In April 2008, American naturalist Peter Matthiessen received the Hadada Award for his lifelong commitment to the literary arts. One of the founders of The Paris Review and the author of more than 20 works of nonfiction and historical fiction, Matthiessen has been called "the poet laureate of nature writers."
A recurrent theme in his writings is the exploitation and threatened destruction of people and places by the advance of modern civilization. In Men's Lives (1986), he describes the effects of pollution on the waters around the South Fork of Long Island and the disappearing way of life of the local fishermen. The changes that he records in the following paragraphs took place in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Changes
from Chapter 12 of Men's Lives* by Peter Matthiessen
With the sudden rise in value of the land, the peaceful atmosphere of the South Fork began to change. The change developed like faraway massed clouds in the northern sky, the first iron weather of winter storm. Sagaponack was now the closest public beach to Sag Harbor, and traffic down its main street increased quickly. Within a few years the old Hildreth store expanded its services to accommodate the swelling tide of tourists, and the old village's quiet days were over. A new rash of real estate speculators, entreating other newcomers to "share our heritage," discovered Sagaponack, where the smaller local farms, unable to compete with the huge agribusinesses in the West, or survive the growing tax on land inheritance, had begun to die. Even that oldest family farm in the United States was sold off by the squabbling heirs, with most of the money, it was said, gone to the lawyers.
The wells and water table had been polluted by chemical pesticides and fertilizers that leached into the earth and were washed by rain into the creeks, where the stunned fish were scavenged by the ospreys. The DDT absorbed by the microorganisms and plankton, and concentrating in the fish tissues on which they fed, weakened the osprey eggs, which broke when incubated. The great fish hawks were once so common here that twenty-five or thirty at a time could be counted over Fort Pond Bay; by the early sixties the huge primitive nests on Gardiners and Cartwright Shoal stood empty. Within the decade, the osprey was so rare that I would call my children out to look when one passed over, for fear that this sighting might be the last. The blue crabs that used to run in streams out of every salt pond when the gut was opened to the sea, and the fiddler crabs, once so thick in the spartina grass of the tidal wetlands that the flow of claw-snapping brown creatures could be channeled into tubs for use as bait, were killed off by DDT in the aerial sprays. Filling, bulkheading, and pollution of the wetlands were eliminating marine life spawning grounds and the last resorts of the wild duck, and even the long strings of sea duck had been much diminished by massive oil spills in the coastal waters. The remnant flocks were harassed by speedboat shooters who cared more about noise than boats and birds, who chased the flocks as they labored off the water and did not bother to pick up what they blasted down.
Selected Works of Nonfiction by Peter Matthiessen
- Wildlife in America, 1959
- The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness, 1961
- Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution, 1969
- The Snow Leopard, 1978
- Men's Lives, 1986
- End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica, 2003
* Originally published by Random House in 1986, Men's Lives by Peter Matthiessen was reprinted by Vintage Books in 1988.
