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TODAY Monday 11 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Cleavage

At the conclusion of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes some of the world's most achingly beautiful prose about hope, futility, and the American experience ("So we beat on, boats against the current..."). Hope is the most crucial, defining factor. The traditional color of hope -- green -- recurs throughout the threnody. There is the famous "green light at the end of the dock." And there is also a marvelous passage in which Nick Carroway "sees" America for the first time, as he conjures the shades of old Dutch sailors and looks through their eyes at "the fresh green breast of the New World."

The young bosom glimpsed by the Dutchmen is what they named Long Island. Today we take some offense at the implication that the place was uninhabited, for even then New York and environs attracted sizable human communities, drawn to the sea-tempered climate and the wealth of food in the estuaries and forests. And we know that Henry Hudson and his crew were not even the first Europeans here (that honor falls to Giuseppi Verrazano, whose bridge looms over "Saturday Night Fever"). But Fitzgerald's is a great vision, still capable of moving the heart and -- maybe more surprising -- opening the eyes.

It required artistic imagination in the 1920s to glimpse a fresh green breast of the New World in the precincts of Long Island. Today it seems to demand a willful suspension of normal brain functions. Highways, malls, subdivisions. Lakes of parking, forests of signs, fields of department stores, a steady breeze of air conditioning. But 17th Century nature still can be found. You have to look in the contrasting zones of high privilege and mass democracy. On the North Shore, private money has maintained pockets of old landscape, where deciduous trees and granite boulders mingle by the shallow waters of Long Island Sound. On the South Shore, Robert Moses and his generation boldly appropriated vast acreages of Atlantic oceanfront for the masses. The world's most beautiful extended line of barrier beaches is public property for significant stretches. Anybody with a train ticket and some patience can get the same ashtray-quality sand and gorgeous turquoise breakers as the plutocrats get in their compounds.

The farther east one travels on Long Island, the less dense the population and the more evidence one finds of the native beauty of the place. What is missing, therefore, is what is hardest to achieve: a place where statistically typical Americans can own property and make a living without trashing the environment. Walt Whitman's 1850s Long Island of farms and fishing villages may have been the closest we'll come. Long Island fed New York back then: vegetables, poultry, and the most bountiful shellfish grounds north of the Chesapeake. As late as the 1960s, the East End of the island was still productive farm country.

Pollution, dumping and drainage have reduced the great oyster beds to a pittance. Overfishing has nearly ruined the stocks of marine life over the Continental Shelf; in the relentlessly competitive business of harvesting what's left, the kinds of small Long Island fishermen communities celebrated by Peter Matthisssen in "The Lives of Men" have gone virtually extinct. Agriculture, rarely practiced for sentiment, has retreated steadily as farmers cash in land for real estate profits that are bigger and easier than potato profits. On the East End, you'll still find some efficient farms keyed to the niche markets of high-end restaurants and often subsidized through the Agricultural Preservation Rights program of Suffolk County. But the land of the East End is now essentially divided into four parts: New York State public property, consisting of pine forests, dunes, and recreation beaches, easily accessible if you have a car; local town beaches, easily accessible only if you don't have a car; conservation preserves, owned by the Nature Conservancy and local land trusts, that either make themselves inconspicuous or tell you not to trespass; and private property. Some of the buildings on private property are in marvelous harmony with the landscape; others are depressingly clueless. I stayed in both.

As enviros must do, this weekend I became part of the problem, and had a great time. In the Walt Whitman Long Island I celebrate, my Irish Catholic ancestors couldn't have afforded a trip to the Hampton beaches, and they might not have been particularly welcome if they got there. Beneficiaries of the industrial and democratic revolutions, we relish our moments in the slices of paradise that we preserve or stumble upon, knowing that the hard men and women of earlier times were too grounded, too occupied to linger over the sensual epiphanies at hand.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Peter Bahouth, former head of Greenpeace USA, current head of the Turner Foundation, says that enviros have been slow to recognize a quiet revolution in the ways in which federal environmental laws are enforced. Give a look, please, to his stimulating op-ed on "The Danger of Devo."

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/08: The Monsters from 12,000 BC
8/07: A Little More Room
8/06: Big Victory, I Guess
8/05: Necessary Vulgarization
8/04: More Crime, Please
8/01: Wise Use, Smart Use
7/31: DC Blues
7/30: Atlanta and Salina
7/29: Herons and Frogs
7/28: Golf

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