Watch: Let’s talk about carrying capacity.
Hey there Nantucket its Grant from the Nantucket owner’s manual, a guide to leaving the island better than we found it. Today let’s talk about carrying capacity.
It was in the news recently that the vineyard is doing a carrying capacity study. And a lot of folks wonder what’s our carrying capacity. You know we’re an island. You can only fit so much water in the drinking glass before it spills, right. The problem is that we are not like a drinking glass. It’s more like stuffing potatoes in a sack, you can always wedge. one. more. damn. potato in that sucker, right? …
But more to the point: “What’s our carrying capacity?” is not really the right question. We can add more people and cars and houses and build bigger schools and widen our roads and add another electric cable. It’s just going to be hard for a lot of people if we do. So the question we really should be asking is, not how much can we add, but how much are we willing to endure as a community. In order to make ends meet. In order to make money. In order to live here. What are we willing to endure?
We can measure a lot of stuff, we can measure cars and, you know wait times at stop signs, we can do water quality testing, we can measure the health of the community the mental health of the community. We can measure the scallop harvest. But it doesn’t really help to measure all these things unless we decide what we want as a community. What are we willing to endure?
The problem with a carrying capacity study is that people look at it differently. Some people are in search of money, some people are trying to generate wealth, and you know what? You can’t blame them because money comes in pretty handy on an island where the median home price is $1.8 million dollars.
Some people, however, are in search of peace and quiet and community. Togetherness. And those people aren’t necessarily looking at the same goals as the people who are trying to build wealth. We could spend a lot of money on a carrying capacity study. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, it could take two or three years to do. But people are never going to agree on it.
Let’s face it folks, until we decide as a community, what we are willing to endure in order to live here. We’re never going to solve any of the problems that we have, we’re just going to keep living with them. Or treating the symptoms. Adding roundabouts. And building apartment buildings. And extending the sewer system. We are going to keep stuffing more potatoes in the sack.
Anyway, it’s an idea, and hopefully, we’ll talk a lot more about it. Thanks for watching, thanks for clicking Like and Subscribe. Thanks for signing up for our email newsletter. Thanks for supporting us on Patreon. Until next time, We will see you on the bluff walk.