This is the week that Cape Point closed “temporarily” to off-road vehicle and pedestrian access because a pair of piping plovers is courting in an area of the beach between Ramp 44 and the Point.
The Park Service’s ORV plan requires a mandatory buffer of 75 meters around the birds, which has cut off access.
There have been two piping plover nests at Cape Point so far this year, and one has been lost already, perhaps in last week’s especially high lunar tide.  One nest remains.
Last week, about 20 groups of folks in ORVs were stranded at the Point because the high lunar tide cut off the beach at the “narrows.” With the natural resource protection in place, the folks had no passage off on dry sand.
The Park Service declined to allow them to pass through the resource closure.  One man who was stranded with his wife and two young children tells his story in a guest column on the Commentary and Letters Page.

Most of my last blogs on the issue of beach access have been frustrating – to me and to some of The Island Free Press readers.

“I don't read Irene's Blog to learn about the island's important issues,” one reader said in a comment posted today. I skim over the comments to laugh at the KEYBOARD SPEWED HATE/PERSONAL ATTACK forum that it has become.”

Now, this is really depressing, since “Shooting the Breeze” is intended to be a forum to present and discuss the island’s important issues.

As one of my detractors noted in comments this week, “If the editor was really serious about having civil discourse, she would find guest speakers of different viewpoints and scrupulously edit the uncivil comments or do away with the comment sections altogether.”

So, I am taking the advice given me by this anonymous commenter and by a trusted friend and cracking down on the comments.

Going forward, I will edit the uncivil comments more scrupulously and brutally than I have in the past.

I have been editing the comments regularly, but I have preferred to be lenient to make sure everyone gets his or her chance to contribute an opinion, ask a question, or otherwise participate.

However, too many comments are full of coded obscenities and personal attacks. I understand why folks no longer want to read them.

No more.

Ever since Defenders of Wildlife, the National Audubon Society, and the Southern Environmental Law Center took aim on the National Park Service for not have an off-road vehicle management plan, the groups have managed to get their message out masterfully.

You’ve got to admire these folks.  They’re well funded, and it shows.  Their public information campaign of press releases and wildlife alerts stay on message and hammer that message home to all who will listen month after month, year after year.

The spin they put on their role in saving wildlife at the Cape Hatteras National Seashore should be the envy of any political consultant in this Presidential campaign year.

It isn’t that their message contains untruths.  Mostly, the problem is that they contain partial truths.

There are a couple of recent examples of how the environmental groups present their spin, making the same points they have made over and over since the consent decree settled a lawsuit by the groups against the Park Service.  

One is an SELC press release from March 13 announcing that a federal judge in Washington, D.C., granted the request of the environmental groups to intervene in the Cape Hatteras Access Preservation Alliance’s lawsuit against the Park Service over the final ORV plan and regulation.

Another is a letter from Jason Rylander, senior staff attorney for Defenders of Wildlife, urging supporters to contact their congressmen to oppose a bill that U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., has introduced to overturn the consent decree and the final rule and return the seashore to management under the 2007 Interim Protected Species Management Strategy and Environmental Assessment.

Here a few examples of misstatements or partial truths from those two documents – ones that have been mentioned in dozens of other release and alerts to members in the past four or five years.

The “impact of unrestricted ORV use has taken its toll on the habitat that seabirds and sea turtles rely on.”  Not true. There has not been unrestricted ORV use at the seashore in more than three decades – since the Park Service’s first attempt at an ORV plan was sent to Washington and then disappeared.  Since at least the late 1970s, there have been closures for nesting shorebirds, ORV trails, ramps, etc.