Shops, restaurants and offices joined homeowners across the Island in switching off their lights from 8 to 9 p.m. last Saturday in an effort to raise awareness about energy consumption.

Earth Hour, an event established last year in Sydney, Australia, by the World Wildlife Fund, went global this year when the Vineyard and a number of other small communities joined a cluster of participating major international cities from San Francisco to Bangkok.

A quiet and efficient presence at the weekly Edgartown selectmen’s meetings, Margaret Serpa has spent a long career scrutinizing municipal budgets on the Vineyard.

Born and raised in Edgartown, Mrs. Serpa was a member of the last class to graduate from the old Edgartown High School. She started to work at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School in 1972 and took over as administrative assistant in 1979, a position she kept until 2006.

Robert Fynbo, a 49 year-old carpenter from Chappaquiddick, remembers the moment he decided to run for selectman. It was last December following the puffback incident at the Edgartown library, when oily furnace soot coated books and computers and forced the library to set up temporary headquarters in the Edgartown town hall.

A lean budget, down two per cent overall on last year, and compiled in the shadow of a darkening national economic scene, will go before voters at the Edgartown annual town meeting next Tuesday, April 8. The meeting is set for 7 p.m. at the Old Whaling Church on Main street. Philip J. Norton Jr. will preside.

San Francisco is turning out the lights on the Golden Gate Bridge. Chicago is switching off Sears Tower. The Sydney Opera House will go dark.

Here, the concession booth at the Capawock Theatre in Vineyard Haven might stop the popcorn maker.

Martha’s Vineyard is David in a list of Goliath locations — from Bangkok to Miami — participating in Earth Hour, a global energy conservation event taking place tomorrow night, Saturday, March 29, from 8 to 9 p.m.