June 05, 2003|By Kirk Johnson | Kirk Johnson,NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
GROTON, Conn. -- Forty years ago in the summer of 1963, a writer for The New Yorker named Morton M. Hunt spent two weeks circumnavigating Long Island Sound in a little sailboat.
When he sat down to write, he mourned. A way of life was disappearing. The old culture of the sound -- a still wild mix of scruffy boatyards, Gold Coast snobs and fishermen, all set against the vast mirror of nature -- would surely be homogenized and pushed to the brink, Hunt wrote in the magazine, by the pell-mell rush of suburbanization and the mass market.
In the years that followed Hunt's trip, people gradually began to realize that the sound -- by the power of history and population and the environmental damage inflicted upon it -- had in a very real way become a human creation.
Ancient estuary
The ancient estuary, extending 110 miles northeast from New York City to Rhode Island through the densest population corridor in the nation -- loved and loathed as a breadbasket, playground and dump -- would have to be managed for its own sake, and for the region's.
In economics, politics, culture and science, people took action, and nature responded. A tiny sea plant called eelgrass, and a group of families here in Groton who unintentionally triggered its resurgence, play a part in that story.
"We're learning for the first time where the sound's heartbeat is, where the pulse is," said Robert B. Whitlatch, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Connecticut.
The management of nature, loosely called environmental stewardship, is being applied in many places around the world. In the North Sea, marine managers have compiled an exhaustive database about the aquatic food chain -- a kind of who-eats-whom of the fish world.
In the United States, managers are remaking the bottom of Tampa Bay with the sea grasses of its past.
More than ecology
But on the sound there is much more going on than mere ecology. How people connect with the sound, for instance, or how they don't -- and thus how much political clout the sound's advocates can wield in Albany or Hartford or Washington -- is part of the new management equation as well, as politicians and environmentalists try to increase access to the water with new parks and beaches.
Unlike the Adirondacks or the Hudson River, the sound never stole the region's heart. What the sound had, first and foremost, was people -- a bustling, grasping, dreaming, teeming population.
Now, in the age of management, scientists and politicians say, the huge force and clout of that population -- one in 10 Americans within an hour's drive -- has once again made the sound a kind of vanguard and sentinel. Where the nation's other great tidal estuaries might go, as demographic patterns and economies change around Chesapeake Bay or Puget Sound or San Francisco Bay, the Sound has already arrived.
"It's the first 21st-century estuary," said Glenn R. Lopez, a professor of marine sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, on Long Island. "Its issues are all about human habitation."
Questions emerge
Questions have emerged from this. What is the optimum natural state in a system that has been overwhelmingly and permanently transformed by human presence? Should the sound be managed for the sake of nature and biological diversity, or for the human pocketbook, to maximize the species people want to extract and attract the most tourists?
Nature, for every push that people impose, has pushed right back.
Local and state governments have committed billions of dollars, for example, to reduce nitrogen from sewage treatment plants. But even as that process goes forward, evidence has mounted that climate change and warmer water temperatures may be altering the ecosystem as fast as humans can fix it.
Efforts to restore lobster populations have been undercut, some scientists believe, by programs to bring back other species like striped bass, which have soared in number in recent years under wildlife management. Stripers adore finger-sized larval lobsters and eat them with great gulps whenever they can.
The air itself
Wind moves differently over the built-up expanses of New York City and its suburbs than it did in centuries past, climate researchers say, and different winds make for different rates of mixing in the sound's water column. Different mixing rates, in turn, can compound the problem of low oxygen that kills the animals that local governments are working to save through nitrogen reduction.
At a recent daylong conference on the sound, Arthur Glowka voiced those anxieties. Glowka, a fisherman and retired pilot who had the lean and windblown look of a life lived on the water, thundered that the sound's new managers were messing with things beyond the human ability to control, and that the piper would have to be paid.
"We're playing God," Glowka said. "And when you start to play God, you don't know what's going to happen."
