Cumberland Island National Seashore and Wilderness is the largest undeveloped barrier island on the eastern seaboard and one of the gems of America’s National Park system. Massive live oak maritime forests, saltwater marshes, and a spectacular white sand beach—home to loggerhead sea turtles, are remarkable to experience. But Cumberland needs your help now. The National Park Service is accepting public comments on its Visitor Use Management Plan (VUMP) through December 30. The plan seeks to maximize visitor numbers and recreation at the expense of the Island’s Wilderness and its wild inhabitants. NPS's plan is so off-base that it even proposes to allow bikes, including ebikes, in Wilderness. Please urge the National Park Service to preserve the wild characteristics Cumberland Island was set aside to protect. Once the private enclave of wealthy families, the federal government acquired the Island and established the Cumberland Island National Seashore in the 1960s to save it from real estate development like that which had beset many of the barrier islands. In 1982, Congress designated much of the Island’s northern two-thirds as the Cumberland Island Wilderness, or as potential Wilderness in areas where private existing rights would eventually expire. Already quite a treasure, Cumberland Island was on the path to wild restoration and becoming one of the premier Wildernesses in the National Wilderness Preservation System. Tragically, the National Park Service (NPS) has failed to keep the promise of a wild Cumberland Island. The agency allows excessive and unlawful motor and mechanized vehicle use in the Wilderness, it has prioritized saving structures rather than allowing nature to reclaim the Wilderness, and the list goes on. Unfortunately, the NPS VUMP fails to maintain…”the primitive, undeveloped character of one of the largest and most ecologically diverse barrier islands on the Atlantic coast,” as the law intended. The plan allows a substantial increase in visitor numbers and amenities and a transition from a relatively primitive experience to a more developed tourist experience. Please tell the National Park Service by 12/30 to protect and restore Cumberland to a more wild and primitive condition, with development limited to the southern non-Wilderness part of the island and only to the extent necessary to administer the Island and protect natural and cultural values. Send comments online: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/commentForm.cfm?documentID=124495 For more details, visit the website of our friends at Wild Cumberland. |
