America’s roads connect us with our lives. They carry us on
mundane trips to work and school, adventurous treks to parts
unknown, visits to friends and family. Roads are the arteries of
the American Body, providing the lifeblood of commerce and
recreation. But one road in particular has become the target of
environmental tyranny, posing a grave threat to the people who rely
on it for their livelihood and safety.
It is called Highway 12, a simple two-lane affair that serves as
the lifeline for the villagers who live on Hatteras Island,
situated among North Carolina’s fabled Outer Banks. A narrow
barrier island anchored many miles in the North Atlantic Ocean —
some refer to it as a giant sandbar — Hatteras has but one main
road which is the only way on or off the island other than boat or
private aircraft. It is a necessity of life for the sturdy
fishermen, shopkeepers, and tradesmen whose families have lived on
Hatteras for generations.
No one is more aware of the delicate balance between nature and
humanity than Hatteras islanders. They know their stewardship of
the environment is both practical and necessary. They also
understand that the Atlantic isn’t always content to respect the
province of dry land and, as such, Hatteras is subject to
occasional ocean washovers when hurricanes or Nor’easters come too
close for comfort.
The island and Highway 12 were most recently breached by
Hurricane Irene in August, 2011. The storm washed away five
sections of road; four were filled in and one required a bridge
spanning more than 650 feet. It also sparked renewed interest in a
radical idea, noted in passing in a September 28
Fox News article: “Depopulate Hatteras Island, stop the repair
and rebuilding, and simply turn it back over to nature.” But the
preferred means of modern depopulation is not physical force. It is
economic force, leveraged on the fulcrum of militant
environmentalism.
A Media Narrative Emerges
The cost of rebuilding Highway 12 after Hurricane Irene amounted to
roughly $11 million, a price that had activists howling before the
repairs were even complete. As early as October 8, 2011, the
Los Angeles Times quoted East Carolina University
geologist Dorothea Ames saying the state was, “just filling those
holes in the road with money.”
The LA Times article, provocatively titled “Ready to
stick a fork in Hatteras Island road,” also noted the Southern
Environmental Law Center (SELC) lawsuit to block construction of a
new bridge that would replace the half-century old Bonner Bridge
over which Highway 12 passes between Hatteras Island and Bodie
Island to the north.
A few months later, critics were in high dudgeon, hectoring
readers of the
New York Times in a March 5, 2012 article about the folly
of, “our own little bridge to nowhere,” unsubstantiated claims that
Highway 12 will “bankrupt the state,” and road maintenance as
“totally a lost cause.”
Stanley Riggs is a particularly vocal critic of keeping Highway
12 open. The East Carolina University geology professor has
crunched the numbers and estimates that between $90 million and
$100 million has been spent on the road since 1983. He further
reckons that keeping Highway 12 open for the next 100 years will
cost $930 million.
But economic arguments like these neglect the other half of the
equation, that being the value of commerce owing to Highway 12.
Hatteras Island and most of the Outer Banks are part of Dare
County, which relies primarily on tourism for revenue. It is not an
insignificant sum. County officials estimate that tourism generated
$834 million in economic impact in 2010 (the most recent year for
which full data are available), supporting more than 11,000 jobs
and a payroll exceeding $172 million.
Hatteras Island isn’t responsible for all of this economic
activity, but it contributes more than its fair share. In terms of
occupancy receipts for 2011, the revenue from motel, campground
and cottage rentals by visitors to the seven villages of Hatteras
exceeded $99.5 million, according to country records. That’s
slightly more than one fourth of all occupancy receipts county-wide
even though the island’s 4,300 residents represent just one-eighth
of Dare County’s population. Claims that Hatteras doesn’t pay its
share of the freight don’t withstand scrutiny.
The economy is so robust Dare County is classified as a “donor”
county, a designation conferred to municipalities that provide more
revenue to the state treasury than they receive in annual
appropriations from the capital in Raleigh. But these facts are
absent from arguments promoting an agenda that is strangling the
economy and are echoed by some of the nation’s largest, most
notoriously liberal newspapers.
An Underlying Agenda
Riggs,
Ames, and a number of their East Carolina University colleagues
produced in 2009
a research paper entitled “Eye of a human hurricane: Pea
Island, Oregon Inlet, and Bodie Island, northern Outer Banks, North
Carolina” noting, among other things:
… the constructed dune ridges prevent the natural, overwash and
inlet-driven evolution of habitats that constitute a major
component of the “mission and purpose” of both Pea Island National
Wildlife Refuge and Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Piping
plovers, oyster catchers, black skimmers, and numerous species of
terns and turtles are critically dependent upon overwash and inlet
habitats.” (Page 65)
The concern for turtles and plovers is admirable but what of the
human habitat protected by those dune ridges? People have lived on
Hatteras Island for centuries, long before the Cape Hatteras
National Seashore Recreational Area (its
proper name) was established, yet people seem immaterial. As
for the ribbon of asphalt that brings life and commerce to island
residents, the authors dismiss portions of Hatteras as, “little
more than a conveyance for Highway 12.”
Professor Riggs and his colleagues have also prepared
a science curriculum for middle and high school students
exploring the geology of barrier islands. For students
contemplating a life on the Outer Banks, the curriculum bleakly
instructs them that, “large island segments will totally disappear
within the next few decades.” (Part 1, Lesson 8)
Elsewhere in the curriculum, students are given reading
assignments that include a pair of news articles from 2003. One
describes a local state senator as “one of the state’s most
powerful politicians,” with the audacity to work on behalf of his
constituents. The second features a Duke University geologist
explaining to children that, “Very powerful and very wealthy people
live along the beaches. The politically correct thing to do is rush
in and help these people who have suffered from an act of God.”
(Pages 111-113)
It is true that many houses on the Outer Banks are owned by
families who live out of the immediate area. It is also true that
these beach homes generate roughly half of the $49.3 million in
real estate taxes listed in the 2011 Dare
County budget. Providing better schools and services to
Hatteras islanders through taxes on people who don’t utilize them
on a day-to-day basis constitutes a win-win for all concerned. As
for repairs to Highway 12, villagers and contractors need it for
work, school, emergency trips to the hospital and clearing the
aftereffects of storms; not exactly the “very powerful” people
described to middle school kids.
Placing Environmentalism Above
Humans
Geologists aren’t alone in targeting
Highway 12. The SELC, the Audubon Society, Defenders of Wildlife,
and other environmentalists have waged a lengthy campaign to close
or restrict access to the island’s beaches, prized attractions for
islanders and visiting tourists. So far, they have enjoyed
remarkable success in preventing people from using many of the
beaches on Hatteras. In some cases, strolling along the water’s
edge or reading a novel in a beach chair are now illegal.
Frustration with environmental activism is so acute, Dare County
Commissioner Jack Shea penned
a 2010 opinion piece lamenting “a forgotten and ignored
endangered species,” in the region: people.
The patina of ecological altruism dissolves as human
consequences surface. Hatteras Island residents and business owners
marked the first day of spring this year by staging a
rally and protest march to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse,
drawing attention to the economic hardships they face as a result
of environmental restrictions.
Among the
newest restrictions is the requirement that anybody wishing to
drive an off-road vehicle on Hatteras beaches — a decades-old
pastime for picnickers, surfers and fishermen — must undergo a
National Park Service (NPS) instructional program and pay a permit
fee. The program is designed to protect bird habitat but the new
restrictions have already proved frighteningly inflexible.
On April 4, 19 families found themselves trapped by a lunar tide
along Cape Point. Caught between the rising ocean and a protected
bird area with no place to drive, the NPS denied permission for the
families to maneuver their off-road vehicles five feet inside a
bird area. One father relayed the story of his
harrowing escape from the tide while his two young children
wept and vomited in fear.
The economic implications are no less fearful. Bob Eakes, owner
of Red Drum Tackle in the village of Buxton, told the
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot newspaper in January, “We have had
a tremendously huge loss from the (National) Park Service rules.”
How bleak is the future for Eakes’ and his tackle shop? “I just
don’t know if I can stay in business.”
Unlike the questionable economic pronouncements of geologists,
the plight of these villagers does not merit the attention of
newspapers in New York or Los Angeles.
Life on a Sandbar; Not All It’s Cracked-Up to
Be
Hatteras Island rose from the sea
thousands of years ago and the Atlantic will likely reclaim it, and
Highway 12, at some point. Whether this reclamation occurs over the
next couple of decades or the next couple of millennia is anyone’s
guess. Professor Riggs and others are convinced that the island’s
geological clock is about to strike midnight, and their certitude
rivals that of a
Time magazine cover from April, 1977 which informed us
on how we may forestall the coming Ice Age. (Whatever it was they
wrote, it must have worked.)
But this belief in the imminent doom of Hatteras Island, whether
by accident or design, gives aid and comfort to environmentalists
promoting policies that are killing the island’s economy. The
apparent target is Highway 12 but that is conveyance for a broader
goal of forcing people from their homes without optics akin to
those of Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps during World
War II.
Those who live on Hatteras understand the sometimes tenuous
nature of living on a barrier island, as well as the joy of being
in one of America’s most unique and storied places, a joy reflected
in part by the popular “Life on a Sandbar” memorabilia sold to
tourists. Hatteras islanders also possess a deep knowledge of the
sea and the skies and the shifting sand, which holds them in good
stead when the winds stiffen and shift to the northeast. But it
does them little good in confronting the array of political forces
that are now bearing down on them and the road that takes them
home.
