What I’m Thinking

It is that time of year again. Along with sun-filled days and time outside with friends and family, early summer also brings with it APCC’s Summer Appeal. While no one enjoys asking for money, the hard truth is that the job of speaking for the Cape’s environment has...

The answer could be a lot of things but for this purpose it is cyanobacteria. Along with the transition from cool spring to hot summer, we are starting to see the return of unwelcome but increasingly familiar cyanobacteria blooms. Along with providing yet another...

The overwhelmingly positive reaction to The Cape We Shape campaign has validated one of our foundational assumptions. There is widespread public support for preserving at-risk sensitive open space essential to the protection of water quality and critical habitat....

I spent some time the other day watching a pair of birds taking turns feeding their chicks. Back and forth they went bringing soft caterpillars to drop in hungry mouths making more than 150 feeding trips a day for a few weeks before their hungry chicks fledge from the...

Local elections are a good opportunity to assess what is important to the 10-12 percent of people who show up to vote in most local elections. The majority of registered voters defer decision making to the voting few. For better or worse, the voting minority speaks...

Spring 2026 town meetings have demonstrated the validity of the premise behind APCC’s The Cape We Shape campaign: When given the chance to act, voters will support the preservation of critical natural resources. Thanks to work in the trenches by local activists and...

Democracy is neither self-actuating nor is it self-sustaining. Governance requires ongoing interest, awareness of the issues of the day, and a willingness to make the effort to show up and participate. While events at the national level can often seem beyond the reach...

Falmouth Town Meeting approved two transfers of town-owned land in the watershed of its drinking water reservoir to the care and custody of conservation commission. The two articles were the first supported by APCC under The Cape We Shape campaign and serve as an...

This was written on a flight to see friends, family, and a concert (frequent readers can probably guess the show). High above the ground I find myself grateful for all the people who made systems, ones I don’t think about much and probably wouldn’t understand if I...

Ninety percent of the Cape’s estuaries exhibit poor water quality resulting directly from excess nitrogen, mostly from septic wastewater disposal. Towns across the Cape are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on wastewater infrastructure with the goal of reducing...