I have a perspective to offer about preserving the character of the Boothbay region. It’s a topic that is now becoming more prominent in a variety of venues, from interest in defining our unique brand to debating the impacts of major developments, such as the St. Andrews controversy and the revitalized golf course.

First of all I should confess that I’m a partisan of the “specialness” of this community and the need to preserve its unique character. I write to encourage a long view of where we’ve been and where we might want to go.

That’s why I’ve chosen the “long view” perspective of the Baptist Church, as seen from the location today of Simmons, Harrington and Hall Funeral Home. I could have made the point with a photo of the Mill Pond Overlook in East Boothbay — at the time it was threatened by a for sale sign in 1997.

The 1960s was a time of heightened warning about the environment, and especially about our collective ignorance. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was published in 1962 and in 1966, Bowdoin College produced a publication of photographs, including that picture of the Baptist Church, called “As Maine Goes,” a call to arms to save the character of the coast.

No wonder that Carson and others created the Maine Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, thus unleashing a wave of conservation efforts by private nonprofits like the Boothbay Region Land Trust, the Historical Society and the Boothbay Civic Association.

I think it’s a positive step to have these conversations about our character, our brand, and who we are as a community, even though they inevitably incite passionate viewpoints.

Here are a couple of observations with respect to seeing the long view in 2013:

It’s time to think of landscape as a kind of infrastructure, one that supports the economic well being of our community. Changing the landscape, as rampant billboards once did, needs to be carefully calculated as to its impact on the need to preserve our rural lifestyles and appeal to new residents and visitors.

The positive growth in our values surrounding the idea of a healthy community is a great long view achievement, so I think. Community, as we define it here, now includes almost a civic consensus about the need for individual responsibility to match up with a raised bar of social idealism. By idealism I mean to emphasize the duty we all have to act for the benefit of our larger community, even though each of us have a fiduciary responsibility to take care of business, our own or our organizations.