I HAVE FOND memories of summers on Nantucket, my father reading "Moby-Dick" to me and my sister as we searched across Nantucket Bay for the great white whale from the porch of the Wauwinet beach house we rented every August. The island was a different place back then, quiet and provincial, a cobblestoned community of hardy year-rounders and the preppy summer set attracted to the island's proud maritime past and pristine setting. Despite these memories, I've come to think twice about Nantucket after several visits this summer. Three controversies speak to what I call an "island" mentality that defies the very idea of the Commonwealth of which Nantucket is a part. This way of thinking asserts the primacy of the individual above the collective without exception. Island thinking is the opposite of the Commonwealth idea, which holds that as citizens we must think not only about ourselves but others, must recognize that our fates are entwined.
The first controversy involves affordable housing. With only 2.5 percent of the island's housing stock qualifying as affordable -- a quarter of the state minimum standard -- and the average price of a Nantucket home hovering around $1 million, the need for affordable housing on the island could not be greater. My brother-in-law, an elementary school principal, interviewed for a job on Nantucket a few years ago only to withdraw his candidacy after reviewing the real estate options. With 40 percent of the island's land protected from development, the simple rules of supply and demand have made Nantucket one of the nation's most exclusive communities.
Further, despite a string of recent proposals to build more affordable housing, resistance is visceral and effective. Millionaire summer residents, their lawyers at the ready, decry proposal after proposal as a scandalous, unsightly assault on the island's precious green spaces. These litigious islanders have made not-in-my-backyard an elite sport, like polo, reserved for those with money to spend and a nose for a dirty fight. Not surprising, little progress has been made in building affordable units in the last decade. Nantucket continues to rank at the bottom among Massachusetts cities and towns.
Raging alongside the affordable housing row is the season's true cause celebre, the fight against a proposal by Cape Wind to build 130 wind turbines 14 miles off Nantucket on Horseshoe Shoal. The project would provide on average three-quarters of the energy needs of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Cape Cod and is the most significant renewable energy project ever proposed in New England. It's a private-sector response to the growing need for locally produced power brought about by global climate change, a deregulated utility industry, and the national security risks associated with Middle East oil.
Notwithstanding minimal aesthetic and environmental impacts and the intense scrutiny of 17 state and federal agencies, the project's opponents, many of whom reside on Nantucket, are unbending in their belief that the wind farm will forever "industrialize" the region, undermining its fragile ecosystems and maritime appeal. With the likes of Walter Cronkite, the Kennedy family, big-name CEOs, and dozens of other high-powered landowners digging in their heels, the antiwind forces, like their counterparts battling affordable housing, have time and money on their side.
SUVs round out the trinity of island controversies. Maligned by locals and visitors alike because of their size and numbers, the SUV is perhaps the most fitting and menacing symbol of the island mentality. Where once station wagons and rust-covered Jeeps ruled, the SUVs that now dominate the island are too wide for its 18th-century streets and single-lane secondary roads, too tall for the tree-lined curbsides of town, and too aggressive for its proverbially quaint setting. In their great girth and towering stance, supersized rigs that lumber up and down the island's roads and beaches stand for one thing only: the power of me.
The Nantucket I knew as a child is gone. It went the way of the rusty Jeeps. And that's OK. Today's Nantucket is more diverse and more dynamic than yesterday's, with its cosmopolitan feel, flourishing arts community, rising immigrant population, and even a local vodka distiller.
But what these three struggles suggest is that today's Nantucket is also too much of an island, not enough of a Commonwealth. There needs to be greater balance -- more affordable housing, more wind turbines, fewer SUVs.
This isn't so much a function of rulemaking or regulation as it is of mind-set. The Commonwealth idea needs to be learned and lived by all Nantucketers -- year-round and summer, resident and visitor, wealthy and low-income -- so that the interests of the individual and the collective can be better aligned.
Perhaps this will prove as difficult a quest as the hunt for the great white whale. But if I learned nothing else from my father's readings those quiet summer evenings overlooking the bay, it's that in Ahab's mad pursuit was also a dream of righting wrongs. We may never take the whale, but I hope at least we try.
William Shutkin, a professor of environmental policy at MIT, is author of "The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the 21st Century."
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.