A brief reflection on dunes at Sandy Neck
Getting the COVID vaccine, returning national parks to Indigenous peoples, and plant of the week
Happy Sunday! I’m behind on writing the newsletter this week because I got dose 1 of the Pfizer COVID vaccine on Thursday. Some chills the following night led me to feel pretty out of it on Friday. But I’m feeling better now and very grateful to have gotten the vaccine—and excited for dose 2. Thrilled, actually.
As I was driving home from the drive-thru vaccination site, I found myself thinking about the people who volunteered for the clinical trials of vaccines and unknowingly received a placebo dose so that researchers had a reliable comparison for the vaccines’ effectiveness. And then got COVID, developed serious illness, and died. I feel like we owe it to these people to get vaccinated if we are able, putting the lifesaving ability of the vaccines to their fullest use.
I also feel strongly that Western governments preventing other countries from manufacturing these vaccines are betraying those who sacrificed their lives and welfare in testing the vaccines and, further, are culpable in the preventable deaths of millions. India is reporting unthinkable numbers of new cases each day—300,000 is the official number, but it’s likely far higher. The Biden administration needs to immediately share vaccine manufacturing instructions and share already produced doses with other countries, according to need and not according to the profit motive.
Further reading: Vanity Fair has a thoroughly reported story on how restrictions on sharing vaccines emerged under the Trump administration and ways around those restrictions for the U.S. to do its part in sharing doses with other countries.
A brief reflection on dunes at Sandy Neck
Before the spartina grass turns green in late spring, a salt marsh can look more like a desert than a wetland.
Priya and I walked several miles at Sandy Neck on western Cape Cod yesterday. Starting in the late afternoon, we passed few people on the trail. Compared to the remnant salt marshes of metro Boston, the scale of the miles-wide marsh was humbling. With the expanse of the tan wetlands and broad tidal river basin to our right, and high sand dunes the color of weathered shell to our left, Priya remarked that it felt like we had entered another world.
But Sandy Neck is not a wilderness in the traditional sense. It’s a protected natural area just over an hour from Boston and Providence that sees heavy use: one of the few places where you can legally drive off-road vehicles on the beach.
Signs warned walkers from straying out of the path and contributing to the erosion of the dunes. While it was evident that a few people broke these rules, the endurance of the slopes suggested that most stayed within bounds.
The signs, and the dune habitats that support nesting terns and plovers behind them, led me to reflect that a day or two where hikers walked all over the dunes and cars drove beyond their marked-off limits would finish off this ecosystem for generations. And yet that hasn’t happen. I wonder: how much of that is due to the threat of $50 or $150 fines (difficult to enforce with the scope of the park and the number of visitors) and how much is due to the cultural understanding that to trample on dunes would be to ruin this place for yourself and others?
Even if there were full-time hall monitors slapping wrists to enforce these rules, it wouldn’t be enough. The place exists because large numbers of people choose for it to exist, and acts that despoil it are seen as not merely illegal but shameful. There are plenty of examples like this: hikers keeping to established trails in heavily visited preserves, impromptu cleanup efforts in city parks, people respecting roped-off areas for nesting birds and turtles on popular beaches.
When I begin to count all the habitats that exist “but for the grace of God”—or more to the point, because people value them in ways that go beyond regulations and laws—my first reaction is anxiety at having to rely on fellow humans to continue to safeguard these places. But a second understanding soon emerges: that value for natural systems is broad—more so than is often acknowledged. It’s not just singular, heroic conservationists keeping wildlife protected, but great masses of people deciding that conservation is worth it. Carelessness and harm does happen—that’s inarguable. Yet cultural values keep beloved ecosystems alive. Sand dunes are my primary topographical evidence of this fact.
After two miles of a winding course along the marsh, passing tidal pools full of young fish, we took one of four established paths across the dunes to the beach. Halfway through the sand-canyon, a bird’s song rose from beach heather above our heads. After a minute of triangulating the thin whistling to its source, I saw a horned lark’s head peeking out of a heather-patch.
The beach heather where the lark sang was rooted to the narrow ridge of the dune, the preservation of which depended on Priya and I, and others like us, walking on the gravel-enforced trail and not treading on the dune’s base.
Horned larks, like many grassland birds, make their nests on the ground. Their protection lies in their skill at hiding the nest, the scope of the habitat, and our continuing goodwill.
Return the National Parks to the Tribes
All 85 million acres of national-park sites should be turned over to a consortium of federally recognized tribes in the United States. (A few areas run by the National Park Service, such as the National Mall, would be excepted.) The total acreage would not quite make up for the General Allotment Act, which robbed us of 90 million acres, but it would ensure that we have unfettered access to our tribal homelands. And it would restore dignity that was rightfully ours. To be entrusted with the stewardship of America’s most precious landscapes would be a deeply meaningful form of restitution. Alongside the feelings of awe that Americans experience while contemplating the god-rock of Yosemite and other places like it, we could take inspiration in having done right by one another.
David Treuer’s piece in The Atlantic proposing the return of the national parks to Indigenous peoples is well worth your time. Treuer, a Leech Lake Ojibwe writer, has thought out many of the practical aspects of the idea. The act would both provide material support to Native Americans as well as deeply symbolic stewardship of some of the continent’s most sacred places. It would also ensure that people devoted to the long-term endurance of these ecosystems would be responsible for their care.
Treuer spends most of the piece focusing on the enormous parks of the West. But I think, too, of what it would mean for Scotts Bluff National Monument, a small park with high slopes looming above Scottsbluff, Neb., to be in Native hands again. Or Acadia National Park in Maine, a place of surpassing beauty a few hours from large Northeastern cities. To have Native Americans in charge of the storytelling and land management at these places has the potential to reorient environmentalism in this country, re-centering it on the understanding that “land empowers the people it sustains.”
Plant of the week: Bear oak
On the granitic slopes outside Boston, a shrub is coming into bloom: bear oak (Quercus ilicifolia), a low-growing but high-placed relative of neighborhood oak trees. Look for it on hilltops and openings all along the Appalachians and hills to the east. In summer, its leaves look like this:
The name references bears’ fondness for the upper-altitude acorns offered by these shrubs, despite their bitterness. Acorns from oak shrubs and trees are particularly important in bears’ diets during the fall.
Also known as scrub oak, this species tells me I’ve reached a certain altitude in a climb: the place where wind and geology make it more practical to be a low-growing shrub than a lofty pine. The place where pitch pines become more sculpturally shaped, more storm-inflected.
Bear oak reminds me of the continuing presence of large mammals in the northeast, and the harsh geological facts of life on high granite.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.