When Christine Dentremont finished the industrial design program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., she relocated two days later to Swan’s Island, where she would spend the next few years as a sternman on a lobster boat.

For a week during each of the past four summers, a group of college students and their instructors have been channeling the innovative spirit and nature-oriented sensibility of R. Buckminster Fuller in the design pioneer’s own habitat.

By this time, I and others have usually made our way through the odd feeling that comes at the end of August. Overtired from working days and staying out later than usual at night, we have scrambled for every last chance to see friends before saying those parting words, “Have a good winter!”

When your community's electric rates are among the highest in the nation, it pays to consider ways to cut consumption. Work done on Monhegan Island was both simple and effective, and could reduce the island's collective annual electric bill by $15,000.

Being an Island Fellow is pretty awesome. You get to live and serve in one of the most beautiful places in the world, with some of the best people you’ll ever meet. However, like anything in life, there are some rules that must be followed.

We’re proud of our homegrown Internet service, but with the need for even more speed and investment, we need the cooperation of local, state and federal governments, as well as that of FairPoint, which will finally offer Internet on the island.

To call this an industry would be a stretch, but they are certainly a group of businesses with the potential to become an industry. What would the industrial scale look like? Well, there will be choices.

A few weeks ago, a big man burst into the Tidewater Motel lobby mid-morning carrying a half-dozen unmarked white cardboard boxes, each about 18-inches by 18-inches and 4-inches deep. He’d emerged from an unmarked white pickup that held three white chest freezers in its bed, tied down haphazardly with pot warp.

There is a particularly odious saying that gets bandied about from time to time: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Rather than get my hackles up, I let it goad me into action.