About

Community Well-being

A key to our community’s well-being lies in understanding the scope of our ecological footprint and our required ethical coexistence with it.  Our relationships to our physical surroundings, our natural world’s intersections with our built world, the sober truth that everything is connected - these realities are fundamental to how we manage change in a changing environment.  Global warming and an increasing population perturb our community’s equilibrium and make our decision-making critical.

We have asked ourselves how we rank order our community values: preserving open space; safekeeping the natural environment; staying rural with a coastal feel; having informed and wise leadership with a small-town feel; and cultivating the arts and culture were the at the top.  But quality of life factors such as human connectedness, livability, economic sufficiency, responsibly developing housing, and social equity also belong on the list.

The actuality is that community well-being is greater than the sum of these parts. Everything is important or nothing is important.  However, our ecological footprint underpins it all, and no factor is more essential than having water security - the needed trust that our water will be amply available to all, potable, uncontaminated, and unthreatened.  That trust will help assure the town’s future as a healthy community, one that is confident in its well-being as a safe and promising place to live and visit.