Looking at the population of San Juan County, it’s easy to wonder how such a tiny place—just 0.000212% of the world’s population—expects to make even the smallest dent in the challenges around us. Our demographic reality is clear: we are aging, our working-age population is shrinking, health burdens are rising, and many of our young people are navigating a world more volatile and disorienting than anything their grandparents faced.

But numbers alone never tell the full story of capacity.

Demographics count bodies; they do not count behavior. They cannot measure how many of us are working to preserve rural character, or how many are pushing toward a more modern, connected island future. And if we’re honest, most of us live a blend of political realities at once: communal with our families, cooperative in our neighborhoods, and deeply individual inside the national economy. The world is shifting fast, and the market increasingly rewards autonomy more than interdependence. Our national politics swing between those impulses too—left to right and back again—rarely pausing long enough for anyone to catch their breath.

All of this unfolds against a backdrop of global strain.
The U.S. now carries over $35 trillion in national debt, part of a global burden exceeding $315 trillion. These numbers aren’t abstractions—they represent promises made with the assumed capacity of future citizens. We can imagine solar-punk futures and technologies that mimic biology, but history reminds us that human invention is fallible, vulnerable, and often misunderstood. Earth changes on timelines that laugh at our lifespan; we are still learning the basics.

Which brings us home.

For all the noise of the world, San Juan County remains one of the rare places where wild nature still has a say—where storms dissolve politics, and community reasserts itself through instinct, not ideology. When the wind knocks out power, tractors show up. Neighbors check on neighbors. Kids get fed. Life returns, briefly, to a human pace.

That is our wealth.
That is our inheritance.
And that is why this place still matters.

But none of that protects us from the nonprofit industrial complex—a system that asks us to nurture community while feeding bureaucracy. Every nonprofit on these islands knows what their people need; we see it daily, in real time, in ways no grant rubric or quarterly report can capture. Yet we detour through paperwork, competition, and compliance rituals that turn certainty into delay and urgency into administrative burden.

We want to help.
We’re built to help.
But before we can do the work, we must first survive the labyrinth designed to measure it.

And this tension isn’t unique to organizations. It shows up in the smallest choices of daily life. Even when shopping for clothes or groceries, we’re forced into impossible moral math:
Do we pay more for humane treatment, real nutrition, and environmental care—
or pay less so we can redirect money and time toward the people we’re responsible for?

Every necessity demands a trade-off.
Every basic human right now has a surcharge.
And the pressure to work harder for the essentials is nudging all of us toward a deep collective exhaustion.

Grassroots change doesn’t lack heart here. It lacks time—the very resource siphoned away into proving, documenting, and justifying what we already know to be true on the ground. Consequently, participation becomes more than civic goodwill—it becomes the antidote to burnout. Honest disagreement becomes a lifeline. Sitting at the same table becomes an act of resilience.

Because if we, in one of the smallest counties in the nation, can cultivate a shared sense of purpose despite these pressures, then we are modeling something the world desperately needs: democracy practiced at a human scale.

And that is the invitation at the heart of Island Stewards—
not to fix the world,
not to save the country,
but to practice what is possible here.

To use this intact, wild, healing place to reconnect with the pace of nature and the pace of each other. To remember that small communities can carry big wisdom. That slow can be strong. And that hope is not found in scale—it is found in people willing to keep showing up.

Even in a world stretching at the seams—economically, environmentally, socially, cosmically—we are still lucky to live in a place where community remains a muscle, not a memory.

And now, we want to strengthen that muscle together.

New: Island Stewards Monthly Community Meeting

Beginning Sunday, November 30th at 3:30pm, Island Stewards will host a remote monthly community gathering.

Online attendance will be available for everyone @: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86863916766?pwd=8ZdNPWPri5MSnbgSjVSrxnspbJmBSf.1

Meeting ID: 868 6391 6766

Passcode: 586246

Beautiful skies at Crescent Beach Orcas Island — Photo by Island Steward Volunteer Paxson Williams

• If you prefer in-person in the coming months, let us know—we’ll host a potluck and livestream from the room.
• The meeting time can adjust as we hear from you.

This is a space to talk honestly, learn from one another, and keep building a shared path forward.

If a tiny county like ours can do this, then there is still reason to hope—not someday, but now. And that hope starts with all of us.

Democracy does not survive on national stages—it survives in towns like ours, where participation is personal and accountability is shared. The future won’t be built by the loudest voices but by the most persistent ones, the ones who keep showing up even when the systems feel too big, too slow, or too tangled.

And to do that well, we have to give each other the benefit of the doubt. We have to stop taking the oxygen out of the room by arguing over what we think matters most to someone else. None of us can read another person’s full story, and none of us can carry the whole weight of the world. But if we leave space—for difference, for disagreement, for dignity—we give ourselves the best chance at the most hopeful outcome in a time when outcomes cannot be guaranteed.

We are not owed a bright future with pristine nature and every need met. If society stumbles or systems fail, it will not be the fault of any single person or group. But our story—this story of a tiny county trying despite all odds—might still offer something invaluable. Even if the world grows darker for our children, our effort, our cooperation, and our willingness to try, may become a quiet inheritance: a memory of people who chose to act when nothing was promised.

Here, on these islands, we still have the rare ability to shape our own story. Let’s use it.

Your presence matters.
Your voice matters.
And together, we can make these islands a model of what resilient, human-scale democracy looks like.

The Island Stewards Team

Is This Imposter Syndrome?

P.S.

Is This Imposter Syndrome?

P.S.

Intro Path Less Taken