Though the Cape has been technically an island since 1914, it continues to be increasingly a part of the mainland. The old, indigenous, rural maritime culture of the Cape is irretrievably gone, though small fishing fleets continue to go out of local harbors and inlets. Cape Codders now live in a cosmopolitan contemporary culture, sharing more with their urban counterparts than with the sea captains in whose 200-year-old houses they may dwell or spend the night.

With this staggering growth and its resultant pressures on the Cape’s resources and natural habitats, there has been an increasing movement to protect the Cape’s fragile landscape and its wildlife. The most dramatic and sweeping manifestation of this was the Congressional authorization of the Cape Cod National Seashore itself in 1961, but a number of homegrown environmental research, conservation, and educational organizations have also been established. These groups include the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, the Wellfleet Bay Audubon Sanctuary, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, the Association for the Preservation of Cape Cod, and the Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts.

In part because of the work of these and other groups, general environmental awareness has also grown. The Cape’s salt marshes are no longer regarded as wasteland to be dredged for marinas or filled for development but as one of the richest and most productive marine habitats in the world. Local kettle pond shores, once built up with little regard for environmental impact, are now recognized as important buffers protecting water quality and as important habitat for certain flowering plants, some of which are found in only a handful of sites worldwide.

No longer are local whales driven ashore or hunted with harpoons. Instead, today’s Cape Codders ply a lucrative trade running whale-watching trips out of Provincetown and other ports, and a Cape Cod Stranding Network has been established to aid stranded whales and other marine animals.

Shorebirds, too, have ceased to be slaughtered by the thousands on our beaches and in our marshes. Instead, areas such as the Monomoy Wildlife Refuge and the National Seashore provide protected feeding and resting stations for thousands of migrating shorebirds and waterfowl. Each summer sections of beaches and dunes within the Seashore and elsewhere are roped off and patrolled to insure the survival of such local nesting species as terns and piping plovers, and park talks and walks stress to visitors the importance and fragility of these breeding areas.

Besides changes in human attitudes and practice, natural changes in wildlife populations continue to take place as well. As ocean waters warm, cold-water species such as cod and halibut have moved farther north, while warmer-water species such as striped bass and bluefish seem to be increasing. Sizable numbers of wintering harbor seals have appeared in the Cape’s estuaries and offshore beaches in the past 20 years, and during the winter of 1989-90, for the first time ever, some rare gray seals gave birth to several pups on Monomoy Island. Willets and oystercatchers, after a long absence, are nesting on Cape beaches once again, and ospreys, responding to artificial nesting platforms, have returned to Cape bays and ponds after their disappearance during the 1960s from DDT poisoning. Other recent self-arrivals on the Cape’s wildlife scene include opossums, house finches, and even coyotes.

What do all these changes and transformations teach us? It may be, most importantly, that we still confront what the First Comers faced: the land itself, sea-born and sea-shaped. When we learn its history and observe the age-old forces that continue to work today, the lesson seems to be that any human occupation of the Earth is, at best, tentative and transitory, and particularly so here. The waves, beaches, dunes, and trees of the Cape continue to dance, and we have begun to learn to dance with them—to understand and adapt to the land’s rhythms, tempos, and limits—so that we and those who come after us may continue to enjoy all that it has to offer. For it is we, residents and visitors alike, who are today’s Cape Codders.