Shell Island Newspaper Articles

Reprinted by permission of The News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina

December 8, 1999

The News & Observer

...Real people vs. idealized nature

By Edwin M. Yoder Jr.

Page: A23

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- As the owner of a unit at the endangered Shell Island Resort who has invested thousands of dollars in the prolonged attempt to save it, I am appalled to learn that yet another round of petitioning by "environmentalist' militants threatens to delay, again, the proposed Mason Inlet dredging project.

This, after years of obstruction by official bodies of the State of North Carolina unnecessarily prolonged and aggravated the erosion crisis. The interference of these groups and bodies, however warranted by legal technicalities, could well thwart the project altogether, allowing the destruction of millions of dollars of valuable property on Wrightsville Beach and Figure Eight Island.

(The dredging project aims to stop the erosion of land on the north end of Wrightsville Beach as Mason Inlet migrates south, threatening the condominium hotel.)

I note in a recent item in the Wilmington Star that a biologist with the Coastal Federation explained: "There's enough uncertainty that we feel it deserves an (Environmental Impact Statement)."

Such a rationale can be refuted by neither logic nor learning. Of course there is "uncertainty" in any interference with any water table, anywhere, coastal or otherwise - just as there is still greater "uncertainty" in leaving a coastal environment to the random wear of wind, storm and wave. But if "uncertainty" and the fragile "feelings" of biologists are to constitute the standard, then human enterprise on the North Carolina coast - and inland, too - may as well be abandoned and the s tate permitted to revert to the primeval condition of 1585.

Wrightsville Beach has, however, a century of urban history behind it. We are not dealing here with a pristine "natural" site such as the Hatteras seashore. We are dealing with an outpost of human building, concerning which prudent and necessarily uncertain calculations of cost and benefit are appropriate and inevitable.

When those calculations become so complex as the delay and defeat all rational effort, we reach a state of paralysis. In this matter, I suspect that the opponents seek just such paralysis.

The environmentalist groups that continue to interfere with the Mason Inlet project apparently are animated by the idea that there is a static condition known as "nature," upon which any human or civic improvement is a violation, a rape of the appointed order. This is Romantic-era cant; and it is also scientific nonsense. The "nature" they idealize is itself dynamic and unstable; their ideal is an undisturbed wilderness for the few, not a beach of more than a hundred years' existence, offering pleasure and accommodation to millions of visitors.

About a quarter century ago, when the supposed plight of a small creature known as the snail-darter (which plight incidentally turned out to be either imaginary or invented) was delaying a reclamation project in Tennessee, I wrote a teasing editorial in The Washington Star, of which I was then an editor. I said that it appeared that the real goal of the ultra-environmentalists was to turn the Endangered Species Act into a means of stopping the "nasty business" of evolution in its tracks.

I thought of it as a joke. But a well-informed government scientist wrote to tell me that, in fact, what I had treated as a joke was very much the case; and he quoted passages from the congressional debate on the act to prove his point. We can be sure of one thing: No human effort, however wise, will accomplish so presumptuous a goal, at Wrightsville or elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the monitors of our recreational pleasures assume a sanctimonious air of moral superiority in which they become heroes and the rest of us are portrayed as vandals relishing the desecration of God's handiwork. This is as outrageous an imposture as could be devised in a civilized society; and it is time to call the bluff of those who exploit and benefit from it.

I have a suggestion: Those who invariably find elaborate legal and environmental reasons to oppose and obstruct any human management of the natural environment should be required to back up their intervention by posting a cash bond equivalent to the financial stake of those of us whose property their officiousness imperils.

Whenever their protests turn out to be bogus and damaging - as I firmly believe they are and will be in the case of the Mason Inlet dredging project - these bonds should be forfeited. The proceeds should be paid into a conservation fund for use in the public interest, preferably the renourishment of our beaches.

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(Edwin M. Yoder Jr., whose syndicated columns appeared regularly on this page until his retirement as a columnist in 1996, is a professor of journalism and humanities at Washington and Lee University.)

Section: Editorial/Opinion
Edition: Final
Estimated Printed Pages: 3

Index Terms:
NC
coast
environment
Shell Island Resort

Copyright 1999 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.

Record Number: fmfao089