Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (25 page)

Pinchot and Muir clashed in epic turf wars that still rage today. Is nature a resource to be used or a sanctuary to be protected? Pinchot bashed Muir for locking up natural resources: “The mere preservation of a romantic and picturesque spot should not take precedence over the urgent needs of great masses of human beings for the necessities of life.” Muir decried Pinchot’s economic motivation to turn every tree and waterfall into money: “These temple-destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature. Instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, they lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”

By the middle of the twentieth century, national forests were used mainly for timber harvesting, and many national parks had become tourist attractions managed to maximize visitation. Neither jived with the pure wilderness protection ideals of Thoreau and Muir. Stronger measures for wilderness preservation were needed.

Along came Aldo Leopold. He was a U.S. Forest Service ranger who initially supported Pinchot’s use-oriented management of forests. A seasoned hunter, he had long believed that good game management required killing predators that preyed on deer. Then one afternoon, hunting with a friend on a mountain in New Mexico, he spied a mother wolf and her cubs, took aim, and shot them. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” Leopold wrote. “There was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the fierce green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

The wolf’s fierce green fire inspired Leopold to extend ethics beyond the boundaries of the human family to include the larger community of animals, plants, and even soil and water. He enshrined this natural code of conduct in his famous land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Carol inscribed Leopold’s land ethic in her journal when she was a teenager and has steadfastly followed it throughout her life. She believes that it changes our role from conqueror of the earth to plain member and citizen of it.

Leopold led the effort to create the first federally protected wilderness area: a half million acres of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico was designated as wilderness in 1924. Leopold had laid the groundwork for a national wilderness system, interconnected oases of biodiversity permanently protected from human development.

Wilderness became the most fiercely contested idea in conservation history. It was vigorously opposed by the lumber, oil, cattle, and mining industries, which echoed Pinchot in criticizing the lockup of natural resources. It revived religious arguments against the pagan wild. Timber baron William Hunt lashed out at the “woodsy witch doctors of a revived ancient nature cult,” and Cumberland Island developer Charles Fraser later characterized wilderness advocates as “druids who worship trees and sacrifice human beings to those trees.” Other wilderness opponents argued that the land belonged to man, not animals. Nature was not a divine cathedral but a mosquito-ridden hell. It needed the human hand to transform it into something useful and beneficial.

As the debate over wilderness raged, a reclusive female marine biologist helped launch the modern environmental movement. In 1962 Rachel Carson published
Silent Spring
, which showed that pesticides like DDT kill far more than the pests at which they are aimed. They nearly wiped out the bald eagle, symbol of American freedom and wildness. Carson became one of the most important scientists of the century who strikingly linked nature’s health with our own. “Man is a part of nature,” she wrote, “and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

Carson was the first modern female voice of the wild—and an inspiration to young Carol Ruckdeschel. Rachel Carson was her favorite author and scientist. As a teenager, Carol read everything that Carson had written, including three books about islands, the sea, and biodiversity. Carson combined a romantic love of nature with the cool analytical mind of a trained scientist and the controlled passion of a political activist—a model that Carol would follow on Cumberland more than a decade later.

Carson was also one of the first to link science to wilderness. Wilderness offered an evolutionary baseline of how healthy ecosystems maintain themselves, she argued. Wilderness areas were places for pilgrimage into our species’ past, where we could temporarily strip away the thin veneer of civilization to rediscover the deep evolutionary flow that shaped us.

Her research fueled the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which would permanently protect the purest and most pristine pockets of nature in America’s existing public lands as “an enduring reservoir of wilderness.” The bill passed almost unanimously. Upon signing the Wilderness Act into law on September 3, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.”

It was the first piece of legislation to acknowledge an inherent value to nature and—even more radically—to give nature precedence over civilization on these last scraps of American wildlands. The United States was the first country ever to set aside lands for their intrinsic natural values. Today, America’s wilderness is the largest and most biologically diverse system of protected lands in the world.

Wilderness has been called America’s best idea yet. It’s also one of our most controversial—and Cumberland Island is a magnifying lens for the wilderness wars. Over a century after Pinchot and Muir first clashed, their philosophies remain locked in battle over the future of America’s wilderness: wise use versus wild sanctuaries. Wise use is prevailing, but the devoted cult of wilderness has succeeded in expanding the wilderness preservation system. Today there are 704 wilderness areas totaling 107 million acres.

That’s still not much. Only 2 percent of the continental United States is protected as wilderness. The United States has more theme parks than wilderness areas. East of the Mississippi, there are more acres of pavement than wilderness. Now more than ever, wilderness is an endangered geographical species. And nowhere is it more imperiled than on Cumberland Island.

16

A heated wilderness debate in the early 1980s was already raging on Cumberland Island when, on a coal-black night, Carol saw flickering light through the trees—fire.

Lightning had ignited a pine near Lake Whitney, and soon the entire forest was ablaze. Park rangers were evacuating the island, and fire crews were clear-cutting giant swaths of forest as firebreaks. Island families frantically packed up belongings and loaded them onto boats.

Jesse Bailey, half-drunk and hungover, sprawled out in a stupor beside the road. Strong southerly winds were whipping the wildfire closer to the Candler property, and a park ranger came racing up the road to help them evacuate by boat.

“Dammit, Jesse, get out of the way!” he shouted.

The midnight horizon was eerily orange. The Candlers backed up trucks to their houses and loaded them with rugs and keepsakes. The fire swept closer. Jesse didn’t move.

“You better get on that boat,” the ranger warned Jesse. “The whole north end is going up in flames.”

“The fire will stop when it hits them big oaks,” Jesse said.

Sure enough, the fire arrived at the wall of live oak trees ringing the Candler compound and abruptly fizzled. A few flickers of flame flared in the duff, but the blaze had burned out before their eyes.

Living on barrier islands his entire life, Jesse knew that oaks were a natural firebreak. Long before fire hydrants and helicopter fire crews, Jesse and his kin had learned how forest fires moved. They welcomed wildfires, which were a regular and restorative part of island life—as natural and necessary as rain showers, as regular as the tides in replenishing life.

Smokey the Bear was wrong. Fire had been suppressed and extinguished on public lands since 1911, causing choked combustible understories of brush to accumulate. Wildfires are natural and healthy, but when smothered for a century they swell into raging infernos that are far more severe and catastrophic. Worst of all, fire suppression doesn’t work. Under fire suppression policies, wildfires have grown larger, hotter, and more destructive. Acreage burned by wildfires has quadrupled since 1980.

Scientists and land managers are starting to realize the essential role of wildfire in maintaining healthy forests. After wildfires, the thick understory is cleared, allowing light to reach the forest floor and new growth to emerge. Tick and parasite populations are dramatically reduced. Soil fertility is enriched by the ash. Birds flourish, their nests protected from predators below by the burned-out understory. Some species of trees, like the pond pine, even require wildfire to regenerate. Its pine cones only shed seeds in the presence of searing heat.

Although the island wildfire had stopped before reaching the Candler compound, farther south it continued to blaze. Carol was staked out nearby, photographing the fire. Smoke burned her throat. She felt heat from the fire pulsing through the scorched pines. Fingers of orange and black seeped across the forest, cracking and popping in mossy wet logs.

Then she heard the helicopter overhead. It had scooped saltwater from the ocean into a one-thousand-gallon bucket that hung by a cable from its skids. The chopper was dumping saltwater onto the island’s freshwater ponds, lakes, and forests and spraying the wilderness with poisonous fire retardants.

Carol was incensed. Smothering an entire freshwater-dependent forest with saltwater and retardants would devastate the wildlife there. She wanted photographs of the deadly rain of saltwater and toxins, so she crept closer to the heart of the fire.

She hid behind an oak as the chopper returned from the ocean with its full bucket and hovered directly overhead. Carol snapped her camera three times before a wall of water fell toward her. She scrambled out of the way and dove just a few feet from the thundering slam of half a ton of water. Trees snapped and crashed beneath the weight of the deluge.

A few days later, Carol stormed into the superintendent’s office and slapped the photos on his desk. “You’re supposed to be protecting the island, not poisoning it!” she said.

“I did what was necessary to ensure public safety,” the superintendent replied.

“The island needs fire. Without it, you’ll lose the endangered wood storks and a bunch of other wildlife. The longleaf pines will disappear.”

The superintendent cleared his throat. “To be perfectly candid, Carol, as long as we don’t lose any houses or human lives, it really doesn’t matter.”

Wildfire had fanned the flames of the wilderness wars on Cumberland in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the name of fire safety, the park could bulldoze ancient forests, cut new roads, and spray chemicals across the island. The National Park Service could be just as dangerous as developers, Carol believed. They weren’t stewards of nature for the common good. They were deliverers of a nature experience to their customers.

The National Park Service had recently announced plans for developing Cumberland Island into a vast tourist resort for one million annual visitors. Plans included a conference center, hotels, and a network of paved roads and beachfront developments. A wastewater treatment plant would be built atop the island’s most treasured archaeological site near Brickhill Bluff. A fleet of twelve ferries would run nonstop from the mainland. Tour buses would shuttle visitors all over the island and out to the beach, where they would congregate along boardwalks with concession stands and gift shops.

At first, Carol wanted to bury her head in the sand. But she had vowed to fight for Cumberland. She couldn’t let one of the country’s last wild islands become yet another road-filled resort. Cumberland sheltered over one thousand different kinds of plants and animal species, including a dozen endangered species. The island was an integral hub along the Atlantic Flyway, an aerial highway for migrating birds. It was home to the most fecund saltwater marshes and largest old-growth live oak forest in the country.

She had made a promise and she intended to keep it: If she was going to stay on Cumberland, she was going to give nature a voice in the fight. She dove headfirst into the fray.

From the start, it was a gamble. She was a wild card, and the deck was stacked against her. The National Park Service, state and local leaders, the Carnegie families, and even several environmental groups already supported the tourist resort proposal.

Politically, Carol was clueless. She was a loner living in the wilderness. She had no people skills, she didn’t understand the National Park Service bureaucracy, and she certainly wasn’t familiar with federal agencies’ revenue streams or cost-benefit analysis. She knew little about environmental law and even less about public policy. Most of her friends were four-legged and either furry or flippered.

Unlike the deep-pocketed Carnegies, she couldn’t buy influence or political power. She couldn’t call her congressmen—she didn’t even have a phone. She had no constituency and spoke for no organization or voting block. She was a nobody, and she knew it.

Her only hope was to rally the American people. Ironically, the best chance for saving Cumberland was for the public to choose self-restraint over self-indulgence. Could they love an island enough to leave it alone? Would they be willing to voluntarily limit their visitation to keep Cumberland wild? It seemed unlikely, but it was her only play. She was betting everything on wilderness, and she anted up the next three years of her life.

Though she didn’t have a rolodex of political heavyweights, she did have one friend in a very high place. Her old boss and fellow river rat Jimmy Carter was now president of the United States.

She had an ace up her sleeve, but she couldn’t play that card until she had a seat at the table. She wrote letters to conservation leaders in Atlanta and quickly assembled a team of grassroots activists who could build a movement. She got the newspapers and national media interested in the island. Most importantly, she launched a grassroots letter-writing campaign aimed at not only stopping the park’s development plan, but also creating a federally designated wilderness on Cumberland.

“Environmentalists are always on the defensive,” Carol observed. “Their only hope is to stop the next rotten deal or to block the next bad bill. They can never win with that strategy.”

Carol believed the best defense was a good offense. The National Park Service had proposed a tourist playground. In response, Carol proposed designating the entire northern half of the island as wilderness.

“People are tired of fighting against things. They want something to fight
for
. An island wilderness is something that people can believe in,” Carol told her core crew of conservationists in Atlanta.

Among them was a twenty-six-year-old creative writing major and Sierra Club volunteer named Bill Mankin. He had just recently joined the Sierra Club, barely scraping up $10 to cover his membership dues. At his first meeting, the Atlanta chapter nominated him to lead the Cumberland Island committee. It seemed like a safe, easy way to get his feet wet. The national seashore had just opened, and everyone was enchanted by it. Surely there was not much controversy yet surrounding the nation’s newest national seashore. Then he met Carol.

“She instantly drew me in,” Bill said. “Whenever she talked about the island, she glowed with fire, and everyone around her wanted to catch some of her warmth.”

Bill became the lead coordinator for the Cumberland Island wilderness campaign in Congress. He traveled to D.C. on his own dime to meet with representatives and lobby for wilderness on Cumberland. But it was Carol who fueled the fight.

“The wilderness was Carol’s idea,” he explained. “She was the inspiration for our perspiration. She knew everything that was happening on Cumberland, even behind closed doors. She was the island’s watchdog and bulldog.”

Carol had literally drawn a line in the sand. Nearly all of the island’s historic structures were on the southern half of the island, including the Dungeness ruins and the Stafford slave chimneys. The National Park Service and the Greyfield Inn could run vehicle tours on the southern half of Cumberland. But under Carol’s plan, the northern half would be forever preserved as federally designated wilderness.

“The park is gonna keep hatching plans to develop the island. We’ll be fighting them constantly,” Carol reasoned. “But if we can get the island designated as wilderness, then we’ve got it protected permanently. Instead of fighting endless battles, let’s try to win the war.”

Not everyone liked Carol’s approach. Nearly all of the environmental groups initially supported the park’s development plan. Many thought Carol’s wilderness proposal was too radical and unrealistic. Only one environmental leader from Atlanta, Hans Neuhauser, liked Carol’s game plan and eventually joined her team.

“Carol is extreme, but so are the problems we face,” he said. “She puts herself way out there, where most people are afraid to go. She is uncompromising—sometimes frustratingly so. But we need people like Carol to hold the line.”

Hans was a giant hulking German with a gentle voice. A pillar of the conservation community, Hans was well connected in the political arena and helped draft a Cumberland Island wilderness bill for Congress based on Carol’s recommendations.

“She drew the wilderness map for the island,” Hans explained. “She had the on-the-ground knowledge for the Cumberland campaign. She spearheaded the grassroots effort. I talked to lawyers and legislators, but it was Carol that inspired the movement.”

Newspaper reporter Robert Coram also played a key role in Carol’s wilderness campaign. Though he disliked Carol for breaking up with his friend John Pennington, Coram joined forces with her in criticizing the park’s tourist resort plan. He wrote a series of scathing editorials in the
Atlanta Constitution
, which earned him a Pulitzer nomination. The National Park Service was soon flooded with thousands of letters and phone calls opposing its development plans and supporting a wilderness on Cumberland.

“Leave Cumberland Island alone. Georgia’s crown jewel sparkles in its own light,” wrote Sandy Colhard, a Marietta housewife. “Turning Cumberland into a tourist trap would be like painting a road sign over a Picasso,” wrote Benjamin Murphy, an artist from Savannah. Most of the four thousand responses were summarized in a single statement by Roger Buerki, a carpenter from Atlanta: “This is a plea from the heart: keep Cumberland wild.”

The feds were stunned by the flood of public response. They received more letters about Cumberland than even the big heartthrob parks out West like Yosemite and Yellowstone. “We didn’t expect this,” said National Park Service spokesman Paul Winegar. “I know of no national park anywhere in the country that arouses the feeling Cumberland does.”

Already the National Park Service had spent millions buying the national seashore, and the service had hoped to recoup its investment through visitation revenues. Cumberland Island superintendent Paul McCrary had spent years drafting the tourism and development proposal for the national seashore. He sure as hell wasn’t about to let Carol’s ragtag band of wilderness warriors wreck his plans.

McCrary envisioned the country’s newest national park becoming its most visited. Fortunately for McCrary, most of the higher-ups in the National Park Service still supported his development proposal, despite the rising tide of public opposition to his plan.

McCrary was short and stout, with tightly cropped hair and an angular face. He despised Carol and the whole idea of wilderness. Carol didn’t think much of him, either. “He’s a mouth breather. If his IQ were any lower, he’d have to be watered twice a day,” she said.