Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (34 page)

TEDs were not saving sea turtles. The only solution, Carol realized, was an end to trawling. Trawlers were bulldozing the ocean and decimating marine life. Carol wrote letters, published papers, and gave anti-TED talks everywhere.

“Pirates like Blackbeard once sailed our coast. Today’s pirates use massive trawls to plunder the ocean,” she told audiences.

No one was all that interested. Even turtle-loving environmentalists preferred the happy, fairy-tale ending that they thought TEDs provided. They could have their turtles and their seafood, too. They stopped inviting Carol to their meetings and largely ignored her findings.

Eventually, though, government scientists begrudgingly acknowledged Carol’s data.

“TEDs have not proven successful at reducing turtle mortality on Georgia beaches,” admitted Brad Winn, head of the non-game division for Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources.

“TEDs have not been as effective as we had hoped,” conceded David Bernhart, a leading biologist at the National Marine Fisheries Service. They even recognized Carol’s work in a landmark report on turtle mortality, which concluded: “We are compelled to singularly acknowledge the valuable contributions of Carol Ruckdeschel. Sea turtles have no greater ambassador.”

In 2001, Carol invited one of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s top officials to Cumberland. After examining the turtle collections in Carol’s museum, they sat on the porch eating popcorn and drinking highballs.

“I was hoping TEDs would put me out of work,” Carol said. “I’m busier than ever carving up carcasses.”

“I can’t argue with your data,” said the official.

“Then close the waters to trawling.”

“We can’t rule out other causes for turtle mortality. Maybe shrimpers are cheating and not using TEDs properly. Maybe other fisheries are responsible, or collisions with boats, or disease.”

“A marine reserve could answer all of those questions. Close a section of the coast to commercial fishing and see how it affects the number of dead turtles washing ashore.”

“That’s not an option.”

“That’s the only option,” Carol said.

The official shifted uncomfortably in the hard wooden chair. “We haven’t given TEDs enough time to work. It may take several generations before we see results.”

“For over a decade, TEDs have proven to be a colossal failure,” Carol bristled. “That’s indisputable.”

“They’re keeping turtles out of the nets and off the decks. They’re helping.”

Carol’s cheeks flushed with fury. “Can you point to a single example where TEDs have reduced turtle deaths? Name one place—just one—where TEDs have been effective.”

There was a long silence. “We might be seeing some promising results from a test project in Costa Rica.” The official tossed back his whiskey and looked out across Carol’s yard, where dozens of turtle skulls macerated in five-gallon buckets.

“All right, Carol, I’ll level with you,” he said. “We don’t have any evidence that TEDs have reduced turtle strandings.”

“None?”

“None.” The official leaned forward and whispered. “But turtles don’t pay taxes or provide jobs. We gotta put the welfare of people ahead of turtles.”

21

Sea turtles are the most endangered reptile in the world, and it’s not just shrimpers to blame. Along the Southeastern coast, the largest loggerhead nesting site in the world, beaches were built up and brightly lit, and dunes were leveled for development. On Cumberland, feral hogs were almost as destructive as high-rise hotels. Over two thousand feral swine plagued Cumberland, and they feasted especially on the omelets buried in the dunes. Hundreds of endangered turtle nests were scavenged by hogs each season.

Pigs are smarter than dogs, as the fabled wolf knows too well. They can do a circus’s worth of tricks, use mirrors, and play video games with their snouts. Hogs also live in long-term families that protect one another from predators. Their smarts and social bonds make them difficult to hunt or trap.

The National Park Service had made halfhearted attempts to remove hogs from the island through trapping yearly hunts, but their efforts failed miserably. Sows reach sexual maturity at six months and can farrow sixteen piglets a year. The park’s annual hunt barely made a dent in the island’s swelling population of swine.

So Carol launched her own hog eradication campaign. Every day, she followed tracks through the dunes to find a hog digging up a nest. She sighted her rifle, pulled the trigger, and watched the hog slump over.
One hog down. Two thousand to go,
she said to herself. Then she sliced open the hog, whose belly was loaded with dozens of turtle eggs.

But after a few years of hog hunting, she realized that her solo efforts were futile. The hogs bred and fed too fast for her to keep up. She needed the National Park Service’s help to stop the turtle slaughter. Because sea turtles were an endangered species, the National Park Service and the state of Georgia were required to protect their nests from feral hogs. For nearly thirty years, Carol made a stink about the hogs, but the National Park Service ignored her. Finally, she teamed up with a young attorney named Hal Wright, who quickly got the feds’ attention by threatening a lawsuit.

In 2001, the National Park Service and Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources agreed to hire hog hunters to patrol Cumberland beaches. During turtle nesting season, the hog hunters shot every hog that wandered onto the eighteen-mile stretch of beach. Hundreds of hogs still roamed the island’s interior, but on the beach, the numbers of hog-raided nests dropped to nearly zero.

Another unexpected reprieve in the turtle holocaust arrived in 2005. The number of sea turtle carcasses washing ashore suddenly dropped dramatically. But it wasn’t because of TEDs. Nor was it due to any of Carol’s efforts. Ironically, it was caused by the collapse of commercial shrimping in the South. The demise of the industry has cost many shrimpers their livelihoods, but it has been saving sea turtles’ lives and staving off their extinction.

Just offshore from Cumberland Island, Calvin Lang continued to trawl the waters, gathering lots of bycatch but few shrimp. All day long, he and his strikers sorted through a deck full of jellies and flopping fish for a few pounds of brown shrimp. The nets’ harvests weren’t nearly as bountiful as they used to be.

“It’s cheaper to go to bed than to keep doing this,” Calvin grumbled. He puttered back toward the dock after dark, slipping past other paint-chipped, barnacle-hulled shrimp boats bobbing idly along the river, tow arms folded up in prayer. Dozens of boats once trawled here. Now,
Lang’s Pride
was the last.

The ebb tide flowed silently through the shadowed pilings as the strikers moored the boat for the night. A crescent moon cast the skipper’s reflection onto the dark pilothouse window. Calvin Lang stared into the barren waters.

Shrimp harvests had crashed in the Atlantic after decades of overharvesting. Average hauls were down 50 percent, even with fewer boats trawling the waters. And with flattened ocean floors and far fewer sea turtles than ever before, many shrimpers caught more jellyfish than shrimp. The explosion in jelly populations was leading some shrimpers to switch from shrimping to harvesting jellyfish, which commanded a high price in Asian markets.

Rising fuel prices had also walloped shrimpers. In a weeklong trip,
Lang’s Pride
gulped about 1,500 gallons of diesel, which required catching 1,250 pounds of shrimp just to cover fuel, to say nothing of the TED-equipped nets and other equipment. Throw in 10 percent of the take for each striker, and it’s easy to see why the boat owner sweats as much as the crew.

But the biggest blow to shrimpers had come from shrimp aquaculture, which didn’t require boats or fuel. Shrimp ponds had undercut prices, especially the overseas shrimp farms, whose cheap labor and lack of government regulations enabled them to sell their shrimp at lower prices. Today, 90 percent of all shrimp consumed in the United States is imported, mostly from foreign shrimp ponds.

Shrimp farms don’t snare sea turtles, but they are equally devastating to the health of the ocean. Shrimp aquaculture destroys saltwater marshes, wetlands, and mangroves—nurseries for wild shrimp and fish. The antibiotics and pesticides used by shrimp farmers poison the water, and pollution from shrimp farms devastates marine life, creating vast dead zones along the coast.

By 2010, most shrimpers in Georgia had pulled in their nets and sold their boats. Many went bankrupt. Shrimping boomtowns like Darien were quiet. Warehouses were shuttered, and piers rotted.

After sixty years of shrimping, Calvin Lang sold all but one of his seven trawlers. Fortunately, he hadn’t put all of his shrimp in one net. Years before the big crash, he bought a two-story former brothel along the St. Marys harbor from Wild Bill Carnegie, who had been banished from Cumberland years ago by his mother, Lucy. Calvin renovated the building and opened a family-run seafood restaurant and marina.

He also became the National Park Service’s exclusive concessionaire to ferry passengers to Cumberland Island. Twice a day, Calvin Lang’s
Cumberland Queen II
shuttles visitors back and forth. He and his sons pilot the ferry boat from the St. Marys dock, through the wind-dimpled marshes lining the river, past the paper mills and submarine base, and across the sound to Cumberland’s docks. In between ferry trips, Calvin has spent many afternoons on Cumberland collecting shark’s teeth and seashells.

“Being on Cumberland is like a religious experience,” Calvin says. “It’s a very strong feeling, like you’re in the presence of God.”

In a strange twist of fate, the shrimper king and turtle queen became accidental allies in saving Cumberland Island. Calvin had inadvertently played a crucial role in Carol’s wilderness campaign. The three-hundred-person daily visitor limit to the island that Carol helped achieve was largely due to the carrying capacity of Calvin’s ferry. In the end, it wasn’t just Carol who saved wild Cumberland, but also the size of Calvin’s boat.

The island had been preserved, but its sea turtles were still being slaughtered. Though the local shrimping industry was declining, international super-trawlers—some with nets large enough to hold thirteen jumbo jets—continued to plow the seafloor just a stone’s throw from Cumberland. Turtles were vacuumed up in the giant nets. And it was completely legal. The National Marine Fisheries Service continues to issue special permits allowing trawlers to legally kill ten thousand endangered sea turtles each year and injure more than 344,000 others.

Beyond U.S. borders, turtles face more troubles. Turtle eggs are poached by gangs throughout Latin America, and dozens of turtle activists have been kidnapped or killed trying to protect nesting beaches. In coastal communities worldwide, sea turtles are still routinely hunted and eaten. Outside of American waters, shrimp trawlers drag the open ocean without TEDs or regard for turtles that end up in their nets.

Carol stopped eating shrimp, except the ones she caught off the dock with her handheld cast net, which did not threaten turtles. “When the buying stops, so will the killing,” she said.

Carol squarely faced a hard truth of twenty-first-century environmentalism: there was nothing pristine left on the planet. Climate change and industrial pollution were global game changers. Already on Cumberland, sea levels were rising and freshwater lakes were drying up amid prolonged drought. Invasive species were migrating to the island while native species were disappearing. No wilderness—on land or at sea—was untouched by us.

However, that didn’t mean we should tinker even more with the natural world, Carol believed. Give nature enough wild space so that animals and plants can adapt to changing conditions, and it can manage itself far better than we ever can.

“To save people, we must save nature,” Carol maintained. Like fish without water, we won’t survive long without the ecosystems that sustain us. But most folks are blind to this bare truth, she said. As a result, they see conservation as a minor amenity benefitting a small cadre of birdwatchers and backpackers rather than the best way to save humanity.

On Cumberland, Carol had achieved as much as she could hope for: a relatively undeveloped island, a federally protected wilderness, a global biosphere reserve, and a hog-free seashore. She had single-handedly launched a national turtle stranding network and had sounded the alarm on trawling and TEDs. She had amassed one of the country’s largest collections of sea turtles in her hand-built museum. From her four thousand necropsies, she had gathered the most complete, continuous, and comprehensive data on what was killing the world’s most ancient and endangered reptiles.

Just beyond the island’s boundaries, however, new threats emerged. South of the island, a one-thousand-acre marsh was about to be buried beneath a gated community with million-dollar waterfront lots and an eight-hundred-boat marina. To the west, a private spacecraft pad was being built to launch rockets over the island year-round. Four Superfund sites on the adjacent mainland leaked radioactive waste into Cumberland’s waterways.

“We’re fouling our nest,” Carol said.

And directly across from Cumberland, the U.S. Navy had built the world’s largest nuclear submarine base. The sixteen-thousand-acre facility was nearly as immense as Cumberland Island. Eighteen submarines armed with Trident nuclear warheads docked there. They produced toxic nuclear waste and discharged radioactive water into the ocean. Bill Mankin, who had helped lobby for Cumberland’s wilderness, called Kings Bay Nuclear Submarine Base “the greatest threat to the future of the Southern coast.”

The nuclear sub base—one of only two in the country—created a gushing money pipeline from D.C. to south Georgia. It brought thousands of new jobs, boosted the local economy by a hefty $560 million each year, and ignited a development boom. Grover Henderson was one of the most prosperous locals who capitalized on the real estate rush that resulted from Kings Bay.

But it was hardly the wisest geographical location for a submarine base. Kings Bay is nestled in the Georgia Bight, an indented stretch of concave coast where the shallow continental shelf extends for sixty miles. Every six months, the navy must dredge out an eleven-mile, sediment-filled channel in order for the mammoth, missile-heavy submarines to reach Kings Bay.

The submarine base is also located directly in the path of the world’s only known right whale calving grounds. Only eighty female right whales remain worldwide, and they all return to Cumberland Island’s offshore waters to give birth each winter. Carol watched helplessly from shore one afternoon when a right whale was struck by a forty-foot boat. It thrashed the water with its wounded tail, bleeding into the ocean from a long gash inflicted by the boat’s propeller.

She feared even more collisions in the future. In 2008, Kings Bay announced plans to construct a five-hundred-square-mile Undersea Warfare Training Center offshore from Cumberland Island, in the heart of right whale calving habitat. More ship strikes, entanglements, and whale casualties are expected. The world’s most endangered whales will be dodging torpedoes, missiles, and sonar-pulsing subs as they give birth.

Sound is the most important sense for marine mammals. Whales, dolphins, and manatees use their voices to navigate, hunt, find mates, and sing to their calves. Sea turtles rely on underwater sound, too, transmitting low-frequency vibrations to communicate with each other.

The navy blasts nonstop sonar pulses at more than 235 decibels—louder than dynamite explosions—that travel across hundreds of miles of ocean, drowning out the songs and calls of these animals.

The navy admits that the sonar testing kills 6,000 whales and dolphins and thousands of other marine animals each year. Already, the navy’s use of deafening sonar pulses in its submarines has been linked to several mass whale strandings. Cumberland Island has the most whale, dolphin, and turtle strandings of any island along the Southern coast.

Carol had hoped to live an untainted, self-reliant life on a wild island, away from the noise and pollution, apart from the mainland. But no woman is an island. The submarine base on the horizon reminded her every day that she couldn’t escape the world beyond her island borders.

To save Cumberland, she would have to venture beyond the tide line. So, instead of an underwater navy battleground, Carol proposed a five-hundred-square-mile underwater wilderness.

Offshore, there is another United States larger than the one above sea level, extending two hundred miles from the coast. This continental shelf is a mostly undiscovered treasure of coral reefs, kelp forests, and sea grass meadows, with chasms deeper than the Grand Canyon and mountains taller and richer than the Appalachians. Turtles spend most of their adult lives foraging along the continental shelf. Almost all of it is open to trawling, mining, fishing, dredging, drilling, and dumping.