Cape Cod Museum of Natural History presents Swirling Currents: Controversy, Compromise and Dynamic Coastal Change With Sandy Macfarlane

Sandy Macfarlane has lived her entire life by the sea. Like many kids, she grew up loving the water and her curiosity about all things marine, continues. Aided by forty years of hands-on experience in resource evaluation, policy and management, and decades of recreational rowing in a 14-foot Cape Dory sailboat, she learned about the biological and physical world around her.
 
Swirling Currents explores Cape Cod’s front row seat for several global marine conflicts in its waters. Its unique geography, an arm of sand and glacial till sticking more than forty miles into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Massachusetts, make it a physical boundary between cold water species to the north and warm water ones to the south. Local events, such as the incredible show of over 200 highly endangered North Atlantic right whales in 2017 off the coast of Cape Cod, is often part of a much larger picture. Whales closer to demise; sharks chasing seals chasing fish; turtles stranding; functionally extinct oysters and aquaculture filling the gap; the Gulf of Maine heating swiftly and the Gulf Stream slowing down — all happening in the global context of dynamic coastal change.
 
Join Sandy in a discussion of how to manage coastal environments and social pressures of today with historical perspective of the past and needs of the future. Book signing to follow.