The tiny eastern seaboard island of Nantucket and the giant, 49th State of Alaska are the most incongruous of bedfellows. They do not share the same boarding house geographically, culturally, economically or in other overarching ways. Yet the two lands, cherished symbols for most Americans of pristine seascapes, landscapes and rugged individualism, share startling similarities in the self images, self conceits and the very mojo and zeitgeist of those who live there. Inhabitants are proud of their "difference", their lifestyle. The individual, institutional and corporate dwellers share an inner conflict over striving to maintain the way they are for which they are famed, or developing the land and its resources for what it can be for the economic benefit of all. The open internal social sores over the proposed giant wind-farm in island waters of Nantucket are the same as the battle over the development of ANWR, and are only headline examples of deeper psychic conflict.

Whether in tourist promotion, resource extraction or just day to day living, the social tensions that drive the two lands, the pull between impulses for conservation and preservation and those for development and, yes, exploitation, are bicoastal mirror images of each other and bind the two lands emotionally.

Crocker Snow Jr., a native New Englander and veteran international journalist who first visited in 1990 returned to address the CWN membership. He has long dangled a foot figuratively and literally in Nantucket Sound and Prince William Sound waters through family, friends and direct professional interest. He is prepping a treatise on the unlikely subject of "Nantaska", the pilot minnow and the prudent whale.