Brendan O’Neill is a rather reluctant media star, but a recent Friday afternoon nonetheless found the mild-mannered executive director of the Vineyard Conservation Society driving from one end of the Island to the other with a print reporter in his passenger seat and a chase car with an Island television crew in hot pursuit. “I’m really not into a kind of cult of personality,” he said at one point. “This isn’t about me, right? It’s about the conservation society and the Island.” But with O’Neill celebrating his twentieth year at the helm of the organization, which is itself celebrating its fortieth anniversary with a big public shindig at the Allen Farm on August 13, it’s quite frankly hard to imagine the Vineyard Conservation Society without him there, year in and year out, testifying at public hearings, filing legal briefs, nudging landowners, annoying big-time developers, and generally fighting the good fight to protect what he calls “the unique quality of life on Martha’s Vineyard.”  

“In some ways Brendan has been the heart and soul of the conservation society,” says his counterpart at Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, Dick Johnson. “And it’s a lucky thing, because the work he has done all these years, and the work the society does, is so important to the Island, and they almost never get the kind of recognition they deserve.”     

As Johnson suggests, O’Neill’s modest nature meshes well with the often behind-the-scenes work of the society he runs. (Most notably, VCS rarely owns or manages conservation land; most of the places where the society played a crucial role in helping to arrange protection – including Waskosim’s Rock, Polly Hill Arboretum, Eastville Beach, Sailing Park Camp, Katama Farm, the Southern Woodlands, and many others – are managed by the towns or the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank Commission or what O’Neill affectionately calls “colleague organizations” such as Sheriff’s Meadow and The Nature Conservancy.) But anniversaries have a way of coaxing out even the most unassuming local heroes, and so it was that O’Neill found himself leading a tour of some of the conservation society’s greatest hits, stopping here and there to speak into the camera about what might have been had the society not stepped into the breach.

The first stop was an Island treasure known as the Shell station on Beach Road. It wasn’t exactly scenic, with Five Corners traffic backed up almost to the drawbridge and the vague smell of gasoline and hot pavement. But in yet another alliance, VCS teamed up with the R.M. Packer fuel company to bring clean, renewable biodiesel fuel to the Island, and O’Neill was eager to pose beside the big green tank and give the stuff a plug. Two times the crew from MVTV had to ask him to start his presentation over because the roar of a passing truck overwhelmed his voice, but eventually he was able to explain that the fuel works well in any diesel engine, reduces pollution significantly, and that VCS is hoping to get the tour buses and Steamship Authority to start using it. When the tape stopped rolling, O’Neill said that he had planned to fuel up his miserly twenty-year-old diesel Volkswagen for the benefit of the cameras, but had just filled his tank the week before. “And that,” he said with a satisfied grin, “should pretty much last me the rest of the summer.”

From there it was over the drawbridge to Eastville Point Beach, which VCS purchased and handed over to the town of Oak Bluffs in 1985. “This was a little before my time, but one of the scenarios called for dense waterfront development right here at the mouth of the Lagoon,” he said, looking casual and comfortable, leaning against the split-rail fence, while in the distance behind him surf-casters cast and beachcombers combed. (“This is great stuff!” enthused the camerawoman, as the Islander headed out for Woods Hole in the background.) A few stops later, in a field at Rainbow Farm in Chilmark, O’Neill squinted into the sun and rattled off nearly a dozen other farms around the Island where the conservation society has helped Vineyard farmers keep their land in agricultural production. And at the Edgartown cemetery, he checked in on a little parcel that protects the secluded flank of the cemetery annex across the street, and marched into the bordering woods to point out the old raised roadbed of the Martha’s Vineyard Railroad, saying, “Isn’t that cool that it’s still here? I love that.”

On the road between stops, O’Neill talked about the choices facing the Vineyard in the coming years: about the projected rise in population and its effects on traffic and water quality, about the continuing shortage of affordable housing and its effects on the overall health of the community, about the dangers of complacency, and about the need for a legal defense fund for the Vineyard. (VCS spent over $100,000 in legal fees in recent battles over the fate of the Southern Woodlands in Oak Bluffs, which might have become a golf course, but now will be substantially preserved as a forest.) And, truth be told, he mused as well about the difficulty of sustaining a membership organization like the Vineyard Conservation Society in an era when Islanders are overwhelmed with requests for donations.

Mostly, though, Brendan O’Neill just seemed genuinely thrilled to be away from his desk and unattached to his phone. “It’s so wonderful to get out in the sun and see the land and the water and the farms and be reminded why we keep at this work,” he said near the end of the day. By that time the television crew had packed up and gone home and O’Neill was at Moshup’s Trail in Aquinnah, where the society is engaged in a protracted effort to keep the down-Island end of the road from becoming as chopped up and patchworked with large second homes as the stretch nearer the lighthouse already is. He was up to his waist in a thicket, holding his hands up over his head to keep them out of the poison ivy, looking for a place he knew of where he hopes someday there might be a walking path and a public overlook.

“We only need to get a little higher up the grade to see the view, he called back over his shoulder to the stragglers marching behind him. “But I promise it will be worth it.” And he was right.