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The Atlantic Shore: Human and Natural History from Long Island to Labrador,
A history of the northeastern coast, its vegetation and wildlife and the men who settled there
- GenresAmerican History
Hardcover
First published December 1, 1966
13 people want to read
About the author
John Hay
554 books5 followersJohn Milton Hay (October 8, 1838 – July 1, 1905) was an American statesman & official, lawyer and writer; his career in government stretched over almost half a century. Beginning as a private secretary and assistant to Abraham Lincoln, Hay's highest office was United States Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay was also an author and biographer, and wrote poetry and other literature throughout much of his life.
John Hay was born on October 8, 1838, in Salem, Indiana, but spent most of his youth in Warsaw, Illinois. The third son of Dr. Charles Hay and Helen Leonard, Hay moved to Illinois when he was 13 years old to study at an academy in Pittsfield. There, he met John Nicolay, with whom he would later work as a private secretary for President Abraham Lincoln. A year later, in 1852, Hay left for Springfield College. After completing his early education, he was accepted into Brown University, his grandfather's alma mater.
While studying at Brown, Hay developed a strong interest in literature, particularly poetry. He became actively involved in Providence’s literary community, which included Nora Perry and Sarah Helen Whitman, who had been engaged to Edgar Allan Poe. Upon graduating from Brown, Hay was named "class poet," but he left school before receiving his diploma at the university's official commencement ceremony. After graduation, he returned home to Warsaw, Illinois, where he studied law and worked for his uncle, Milton Hay's law office.
The law office where Hay worked was next door to Abraham Lincoln's law office and, as a result of their close proximity, Hay and the future president became acquaintances. Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1861 and he chose John Nicolay, Hay's childhood classmate, as his secretary. Nicolay subsequently recommended Hay for the position of private secretary to the president. Hay was offered the position, and served in the Lincoln White House from 1861 to 1865.
He went on to serve as the U.S. secretary of state for both William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Arguably his greatest influences were negotiating the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty and promoting an "Open Door" policy in China.
Hay continued to write throughout his life. His literary work includes Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces, a book of poems; the novel The Bread-Winners; and Abraham Lincoln: A History, a historical non-fiction book co-written by John Nicolay.
Hay died on July 1, 1905, in Newbury, New Hampshire.
John Hay was born on October 8, 1838, in Salem, Indiana, but spent most of his youth in Warsaw, Illinois. The third son of Dr. Charles Hay and Helen Leonard, Hay moved to Illinois when he was 13 years old to study at an academy in Pittsfield. There, he met John Nicolay, with whom he would later work as a private secretary for President Abraham Lincoln. A year later, in 1852, Hay left for Springfield College. After completing his early education, he was accepted into Brown University, his grandfather's alma mater.
While studying at Brown, Hay developed a strong interest in literature, particularly poetry. He became actively involved in Providence’s literary community, which included Nora Perry and Sarah Helen Whitman, who had been engaged to Edgar Allan Poe. Upon graduating from Brown, Hay was named "class poet," but he left school before receiving his diploma at the university's official commencement ceremony. After graduation, he returned home to Warsaw, Illinois, where he studied law and worked for his uncle, Milton Hay's law office.
The law office where Hay worked was next door to Abraham Lincoln's law office and, as a result of their close proximity, Hay and the future president became acquaintances. Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1861 and he chose John Nicolay, Hay's childhood classmate, as his secretary. Nicolay subsequently recommended Hay for the position of private secretary to the president. Hay was offered the position, and served in the Lincoln White House from 1861 to 1865.
He went on to serve as the U.S. secretary of state for both William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Arguably his greatest influences were negotiating the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty and promoting an "Open Door" policy in China.
Hay continued to write throughout his life. His literary work includes Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces, a book of poems; the novel The Bread-Winners; and Abraham Lincoln: A History, a historical non-fiction book co-written by John Nicolay.
Hay died on July 1, 1905, in Newbury, New Hampshire.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 3, 2023
Although this book was written about 50 years ago, it's still relevant and fresh, and any out-dated portions - given that we now know what happened in the intervening decades - are also interesting even if they are out-dated. This is an extremely well-written book about nature along the NE shore - from Long Island to Labrador - the sea, the fish, the birds, the plants and the impact of humans (including Native Americans prior to colonial settlement) on the land and sea. It contains fabulous, poetic prose that truly pays tribute to the power of nature along this shoreline - I've never been further north than Massachusetts, but the descriptions of Maine, and Canada were so vivid I could imagine them in my mind's eye. It's also very well-illustrated with informative and charming line drawings so that the plants and creatures referenced can be more easily visualized by the reader. The reader will come away with a greater appreciation and understanding of the complexity of the shoreline - the tides, the fish and bird migrations, the plant life.
I'll add the quotes in the next couple of days.
The quotes:
"Due north of block Island, Verrazano came to "a very beautiful port"--Narragansett Bay--where he remained for two weeks, delighting in the surrounding land's "charming hills with many brooks, which from the height to the sea discharged clean waters." These hills are now fully exploited by human commerce and housing, and the few brooks that still have clear water trickle into a polluted bay."
"Erosion and deposition, building up and taking away, are the processes that continually shape the shore. What the sea removes from one place, it returns to another."
"Except for a slight warming of the ocean waters in this century, and the resulting migration of some cold-water species northward, the conditions still prevail that were responsible for the fertility in marine life which was so impressive to Cartier and Cabot, though for reasons totally unknown to them."
"...what we see today on the coast of Maine is unmistakably the result of the most recent ice age. In it two primary forces were at work. The colossal frozen masses of ice, a mile high in some places impounded an immense amount of the world's supply of water, bringing the level of the sea much lower than it is today and uncovering the coastal plain as dry land."
"For the past 4,000 years or so the sea has stood at approximately the same position in relation to the land..."
"Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Long Island are almost entirely the work of glaciers, a mixture of clay, stones, and boulders resting on submerged banks."
"The upper lobe of the tail, Orient Point, is a morainal ridge, debris left by the last glacier; and the lower, Montauk, was left behind by an earlier advance of the glacier."
"Underwater mapping has revealed that the Hudson's deep-walled, winding, submarine canyon beyond the coastline is comparable to some of the most spectacular canyons on land. This canyon is a continuation of the rocky bed of the Hudson, which attains great depths long before the river arrives at its outlet in the sea. At the Storm King Highlands, not quite fifty miles upstream from Manhattan, the Hudson deepens to about 950 feet, then it becomes relativity shallow until it flows into the offshore channel, where it plunges as deep as 6,600 feet over the continental shelf."
"Where once pure waters yielded up their bounty of shellfish, and sturgeon ran up the river, pollution has long since done its work. The lobsters were all gone by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and where the ten-inch oysters once thrived, the beds that are left have been poisoned beyond redemption."
"...like all great cities, it has become the kind of place where men can concentrate on themselves almost to the exclusion of every other form of life."
"A shore where shattered rock fragments and water-smoothed pebbles are jarred and tumbled and abraded by the constant overturning of the waves gives little shelter for life, and is usually barren. Sand gives little support to seaweeds and none to animals such as barnacles, and on a sandy shore much of life is hidden from view; beneath the surface, sand affords shelter to a large population of burrowing animals such as are usually absent from rocky shores -- worms, certain mollusks, and crustaceans."
"...the horseshoe crab...can survive freezing in the New England ice, is of the same species as basks in the tepid waters of Florida."
"A warming trend in the northern part of the globe appears to have allowed several southern species to survive and reproduce north of the cape [Cod]. The green crab, a predator on clams, was once found only south of the cape, but early in this century it extended its range; it has now spread as far north as Nova Scotia. Several species of fishes found near shore--menhaden, round herring, and whiting, for example --that once were totally absent or very scarce north of the cape, today are often caught along the gulf of Maine. At the same time, cool-water species such as the cod have been deserting the warming waters just north of the cape, and the center of the cod's abundance has now shifted far northward to Greenland."
"The tides are a complex phenomenon; but in general they are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, and to a lesser extent of the sun, upon the waters of the revolving earth."
"In one place on the south shore of Nantucket, measurements over a fourteen-year period revealed that the sea had been claiming an average of seventeen feet of land each year. It has been estimated that most of Cape Cod will be gone in another two thousand years, leaving only some shoals and a few of the higher and wider areas emergent above the sea, and that two thousand years after that even these will have disappeared utterly. The same fate is in prospect for the offshore islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Not that all of this rock, sand, and mud will simply vanish. The currents will carry it elsewhere and deposit it along other shores, building up new beaches, new rolling dunes; in a way this is already happening, for Cape Cod Bay grows shallower every year, and new dry land is being built up near the tip of Cape Cod at Province-town."
"Green plants are at the bottom of every food chain for only they can harness the energy of the sun, by means of photosynthesis, and convert it into food."
"...the path that leads from the primary producers of energy (the countless billions of minute diatoms) to the final consumer (the single human being) shows the ultimate survival of only a tenth of a pound out the original resource at the beginning of the chain of 10,000 pounds."
"Sea birds that nest in colonies--for example, the gannets--have a higher rate of reproduction in proportion to the size and density of the colonies; indeed, sometimes in very small colonies no young are produced at all."
"The original stands along the shore, the virgin, savage, nearly un-surmountable forest, exist only in memory or potentiality. Our mental reconstruction of these forests, described by the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman as "vast, continuous ... dim and silent as a cavern" may be inaccurate, too much colored by the romantic recollections of the last century, although Thoreau's on-the-spot description of the Maine woods makes them dark and deep enough. Longfellow wrote of "the forest primeval," and Parkman amplified his idea of an unbroken forest when he described Verrazano surveying "the shadow and gloom of mighty forests" on the New England shore, Maine as "a waste of savage vegetation," the St. Lawrence River as rolling through the "vastness of lonely woodlands.""
"Practically all northeastern Indians lived in settlements, some large and permanent, others small seasonal camps.Every village, large or small, meant clearing land for shelters and foraging in nearby forests for fuel, food, building materials, and wood for weapons and tools, thus affecting the forests far from their settlements."
"By the time of European settlement, agriculture and burning had spread far northward, even into the Maritime Provinces of Canada."
"Provided there is enough left of the body region to which it is attached, only one arm or ray may be reconstituted into a whole new starfish-- hence the futility of trying to get rid of starfish preying on oyster and clam beds by hacking them to bits."
"In fact, [the starfish] ... is an extremely complex animal despite the complete lack of an excretory system, a primitive respiration system, and no organs of circulation at all as we commonly use the term."
"During the day, for example, the water is usually saturated with oxygen, visible as rising bubbles, because of the photosynthetic activity of algae. At night, both the algae and the animals of the [rock]pool give off carbon dioxide, and the oxygen content may fall below the minimum requirements for certain animals."
"A lobster allowed to attain its full size may weigh thirty pounds, two-thirds of it in the enormous claws."
"Every grain of sand on the beach has had a long history. Before it became sand it was rock, fractured by frost and by tree roots, ground by advancing glaciers and the waves, fractured again, and polished by the surf."
"In Newfoundland some beaches are the dark gray of the local slate. In Nova Scotia, red beaches take their color from the sandstone of which they are largely composed. The "sandy beach" at Acadia National Park in Maine is about sixty per cent quartz; the remaining forty per cent is largely shell fragments, which give it an odd texture, granular but at the same time a little reminiscent of sawdust. Along most of the North Atlantic, though, sandy beaches are made up principally of light-colored quartz grains, plus an assortment of other minerals that usually amount to no more than a tenth of the total mass of sand grains at the beach. Quartz is the most abundant mineral in the rocks of the northern part of the continent, as well as the toughest--the most likely to survive grinding and buffeting and to endure on the beach in the form of transparent grains, hard enough to scratch glass with."
"Grains that have been tossed about by the winds over sand dune are usually frosted from the sandblasting they receive. Waterborne grains are usually more rounded,and often smaller, than the grains found on the upper beach."
"By the early decades of the last century [that is, the 19th C], tree cutting and pasturing on the Cape Cod dunes had been forbidden by law; but it was too late to save the Province-town dunes."
"Much of the damage has now been mended by the construction of a long dike to protect the harbor from being filled in by sand, and by plantings, particularly of beach grass, on the dunes."
"...the winds whipping bare sand and piling it up into barrows and dunes, while the sea ebbed and flowed through the expanse of spits and shoals and islands. In some parts of the coast there are wind-carved stones called ventifacts, whose sheer faces are the result of lying exposed to those cold, sand-driving winds for thousands of years. Pick one up and you touch a prolongation of time."
"...the eel-grass grows in nothing like the quantity it once did. It was apparently attacked by a parasite--though weather cycles have also been blamed--and after 1931 great beds of it disappeared along the Atlantic coast; in fact, it was almost destroyed on both sides of the Atlantic, although it survived along Mediterranean and Pacific shores and it is only now returning in a number of areas along the northeast coast."
"To all the fluctuating and hazardous conditions for life in a estuary, man has added anew one. pollutants, the by-products of his tenure on the land, affect estuaries and their natural lives in a a number of ways. The pollutants in themselves may be toxic, or they may alter the natural balance of the water's constituents by decreasing the oxygen content. Waste settling on the bottom may clog the gills of oysters and other animals. Even without being smothered, oysters suffer from pollution, since the presence of certain substances in the water causes their shells to remain closed, so that the oysters do not feed during the favorable part of the tidal cycle and either starve or are greatly weakened if they survive."
"The surf clam inhabits a stout shell, of classic whiteness, whose concentric lines of growth have the grandeur of all slow accretions - of chalk cliffs, coral reefs, and canyon walls."
"Seacoast marshes may have taken thousands of years to build, growing by slow progression during the post-glacial era when there was a gradual rising of the sea in relation to the land."
"A precise study of the Great Marsh at Barnstable, Massachusetts, has been made by Dr. Alfred C. Redfield of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He reconstructed its state at intervals as far back as 3,300 years ago showing that sea level was then about 18 feet lower than it is now."
"Salt marshes are unmatched assets, with strong ties to our own history, and a natural complexity and abundance which have hardly started to measure."
"Marsh-grown rushes were once woven into chairs and baskets."
"Urban money, very often from outside a community, is required for developments, recreation centers, factories, marinas, parking lots, shopping centers, and so on. The urgencies of population have become so extreme in some regions that a marsh is considered a luxury the community cannot afford. In others, a salt marsh is merely another potential section of land out of which development money can be made."
"The marsh acts as a great sponge, absorbing tremendous amounts of moisture, and as a protective buffer for the land against storm waves and flood tides."
"If a salt marsh merges with a brackish and then a freshwater environment, the transitional zone may be wide and gradual enough to contain any number of life forms. A marsh builds up by plant root systems."
"The marsh environment is wonderfully intricate, and it is irreplaceable."
"...sea turtles, for all their direction-finding ability, and their power and agility as swimmers, are still more or less at the mercy of the ocean currents where they feed."
"The population of harp seals, numbering 3,000,000 as recently as 1951, had been reduced to some 1,250,000 by 1960, and unless strong conservation measures are taken, it may not be many years before the [sealing] industry is obliged to shut down altogether. Such marine visitors as sharks, whales, and seals -- and even the Portuguese man-of-war ... may drift from the Gulf Stream into the shallow waters of southern New England..."
I'll add the quotes in the next couple of days.
The quotes:
"Due north of block Island, Verrazano came to "a very beautiful port"--Narragansett Bay--where he remained for two weeks, delighting in the surrounding land's "charming hills with many brooks, which from the height to the sea discharged clean waters." These hills are now fully exploited by human commerce and housing, and the few brooks that still have clear water trickle into a polluted bay."
"Erosion and deposition, building up and taking away, are the processes that continually shape the shore. What the sea removes from one place, it returns to another."
"Except for a slight warming of the ocean waters in this century, and the resulting migration of some cold-water species northward, the conditions still prevail that were responsible for the fertility in marine life which was so impressive to Cartier and Cabot, though for reasons totally unknown to them."
"...what we see today on the coast of Maine is unmistakably the result of the most recent ice age. In it two primary forces were at work. The colossal frozen masses of ice, a mile high in some places impounded an immense amount of the world's supply of water, bringing the level of the sea much lower than it is today and uncovering the coastal plain as dry land."
"For the past 4,000 years or so the sea has stood at approximately the same position in relation to the land..."
"Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Long Island are almost entirely the work of glaciers, a mixture of clay, stones, and boulders resting on submerged banks."
"The upper lobe of the tail, Orient Point, is a morainal ridge, debris left by the last glacier; and the lower, Montauk, was left behind by an earlier advance of the glacier."
"Underwater mapping has revealed that the Hudson's deep-walled, winding, submarine canyon beyond the coastline is comparable to some of the most spectacular canyons on land. This canyon is a continuation of the rocky bed of the Hudson, which attains great depths long before the river arrives at its outlet in the sea. At the Storm King Highlands, not quite fifty miles upstream from Manhattan, the Hudson deepens to about 950 feet, then it becomes relativity shallow until it flows into the offshore channel, where it plunges as deep as 6,600 feet over the continental shelf."
"Where once pure waters yielded up their bounty of shellfish, and sturgeon ran up the river, pollution has long since done its work. The lobsters were all gone by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and where the ten-inch oysters once thrived, the beds that are left have been poisoned beyond redemption."
"...like all great cities, it has become the kind of place where men can concentrate on themselves almost to the exclusion of every other form of life."
"A shore where shattered rock fragments and water-smoothed pebbles are jarred and tumbled and abraded by the constant overturning of the waves gives little shelter for life, and is usually barren. Sand gives little support to seaweeds and none to animals such as barnacles, and on a sandy shore much of life is hidden from view; beneath the surface, sand affords shelter to a large population of burrowing animals such as are usually absent from rocky shores -- worms, certain mollusks, and crustaceans."
"...the horseshoe crab...can survive freezing in the New England ice, is of the same species as basks in the tepid waters of Florida."
"A warming trend in the northern part of the globe appears to have allowed several southern species to survive and reproduce north of the cape [Cod]. The green crab, a predator on clams, was once found only south of the cape, but early in this century it extended its range; it has now spread as far north as Nova Scotia. Several species of fishes found near shore--menhaden, round herring, and whiting, for example --that once were totally absent or very scarce north of the cape, today are often caught along the gulf of Maine. At the same time, cool-water species such as the cod have been deserting the warming waters just north of the cape, and the center of the cod's abundance has now shifted far northward to Greenland."
"The tides are a complex phenomenon; but in general they are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, and to a lesser extent of the sun, upon the waters of the revolving earth."
"In one place on the south shore of Nantucket, measurements over a fourteen-year period revealed that the sea had been claiming an average of seventeen feet of land each year. It has been estimated that most of Cape Cod will be gone in another two thousand years, leaving only some shoals and a few of the higher and wider areas emergent above the sea, and that two thousand years after that even these will have disappeared utterly. The same fate is in prospect for the offshore islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Not that all of this rock, sand, and mud will simply vanish. The currents will carry it elsewhere and deposit it along other shores, building up new beaches, new rolling dunes; in a way this is already happening, for Cape Cod Bay grows shallower every year, and new dry land is being built up near the tip of Cape Cod at Province-town."
"Green plants are at the bottom of every food chain for only they can harness the energy of the sun, by means of photosynthesis, and convert it into food."
"...the path that leads from the primary producers of energy (the countless billions of minute diatoms) to the final consumer (the single human being) shows the ultimate survival of only a tenth of a pound out the original resource at the beginning of the chain of 10,000 pounds."
"Sea birds that nest in colonies--for example, the gannets--have a higher rate of reproduction in proportion to the size and density of the colonies; indeed, sometimes in very small colonies no young are produced at all."
"The original stands along the shore, the virgin, savage, nearly un-surmountable forest, exist only in memory or potentiality. Our mental reconstruction of these forests, described by the nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman as "vast, continuous ... dim and silent as a cavern" may be inaccurate, too much colored by the romantic recollections of the last century, although Thoreau's on-the-spot description of the Maine woods makes them dark and deep enough. Longfellow wrote of "the forest primeval," and Parkman amplified his idea of an unbroken forest when he described Verrazano surveying "the shadow and gloom of mighty forests" on the New England shore, Maine as "a waste of savage vegetation," the St. Lawrence River as rolling through the "vastness of lonely woodlands.""
"Practically all northeastern Indians lived in settlements, some large and permanent, others small seasonal camps.Every village, large or small, meant clearing land for shelters and foraging in nearby forests for fuel, food, building materials, and wood for weapons and tools, thus affecting the forests far from their settlements."
"By the time of European settlement, agriculture and burning had spread far northward, even into the Maritime Provinces of Canada."
"Provided there is enough left of the body region to which it is attached, only one arm or ray may be reconstituted into a whole new starfish-- hence the futility of trying to get rid of starfish preying on oyster and clam beds by hacking them to bits."
"In fact, [the starfish] ... is an extremely complex animal despite the complete lack of an excretory system, a primitive respiration system, and no organs of circulation at all as we commonly use the term."
"During the day, for example, the water is usually saturated with oxygen, visible as rising bubbles, because of the photosynthetic activity of algae. At night, both the algae and the animals of the [rock]pool give off carbon dioxide, and the oxygen content may fall below the minimum requirements for certain animals."
"A lobster allowed to attain its full size may weigh thirty pounds, two-thirds of it in the enormous claws."
"Every grain of sand on the beach has had a long history. Before it became sand it was rock, fractured by frost and by tree roots, ground by advancing glaciers and the waves, fractured again, and polished by the surf."
"In Newfoundland some beaches are the dark gray of the local slate. In Nova Scotia, red beaches take their color from the sandstone of which they are largely composed. The "sandy beach" at Acadia National Park in Maine is about sixty per cent quartz; the remaining forty per cent is largely shell fragments, which give it an odd texture, granular but at the same time a little reminiscent of sawdust. Along most of the North Atlantic, though, sandy beaches are made up principally of light-colored quartz grains, plus an assortment of other minerals that usually amount to no more than a tenth of the total mass of sand grains at the beach. Quartz is the most abundant mineral in the rocks of the northern part of the continent, as well as the toughest--the most likely to survive grinding and buffeting and to endure on the beach in the form of transparent grains, hard enough to scratch glass with."
"Grains that have been tossed about by the winds over sand dune are usually frosted from the sandblasting they receive. Waterborne grains are usually more rounded,and often smaller, than the grains found on the upper beach."
"By the early decades of the last century [that is, the 19th C], tree cutting and pasturing on the Cape Cod dunes had been forbidden by law; but it was too late to save the Province-town dunes."
"Much of the damage has now been mended by the construction of a long dike to protect the harbor from being filled in by sand, and by plantings, particularly of beach grass, on the dunes."
"...the winds whipping bare sand and piling it up into barrows and dunes, while the sea ebbed and flowed through the expanse of spits and shoals and islands. In some parts of the coast there are wind-carved stones called ventifacts, whose sheer faces are the result of lying exposed to those cold, sand-driving winds for thousands of years. Pick one up and you touch a prolongation of time."
"...the eel-grass grows in nothing like the quantity it once did. It was apparently attacked by a parasite--though weather cycles have also been blamed--and after 1931 great beds of it disappeared along the Atlantic coast; in fact, it was almost destroyed on both sides of the Atlantic, although it survived along Mediterranean and Pacific shores and it is only now returning in a number of areas along the northeast coast."
"To all the fluctuating and hazardous conditions for life in a estuary, man has added anew one. pollutants, the by-products of his tenure on the land, affect estuaries and their natural lives in a a number of ways. The pollutants in themselves may be toxic, or they may alter the natural balance of the water's constituents by decreasing the oxygen content. Waste settling on the bottom may clog the gills of oysters and other animals. Even without being smothered, oysters suffer from pollution, since the presence of certain substances in the water causes their shells to remain closed, so that the oysters do not feed during the favorable part of the tidal cycle and either starve or are greatly weakened if they survive."
"The surf clam inhabits a stout shell, of classic whiteness, whose concentric lines of growth have the grandeur of all slow accretions - of chalk cliffs, coral reefs, and canyon walls."
"Seacoast marshes may have taken thousands of years to build, growing by slow progression during the post-glacial era when there was a gradual rising of the sea in relation to the land."
"A precise study of the Great Marsh at Barnstable, Massachusetts, has been made by Dr. Alfred C. Redfield of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He reconstructed its state at intervals as far back as 3,300 years ago showing that sea level was then about 18 feet lower than it is now."
"Salt marshes are unmatched assets, with strong ties to our own history, and a natural complexity and abundance which have hardly started to measure."
"Marsh-grown rushes were once woven into chairs and baskets."
"Urban money, very often from outside a community, is required for developments, recreation centers, factories, marinas, parking lots, shopping centers, and so on. The urgencies of population have become so extreme in some regions that a marsh is considered a luxury the community cannot afford. In others, a salt marsh is merely another potential section of land out of which development money can be made."
"The marsh acts as a great sponge, absorbing tremendous amounts of moisture, and as a protective buffer for the land against storm waves and flood tides."
"If a salt marsh merges with a brackish and then a freshwater environment, the transitional zone may be wide and gradual enough to contain any number of life forms. A marsh builds up by plant root systems."
"The marsh environment is wonderfully intricate, and it is irreplaceable."
"...sea turtles, for all their direction-finding ability, and their power and agility as swimmers, are still more or less at the mercy of the ocean currents where they feed."
"The population of harp seals, numbering 3,000,000 as recently as 1951, had been reduced to some 1,250,000 by 1960, and unless strong conservation measures are taken, it may not be many years before the [sealing] industry is obliged to shut down altogether. Such marine visitors as sharks, whales, and seals -- and even the Portuguese man-of-war ... may drift from the Gulf Stream into the shallow waters of southern New England..."
September 24, 2023
very interesting naturalist perspective on the New England coastline - especially as it was written at the height of the DDT crisis
April 29, 2026
Extra stars because written my very esteemed & beloved great uncle.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews