the business community, which sees both as vital to its busy tourist sea-
son. Real estate lobbyist Ken Smith calls Bennett “a lousy misanthrope”
for opposing more coastal development, and Bennett returns the volley
by labeling Smith “a shill for the real estate industry.”
Much as the environmentalists might want it, there is no
groundswell for a retreat from the shore, the option favored by critics
like Pilkey. The radical concept evokes both amusement and anger
from New Jersey property owners and businesspeople. What, just walk
away from billions of dollars of investment, not to mention the emo-
tional attachment?
But Pilkey, who directs the Program for the Study of Developed
Shorelines at Duke University, says retreat from the shore at least got
a hearing in North Carolina, where he lives. He cites current events on
North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where the Dare County Project has actu-
ally concluded that moving buildings back from the water’s edge would
be cheaper than a program of 10 to 20 years of constant beach nour-
ishment.
In New Jersey, the beach loss has so far been gradual and in many
cases reversible. But they have good reason to fear the sea’s restless-
ness in North Carolina, where global warming is helping to rapidly
reshape the shoreline. The more than 130-year-old Cape Hatteras light-
house was moved a half-mile inland in 1999 because a National
Research Council study had shown that the shoreline in front of it was
due to retreat 400 feet by 2018.
“Buying all the beachfront buildings on the Outer Banks would be
cheaper than nourishing the beach, but they decided to nourish any-
way at a cost of millions per mile,” says an exasperated Pilkey. “Twenty
years ago retreat from the shoreline wasn’t even mentioned in the cost-
benefit analysis, but now it’s not so outrageous and at least has to be
considered as a real possibility. We need to understand that when we
build a high rise on the beach, we’re forcing generations of people to
defend it against the rising ocean.”
Like most observers who closely follow coastal New Jersey, Pilkey
cannot say how much of the rapid erosion there is caused by global
warming. “Those beaches are very far north, so the nor’easters produce
a great deal of wave energy,” he says. “It’s the longest stabilized coast
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