Witnessing Change: Building an Environmental Relationship with the Island

With each visit I made to Bald Head this spring as a creative writing intern for the Conservancy, I could measure the passage of time by shifts in the seasons. In February, heavy rain fell. When I returned a few weeks later, a thick fog shrouded the island. As the weather warmed in March and April, I witnessed animal life emerge: alligators crawled up to sun on the golf course green and flocks of birds congregated on the sand. 

Of the conversations I had with the Conservancy team and with Mayor Peter Quinn and Village Manager Chris McCall, almost all turned repeatedly to the island’s relationship with time. Since lots were first platted and developed, Bald Head has gained a marina, shops and restaurants, and infrastructure necessary to sustain its growing population. Living in harmony in nature is a priority of the Village, as the Mayor and Village Manager made clear through the emphasis they placed on stewardship of the island’s natural environment. But what harmony means and looks like over the years is not set in stone, especially as development continues and the residential population changes.

Our own human memory—and its limitations—shapes how we feel about change. When we knew the untamed natural beauty of an empty lot before it was clear-cut for commercial development, we mourn its loss. Where there is a broad gash of mud, those who came before it remember the thick dark green of underbrush and glossy palmetto fronds. But for future generations of residents and island vacationers, the threshold of what is defined as acceptable loss of natural environment will shift. For those of us who knew the “before,” what is our responsibility as witnesses to the island? 

Novelist and environmental activist Wendell Berry writes that without the observations from those who have formed deep relationships over time with the natural environment they live in, humanity loses an understanding of the changes to a place over time. If those who come to visit Bald Head in the future build a relationship to its environment without understanding its past, they will do so without knowledge of the full impact of human interference on this unique natural landscape. Their aptitude for change will be different. Bald Head relies on long-term residents and caregivers who are deeply familiar with its changes. While the future of the island may continue to strive to live in harmony with nature, each individual’s framework for what this means—for what exactly they are protecting—relies on a deeper vision of place, one that reaches past vacation-minded memory spans and seeks out a deeper, generative relationship with the island.

At the Youth Sustainability Symposium in March, attending high school students acted in stakeholder roles to discuss the complex environmental impacts of wind power development. Several weeks later at the Johnston Coastal Sustainability Symposium, adult attendees engaged in group discussions around responsibility for land stewardship. These methods of engaging community members across ages and backgrounds enables each individual to reflect on and understand their own responsibility in the coastal ecosystem. Knowledge of and identification with place enables reciprocity: it builds bonds between the island and those who have spent time with it across its seasons; who have watched trees grow, birds come and go. Potawatomi writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.” 

What does it mean to build a relationship with Bald Head Island? It means many things, but the natural world—its beauty, its surprise—already surrounds us, inviting engagement. Take, for instance, a brief encounter I had with terns this spring. I spent my last few visits to the island trying to photograph birds without much luck: I would raise my phone or camera only to move too slowly to catch them in flight, or for the lens to barely register their small bodies. On my second-to-last visit to the island before the end of the semester, I walked towards the shoals. All at once, a flock of several hundred terns took off together and cartwheeled above me, closer than they had ever been. Their orange beaks were just flashes of light above my head. My camera, in my pocket, was completely forgotten. There they are. For an instant as they swooped over me, I felt I too was lifting off the earth, carried in the wind. It had taken nothing more from me than a willingness to witness them, right then and there, in the present moment.

Josepha Natzke, BHIC Creative Writing Intern