And Castles Made Of Sand, Fall Into The Sea…Eventually

This is a guest post by Ben Kalina.

Sheril has written extensively about the perils of rising sea levels.  In this post she points us to descriptions of what Maine, Rhode Island, Maryland  and Texas are doing to prevent further land erosion. Is it enough? What more can be done?

In “The Control of Nature,” a book written by Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee, readers are taken on a journey deep into the geology of the Mississippi River Basin, where the futility of human efforts to contain and guide the massive river become obvious, and in some ways, amusing.  In each chapter we visit another location where humans have developed atop a moving target, where times scales of geology and civilization come into dramatic conflict.  But our failures to recognize the limits of our ability to engineer nature become less trivial and lyrical when we see the impact of what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans, or when we watch mudslides bury villages and towns.

If you’re out there Mr. McPhee, I’d like to suggest a new chapter on how we’ve built out our barrier islands.  Barrier islands are geology in motion, they’re mobile pieces of land that move in almost historical times scales, shifting and changing with passing storms.  But not anymore.  With our passion to live by the edge of the ocean, we’ve put ourselves in a tough spot.  To maintain our property lines, we’ve become dependent on the practice of piling sand on top of sand on top of water to hold back a rising sea.  Yet beach replenishment, in the blunt words of at least one person, is a “just a bandaid on a hemmorage”, one that only distracts us from dealing with the reality that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner with coastal development.  These projects are 65% federal money, 26.25% state and 8.75% local.  But with federal budgets under fire, there will come a time when the money dries up for these communities.  Are there other approaches to protect our coasts that don’t have the collateral effects of beach replenishment on our budgets and our ecosystems?  And if not, what then?  It’s no fun to imagine a modern day Atlantis along our coastlines, and my documentary, Shored Up, is an attempt to bring some of these issues out into the open before it’s too late:

Ben Kalina is a filmmaker based in Philadelphia, whose work explores the intersection of science, culture and the environment.  He’s the Creative Director at Evidence Based Media, and the President of Mangrove Media.