How does that happen? Mostly, it's the result of a mixture of hubris and inadvertence. Humans, stuck on themselves, think they know it all. Others are convinced "all it takes is the idea" (the ExxonMobil slogan) and, as it was in the beginning, man says the word and nature is obedient.
Fortunately, the age of electronics has made it possible to virtually eliminate inadvertence. We can look ahead and simulate what will happen, if we repeat the mistakes of the past. That's what James Holland is doing with the various projects at Cannon's Point in the marshes on the coast of Georgia. Holland is superimposing the planned erection of a monster dock in a little tidal creek to demonstrate how erosion will occur, just as it did before. The only difference is that when the site was a fish camp, people fished for a living. What's being proposed as the Cannon's Point Preserve is an eco-park for edu/tainment purposes. That's where the good intentions come in.
The Saint Simons Land Trust people are big on management and proud of it. That's what "offering the community limited access" means. If the ecology and the history are to be protected, people have to be restricted. Can't have people, especially people with children, wandering about willy nilly. Which is probably why some lucky winners of a lottery were invited to bring in their kids and hunt the deer, under the supervision, of course, of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Having been adjudged too numerous, the wild herd needs to be thinned.
Our local paper, The Brunswick News, interviewed Mr. Holland, whose ad had caused quite a stir, and published the story in the dead of night, but then withdrew it, but not before some early risers had got ahold of it.
It wasn't a one-sided story. The St. Simons Land Trust got to explain its eleemosynary intent.
The land trust’s executive director said Wednesday that his organization has not made a single penny off of the limited hunts and has no plans of doing so. He said the Department of Natural Resources hunts are necessary to control a growing herd of deer that has become overpopulated.
Management. That's the ticket. It's a mistake to think that the Department of Natural Resources serves the interests of Mother Nature and the wild things in her domain. No, the mission of the DNR is to manage and maintain order and that includes people.
Which explains, for another example, why our little marsh rivers are becoming littered with docks.
The Georgia legislature has, in its wisdom, granted individual property owners the option to erect docks in state waters, as long as they own the banks, as many of the homeowners on Dunbar Creek apparently do. Though not all. The red line in the image from the county's property maps (which all 159 Georgia counties have available online) indicates ownership by an indulgent corporate entity. Why the DNR countenances this kind of "poaching" is a puzzlement, since it makes it virtually impossible to prohibit construction that's inappropriate (interferes with traffic in the waterway or damages the marsh).
In addition to wanting to call attention to this public information resource that's available in Georgia and likely other states, I'm posting these images because the proposed building of a dock off Cannon's Point is doubly questionable, aside from being inappropriate for such a small body of water. The first reason it's questionable is because, unlike other docks in the area, the one proposed by the Land Trust would not be serving an individual property owner or household. And the second reason is that the marsh and creek slated to be disrupted don't even belong to the Land Trust. As is their won't, the Sea Island people sold off the high land (for twenty five million dollars) and kept the 1264 acres of surrounding
marsh (appraised at a mere fifty thousand dollars) for themselves. (Imagine owning more than twelve hundred acres and paying just $415 in tax!)
I suspect one of the reasons Google Earth is so popular is because things on the ground almost invariably look attractive from up high. That's certainly true of most of the pictures James Holland takes of the machines in the garden and the offensive monsters in the marshes. However, this one seems to be an exception. It's not a pretty picture.
Our governmental agencies are well practiced at redefining insults to nature by virtue of their good intentions, so whether or not these frivolous man-made obstructions are illegal or unlawful is largely irrelevant. They're the useless and carelessly intrusive signature of vandals.
"Killjoy was Here" is what they announce.
We should make such erections socially unacceptable--a fad we can do without.
"Machines in the Garden" and "Monsters in the Marsh" Evidently, Adam still hasn't learned from being expelled from the Garden of Eden and, unable to keep his hands to himself, still has to be expelled from the likes of the Marshes of Glynn.