Undoing Cumberland

originally published October 1, 2008

I’ve always been wild.

Imagine this. I’m eight months pregnant. Once the baby arrives, no telling when I can camp again, so I stuff a backpack and board the ferry to Cumberland Island.

The giant belly is definitely a handicap. Every time I stop hiking to rest, I have to get on my hands and knees to stand up. But I’m happy.

I’ve been dozens of times to Cumberland. It’s one of my favorite places on the entire planet. I don’t care about the ruins and trappings of wealth - I like the kingfishers, sea turtles, dolphins, pelicans. I like the sea oats and live oaks. The royal tern.

Now all that wildness is in jeopardy. The National Park Service (NPS) wants to run motorized tours through it. It wants to rewrite history: take 9,800 acres of wilderness and hamstring it. It wants roads, Moses in an 18-passenger van.

A legal Wilderness is, by definition, free of motors. If you want to clear a trail in Wilderness, you can’t use a chain saw. Which means you can’t joy-ride through Wilderness. Driving through alligator wallows is inconsistent with the spirit of the Wilderness Act.

An 11th Circuit Court judge agreed. No motor traffic. But the NPS and Cumberland landowners have a friend in Rep. Jack Kingston, and he performed a little magic trick for them. He made a bill that would redraw the wilderness. After the bill failed more than once on its own, he attached it as a rider - one of an infestation of anti-environment amendments - to the omnibus spending bill of 2004. The bill passed, so the rider rode through. Abracadabra!

Here’s where we are. The NPS has developed a transportation plan. They have to take public comment on it. We’re in the public comment period. Now through Oct. 15, 2008, you get to say what you think of the only coastal wilderness in the East being chucked quicker than you can get out of a fire ant bed.

The public, which is you and me, can read the plan online at http://parkplanning.nps.gov/cuis. Submit comments to CUIS_Transportation@nps.gov. Or mail them to Mr. Charles E. Fenwick, Acting Superintendent, Cumberland Island National Seashore, P.O. Box 806, St. Marys, GA 31558.

The NPS folks scheduled three times for public outcry. They billed these as “open houses,” which meant that they were cunningly trying to figure out how not to listen to what you may have had to say.

I don’t mind island tours. If somebody is wheelchair-bound or elderly, or even scared of armadillos, I’d hope they’d get a chance to see Cumberland Island too. But I say, obey the law. Conduct animal-powered tours. Horse-drawn buggies. Heck, you could even put some of the wild horses to work.

Janisse Ray

Community organizer Janisse Ray is the author of three books of nature writing, including Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, named a Book All Georgians Should Read.