from a dedicated $25 million purse taken from realty transfer fees.
Noreen Bodman, president of the business-oriented Jersey Shore
Partnership, calls replenishment “a return on investment that benefits
the state in terms of tax dollars, and ultimately benefits every resident
in terms of quality of life and recreational values. It also protects busi-
nesses and utilities from the impact of some of these storms.”
The luncheonette in downtown Sea Bright displays some starkly
revealing aerial photos. One, taken in the early 1990s, shows a town
with no beach to speak of, thanks largely to the effects of that seawall.
The other, from 1999, shows a wide expanse of sand. The photos
appear to offer stark proof that what human folly destroys, human
ingenuity can repair. But many local environmentalists, including
Bennett, Baykeeper Andy Willner, and Surfers’ Environmental
Alliance co-regional director Brian Unger, oppose the beach replenish-
ment work. They say the massive effort to pump in sand benefits only
a few wealthy homeowners, and also encourages even more dangerous
shoreline development. And, they add, it is ultimately folly because
global-warming-induced storms and rising tides will likely wash it all
away in the next decade.
Orrin Pilkey’s classic book The Corps and the Shore, written with
Katharine Dixon, details how jetties, seawalls, groins, and other des-
perate maneuvers offer only temporary respite from the natural effects
of erosion and shifting coastline—and eventually make things worse.
The same thing is true of imported sand. New Jersey’s replenished
beaches, the authors wrote, could expect only a 1- to 3-year lifespan, at
a cost of damage to coral, water clarity, and bottom-dwellers. In actual
fact they have already outlived that prediction, though the sand is
receding.
The East Coast was created in a collision between two tectonic
plates, the American and Atlantic. Their coming together produced the
Appalachian Mountains, and also the longest stretch of thin barrier
islands in the world, extending from New England to Mexico. As
Cornelia Dean notes in Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s
Beaches, “When these barrier islands are attacked by rising seas, their
natural defense is to back out of the way.” In other words, they are con-
stantly shifting and reforming. Pilkey points out that barrier islands
48 Jim Motavalli with Sherry Barnes