Cumberland Island National Seashore and Wilderness in southern Georgia—with its massive live oak maritime forests, saltwater marshes, and spectacular white sand beach—is the largest undeveloped barrier island on the eastern seaboard and one of the gems of America’s National Park system. The National Park Service (NPS), though, is looking to maximize visitor numbers and recreation at the expense of the Cumberland Island Wilderness and its wild inhabitants.
Once the private enclave of wealthy families, the federal government acquired the Island and established the Cumberland Island National Seashore in the 1960s to save it from real estate development like that which had beset many other barrier islands. In 1982, Congress designated much of the Island’s northern two-thirds as the Cumberland Island Wilderness, or as potential Wilderness in areas where private existing rights would eventually expire. Already quite a treasure, Cumberland Island was on the path to wild restoration and becoming one of the premier Wildernesses in the National Wilderness Preservation System.
Tragically, NPS has failed to keep the promise of a wild Cumberland Island. Its proposed new Visitor Use Management Plan (VUMP) prioritizes recreation over wildness by more than doubling daily visitor numbers from 300 to 700, adding a new ferry service to the wilderness boundary at Plum Orchard, creating two new campsites in Wilderness, increasing guided backpacking trips and kayak rentals, and expanding e-bike access across the island. It also allows degradation—including thousands of feet of trenches and a 1,200-square-foot septic leach—to areas adjacent to the wilderness boundary, risking important habitat for loggerhead sea turtles, piping plover, and other migratory birds.
The plan’s substantial increase in visitor numbers and amenities would transform what is a relatively primitive experience to a more developed tourist experience. The NPS needs to change course and instead promote restoring a wild Cumberland Island by prioritizing Wilderness and its wildlife over intensively expanding recreation.
Wilderness Watch and our members are urging the agency to drop this VUMP, keep the current 300-visitor-per-day limit, and ban motorized or mechanized vehicle use—including bicycles and e-bikes—north of the Wilderness’s southern boundary, except for those with private existing rights. We’re also urging the agency not to establish ferry service to Plum Orchard, expand island commercial services, or create any new developed campgrounds in Wilderness.
Photo: NPS
