Cumberland Island Quotes

Kids reveal an obvious truth: natural wonder is built in to us,” she wrote in her journal. “We are instinctively attracted to nature.” Nature tugs on us like gravity, Carol believed. We travel long distances to stand atop mountains or stroll along seashores for reasons we can’t quite put into words. Nature keeps alive a childlike wonder and enables us to see the world anew through fresh eyes.

A few years ago, Ed and I were exploring the dunes on Cumberland Island, one of the barrier islands between the Atlantic Ocean and the mainland of south Georgia. He was looking for the fossilized teeth of long-dead sharks. I was looking for sand spurs so that I did not step on one. This meant that neither of us was looking very far past our own feet, so the huge loggerhead turtle took us both by surprise. She was still alive but just barely, her shell hot to the touch from the noonday sun. We both knew what had happened. She had come ashore during the night to lay her eggs, and when she had finished, she had looked around for the brightest horizon to lead her back to the sea. Mistaking the distant lights on the mainland for the sky reflected on the ocean, she went the wrong way. Judging by her tracks, she had dragged herself through the sand until her flippers were buried and she could go no farther. We found her where she had given up, half cooked by the sun but still able to turn one eye up to look at us when we bent over her. I buried her in cool sand while Ed ran to the ranger station. An hour later she was on her back with tire chains around her front legs, being dragged behind a park service Jeep back toward the ocean. The dunes were so deep that her mouth filled with sand as she went. Her head bent so far underneath her that I feared her neck would break. Finally the Jeep stopped at the edge of the water. Ed and I helped the ranger unchain her and flip her back over. Then all three of us watched as she lay motionless in the surf. Every wave brought her life back to her, washing the sand from her eyes and making her shell shine again. When a particularly large one broke over her, she lifted her head and tried her back legs. The next wave made her light enough to find a foothold, and she pushed off, back into the water that was her home. Watching her swim slowly away after her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.

geography of life. Home is not just shelter, nor is it simply the scenic backdrop to our lives. Places shape people. Home comes from the Sanskrit word aham, meaning self. Where we are determines who we are. It’s why we take pride in our hometowns and root for the home team.

Rivers flood our tallest levees and break through our mightiest dams. Beaches keep moving, despite jetty walls and truckloads of imported sand. “Our domination of nature is a delusion,” Carol says. “We cannot exempt ourselves from nature’s ironclad laws. We cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet.” Mother Nature is a tough old broad. Like the humble tortoise lining up against the hotshot hare, she will outlast us. We can’t sustain our blustery sprint to the front of the pack. Our current reign has lasted fewer than ten thousand years—barely a blip in the earth’s four-billion-year history. Our supremacy is short-lived, and our species’ future is uncertain. Only one thing is for sure: we need Mother Nature a lot more than she needs us.

In 1969, NASA scientist James Lovelock noticed something unusual happening in the earth’s atmosphere: inexplicably, its balance of oxygen and other gases was regulating itself like a thermostat. But what was doing the regulating? He looked at other planetary processes—including the stable concentration of ocean salinity and the cycling of nutrients—and came to a startling conclusion: the earth is alive. He proposed that the earth is a superorganism—one giant living system that includes not just animals and plants but rocks, gases, and soil—acting together as if the planet was a single living being. Its bodily systems, such as the water cycle and nitrogen cycle, are balanced to maintain life on earth. The throb of the tides was the systole and diastole of the earth, and water coursed like blood through its veins. We proud humans may simply be microbes on the surface of a superbeing whose entirety we cannot fully comprehend. Like the bacteria in our body, is it possible that we, too, are part of a larger living earth, a speck on the eyeball of the universe? Tree roots break the sidewalk. Dandelions spring through the cracks. Insects grow resistant to pesticides

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.

Carol built her cabin in the wilderness for many of the same reasons as Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, Carol was a student of nature and a geographical extension of the wilderness that surrounded her. Both explored a life stripped down to its essentials. They wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau believed wilderness provided a necessary counterbalance to the materialism and urbanization of industrialized America. It was a place of self-renewal and contact with the raw material of life. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he famously wrote. Thoreau was among the first to advocate for protecting America’s vanishing wildlands, proposing that the nation formally preserve “a certain sample of wild nature . . . a network of national preserves in which the bear and the panther may still exist and not be civilized off the face of the earth.” Wilderness preserves could provide a perpetual frontier to keep overindustrialized Americans in contact with the primitive honesty of the woods. In 1872—the same year that Tom and Andy founded Carnegie Steel—America designated its first national park: over two million acres in northwest Wyoming were set aside as Yellowstone National Park. A second national park soon followed, thanks to the inspiration of Sierra Club founder John Muir. He so loved the Sierra that he proposed a fifteen-hundred-square-mile park around Yosemite Valley and spent decades fighting for it. When Yosemite National Park was finally signed into law in 1890, Muir

She found it a lot easier to communicate with her parents on paper. In

Cumberland Island was like no place Carolyn had ever seen. Remote, untouched by industry or technology, maybe forty people total lived on this strip of land situated between Florida and Georgia. Its pristine beaches were the domain of wild horses and enormous sea turtles and resembled a land before time, before humans existed. The only place to stay was a mansion-turned-inn, run by descendants of Andrew Carnegie. On the other end of the island was a tiny white chapel built in 1893. John wanted them to be

Since 1948 conservatives and liberals in Congress have given unstinted support to “anti-communist” governments around the world. Men whose revolutionary forebears died for the slogan “Death to tyrants!” have voted vast slush funds for Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy and one of the few lands where human chattel slavery is still legal. Predictably, much of the money—including some from the ragged pockets of Kentucky coal miners—was lavished on palaces and concubines. Even Marshall Tito, when he became restive under Russian pressure, found fifteen hundred million American dollars flowing into his coffers. The question may then be fairly asked, “If we can afford to subsidize autocratic medieval kings, a communist dictator whose expressed ideology is a detestation of our liberties, and every conceivable shade of political and economic thinking in between, can we fail to spare the funds and efforts required to convert an island of destitution within our own country into a working, self-sustaining partner in the nation’s freedom and progress?

Nennius tells us, what Gildas omits, the name of the British soldier who won the crowning mercy of Mount Badon, and that name takes us out of the mist of dimly remembered history into the daylight of romance. There looms, large, uncertain, dim but glittering, the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Somewhere in the Island a great captain gathered the forces of Roman Britain and fought the barbarian invaders to the death. Around him, around his name and his deeds, shine all that romance and poetry can bestow. Twelve battles, all located in scenes untraceable, with foes unknown, except that they were heathen, are punctiliously set forth in the Latin of Nennius. Other authorities say, “No Arthur; at least, no proof of any Arthur.” It was only when Geoffrey of Monmouth six hundred years later was praising the splendours of feudalism and martial aristocracy that chivalry, honour, the Christian faith, knights in steel and ladies bewitching, are enshrined in a glorious circle lit by victory. Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson. True or false, they have gained an immortal hold upon the thoughts of men. It is difficult to believe it was all an invention of a Welsh writer. If it was he must have been a marvellous inventor. Modern research has not accepted the annihilation of Arthur. Timidly but resolutely the latest and best-informed writers unite to proclaim his reality. They cannot tell when in this dark period he lived, or where he held sway and fought his battles. They are ready to believe however that there was a great British warrior, who kept the light of civilisation burning against all the storms that beat, and that behind his sword there sheltered a faithful following of which the memory did not fail. All four groups of the Celtic tribes which dwelt in the tilted uplands of Britain cheered themselves with the Arthurian legend, and each claimed their own region as the scene of his exploits. From Cornwall to Cumberland a search for Arthur’s realm or sphere has been pursued.The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning. One specimen of this method will suffice: "It is reasonably certain that a petty chieftain named Arthur did exist, probably in South Wales. It is possible that he may have held some military command uniting the tribal forces of the Celtic or highland zone or part of it against raiders and invaders (not all of them necessarily Teutonic). It is also possible that he may have engaged in all or some of the battles attributed to him; on the other hand, this attribution may belong to a later date." This is not much to show after so much toil and learning. Nonetheless, to have established a basis of fact for the story of Arthur is a service which should be respected. In this account we prefer to believe that the story with which Geoffrey delighted the fiction-loving Europe of the twelfth century is not all fancy. If we could see exactly what happened we should find ourselves in the presence of a theme as well founded, as inspired, and as inalienable from the inheritance of mankind as the Odyssey or the Old Testament. It is all true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides. And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round. Let us then declare that King Arthur and his noble knights, guarding the Sacred Flame of Christianity and the theme of a world order, sustained by valour, physical strength, and good horses and armour, slaughtered innumerable hosts of foul barbarians and set decent folk an example for all time.