Special places don’t stay special by accident
BY MARK H. ROBINSON DEC 3, 2025
Printed in the Provincetown Independent
After he visited the Great Beach of Outer Cape Cod in the mid-1800s, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.” Today, one might say that all of America is behind him, crowding in, perhaps ready to push the man off the edge of the cliff.
My earliest memories of the Cape go back almost 70 years to vacations with my grandmother, digging in the muddy creeks of Barnstable Harbor and paddling out to the swim raft. The house was on a sandy lane with a primitive cesspool sitting in the water table. Today, that house is on an asphalt road and served by a municipal sewer system that has enabled the tiny summer cottages to become two-story trophy homes.
Much of our natural heritage has been lost to development, but much has been restored. We have lost our barn owls, whippoorwills, bobwhite quail, and meadowlarks, but we have regained our osprey, turkey, piping plovers, and even bald eagles. When I started working in environmental protection, beach buggies were still running up and down the entire length of the National Seashore, squashing plover chicks. It took 20 years for people to understand that there had to be constraints to help this fragile, threatened species. At first, they put bumper stickers on their trucks: “Piping Plover Tastes Like Chicken.” But Cape Cod now leads the nation in the restoration of this tiny shorebird’s population.
All around the globe, local people feel squeezed by tourism. Cape Codders know this feeling all too well. We have “bridge parties” on Labor Day on the Mid-Cape Highway overpasses, waving to the summer people as they leave. Some of it is a thank you for supporting our economy; some of it is a snarky Yankee “good riddance.”
Overdevelopment and fear of losing open space have led to concerted action. Cape Cod towns collectively have spent more than many states on purchasing land for conservation and water protection — about a half billion dollars in the past 40 years — doubling the percentage of land that is preserved.
At the same time, we are exploring several innovations in environmental protection here. One is ecorestoration: turning pockets of blight into attractive jewels in the landscape, like tearing down a dilapidated motel and creating a riverfront overlook. Sustainable agriculture is another. At one time, the Cape had the largest farm (22,000 acres) east of the Mississippi. Our turnips, asparagus, and strawberries were legendary. But soil was lost to the same sprawl that decimated wildlife habitats. Now we are getting some farms to hang on by buying them or their development rights while leasing them for production like the Tony Andrews Farm, a 120-year-old strawberry farm in East Falmouth.
Preserving natural land is the best landscape strategy for climate resilience. We can also turn monocultures like abandoned cranberry bogs into natural systems again. Cape Cod has become an epicenter for this phenomenon with five projects completed in the past five years. We are also leading in the restoration of natural tidal flow to dammed estuaries. The Herring River project in Wellfleet is the largest salt marsh renovation in New England.
In Falmouth, there’s a 60-acre forest with one rundown house on it. Rather than tear down the house and restore the landscaping, we are partnering with Habitat for Humanity to build 14 small houses on the part of the property that had been developed. We will preserve 53 acres of forest instead of 60. And 14 families can move in.
It is mostly my generation that burdened Cape Cod with suburban sprawl. But the same generation responded, out of anxiety or guilt, to keep some special places special.
People still want to come to Cape Cod because it is a lovely place stuck out in the ocean that you can drive to. I am not an expert on how tourism can be sustainable here or anywhere. I do know that when I am a tourist, I try to learn a little of the history before I go and after I return, when I have some context for it. Travel without learning is just loitering.
My wish is that tourists will go home with some appreciation of the hard work that goes on, mostly behind the scenes, to preserve some of the Cape Cod experience, even if we cannot keep it intact everywhere. Special places don’t stay special by accident.
There’s an old joke about day-trippers who come to Cape Cod with a T-shirt and a five dollar bill and don’t change either one. One thing we can all change is our attitude about the people who are struggling to keep it worth traveling to.
Mark H. Robinson of Cotuit has been executive director of the Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts since its founding in 1986. He is the governor’s representative on the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission. This essay is a short version of his keynote speech at the recent World Tourism Forum in Dennis.