork in Katama, at the entrance to Norton Point Beach. The walk will be oversand to the breach and back, making a loop of approximately 3 miles total. Walk is over the sand, and is considered strenuous. For active adults only, please. Free to all, (508) 627-3599.

Would you like to be more involved in the CSA community? Join our team of volunteers! Here's how you can help:

Harvesting U-pick
Help fellow CSA members who are physically unable to harvest their share of u-pick crops. Pick a few extra shares when gathering your own buckets of beans, cherry tomatoes, etc. U-pick harvest volunteers may come to the farm any time after 8:00 am on pickup days to harvest before it gets hot. Contact Deanna Ahearn at 693-8142.

Farm Stand
Help keep pickup days running smoothly and release paid farm crew for field work by assisting Rusty in the farm stand. Friendly volunteers are needed for shifts (10:00-12:30; 12:30-3:00; 3:00-5:30) from now until mid-September to answer questions, direct members to u-pick crops and help re-supply the bins (some strength required). We'll provide orientation and FAQs. Contact Joy Ganapol.

August Project Day: Potato Patch
Join us on Saturday, August 9th to bring in the potato harvest. Meet at the farm stand by 8:30 am to carpool to the potato patch. Wear heavy shoes/boots (no flipflops, please) and bring gloves and a hat. The tractor will do the hard work. Contact Deanna Ahearn at 693-8142.

As a Selectman you are responsible for administering the essential functions of the municipality, such as selecting appointed officials, hiring staff, and paying bills. Depending on which community you serve, you may also have special permit issuance authority. The members of your community look to your board to protect its people, property, and tax dollars. Improving the way your community manages its floodplains can help meet all these goals.

Creating a Multi-Objective Management Plan
Multi-objective management interweaves No Adverse Impact (NAI) principles into all aspects of community planning—simultaneously addressing not only land use but also efforts to protect community economic, cultural, ecological, historic, fiscal, and aesthetic resources. Multi-objective management gathers interested parties, such as residents, business leaders, and local officials, to decide how to manage land in a community, integrating as many interests as possible—not just hazard reduction or economic development.

http://www.mass.gov/czm/stormsmart/
planning/multi_objective_mngmnt.htm

T. Boone Pickens is a Republican billionaire from Texas who handsomely funded the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry. Carl Pope is a veteran of the environmental movement, executive director of the Sierra Club and fierce critic of both George Bush and John McCain.

That the two men are in furious agreement on the need for a radical overhaul of U.S. energy policy, Mr. Pope said, says something very bad about the recent state of politics.

http://www.mvgazette.com/article.php?17664

How Air Pollution Impact Nature: A New Report

MILLBROOK, NY — July 21, 2008 — If you are living in the eastern United States, the environment around you is being harmed by air pollution. From Adirondack forests and Shenandoah streams to Appalachian wetlands and the Chesapeake Bay, a new report by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and The Nature Conservancy has found that air pollution is degrading every major ecosystem type in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic United States.

The report, Threats From Above: Air Pollution Impacts on Ecosystems and Biological Diversity in the Eastern United States, is the first to analyze the large-scale effects that four air pollutants are having across a broad range of habitat types (see inset). The majority of recent studies focus on one individual pollutant. Over 32 experts contributed to the effort; the prognosis is not good.
http://www.ecostudies.org/threats_from_above.html

Full Report, at http://www.nature.org/tncscience/files/threats_from_above.pdf

The state's Energy Facility Siting Board made a series of key rulings yesterday on the wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound, including reasserting that it has more authority than the Cape Cod Commission over parts of the project.

"The bottom line is they defined the scope of the proceedings," said siting board spokesman Timothy Shevlin. The siting board is hearing a petition by Cape Wind Associates that would give the panel almost complete authority over parts of the project that fall under state jurisdiction.

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/
pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080729/NEWS/807290315

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait
Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007

Energizer, 2007
60x99"
Depicts 170,000 disposable Energizer batteries, equal to fifteen minutes of Energizer battery production.