The outfall, the loss of its greatest resource.

its young people continuing to leave,

and its gradual overdependence

on subsistence living and government handouts. The fields lay fallow in flyaway,

the sun went down in a bank at the harbour mouth.

./ View?" at; swag-saw

On the sixth day, new ideas come to quell the storms and calm the economic waters, with elixirs in a variety of forms.

Many ideas promise to reinvigorate

an economy new as delicate as a finick’s stomach. The Cooperative Movement, putting consumer stores, Credit Unions, a cheese and butter factory

into the area, built on a spirit right for the people. but slow to show results and always

threatened by the conglomerates.

The grandiose P.E.I. Development Plan,

coming to help us fix the garden,

with experts and consultants galore

in the end neither developing nor planning.

The Greenwich development, promising economically but so precarious ecologically.

Too controversial. Resisted by irresolvable disagreement between pragmatists and idealists. The growing mussel industry

and the developing recreational salmon fishery marrying new technologies

with a safe and appropriate environment.

The annual Blueberry Festival

playing to the community’s strength,

its people, their friendliness and hospitality.

A new golf course at Crowbush,

a metaphor for modernity.

Signs of an upturn recognized

by the community and encouraged

by the visiting Countryside Institute

and the Institute of Island Studies--

each reminding themselves of what

they knew from the beginning:

that communities develop from the bottom up, never from the top down (the heresy

of modern governments), respecting

l the potential of people, countryside and watershed. { The root of beauty is audacity.

XI