Based in interpretive and qualitative research methodologies, the methods used in the study included participantвЂђobservation and semiвЂђstructured interviews with writers, artists, and musicians whose artistic practices were expressive of islandness and abductive analysis. This article describes research in Tasmania and Newfoundland by a poet and academic profoundly interested in place. In such studies, threads of similarity and connection in peopleвЂ™s experiences of living on islands are revealed in ways that are of interest to geographers as well as those in allied and complementary disciplines. Phenomenology lends itself to the study of islandness, and because works by poets and painters are often rooted in place they are also highly amenable to phenomenological studies. This article explores the way in which a certain kind of island narrative that frames islands as isolated, extraordinary places of mystery and adventure came to dominate the imagination of BostonвЂ™s previously mundane urban islands. This changing perception resulted in the islands recently becoming places reserved almost exclusively for conservation and recreation. In the middle third of the twentieth century, however, Bostonians imagined their cityвЂ™s harbor islands in a new way: one that has obscured most of their long human history and has cast them in the role of a natural landscape fundamentally different from the city. The islands have served as sources of wood and building stone, common pastures, sites of harbor defenses and lighthouses, and as вЂdumping groundsвЂ™ for materials, businesses, and institutions undesirable in the city proper. Since its founding in 1630, the city of Boston has embedded them firmly in its urban infrastructure. The Boston Harbor Islands are a historically urban archipelago. В© 2014 - Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. It adds to the extensive revisionist literature that has already challenged the myth of island isolation, boundedness, and remoteness. The littoral ecotone helps explain many of the distinctive qualities of island economies and the adaptability, dynamism, and resilience of island societies. Continents may contain one or more ecotones but islands, especially smaller ones, are dominated by the ecotone where land meets sea. It therefore illuminates aspects of island life that are obscured when we treat islands as bounded territorial units constituting a singular ecosystem. An ecotone is a place where two ecosystems connect and create a unique environment different from both. Islands must be understood as ecotones, a concept of increasing importance to the environmental sciences in recent years, but not well known to island studies scholars.

Yet, they differ from continents in one fundamental regard: their relationship to water. Islands are usually thought of as being territorial-like continents, but on a smaller scale.

Ecotone poetry