in the U.S. Some of the beaches have had seawalls at their back for a
long time, more than 100 years, and the effect has been to deepen the
shore face and make the problem worse. So it’s hard to separate global
warming from all the other things that humans have done to the
beaches. But there’s no question that climate change is a factor. Global
warming has to increase coastal erosion.”
Pilkey was one of a group of eighty-five coastal geologists who
wrote to President Ronald Reagan in 1982 urging “a new approach to
the management of the American shoreline.” As cited in Cornelia
Dean’s Against the Tide, the scientists had concluded that most shore-
line stabilization projects protect property, not beaches, and that over
10 to 100 years these efforts “usually result in severe degradation or
total loss of a valuable natural resource, the open ocean beach.”
In their book The Beaches Are Moving, Pilkey and Wallace Kaufman
point out that the barrier islands protecting the Gulf and East coasts
are constantly on the move. These “warehouses of sand” have retreated
many miles since they were created. The islands were fed by sand
pumped forth by ancient rivers that in many cases have stopped play-
ing such a role.
A 1990 Coastal Management article by James G. Titus of the
Environmental Protection Agency entitled “Greenhouse Effect, Sea-Level
Rise and Barrier Islands” uses New Jersey’s 18-mile, two- to four-block-
wide Long Beach Island, 15 miles north of Atlantic City, as a case study.
It is an island of single-family homes clustered in such evocatively
named beach towns as Surf City and Barnegat Light, and it is in danger.
Barrier islands’ response to sea-level rise, says Titus, can be either
to roll up landward (“similar to rolling up a rug”), in which case it
remains intact, or it can break up and “drown in place.” Titus’s study
envisions an accelerating, six-inch sea-level rise affecting Long Beach
Island between 1986 and 2013, and another 6-inch rise between 2013
and 2031. Without coastal protection, barrier islands such as Long
Beach are likely to simply become uninhabitable. To prevent that, Titus
imagines residents will eventually have to approve a $1 billion, $219-
per-household “keep things as they are” scenario of raising the entire
island in place. Such an approach is likely to win more support than an
engineered retreat from the shore, which would involve abandoning
56 Jim Motavalli with Sherry Barnes