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Searching the Past for a Sustainable Future on Cape Cod

Cape Cod's salt marshes drew early European settlers with the promise of lush grazing and plentiful hay for cattle.
Photo courtesy of the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management
Cape Cod's salt marshes drew early European settlers with the promise of lush grazing and plentiful hay for cattle.

For thousands of years, native Americans lived on Cape Cod, fishing, farming, and managing the forests in a sustainable way. Then, along came European settlers who, in the span of a few hundred years, fished out the oceans, deforested the land, and depleted the soil.

In the late 1800's, as local resources - from cod and whales, to lumber and salt - collapsed or became economically unviable, enterprising Cape Codders devised a new basis for the economy: tourism. But the resulting development of the Cape has taken (and continues to take) it's own toll, interrupting the natural movement of coastlines and clogging coastal waterways with nutrient-fueled algal blooms.

InCape Cod: An Environmental History of a Fragile Ecosystem, historian John Cumbler, tells a more detailed, nuanced version of this story, and gives it an optimistic, if not happy, ending. Cumbler says he sees signs that Cape Cod is moving toward a more sustainable future. He doesn't imagine a return to the ways of native Americans, but rather, envisions a melding of tourism and local resource extraction - tourist dollars supporting small-scale, local fishing, farming, and salt-works.

Of course, he also acknowledges that he's been accused of being the kind of incurable optimist who, if he fell off a ship in the middle of the ocean, would simply start swimming. Still, as the old saying goes, if we don't know our history, we are doomed to repeat it. Cumbler's Cape Cod is nothing if not a comprehensive account of the peninsula's environmental history.

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