Friends Of Pleasant Bay Marks 40 Years Of Conservation, Access, Research And Education

PLEASANT BAY – The year was 1985, and Pleasant Bay — the pristine, 9,000-acre estuary that connects Orleans, Brewster, Harwich and Chatham — was under serious threat. Human activity, chiefly nutrient pollution from residential septic systems, was threatening water quality. Erosion, and the struggle to prevent it, were changing the shoreline. Beloved sailing camps had closed, opening the likelihood of a waterfront building boom. And the four towns lacked a plan for working together to protect the Bay.

 The late Alan McClennen, Sr., of Orleans, was one one of the first to see the need for a regional approach.

 “His generation, people born 1910 to 1920, remembered the Cape the way it was,” said his son, Alan Jr. “Then they came back here and retired and realized that things were changing very, very rapidly.” The qualities that made Pleasant Bay such a special place “were gradually being forgotten,” he said. He and a small group of others decided to act.

 On Sept. 23, 1985, with 350 people already having signed on as members, the fledgling Friends of Pleasant Bay held its first public meeting at the Snow Library in Orleans. On Aug. 7, the group is inviting the public to attend a birthday celebration honoring its 40 years promoting conservation, access, research and education about Pleasant Bay. The event, to be held at the Wequassett Inn from 4 to 6:30 p.m., will include a panel discussion moderated by Rich Delaney of the Center for Coastal Studies. Admission is open to the general public with a suggested donation of $25, which includes membership dues.

Working Together

 By 1985, it was already clear that Pleasant Bay was endangered, said Bill Litchfield, then a Chatham selectman. 

 “There were challenges over the years. In 1974 or ‘75 there was going to be a big condominium development on Strong Island,” he said. And a few years later, there were plans to develop a large state beach at Jacknife Harbor. “They were indicators of the sorts of things that could have been proposed, and almost certainly would have been proposed.”

Around that time, there was talk about employing a new strategy: securing a state designation of Pleasant Bay as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC), which would open the possibility of imposing stricter regional development controls around the estuary. The towns were beginning to investigate the possibility, but it became clear that it would need to be done as a consortium.

 Andy Young, then a member of Chatham’s conservation commission and open space committee, said he was approached by Kathryn Manson of the Orleans planning board about creating a group that focused on Pleasant Bay as a resource, “as opposed to the town-by-town focus that had been the case, as far as we could tell, for most of the past,” Young recalled. “It was a fairly unique idea at the time. But the four towns around the bay had never been engaged in this way,” he said. Manson was chosen as the first leader of the group.

 “She’s knowledgeable and pretty plain-spoken, and was somebody around which a group would agree to gather,” Young recalled.

 A core group of people met as the “grandly named” Friends of Pleasant Bay Steering Committee, Young said, to talk about the idea of seeking an ACEC together. That job went to the elder Alan McClennen.

 “He sat down and he drafted that application,” his son said. “He fought with the state secretary of environmental affairs to get that application approved.” Brewster was not initially a signatory, since its tiny shorefront on Pleasant Bay consisted of “a rock,” McClennen quipped.

 It took years to earn the ACEC designation, which ultimately prompted creation of a regional resource management plan. When McClennen went to the towns to ask for funding for it, “the standard response at the time was, ‘we don’t have any money,’” he said. The Friends of Pleasant Bay had raised $30,000, and persuaded the towns to match the amount. The Friends helped select a local planner, Carole Ridley, to write the plan. The effort grew into the Pleasant Bay Alliance, the formal municipal partnership between the four towns that has carried out research, policy analysis and public outreach on matters related to the bay.

 The work hasn’t been without conflict, Young said. 

 “As soon as you talk about resource protection there will be conflict,” he said. There were, and are, legitimate business interests around Pleasant Bay that can conflict with conservation interests. Some of the group’s early leaders, like State Rep. Rick Cahoon and others, “were also sensitive to the rights of people that had property around the bay and what they might want to do in terms of development activity,” Young said. 

 It was clear early on that protecting land around Pleasant Bay from overdevelopment would be key to protecting the resource. The Friends of Pleasant Bay does not acquire land, but has supported local land trusts that do so. The organization also supported the Compact of Conservation Trusts, which surveyed the remaining open space in the Pleasant Bay watershed with an eye toward conservation. 

It has also contributed to the compact’s Thomsen Land Fund and supported land purchases in several towns, including the Pleasant Bay Woodlands, Eelman’s Point, Twinings Pond and the D. Isabel Smith Monomoy River Conservation Lands. 

 More recently, it supported the acquisition of Sipson Island, one of the jewels of the bay, by the Sipson Island Trust. 

Another key goal of the Friends has been to ensure public access to the bay, where the public’s ability to get to the water is jeopardized by dense waterfront development. The organization has funded a series of informative maps and guides that help people find accessible boat ramps, beaches and walking trails. 
 The Friends are also supporters of Pleasant Bay Community Boating, which offers public sailing programs, school outreach initiatives and citizen science programs. The Friends underwrote, designed, built, permitted and launched a 37-foot solar-powered pontoon boat, the Friend of Pleasant Bay, based at Pleasant Bay Community Boating. The boat operates as a floating classroom and research platform.

Understanding the science behind Pleasant Bay has underpinned efforts to improve regulation, and the Friends of Pleasant Bay has over the years supported studies of the area’s archaeology and its coastal morphology. In 1985, there were suspicions that there might someday be a breach in Nauset (North) Beach that could cause dramatic changes in Pleasant Bay. Two years later, it happened, sending houses toppling into Chatham Harbor.

 The Friends have also supported water quality monitoring, which is key to understanding the impacts of coastal development on the Bay, and helped pay for studies of horseshoe crabs and other marine life that call Pleasant Bay home. The first marine ecosystem assessment was carried out in 2014 by the Center for Coastal Studies, using funds from the Friends. The comprehensive study is now being updated, again with money from the Friends.

Education
 The Friends’ final goal, education, involves ensuring that the next generation of Cape Codders sees the value of Pleasant Bay and places like it. Since the early 2000s, the organization has provided competitive grants to teachers in the Lower Cape’s school systems, helping students carry out research projects and cultural activities linked to the bay. 

 In addition to its partnership with Pleasant Bay Community Boating, the Friends have sponsored a number of public educational programs on topics ranging from horseshoe crabs and seals to the impact of climate change. In 2023, the organization launched its Native Cultural Initiative, working with the Wampanoag Tribe to educate the public about indigenous history and culture in the Pleasant Bay area.

“Over these 40 years, [the Friends] have been in the vanguard of protecting the bay from challenges,” Litchfield said. “Of course, the job’s not over with.”

 The organization has provided steady leadership, a regional approach and the needed resources to meet the evolving concerns affecting Pleasant Bay, McClennen noted.

 “You had an ongoing organization, the Friends, which got bigger and bigger,” he said. “They were always there and always made a donation, large or small, to any land acquisition on the bay. They were there.”

 Young and some of the other charter members feel good about what the Friends have achieved.

 “The idea that you would have a resource focus, I think, has been very much validated by the work that they’ve done,” he said. A key achievement was simply bringing the four towns together around a common cause, a viewpoint that ultimately led to the creation of the Pleasant Bay Alliance.

 “The Friends of Pleasant Bay had a distinct hand in all of that,” Young said.

 As for the next 40 years? Current board president Allison Coleman said the focus will continue to be on funding partnerships with scientists and conservationists to understand the bay and to mitigate the negative impacts that threaten it. The organization will keep supporting groups like Pleasant Bay Community Boating and the Sipson Island Trust to ensure access, and educational initiatives will continue being important.

 “Indigenous wisdom reminds us that we are all related to the bay just as we are related to our families,” Coleman said. “I hope that over the next 40 years we can learn to embody this wisdom more deeply by taking care of the bay as we would a beloved family member.”

 For more information, and details about the Aug. 7 public meeting, visit www.FriendsOfPleasantBay.org.