To the Editor:

The comments received following my Letter to the Editor published May 28 (“Economics 101: The fluff factor”) about the Island-wide need for serious proactive planning and economic development have been virtually all positive. It seems as if the piece touched a vital nerve. Further, several examples which could be cited as prototypes for successful businesses or industries that we should encourage either came to mind or were mentioned, and this letter will pass along that information. Finally, several people wanted more information about the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine.

It is a nonprofit with a long history of “working to sustain Maine’s island and remote coastal communities. Our core program areas — including economic development, education, community energy, marine resources, and media — are driven by the requests of the community members themselves.” You can find more information at islandinstitute.org.

Mention should have been made of how Islanders have used the maritime environment to shape business ventures. In Vineyard Haven, there is actually an area of the waterfront which is devoted to and zoned for marine-oriented businesses. One of the key businesses is Martha’s Vineyard Shipyard, now about 160 years old (the third oldest Vineyard business), the subject of a deeply researched and beautifully written piece, “The Shipyard at 150,” by Tom Dunlop, published in the Martha’s Vineyard Magazine issue of summer 2006.

He wrote, “With the creation of this shipyard [in the mid-1800s], Vineyard Haven established itself as a harbor that did more than offer refuge and provisions to transient vessels or a wharf to passenger steamers. It would become a harbor that actually produced things — a working harbor, as its devotees call it today.”

The piece goes on to detail how Tom and Anne Hale bought the Shipyard in the early 1960s and began building Vineyard Vixens (sailboats) and Wasques (powerboats), which became iconic boats. The economics, however, of building GRP boats on the Vineyard in competition with the Far East did not work out, but the Shipyard, now owned and/or managed by their descendants — several generations of Hales — continues. The Shipyard, R.M. Packer and Tisbury Towing and Transportation, Gannon and Benjamin, West Marine, and Coastwise Packet Co./Black Dog Tall Ships, along with a few other maritime-oriented businesses, annually employ more than 100 Islanders, most of whom are employed year-round.

Another business which flourished in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s was the seafood and fish business of Everett Poole in Menemsha. Poole’s Fish Market on the Harbor represented the retail side, which operated alongside a busy wholesale business, Menemsha Bites, the prepared-food side of the business, located on Basin Road. Everett recently told me that during the most active period, the businesses employed six to eight people year-round, and during sea-scalloping season, many more were hired to shuck.

Other names which came to the surface were George C. (known as Carey) Matthiessen and others — all early researchers and oyster propagators (the efforts of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group and Rick Karney grew, in part, from those projects); John Hughes and the Lobster Hatchery; the late Mike Syslo, etc. Currently the value of oysters being produced by the eleven or twelve oyster farmers in Katama is enormous.

I am not ignoring the agricultural facets of the Island economy — my family is farming — but farming has been well publicized, although the grim economics of trying to produce to meet the demand aren’t well known. The cost of land (even permanently preserved) precludes larger farms, and the costs of transportation for trips to an FDA-approved slaughterhouse, for hay or feed, or to get equipment repaired, drive up expenses and virtually eliminate any possibility of profit. But the farmers struggle on.

We have a lot of successful examples from the past in other facets of an Island economy. If we build on them and use the wisdom of a group such as the Island Institute, we can move forward on a course with a much more optimistic and healthy outcome.

Virginia Crowell Jones

West Tisbury