'We've Built Right Up to the Edge in the Most Foolish Way'
Excerpts:
"The coasts we live on are not natural phenomena, but human phenomena," he says. In his book, Gillis writes about how beginning in the 18th century, Western cultures began to re-imagine and rebuild the shoreline to suit their commercial purposes, creating hard boundaries where tidal areas and marshlands once blurred the edge between sea and land:
What was once the edge of the sea, defined by the reach of water, became the seaside, a feature of land. What had been a threshold open in both directions became an ever firmer border. Every year governments around the world spend billions trying to “fix” their coasts, make them conform to the lines they have drawn in the sand. They build seawalls, groins, and jetties, dredge mountains of sand, and haul still more to replace what has been washed away. In the name of coastal protection, they destroy estuaries and wetlands, actually destabilizing shores by encouraging devastating erosion and flooding by sea surges.
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Our scientific understanding of the sea has advanced exponentially. "We have finally discovered the sea for itself, literally a living, breathing organism in its own right," Gillis says. That organism's breath sometimes comes in the form of hurricanes, a phenomenon we can now predict and measure with unprecedented accuracy.
And yet, he cautions, we are in many ways as ignorant of the sea’s essential qualities as we were in the days when people feared the kraken and believed in mermaids.
"We are attracted to something we don’t really understand," he says. "We have to appreciate that it’s not just another scenic attraction. We need much more realistic education about the sea, from childhood through adults."
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Gillis sees the destruction brought by Sandy as the inevitable result of a pattern of development that disregards all that history tells us about the ocean and its role in daily human life. "We’ve built right up to the edge in the most foolish way," he says. "The whole coast is now an extended suburb."
Full article: 'We've Built Right Up to the Edge in the Most Foolish Way' – Arts & Lifestyle – The Atlantic Cities.
