Field guide: Barrier islands

What makes for a perfect paradise?

Deer Island, Mississippi / Photo copyright Margaret Crosby

“The island seems to have a tenacious hold on the human imagination,” the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan wrote in his classic book Topophilia.

This fact, he notes, stands in contrast with their role—or rather lack of a role—in ecology and human evolution. Islands tend not to be places of great species abundance. They played little role in shaping our species’ trajectory.¹ To explain this riddle, tuan notes that islands’ apartness seems to offer an escape from everything that is wrong with the world—as if on an island we can become “quarantined by the sea from the ills of the continent.”

A few weeks back, a friend organized a group excursion to one of my own personal paradises: Horn Island, one of the barrier islands running along the edge of Mississippi’s coast. I first discovered Horn Island years ago, when I…