I Found Myself Unexpectedly Writing A Green Party Platform For A Local Selectman Candidate.
The Boothbay Peninsula needs leadership that takes environmental sustainability seriously!
I started to write the story that came to have the title The LifeStyle Approach To Economic Development Makes An Environmentally Sustainable Paradigm for Substack, thinking I was going to write a quick post but I have never been able to follow the plan when working creatively. Creative work has a will of its own and writing this post was creative for me since I had no idea where it was going once I got past thinking it was a quick short post, and least of all did I know that I would start writing a party platform for the imaginary Green Party of the Boothbay Peninsula. In effect, I was telling myself what to do, to become more politically active and connected.
The post turned out to be too long for Substack so I posted it on Medium. It might have been a fit with The Age of Awareness which is more high profile than Woodworkers of the World Unite, but Woodworkers seems to be aggressively promoting stories and I would really like to connect more with hand-made makers, AND I see some very interesting writing there. I received a very nice welcome from ScienceDude who runs Woodworkers of the World Unite!
Hi Mackenzie, this is wonderful, I really enjoyed it and found it interesting, insightful, and actually quite funny in places. Thank you for joining WotWU and for this wonderful contribution to it. I look forward to many more! Best, SD
It happens to be that I have only just discovered that I am currently the top featured post on Woodworkers of the World Unite as I am writing this.
Once I started writing a Green Party platform for Boothbay Region selectmen, I decided it made sense to contact the Green Party of Lincoln County to let them know that they are needed in Boothbay for a very good reason. The JECD Party -not an official party either but it acts like one - is running an unopposed candidate. This is for Boothbay Harbor where the West Harbor Pond is not endangered for now. However, the candidate was a member of the JECD, a group that was formed as a joint economic development council for Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor. Boothbay’s two water supplies, Knickerbocker Lake and Adams Pond are listed as endangered by future development which the JECD treated as a non-issue. The two towns are next door to each other so it hardly makes sense for each to be operating out of different development paradigms.
I am promoting the emergence of a Green Party candidate and I hope that there will be someone I can actually have a working relationship with. That seems very difficult to establish in Maine. I am hoping for a younger generation candidate to emerge because after environmental sustainability, attracting young people to the region is a very high priority. It makes sense to include young people in our town leadership.
Let’s do it and keep the Boothbay Peninsula natural!