The first episode in Vineyard filmmaker Ollie Becker’s “Great Ponds” series, titled “On Our Watch,” focused on the human stories and histories behind the Island’s great ponds. Its sequel, “Finding a Better Balance,” is a ride-along with the professionals protecting these vulnerable ecosystems, endangered by property development and climate change.
The film premiered at Grange Hall in West Tisbury to an audience a couple of hundred strong, on the opening night of the 24th annual Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival.
“Finding a Balance” sets its scenes with bird’s-eye views of the Island’s largest estuaries, and with the recollections of deceased Vineyarders — whether hunters, fishermen, or others communing with nature.
One such commenter was Edward Belisle. “I would get down there, actually before I had a license, 1955, 1956, and watch the ducks migrate,” Belisle remembers. “And there would be thousands of them, just steady streaming ducks heading toward Nantucket, for probably four weeks.” These recordings were provided by Linsey Lee, oral history curator at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.
Becker’s own pond memories inspired the Great Ponds series, noting the degradation in water quality over the years. “It really started … Thomas [Bena] and I would take these walks on the side of the Great Ponds, and we both had these shared memories of 20-plus years ago and seeing the water looking a lot clearer, a lot cleaner, and wondering who else has that memory,” Becker said at Wednesday’s premiere. “And it turns out almost everyone we spoke to did.”
Though the Vineyard’s 16 great ponds have always been part of Island history, the pond stewards in “Finding a Better Balance” say that their future is endangered. They say that now is the time to reduce nitrogen contamination of the ponds, restore the eelgrass populations, and research and protect species like herring.
The eelgrass restoration work of the nonprofit Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group (MVSG) is a major focus of the film. “In the mid-’90s, there were scallops commercially harvested in the lagoon, and there were people out there earning their livelihoods and feeding their families and building homes off of scallop money. And all of that’s gone now,” Emma Green-Beach, executive director and shellfish biologist at MVSG, says in the film. “People are out there scalloping, but they’re not building houses off of that money anymore.”
Bay scallops such as those in Lagoon Pond, Green-Beach explains, rely on eelgrass throughout their lives. But Green-Beach explains that the pond’s eelgrass population is too small to serve any ecological function.
In the Edgartown Great Pond, a combination of high temperatures and poor water quality has set back years of restoration efforts. Eelgrass beds there were healthy in 2021, and the plant began to regrow at the start of the season.
“But then, due to the water quality conditions, the turbidity really skyrocketed in early July, and due to that, we think that the lack of light penetrating through the water column might’ve just choked it all out,” says David Bouck, director of science & collaboration at the Great Pond Foundation. Under warmer conditions, says a visiting EPA official later in the film, eelgrass requires more sunlight.
Poor water quality is also contributing to greatly reduced herring populations up-Island. At Herring Creek in Squibnocket Pond, the Natural Resources Department of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah (Gay Head) has been tracking a herring population of roughly 30,000. “Historically Squibnocket Pond was able to hold maybe about 1.5 million fish, and here we are at about 3 percent of historic averages,” says Andrew Jacobs, laboratory manager and environmental technician at the department. “And that’s kind of the decrepit state of the fishery across the Eastern Seaboard.”
“This is scary,” Chip Vanderhoop, Aquinnah harbormaster and shellfish warden, says in the film. “You didn’t think those things were ever going to go away that fast. I would’ve thought 50 years after I croak that it would be like this. Not now.”
Cyanobacteria blooms are another threat to estuaries like the Tisbury Great Pond. Fertilizer use is a key contributor in these cases, feeding the bacteria by adding nitrogen and phosphorus to the water. Large amounts of the bacteria cloud water bodies and deplete their oxygen, which can kill aquatic life. “In 2023, instead of having one or two blooms a year across the Island, I think we had three blooms in a week,” says Emily Reddington, executive director of the Great Pond Foundation.
Reddington adds that In the Hamptons or the Cape, where housing is more dense and land is less conserved, ponds have died.
Though Becker’s film shows the impacts of poor water quality up close, he also shows how professionals on-Island and beyond are responding.
Alley McConnell, MVSG’s restoration coordinator, has been growing eelgrass seeds in a controlled hatchery environment in recent years. The seeds collected in 2021 flowered, which Green-Beach says is the first time eelgrass seeds grown in a laboratory environment have reached sexual maturity.
“Researchers are really excited about this, because they have goals of doing selective breeding — being able to take seeds from different areas and get them to bloom so they can cross-pollinate them,” Green-Beach says. “So that’s what we are contributing to the whole big picture.”
Last summer, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection required that nitrogen-removing septic systems be installed in sensitive areas on Cape Cod. Bryan Horsely, a wastewater treatment plant operator at the Massachusetts Alternative Septic System Test Center, works to design and test innovative/alternative septic systems. “It does about 80 to 90 percent nitrogen removal, so it’s one of our favorite systems onsite here,” Horsely says of a woodchip bioreactor I/A system.
Vineyard officials in Becker’s film also called for a reconsideration of fertilizer use on the Vineyard.
“The first thing you want to do is stop making it worse,” said Chris Murphy, chair of Chilmark’s conservation commission and zoning board of appeals. “So we need to make a bigger area around all of the great ponds — a no-build zone, no septic systems, nothing that’s going to run off into the pond. The next step is to go around and figure out how to stop the nitrogen intrusion from the septic systems, and the lawns, and anything else that we’re doing around the ponds.”
Samantha Look, executive director of the Vineyard Conservation Society, called for a cessation of fertilizer use on lawns altogether: “There are ways that we can manage those spaces that don’t have to hurt ecosystems in which they reside.”
“Finding a Better Balance” will also screen on Saturday at 3:15 pm at the Capawock Theatre in Vineyard Haven.
