Why Conservation Matters

Letters, The Suffolk Times, November 10, 2022

By year’s end the Board of Trustees of the Town of Southold will have considered close to four hundred applications for waterfront projects. Each has provided an occasion to study a particular parcel of land where it transitions to the expanses of marsh and creek, bluff, dune, bay or beach. Each has also been an opportunity to think on the broader purpose of the work we undertake on the public’s behalf, and our shared relationship with the natural world.  

Moving amongst these vital landscapes monthly, during field inspections, it is possible to momentarily forget the detailed abstractions expressed by surveys, affidavits and plans, and instead be struck with awe, reverence, even, by the natural beauty in a backyard, a mature stand of white oaks arching nave-like overhead, the warm sunlight filtering to tidal meadows and the muck we’ve all sunk our feet in.

When the official purpose of my being there returns, it lands with an abiding sense of gratitude for the existence of wild spaces and the people who care for and conserve them, that they remain commonplace in our lives. I harbor no illusions that I or any one Trustee has the power to halt the many forces negatively impacting Southold’s shorelines. But I do believe that our centuries-long tradition of holding wetlands and waters in common trust continues to hold us together as a community, and that they are a shared feature of our common identity as Southolders.   

When any of us take responsibility for the conservation of land and water, for wild creatures and wild spaces, we nurture the sources of liberty and freedom that root in this nation. We attend also to the health and transmission of the public spirit necessary to traverse polarizing times and remain whole. As the legal scholar Mary Glendon has written, “individual freedom and the general welfare alike depend on the condition of the fine texture of civil society—on a fragile ecology for which we have no name.” In Southold we are fortunate that this fragile ecology goes by many names: Mattituck Creek, Goose Creek, Corey Creek, Goldsmith’s Inlet and Hashamomuck Pond, Hallock’s Bay and Hay Harbor, to name a few among the many. Let us remember that we hold them together, and they us, as much by the force of laws and elections as by the everyday interactions and conversations with neighbors. We will need each other on the road ahead. We must all do our part to serve and preserve the common good.