Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches

An eloquent, forceful plea to save America's rapidly eroding beaches and coastline, this revelatory and disturbing report from the science editor of the New York Times is reminiscent of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in its sense of urgency and moral passion. From the motels and T-shirt shops of beachless Florida ""beach towns"" to Los Angeles County, most of whose beaches are artificial, the story Dean tells is the same. People build on unstable landforms, then attempt to avoid the inevitable consequences through quick technological fixes: concrete seawalls, artificial reefs, sand-trapping steel groins, jetties, underground ""dewatering"" systems of pipes and pumps, etc. These techno-fixes may prolong the life of coastal buildings, but they usually accelerate erosion and environmental degradation--and taxpayers end up spending tens of millions of dollars to protect the property of those who knew they were building or buying in an unsafe place. Dean's book is a lucid primer on coastal engineering; it is also an appalling tale of shortsightedness, greed and willful ignorance, as property owners and developers square off against environmentalists and beach preservationists. It opens with a dramatic account of the hurricane that blasted Galveston, Tex., in 1900, leading the city to make a ""Faustian bargain"" by erecting a seawall that hastened the beach's demise. Dean sees Hurricane Andrew's devastation of the Gulf Coast in 1992 as a warning about overdevelopment of the shore and the failure to make houses hurricane-resistant. As the book's title suggests, Dean's call for restraint in building, strategic retreat and conservation of our shores goes against the current, but it is well worth listening to, especially as many climatologists predict rising sea levels due to global warming. Photos. (June)