I know that when I enter Provincetown’s West End salt marsh softly, without shoes, I feel certain that I am welcomed by something alive, something that wants to live.
I also know that, as things stand, this beautiful marsh will be dead and gone within 10 years.
I don’t know whether to start grieving — how to grieve a piece of the Earth? — or whether we will somehow, against all odds, miraculously do something to save it.
I know that when the tide is high, the dead places are hidden by shining waters. Artists try to capture the shifting colors without realizing that they are painting a dying thing.
I don’t know if Provincetown’s voters and leaders realize how rapid and complete the collapse of this marsh will be.
Scientists have known the marsh is dying for many years. They have published studies that document its collapse.
There is a plan to open a 40-foot gap in the breakwater to allow entry to predator fish that feed on the purple crabs that are killing the marsh. That plan began in 2006 because ecologists knew that predators like striped bass and tautog, which cannot swim through the breakwater, could help keep the marsh in balance.
That plan has been thwarted several times, first by lack of federal funds and then by town meeting voters in 2017. It is slowly restarting now.
But the Army Corps of Engineers, which would install the breach, and the National Park Service, which owns the marshland, are both now saying they don’t think adding predator fish would be enough to stop the purple marsh crab.
Salt marshes all around Cape Cod are being devoured by the crab. Striped bass have collapsed from overfishing, and there don’t seem to be enough predator fish left to control the crabs.
Salt marshes are crucial ecosystems — they protect the land from storms, lock up carbon dioxide, and support the abundance of life in the sea. The peat beneath the grass took centuries to develop, and it is densely packed with roots, clams, and big mussels, like a rich fruitcake. When the marsh grass is devoured by crabs, thousands of years of soil can wash away in a single storm.
In April 2023, town meeting reversed the 2017 vote and set aside $100,000 for the Army Corps to study the breach again. I don’t know why it took 16 months for that work even to begin. And I really don’t know what Provincetown’s public meeting with the Army Corps last month was all about.
We had waited so long to hear from them. But the findings they offered were extremely preliminary, based on a model meant for rivers. They were asking for public comments when they were supposed to be providing impartial scientific analysis to inform us. There will now potentially be another round or two of studies, then further voting. This will take years.
I was disappointed in myself, because I couldn’t find the words to say, “This is an emergency! By the time all this paperwork is done, the marsh will be gone!”
I know that the Park Service has done successful experiments to prevent the purple marsh crabs from eating the spartina grass. They have added sand to small patches of marsh and installed nets to block the crabs from digging, and this has worked on a small scale.
I don’t see anybody rushing to get funding, permits, and personnel for the Park Service to expand this work, however. It does not seem to be a priority, and very soon it will be too late.
There is a precious patient dying and receiving no treatment, while death gets visibly closer — a death that will be referred to as “system collapse.” I don’t know if somewhere it has been agreed to let this patient die, or if our lack of urgency has made it inevitable, or if the piles of paper on the desks of people who work hard with good will are just too tall.
But is this how we lose the Earth? Bureaucratically? Without any sound except the slow shuffling of paper?
I know that if the day comes when there is nothing but mud from Province Lands Road to Wood End, I will remember when there was still a chance but we didn’t take it. When we could still look forward to healing and restoration, to heaping sand and planting grass together, and feeling the quiet gratitude of the living Earth.
If that day comes, I don’t know how we will forgive ourselves.
