Sable Island National Park: How to reconcile the competing interests of wilderness protection and ecotourism.
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THREE HUNDRED kilometres southeast of Halifax, and 170 kilometres from the nearest landfall, at Canso, Nova Scotia, one of the most remote pieces of Canada stands out against the Atlantic like a thin white rune. Sable Island is the exposed tip of a massive sandbar perched on the edge of the Eastern Scotian Shelf, a spare, desertlike landscape in the middle of the sea. Its sands have shifted into an unlikely shape: a crescent some forty-two kilometres long, tapered at the extremities into curled, narrow spits, calling to mind a smile of uncertain temper. A system of tall dunes runs down the middle of the island like a spine, two parallel ridges with fields of grass and heath, and in between a smattering of ponds fed by the freshwater lens that underlies the island and sustains its life. The dunes are fuzzed with windswept marram grass, its deep, fibrous roots holding them together as they are sculpted by the powerful marine elements: gales, waves, and the duelling currents of the warm Gulf Stream running eastward off the island’s southern shore, and the cold, westward-flowing Labrador Current to the north. The mixing of temperatures can cause fog as thick as chowder, which is partly why Sable is infamous for shipwrecks, some 350 of which lie buried in the shoals and sprawling sandbars that surround its coast. It’s also famous for the shaggy wild horses that live among the dunes — one of the world’s last free-roaming herds and, on days when the sun is shining, an almost irresistible symbol of innocence and freedom. In a country known for finding its history comparatively bland, Sable Island is an anomaly: a place that seems, with all its improbable beauty and folklore, to exist half in the realm of myth.