Tales of harm and hope for beaches

Two new books reveal a series of gloomy predications of what lies ahead for the world’s beaches if people continue to respond to rising sea levels with engineering. Cornelia Dean looks into the startling revelations. 

In her song Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell gave voice to a lament we hear more and more these days: You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Her theme is the landscape - “paradise,” she calls it in the song, paved over for a parking lot.

Two recent books make a similar point, in very different ways, about the bit of landscape paradise we call the coast. One of them, The Last Beach, by Orrin H Pilkey and J Andrew G Cooper, describes the abuse people are heaping on the world’s beaches, like unwise building, pollution and the wholesale removal of sand. The authors, coastal scientists at Duke University and Ulster University, provide a grim timeline of the destruction and loss we can expect if sea levels continue to rise and people continue business as usual.

The second, The Narrow Edge by Deborah Cramer, has a focus at once narrower and more broad. Deborah’s subjects are red knots, shorebirds whose annual migrations from their Arctic breeding grounds to Tierra del Fuego and back are miracles of avian endurance, fueled in large part by the fatty eggs of horseshoe crabs. The crabs, unchanged for eras, have long been harvested for use as animal feed and other purposes. Today, the crabs face new threats, as the beaches and mud flats where they spawn drown under rising seas and encroaching development. We already know people and their infrastructure are altering things for the worse on the world’s coasts.

The title of the new book tells you all you need to know about its contents: gloomy predictions of what lies ahead for the world’s beaches if people continue to respond to rising seas with engineering that usually makes a bad situation worse. In 30 years, they write, developed shorelines - particularly those lined with high rise condominium developments and the like - will be surrounded by sea walls facing narrow beaches that come up for air only at low tide. Where there are broad beaches, it will be because they are artificially replenished with infusions of sand from elsewhere. This grim scenario already prevails in much of the world.

Not enough of us
In 60 years, Orrin and Andrew predict, sea walls protecting this development will be so massive that the ocean will be invisible to anyone standing on the ground in the communities they protect. Again, it is a scenario already playing out, along the northern New Jersey coast, in the Netherlands and elsewhere. In 90 years, the authors write, “old men tell stories of their boyhood fun on the beach to incredulous grandchildren,” but people seeking the beach experience will have to travel to Chile, Namibia or even Siberia to find it.

But nature is resilient, even in the face of terrible human insults. As Orrin and Andrew  note, beaches have tremendous capacity to take what nature dishes out. When waters rise, natural beaches simply move inland - if people get out of the way.
“It isn’t that beaches can’t handle rising sea levels,” they write. Beaches have survived 400 feet of sea level rise since the glaciers of the last ice age began melting about 20,000 years ago. Though they change shape and location in response to sea level rise (and storms), beaches have an amazing ability to absorb wave energy and reform and survive, even in extreme conditions.

They are under threat today, Orrin and Andrew  write, because “not enough of us understand beaches.” The same can be said of the red knots and the horseshoe crabs, though scientists are working hard to bring their lives to light.

Never too late
The birds are ideally equipped for their astonishing annual flights. Deborah and the researchers she writes about follow them in boats, planes, trains, helicopters, sport utility vehicles and all-terrain vehicles. The red knots, warmed by their feathers and fueled by a rich diet of horseshoe crab eggs and small shellfish, “can go anywhere, no matter how remote.”

In the 19th century, she writes, ornithologists were stunned to observe tens of thousands of the birds on beaches. Today, though, the Fish and Wildlife Service lists the birds as threatened, perched literally and figuratively on a narrow edge. In one dismal locale after another, places where the birds once gathered in the thousands, there may only be a few hundred - or a few dozen - today.

In theory, anyway, it is not too late for the birds, or the beaches. How their
stories end depend on many factors: whether we allow natural beaches to
survive and shift, whether we halt the emissions of carbon dioxide that are acidifying the oceans, and whether we decrease our industrial use of the crabs, to name three.
“The story of red knots begins with loss,” Deborah writes, “loss of large
numbers of birds, loss of beach and mud flat, loss of horseshoe crab eggs, and a slide toward extinction.” But, she goes on, in their annual flights, the red knots “have taken the measure of a shoreline running the length of the earth.” “As we lose our own bearings,” she adds, “their long flights offer a compass.”