We’re driving down the beach in one of the few vehicles allowed. I’m doing a ride-along with a National Park Police Officer. We pass buildings that have collapsed from the onslaught of wind and hurricanes.
Fire Island is a barrier island, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines as “a constantly changing deposit of sand that forms parallel to the coast”7. It’s an island whose entire geographical purpose is to protect the mainland from weather: “These islands are critical to protecting coastal communities and ecosystems from extreme weather. Beach dunes and grasses on barrier islands absorb wave energy before the wave hits the mainland.”
These are areas of land that are constantly changing: “As wind and waves shift according to weather patterns and local geographic features, these islands constantly move, erode, and grow.” They are geographical places whose ontology is about change. They are responsive, absorbent.
As you drive along the beach it’s hard not to feel that the human endeavour to live on these places is in conflict with the ever changing nature. This can be seen with the deer, whose presence has become a nuisance to the people who live there, or more often, are vacationing there. Lacking natural predators and being fed by tourists, they have lost a fear of humans and roam free. They endanger the landscaping and gardens that people have worked so hard on. That people have poured their labor into.
John Locke defines ownership in terms of labor: “Though the earth, and all inferiour creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”8
Fire Island is a barrier island, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines as “a constantly changing deposit of sand that forms parallel to the coast”7. It’s an island whose entire geographical purpose is to protect the mainland from weather: “These islands are critical to protecting coastal communities and ecosystems from extreme weather. Beach dunes and grasses on barrier islands absorb wave energy before the wave hits the mainland.”
These are areas of land that are constantly changing: “As wind and waves shift according to weather patterns and local geographic features, these islands constantly move, erode, and grow.” They are geographical places whose ontology is about change. They are responsive, absorbent.
As you drive along the beach it’s hard not to feel that the human endeavour to live on these places is in conflict with the ever changing nature. This can be seen with the deer, whose presence has become a nuisance to the people who live there, or more often, are vacationing there. Lacking natural predators and being fed by tourists, they have lost a fear of humans and roam free. They endanger the landscaping and gardens that people have worked so hard on. That people have poured their labor into.
John Locke defines ownership in terms of labor: “Though the earth, and all inferiour creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”8