The Beaches Are Moving: The Drowning of America's Shoreline

Living with the Shore

by Wallace Kaufman, Deborah F. Pilkey, Orrin H. Pilkey

Our beaches are eroding, sinking, washing out right under our houses, hotels, bridges; vacation dreamlands become nightmare scenes of futile revetments, fills, groins, what have you — all thrown up in a frantic defense against the natural system. The romantic desire to live on the seashore is in doomed conflict with an age-old pattern of beach migration. Yet it need not be so. Conservationist Wallace Kaufman teams up with marine geologist Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., in an evaluation of America's beaches from coast to coast, giving sound advice on how to judge a safe beach development from a dangerous one and how to live at the shore sensibly and safely.

Genres: Geology

346 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1979

Reviews

[Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Focuses on how people need to plan better to avoid property damage due to coastal erosion. Does not really address whether the forces accelerating coastal erosion might be human-caused. A manageable read for a non-scientist, though quite long.

As this book was published in 1979, it might be interesting to follow up on some of the predictions here. For example, the National Marine Fisheries Service Building (now known as the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center) built in California in 1963 in disregard of local regulations on coastal erosion indeed had to be rebuilt in 2013.

[Sandy Heisey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This non-fiction work sounded the trumpet of concern years ago for the over-working of America's shoreline. Little has changed.

[David Winston]

Good baseline information

[Kristofer Carlson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book about 25 years ago, and it made such an impression on me that 25 years later I bought a copy. This book is a must read for anyone living near the sea. Read it once, and the foolishness of much of our zoning laws and development policies is evident.

The beaches are moving, existing in dynamic equilibrium with the sea. The beach is a system, encompassing more than what bathers would call the beach. I truth, the beach encompases the beach proper, the dunes, and the marsh and forest behind the dunes. All of these work together to protect the land from the onslaught of the ocean. The beach expands and contracts with the changing seasons. Storms expend their fury upon the dunes, protecting the land behind them. The larger storms overtop the dunes, shifting the entire beach system further inland. What was dune becomes beach; what was marsh becomes dunes; what was forest becomes marsh; and the ancient forest reappears on the new beach, as the formerly downed trees appear as logs on the beach.

The beach, and in particular barrier islands, are like giant, slow-moving conveyer belts. Like tank tracks, the barrier islands shift their positions over time in response to storms, rising sea levels, and land subsidence. When we build on barrier islands, what we build is by nature temporary and ephemeral.

Seaside cliffs are especially vulnerable to collapsing into the sea, especially when the cliffs are made of sedimentary rock. A storm clears away the rubble beneath the cliff, destabilizing it. Soon a period of rain, wind, and surf loosens the soil, and the cliff collapses into the sea --- creating a beautiful vista where once a building stood.

And yet we continue to develop on what amounts to shifting sands, denying the inevitable, and pretending that our flimsy seawalls can withstand the natural forces that erode cliffs and gradually wear down the mountains.