Cape Cod: The Environment, the Economy, and the People of a Fragile Eco-system

The middle of the nineteenth century was an era of sail and water that capitalized on the Cape's rich fishing grounds, forests, and marshes. This paper will focus on the environmental impact of the regime of resource utilization of extraction and production. It will explore why that environmental impact led to the crash of the regime.   The essay will then consider the emergence of the regime of tourism and the environmental impact of that regime. The example of Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker, who went before the Wellfleet town meeting in 1906 and argued that the community should spend tens of thousands of dollars dyking the tidal inlets to the town's saltwater marshes to cut down on mosquitoes and encourage tourism, provides an example of this shift and the underlying themes.