Feeling the Heat
Welcome to the web page for E’s book Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change, published by Routledge!
Feeling the Heat is the first book to look at climate change as it’s happening on the ground. There are many books that debate the science or the politics of global warming, but only one that looks at actual climate effects—from disappearing beaches to vanishing species—as they are unfolding today. E’s book, written not for scientists but for average readers, demonstrates conclusively that global warming is real and likely to affect all of our lives in the 21st century. The following information is from the preface of the book. We’ve also provided the table of contents, a sample chapter and a handy online order form.
The reality of catastrophic climate change doesn’t seem to be getting through to people, and it’s not hard to understand why. Global warming is dismissed as speculation by the President and Congress, and cited--if at all--by the news media in confusing tit-for-tat exchanges full of scientific jargon. The small band of skeptics is given equal weight with the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, and their bantering about computer models, aerosols and ice cores just confuses the public.
The cold winter of 2002 to 2003 was fodder for the morning shock jocks. “Where’s your global warming now?” they asked. Even if it does come, they’re all for it, because it means they can enjoy pina coladas poolside in November.
But the scientists are telling us that climate change is not simply a global hot foot; it’s subtler and far more dangerous than that. Instead, we’ve entered an era of profound climatic instability, with more severe storms and great variations in temperature and rainfall.
The essays in this book are reports from the climate front. As Ross Gelbspan notes in the Introduction, the science of global warming is no longer being seriously debated. It’s real, and it’s here. From China to New York, minor changes in what were fairly established weather patterns have already produced profound and permanent effects to local ecosystems. Fish species are disappearing, with ripples throughout the food chain. Birds and butterflies are moving, turning up in places they’ve never been seen before. Some plants are dying, others thriving as manmade climatic changes accelerate.
It’s no great mystery what causes global warming: carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, cars and trucks, cooking fires and deforestation results in most of it. As Americans, we have a primary responsibility. The U.S. transportation system emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation’s entire economy (with the sole exception of China), reports the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
We could reduce those emissions with a collective will, embodied in legislation like the Kyoto Treaty, but very little progress has been made. In only a few places--most notably, Europe--are people not only paying attention but also acting on their awareness. (And even the Europeans are missing their targets under the Kyoto Treaty.) Meanwhile, the ominous buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues.
This book grew out of a lengthy article package underwritten with the generous support of the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation and appearing in the October/November 2000 edition of E/The Environmental Magazine. We wanted to move beyond the scientific debate. The idea was to document--through the kind of in-depth, heavily sourced reporting the magazine is known for--the evidence for a changing climate.
We certainly found it. Our reporters traveled to India, China, Australia, Fiji, Antarctica, and the Caribbean islands of Antigua and Barbuda. In the U.S., we visited Alaska, coastal California, the Pacific Northwest, New Jersey and New York City.
This book represents a considerable expansion of that original reporting, and adds a chapter on threats and challenges in Europe. Taken together, it offers overwhelming evidence that global warming is underway, producing exactly the extreme weather events predicted by the vast majority of the world’s scientific community.
In his 1997 book Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Business, S. Fred Singer wrote, “At most, we believe there will be a modest warming in the [21st century], generally beneficial for agriculture and human welfare. Available evidence suggests that none of the extreme fears about severe weather events, sea-level rise, and spread of diseases, is warranted.”
But the “available evidence” suggests no such thing. The testimony in this book is reported from the field, through interviews not only with scientists but with ordinary working people whose lives and livelihoods have already been profoundly affected by the very events that Singer speculates are unlikely to occur.
Is the choking cloud of particulate matter over most of Asia “beneficial for agriculture and human welfare”? Does the loss of beaches and rising waves help the vital tourism industry in island paradises like Antigua and Fiji? Isn’t the disappearing ice in Alaska, producing hungry polar bears and killing seagulls, a “severe weather event”?
If the evidence in this book isn’t enough, consider these anecdotal news stories reported in 2002 and 2003:
April 22, 2002: Glaciers are disappearing in South America. Within the next 15 years, all of the continents small glaciers (80 percent of the total), will disappear, according to French glaciologist Bernard Francou. “The trend is so clear that you can’t argue with the numbers,” he says. (Grist Magazine);
November 9, 2002: Scientists are linking the loss of lobster populations in Long Island Sound to global warming. Dr. Alistair Dove of the State University of New York says that lobsters are dying from what the New York Times summarizes as the “stress of an environment that had become hostile to their ancient internal thermostats.” According to Dr. Dove, “The correlation is very strong. Not proven, but strong. Climate is the killer here.” (New York Times);
December 9, 2002: The Arctic reports record ice loss, according to scientists from the American Geophysical Union. Surface melt in Greenland was the highest in recorded history. Arctic sea ice also reached a record low (BBC);
December 11, 2002: 2002 will likely go down in history as the second warmest on record, exceeded only by 1998. “Studying [the] annual temperature data, one gets the unmistakable feeling that temperature is rising and that the rise is gaining momentum,” says environmentalist Lester Brown (Earth Policy Institute);
January 9, 2003: Dr. Andrew Derocher of the University of Alberta, Canada says the polar bear could be driven to extinction by the loss of Arctic ice, which is melting at a rate of up to nine percent per decade. Arctic summers could be ice-free by mid-century (BBC);
February 14, 2003: In China, severe floods that used to occur once every 20 years now occur in nine out of every 10 years. The number of people devastated by hurricanes or cyclones has increased eightfold to 25 million a year over the past 30 years. The oceans currently absorb 50 times more carbon dioxide than is contained in the atmosphere (Guardian International);
February 26, 2003: Changes in forest productivity, the migration of tree species and potential increases in wildfires and disease could cause substantial changes to U.S. forests. The timber industry in the southern United States is particularly vulnerable (Pew Center on Global Climate Change);
March 7, 2003: Climate change effects could include a “big chill” for the Northeastern U.S. and Western Europe, with temperatures plunging as much as 9 degrees F. The colder temperatures would be caused by the failure of the Gulf Stream to carry warm water from the tropics. The Gulf Stream makes an epic journey, traveling west over the top of Australia, around the Cape of Good Hope at South Africa’s tip and up into the Atlantic Ocean. The moving water is cooled by the northern chill and becomes increasingly salty, sinking to lower depths for the return journey to the Pacific. This process has changed little since the last Ice Age, but global warming is throwing a monkey wrench by melting ice in the Arctic Ocean. A UN assessment says Arctic sea ice in summertime could diminish as much as 60 percent by 2050. This fresh water could dilute the salinity of the Gulf Stream, which would mean it would no longer sink to the bottom of the ocean near Iceland and begin its return trip to the Pacific. According to Robert B. Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, “We’re seeing huge freshening in the North Atlantic. The sinking of the cold, salty water has slowed 20 percent in the last 30 years.” (Wall Street Journal).
April 9, 2003: The Great Lakes region, which holds the world’s largest source of fresh water, could face baking heat, droughts, floods and other catastrophes as global warming raises its temperature over the next century, according to a two-year scientific analysis coordinated by the Union of Concerned Scientists (Environmental News Network);
May 28, 2003: Papua New Guinea is trying to convince two small communities of Polynesians, about 2,000 people, that they should leave their homes on sinking tropical atolls northeast of Bougainville Island. Crops are reportedly being affected by seawater inundation. The Takuu people, one of the groups affected, have a 3,000-year history and more than 1,000 songs. Eric Ani of Papua New Guinea’s Disaster and Emergency Management Office says, “It probably is because of the effects of the greenhouse. There is talk of islands sinking everywhere in the world” (Agence France-Presse).
July 3, 2003: The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which usually produces technical reports and statistics, changed course to announce that the world’s weather is going haywire. The WMO, which works with the weather services of 185 countries, documented record high and low temperatures, record rainfall and storms—and linked it to global warming. There were record temperatures in England and southern France, an unprecedented number of tornadoes in the U.S. and severe monsoon heat waves in India. (The Independent).
September 9, 2003: The record heat wave that baked Europe in the summer of 2003 triggered forest fires, affected agricultural production and proved deadly to thousands in France. “[Europe hasn’t] seen such an extended period of dry weather and sunny days since records began [in about 1870],” said Michael Knobelsdorf, a German weather service meteorologist. In France, the heat wave claimed as many as 15,000 lives many of elderly people. (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Planet Ark).
September 23, 2003: The Canadian Ward Hunt Ice Shelf (which is up to 100 feet thick and has been in place for at least 3,000 years) began to crack in 2000. In 2003, it broke in two, draining a trapped freshwater lake into the Arctic Ocean. Scientists attributed the disintegration to 100 years of relentless warming, a pattern that accelerated in recent years. (New York Times/Washington Post).
In sum, the evidence is clear that global warming is no longer speculative. Whether it’s politically convenient or not, it has arrived. Controlling it is emerging as the major challenge of our time.
Jim Motavalli
Norwalk, Connecticut
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
PART ONE: HUMAN IMPACTS
Chapter One
China: The Cost of Coal
Mark Hertsgaard
Chapter Two
Europe: Planning Ahead
Colin Woodard
Chapter Three
Greater New York: Urban Anxiety
Jim Motavalli
Chapter Four
Antigua and Barbuda: Islands Under Siege
Dick Russell
Chapter Five
Asia: Clouds Got In the Way
Jim Motavalli
Through a Lens, Darkly: A Photo Essay by Gary Braasch
Gary Braasch
PART TWO: ECOSYSTEMS IN TROUBLE
Chapter Six
Alaska and the Western Arctic: The Ice Retreats
Kieran Mulvaney
Chapter Seven
The California Coast: Marine Migrations and the Collapsing Food
Chain
Orna Izakson
Chapter Eight
Australia, Florida and Fiji: Reefs At Risk
David Helvarg
Chapter Nine
Pacific Northwest: The Incredible Shrinking Glaciers
Sally Deneen
Chapter 10
Antarctica: The Ice is Moving
David Helvarg
End Notes
About E Magazine
SAMPLE CHAPTER
New York City: An Island Ecology
By Jim Motavalli with Sherry Barnes
From a sea kayak floating off Pier 40 in lower Manhattan, you get a whole new perspective on New York City. The bustling metropolis falls away, and you’re alone except for the sporadic barge traffic and the high anxiety of Trapeze School New York performing in the Hudson River Park just beyond the sea wall.
If the Hudson rises, it’s most immediately noticeable to people like Randall Henriksen, who has led sea-kayaking expeditions here since 1994. From his perch in the front of the kayak, Hendriksen points to a green-and-white state Department of Environmental Conservation sign on the sea wall. “The algae there shows the mean high water line,” he says. “It’s been moving up against that sign. The water has certainly been rising over the last few years, though you may not notice the change on a day-to-day basis,” he says.
New York City, with more than seven million people, spills out over 378 square miles of land separated by the Hudson, East and Harlem Rivers, Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. The city, one of America’s most diverse urban centers, is held together by a complex network of public works infrastructure, including roads, toll bridges, subway tunnels, water mains, gas lines, and millions of miles of telephone and television cables and electrical conduit.
It’s a difficult city to run on a good day: In 1996, a “report card” prepared by the city’s former U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chief gave New York’s infrastructure failing grades, particularly for its aging water mains and solid waste treatment system, which dumps raw sewage into city harbors during storms.
So what happens when things get really bad? On December 11, 1992 a nor’easter storm hit the great city head on. With wind gusts of up to 90 miles per hour and water surges eight-and-one-half feet above mean sea level, New York’s transportation infrastructure sputtered to a halt. Four million subway riders were stranded. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive, the main highway along the east side of Manhattan, flooded up to four and one-half feet in some areas, and LaGuardia International Airport, only seven feet above sea level, grounded flights for the day. In the end, the federal disaster assistance totaled $233.6 million, according to Environmental Defense.
Was the storm a once-in-a-century fluke? Unlikely. In August of 1999, a single early morning thunderstorm crippled the city’s transportation and drainage system once again. Since global warming brings with it the certainty of rising sea level and stormier weather, the city’s aging infrastructure and delicate natural balance face unheard-of challenges.
Vivien Gornitz, associate research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, points toward a rectangular box jutting out of the Hudson in lower Manhattan, near a guarded U.S. Coast Guard booth. “That tide gauge uses an acoustic device to record the level of the sea’s surface,” she explains. “It takes a reading every six minutes.” Gornitz and other researchers from Columbia University, New York University, and Montclair State University in New Jersey conducted an exhaustive study of the Metro East Coast (MEC) Region, which includes greater New York, Northern New Jersey and Southern Connecticut, for the “U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change for the Nation.” Findings were released in 2002.
One of the things that troubles Gornitz is all the recent construction at the water’s edge. “Look, you can see it’s on both sides of the river,” she gestures, her arm taking in both sides of the Hudson just north of the World Trade Center. Gornitz fears that all the luxurious waterfront condominiums and commercial businesses are taking a risk that will increase dramatically as the new century progresses.
The most conservative climate change model used for the MEC study doesn’t allow for rising greenhouse gas emissions; it merely projects the effects of the current rate of sea level rise. It predicts that, by the end of the century, we will be seeing 100-year floods every 50 years. “In the worst-case scenario, it could be as often as every four to five years,” Gornitz adds. “It wouldn’t mean the whole city under water, just the low-lying areas, including beach communities, coastal wetlands and some of the airports.” And to further exacerbate the problem, the greater New York area is still experiencing land subsidence triggered by the glacial retreat that occurred more than 10,000 years ago.
New York City is not waiting for climate change: it is already experiencing much warmer years and reduced snowfall. Gornitz notes anecdotal effects, including the Central Park pond that people skated on in the 1970s, but now often remains unfrozen all winter. “The cherry blossoms come into leaf a lot earlier now,” she adds, “and the leaves stay on the trees a lot longer in the fall.”
Janine Bloomfield is a senior scientist at Environmental Defense and author of the report “Hot Nights in the City: Global Warming, Sea-Level Rise and the New York Metropolitan Area.” Her report, based on MEC research, makes frightening reading. By 2100, she writes, New York City will have as many 90-degree days as Miami does today. “Sea-level rise will contribute to the temporary flooding or permanent inundation of many of New York City’s and the region’s coastal areas…A large part of lower Manhattan would be at risk from frequent flooding by the end of the [21st] century…The East River would flood Bellevue Medical Center, the FDR Drive and East Harlem between 96th and 114th Street,” the report says. In a poignant note, the pre-9/11 report notes that the foundations of the World Trade Center would be vulnerable to nearly annual flooding at the end of the century. Droughts that now occur once in a hundred years could occur every three to 11 years by 2100.
“The tragedy of this is that we could do something about this now so the scenarios I wrote about won’t come to pass,” says Bloomfield, who now lives in Boston. “Unfortunately, we won’t react until the crises become obvious.”
The coming changes will do more than make people swelter or get their feet wet occasionally. “It really could become a serious economic burden for the city,” says Klaus Jacob, senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “The current flood insurance program doesn’t account for 100 years from now, and that’s no way to plan for the future, especially a sustainable one.”
Coordinated planning for these eventualities has been minimal, and actual action even less. Some airport runways and sea walls have been raised. Rae Zimmerman, a New York University professor and director of the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems, complains that there is little cooperation between city agencies affected by climate change, and long-range planning is often the first thing cut from squeezed budgets. Federal action has been non-existent, with the Bush administration and Congress refusing to commit to anything more than redundant studies. But Klaus Jacob notes sardonically, “Whether Congress wants to address it or not, sea level will rise.”
Losing the Bay
According to the New York Times, “Some have said that [Jamaica Bay’s marsh] islands, rich with large and varied populations of birds and other wildlife, may largely disappear by 2020 if the causes are not found and remedies not applied.” Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA Goddard and also a professor at Columbia University, says the MEC project confirmed for the first time that Jamaica Bay’s alarming wetlands loss is in part due to global warming. “Our wetlands researchers realized that something was happening out there that went beyond the usual stresses on this highly manipulated ecosystem,” Rosenzweig said. “It’s very complex, because there has been an interruption of sediment to the marshes, due to dredging for boat channels. Some people think the marshes are dying for reasons other than global warming, but we have documented with aerial photographs that climate change contributes to the loss by basically inundating the wetlands.”
Jamaica Bay may have lost 12 percent of its marshlands since 1959 and 38 percent of marsh vegetation since 1974. The construction of Kennedy Airport, built on marshland beginning in the 1940s, and other development was a major blow to the wetlands, though it remains one of the largest coastal ecosystems in New York State. The Bay was protected as the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in 1972 and became part of the National Park Service’s Gateway National Recreation Area (which also includes New Jersey’s Sandy Hook).
Federal protection has done nothing to prevent what appears to be an inexorable loss of land, which is dramatically illustrated in a series of aerial photographs of the Refuge’s Yellow Bar Hassock taken in 1959, 1976 and 1998. “It is drowning,” says Rosenzweig. Considerable biodiversity has been lost as well, including all of the residents of what were once high marsh ecosystems there. In the dry words of MEC’s climate change assessment report, “If Yellow Bar Hassock once had high marsh areas, as was suspected upon inspection of texture of some vegetation in the 1959 photographic print, then they were no longer in evidence during field visits.” Jamaica Bay’s ecosystem totaled 24,000 acres in 1900; by 1970 it was down to 13,000 acres. In the summer of 2003, workers began importing sediment and spraying it on Big Egg Marsh, trying to prevent its relentless shrinkage.
The borough of Brooklyn, now home to more than two million people, was once largely marshland, but the re-designing of this landscape for exclusive human use has taken away a valuable, natural protection in times of flood. “If you could imagine just putting a big sponge in front of lower Manhattan, that’s what it would be like if there was a wetland there,” explains Alex Kolker, a graduate student studying ecology and evolution at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
One way to limit the loss of these flood barriers is to give coastal areas room to migrate inland. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation oversee current waterfront development. But according to Ellen Kracauer Hartig, a research associate at Columbia’s Center for Climate Systems Research, applicants can apply to bypass these regulations, and permission is frequently granted. “At this time, the state gives out those permits easily,” she says. That’s an understatement. In 1998, the Corps rejected only 3.2 percent of major wetlands projects.
Global warming has also begun to affect the city’s health. “In New York City, asthma rates in some neighborhoods are among the highest in the nation,” explains Pat Kinney, an environmental health scientist at Columbia’s Joseph L. Maleman School of Public Health. Kinney points out the well-established connection between air pollution, temperature, and rates of hospitalization and death. “What is new, is seeing how it all relates to climate change,” he says, adding that raising the temperature in urban areas like New York, where there is limited vegetation to reflect heat and lots of concrete to absorb it, exacerbates health problems.
According to a 1996 American Meteorological Society report, an average of 300 people a year die of heat stress in New York City. And there’s a socioeconomic factor, too, explains Kinney: “Poor people, and especially elderly poor people, are most vulnerable to heat stress.”
The Virus Specter
Heat stress is probably the most obvious thing people think of when global warming comes up. Other effects are more subtle, but no less deadly. Higher rates of ground-level ozone are a major respiratory irritant, and vector-borne diseases thrive in warmer temperatures. And that’s the problem that’s keeping the city’s public health officials up nights.
New York City had never had a case of West Nile encephalitis before 1999, but that hot summer--the hottest and driest in a century--62 cases were reported in the region. In all, 8,000 New Yorkers were infected, and seven people died.
Between August 12 and 23, six people were admitted to Flushing Hospital in the borough of Queens with high fevers and headaches. Routine culture screens for bacterial or fungal microbes were negative, leading to a growing consensus the patients were suffering from an encephalitis-like disease of viral origin. Within three weeks, three elderly patients died.
Tests at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and Fort Collins, Colorado revealed that the illness was close to the St. Louis encephalitis, which had never previously touched New York City. By September 6, there were five confirmed victims of the new virus, and 34 suspected cases. By September 9, exotic birds began dying in the Bronx Zoo. A general health warning was issued, and city residents began to get used to helicopters overhead spraying clouds of malathion and pyrethriod pesticides. By September 21, scientists had isolated and identified the specific virus, not St. Louis encephalitis but West Nile.
West Nile is spread by a mosquito, Culex pipens, which breeds in stagnant pools of water. According to several prominent scientists, drought is the key factor in spreading West Nile virus. Outbreaks require an unfortunate series of events, they say. According to Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, Culex mosquitoes often live in close proximity to people because of the stagnant water they carelessly let stand. While the mosquitoes’ favorite prey is birds, periods of high heat and drought send such common urban-dwelling species as crows, blue jays and robins out of the city in search of fresh water. City bird populations are further reduced as unlucky individuals are bitten and killed by West Nile infection.
“By reproductive imperative the mosquitoes are forced to feed on humans,” and that’s what triggered the 1999 epidemic,” Dr. Despommier says. “Higher temperatures also trigger increased mosquito biting frequency. The first big rains after the drought created new breeding sites.” It took Hurricane Floyd, which passed through New York on September 16, to break the weather cycle that led to the outbreak.
Dr. Despommier says this same pattern is also discernible in recent West Nile outbreaks in Israel, South Africa and Romania. In Bucharest, Dr. Despommier’s investigation turned up abandoned buildings whose basements were full of water, a perfect Culex breeding ground.
Another prominent proponent of the West Nile global warming connection is Dr. Paul Epstein of Harvard University. “Droughts are more common and prolonged as the planet warms,” he says. “Warm winters intensify drought because there’s a reduced spring runoff. The cycle seems to rev up in the spring, as catch basin water dries up and what’s left becomes organically rich and a perfect mosquito breeding place. The drought also reduces populations of mosquito predators.”
In 2002, the West Nile spread across the country, appearing in 44 states and the District of Columbia. Five provinces of Canada were also affected. In a growing scientific consensus, public health officials believe the next drought will give this serious virus even a wider reach. Spraying certainly hasn’t stopped these infectious bugs. Researchers at France’s University of Montpellier said in mid-2003 that a mutation in the West Nile mosquitoes’ genetic code resulted in their singular resistance to pesticides.
New Jersey’s Beaches: On Shifting Sands
On stormy days, the wind at the tip of Fort Hancock, a former military base that’s now part of the bustling Gateway National Recreation Area at the entrance to lower New York Bay, is enough to knock you down, and it churns the Atlantic into a froth favored by surfers but anathema to the embattled homeowners on this exposed coast.
Climate scientists predict that sea level in New Jersey could rise an additional two feet in the next 100 years, with predictable havoc wrought on that priceless real estate. But despite ominous reports of sea level rise, and horrific damage caused by ever-increasing storms, proximity to New York City has meant rapidly escalating land values for this region, and a determination to build right to the water’s edge. Even Fort Hancock, which can appear eerily deserted on a winter afternoon, is about to undergo a chic makeover.
Sandy Hook, where Fort Hancock is located, is like a finger pointed into the ocean towards Brooklyn, a beacon for the great New York/New Jersey estuary. The national park is a rare respite from a landscape dominated by beach communities and chock-a-block strip development. A former officer’s quarters in the park, not far from 19th century coastal defense emplacements, now serves as home to two organizations that are trying to protect this prosperous region from itself. The American Littoral Society and New York/New Jersey Baykeeper work together trying to preserve what’s left of a natural environment laid low by dredging, filling and construction.
Dery Bennett, the Littoral Society’s friendly and grizzled director, takes visitors on a tour of nearby Sea Bright, where relatively modest vacation homes hide behind a protective seawall built in the 1930s. There is a 100-foot-wide beach behind the wall, built not over the millennia by the workings of the tides but beginning in 1996 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of a $9 billion plan to “replenish” the beaches along the 127-mile New Jersey shore. The new sand is brought in from an offshore “borrow” site, hydraulically put in by a dredge.
New Jersey is the poster boy for beach replenishment, since it is the only state in the union to pay its share not out of general funds but from a dedicated $25 million purse taken from realty transfer fees. Noreen Bodman, president of the business-oriented Jersey Shore Partnership, calls replenishment “a return on investment that benefits the state in terms of tax dollars, and ultimately benefits every resident in terms of quality of life and recreational values. It also protects businesses and utilities from the impact of some of these storms.”
The luncheonette in downtown Sea Bright displays some starkly revealing aerial photos. One, taken in the early 1990s, shows a town with no beach to speak of, thanks largely to the effects of that seawall. The other, from 1999, shows a wide expanse of sand. Bennett, who points out “public access” stairways along the seawall that were erected by the Corps but lack any nearby parking, joins Baykeeper Andy Willner and Surfers’ Environmental Alliance co-regional director Brian Unger as a major critic of the quick fix. Not only does the massive effort to pump in sand benefit only a few wealthy homeowners, they say, but it also encourages even more dangerous shoreline development. And, they add, it’s ultimately folly because global warming-induced storms and rising tides will likely wash it all away in the next decade.
Orrin Pilkey’s classic book The Corps and the Shore, written with Katharine Dixon, details how jetties, seawalls, groins and other desperate maneuvers offer only temporary respite from the natural effects of erosion and shifting coastline--and ultimately make things worse. The same thing is true of imported sand. New Jersey’s replenished beaches, the authors wrote, could expect only a one- to three-year lifespan, at a cost of damage to coral, water clarity and bottom-dwellers.
“There’s a natural process called littoral drift,” explains Willner as he provides a pickup-based tour of Sandy Hook’s windswept charms. “Sand from ancient granite mountains like the Appalachians was carried down by glacial action to create the beaches. Once here, it moves north in a predictable, inexorable fashion, reshaping the coast as it goes. What you see today is the result of millions of years of geological evolution, but people expect that process to stop when human infrastructure is introduced. They’re putting homes and beach clubs on mobile land. And they’re taking a crapshoot that those natural processes won’t happen in their lifetimes. When it does, they’re always surprised.”
The speed with which the ocean reclaims its own is exacerbated by rising tides. According to Norbert Psuty, a coastal geomorphologist with the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, deeper in-shore waters means more powerful waves, which move more quickly and retain more energy. In the last 100 years, the New Jersey coast has sunk 16 inches, through a combination of tectonic plate depression and sea level rise. “Almost everything we have along the coast is at risk sooner or later,” says Psuty. “We’ve been fortunate not to have taken any direct hits lately.” Stephen Leatherman, who directs the Hurricane Center at Florida International University, puts it another way: “The erosion rates are going to accelerate in the future, which means the cost is going to go up exponentially to maintain these beaches. And no one seems to have figured it out yet. It’s like a great big secret.”
Subsidized Privacy
There are no easy answers on the Jersey shore. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, property that was worth $8.7 billion in 1962 is now worth $34.3 billion when adjusted for inflation. In 1945, George Lippincott bought a house with 1.2 acres in coastal Avalon for $500, raising the money by selling a single rare stamp. In 2000, Lippincott’s descendants put the property on the market for $3.5 million. The coast is now fully developed, with the result that a “100-year storm” would be far more devastating today than it would have been 50 years ago. Taxpayers will foot much of the bill for any rebuilding, since flood insurance is federally guaranteed.
The public trust doctrine, derived from English Common Law, says that states hold lands under tidal and navigable waterways in trust for their citizens. It has been incorporated into many state constitutions, and is generally interpreted as guaranteeing public access to shorelines up to the mean high tide mark. The town of Greenwich, Connecticut fought a long and ultimately losing battle to maintain the exclusivity of its beaches that went as far as the State Supreme Court. It began when local attorney Brenden Leyden was turned away from jogging at a Greenwich beach, and it continued for six years. Fortunately for citizens not lucky enough to live in one of the U.S.’s wealthiest towns, the public trust and First Amendment (claiming that the beach is a “traditional public forum”) arguments eventually prevailed.
One of the groups that have suffered both because of beach replenishment and closing access is the surprisingly strong northern New Jersey surfing community. The attraction is clear: It’s state-of-the-art surfing almost within sight of New York City. As Surfline.com points out, “Sandy Hook boasts one of the few point breaks in New Jersey.” Brian Unger, a graying but fit surfer turned environmentalist and access activist, takes visiting journalists on a tour through some of the exclusive beach towns near Sandy Hook that benefit from both beach replenishment and storm insurance, but make it as difficult as possible for the taxpaying non-resident to enjoy the imported sand.
The tour began on a blustery day in Elberon, a section of Long Branch just north of Bruce Springsteen’s Asbury Park. Surfers fear that a pending beach replenishment in Elberon will smooth out the beach, remove natural rock formations, dredge to create deeper water closer to shore, and kill the waves; they’re arguing for an artificial reef to stop beach loss instead. Elberon was once an ocean resort town for Presidents, and known as the Hamptons of the 19th century. James Garfield died there in 1881, and the spot is marked with a plaque. The Church of the Presidents, summer worship center for Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson, is now in disrepair, but it remains in a very upscale neighborhood.
It’s unlikely the Presidents were drawn by Elberon’s great surfing, but they’d have had not problem getting to the water if they wanted to try out a board. Today, it’s far more difficult. In nearby Deal, summer home to many wealthy Jews of Syrian origin, huge estates have names like “Chez Fleur” and “Belle Mer.” The Deal Casino beach club is restricted to residents and costs $2,000 for the season. The police are kept busy writing tickets on the parking-restricted streets.
Many streets that once ended in public beach access are now off-limits, Unger says, because the municipality sold off the street ends to homeowners (a practice that was stopped only after intervention by New Jersey’s first public advocate, Stanley Van Ness). Despite the exclusivity, Deal is also slated for federally subsidized beach replenishment.
It’s probably safe to say that wealthy property owners want to limit the invasion of young surfer kids and grizzled fishermen with their bait buckets and six packs of Budweiser. Immigrant families from Newark or Patterson are often forced to wait until after five p.m. to use the lifeguard beaches, because that’s when the college students collecting $5 and $8 daily fees leave for the day. The few remaining free public access points between the million-dollar homes are hard to find and fairly forbidding. With a cold wind blowing, Unger lead the way down a dangerous pile of construction debris that is the only public entry point to one lovely stretch at Darlington Beach. “Attention: Unprotected Beach. No Swimming,” reads a sign.
The Jersey shore town of Point Pleasant Beach got a particularly bad reputation for harassing beach users in the 1990s: surfers were told to get out of the water by private security guards, and people walking along the high tide line were ordered to leave the “private beach.” Curbs were painted yellow to deter would-be parkers. The residents even posted signs that proclaimed: “Private Property. No Trespassing” (followed by, in tiny letters, “When Beach is Closed.”)
But in 2002, after local activism from groups like Citizens Right to Access Beaches (CRAB), the State Attorney General’s office stepped in and forced a settlement that opens the entire beach “from the water to the edge of the dune” to the public. “The case law is very advanced,” says Deborah A. Mans, an attorney for the New York/New Jersey Baykeeper. “There has to be access to the mean high tide line, and as intervenors in these cases we’re asking for 30 feet above that.”
“The homeowners are just trying to make it as hard as possible,” says Unger, who has run for the State Senate on the Green Party ticket. “But at some point you have to take a philosophical stand and say, ‘No, I won’t buy a beach pass because the beaches belong to the people.’ But from Deal to Sandy Hook you have to really work hard to get on the beach without paying.”
Shifting Sand
With no access to the municipal beach and no parking even if there was, Unger sits in his van and points to the surf as it crashes on the beach. “We’ve already lost 30 feet of beach since they replenished this stretch a few years ago. It’s something that we’ll have to keep doing, and it’s galling that for the most part it benefits only a few wealthy property owners.”
But dire predictions that all the replenished sand would be washed out to sea within two or three years have not yet been borne out. “It’s staying longer than I thought it would stay,” admits Dery Bennett. “But everybody knew from the beginning that it’s only a temporary fix. There will probably be five to seven replenishments within the next 50 years.”
In his office at Sandy Hook, Bennett points to a chart of the Jersey shore. “Do you see how skinny those barrier islands are? Because of global warming there’s faster erosion and these barrier islands are drowning. The Army Corps of Engineers ignores the accelerating of sea level rise because some of them believe in a flat earth.”
The Army Corps does not, in fact, officially ignore sea level rise. Anthony Ciorra, project manager for the Army Corps Beach Erosion Control Project that stretches from Sandy Hook south the Barnegat Inlet, said in 2003 that all but a few miles of the 21-mile replenishment project is completed. “We definitely factor in sea level rise as part of the project design,” Ciorra says. We calculate what it has been over the last 50 years for our benchmark.”
But, of course, most scientists believe that sea-level rise will accelerate dramatically, making a hash of calculations based on the historic precedent. Nonetheless, Ciorra is triumphant. “I think we’ve been vindicated,” he says. The project has exceeded our expectations. Our non-federal sponsors, the state of New Jersey and the local towns consider it a success and are pleased with our performance.”
Scott L. Douglass, author of Saving America’s Beaches and a professor at the University of South Alabama, worked his way through college lifeguarding on the Jersey shore. Like many beach experts, he’s a major critic of the erosion-promoting effects of jetties, seawalls and dredging. Human activity has removed “more than a billion cubic yards of sand from the beaches of America, enough to fill a football field over 100 miles high,” he points out.
But Douglass is relatively bullish on beach replenishment. “Replenishment adds sand to the system,” he says. “It’s positive if done correctly. But whether it’s a long-term answer is a good question. We know that sea level has been rising at a rate of six inches per 100 years, and our beaches have kept up with that. But will they be able to keep up with the serious erosion problems caused by an increased rate? There’s a lot of uncertainty.”
Because we know the tides will rise, Douglass says the smart thing to do is “eliminate avoidable sand loss.” But one’s man’s sand-stealing jetty is the salvation of another’s beach. Development along the water’s edge is relentless, pushed by the rising tide of real estate prices. Tourism brings in $12 billion annually to the New Jersey shore. In Sandy Hook, Dery Bennett’s stand against beach replenishment and unfettered development has put him at odds with the business community, which sees both as vital to its busy tourist season. Real estate lobbyist Ken Smith calls Bennett “a lousy misanthrope” for opposing more coastal development, and Bennett returns the volley by labeling Smith “a shill for the real estate industry.”
Much as the environmentalists might want it, there’s no groundswell for a retreat from the shore, the option favored by critics like Orrin Pilkey, who directs the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Duke University. Pilkey cites current events on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where the Dare County Project has actually concluded that moving buildings back from the water’s edge would be cheaper than a program of 10 to 20 years of constant beach nourishment.
In one of the more prominent symbols of what happens when global warming intensifies the restless sea, the more than 130 year-old Cape Hatteras lighthouse was moved a half mile inland in 1999 because, a National Research Council study showed, the shoreline in front of it was due to retreat 400 feet by 2018.
“Buying all the beachfront buildings on the Outer Banks would be cheaper than nourishing the beach, but they decided to nourish anyway at a cost of millions per mile,” says an exasperated Pilkey. “Twenty years ago retreat from the shoreline wasn’t even mentioned in the cost-benefit analysis, but now it’s not so outrageous and at least has to be considered as a real possibility. We need to understand that when we build a high rise on the beach, we’re forcing generations of people to defend it against the rising ocean.”
Like most observers who closely follow coastal New Jersey, Orrin Pilkey can’t say how much of the rapid erosion there is caused by global warming. “Those beaches are very far north, so the nor’easters produce a great deal of wave energy,” he says. “It’s the longest stabilized coast 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.”
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 playing that 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 prosaically 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’ study envisions an accelerating, six-inch sea-level rise affecting Long Beach Island between 1986 and 2013, and another six-inch rise between 2013 and 2031. Without coastal protection, barrier islands like Long Beach are likely to simply become uninhabitable. To prevent that, Titus imagines that 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. That’s likely to win more support than an engineered retreat from the shore, which would involve abandoning homes and buildings to close to the shoreline. But even $1 billion is not too high a price when $20 billion--a century’s worth of fair-market rents--are at stake.
The Big Makeover
If one place has escaped the runaway development of the northern New Jersey shore towns, it’s Sandy Hook, whose deserted military buildings stand as relatively austere and lonely outposts among the chock-a-block resort towns and summer communities. But even that’s poised for change, as Fort Hancock is going through a dramatic makeover that will turn it from a quiet corner to a bustling conference center.
The offices of Sandy Hook Partners are in a Fort Hancock building that’s benefited from the kind of interior makeover the Littoral Society could only dream about. The development company doesn’t pay rent to the building’s owner, the National Parks Service, which has some of the other rent-paying tenants grumbling. The Jersey Shore Partnership, which is perhaps the biggest civic booster for beach replenishment, shares the office space, and the Partnership’s president, Noreen Bodman, doubles as development director for Sandy Hook Partners.
James Wassel, president of Sandy Hook Partners and of the larger Wassel Realty, has the kind of polish that comes from a lifetime of standing in front of skeptical town boards and showing them plans for big buildings. A veteran of the Rouse Company (creators of Faneuil Hall in Boston and the South Street Seaport in New York) and commercial realtors Cushman Wakefield, Wassel insists he’s not going for the kind of big-ticket mall development that his resume might suggest.
Wassel makes historically informed presentations even when his audience is only one wet reporter with a notebook. “This property was an Indian reservation in the early 1800s,” he said. “A lighthouse [now the oldest continuously operating lighthouse in the U.S.] was built in 1764. The military started using it as a proving ground for new weapons in 1870. They used to put dilapidated ships offshore and blast away at them to test the range and accuracy of their guns.” In the 1890s, as those guns developed longer ranges, Fort Hancock became the first line of defense for New York City.
The Fort sits on 140 acres, with 110 buildings still standing. Sandy Hook Partners plans to spend $80 to $90 million rehabilitating the Fort properties, though its agreement with the National Park Service means it can’t built so much as a new taco stand. Still, there will be gentrification, and some people are objecting to it.
“This is the last undeveloped stretch of shoreline in New Jersey,” says Brian Unger. “I don’t think it needs conference centers, bars, restaurants and all that stuff.” Cindy Zipf of Clean Ocean Action worries about a public space becoming private, “even though the developers say they won’t change a hair on the buildings’ chinny chin chins. The pressure to make money will be huge, and we don’t want a multi-million dollar mogul to repair buildings and turn the place into a mini-Woods Hole.”
But while most local environmentalists would probably prefer for the Fort to remain wild and free, the buildings are crumbling rapidly and need emergency intervention. With only $250,000 in annual federal funding, the Park Service estimates that within five years many of the historic buildings at Fort Hancock “would likely deteriorate to a condition beyond repair.”
Given the development restrictions, what Wassel and his colleagues envision is not a nautically themed mall but an environmentally oriented learning and conference center that would attract corporate clients. Instead of Starbucks, there will be low-key bed and breakfasts. It may open for business in 2008.
Wassel doesn’t seem too concerned that flooding is a regular headache at Fort Hancock, and that rising tides have forced the Park Service to raise the roads 24 inches. “It’s an area that gets submerged,” he admits, but it’s unlikely climate change looms large in the Partners’ planning.
Outside the office window, a flock of Atlantic brants, winter residents of New Jersey before their summer flight to the Artic Circle, were marching around the parade ground. The geese have no reason to fear global warming, or shifting sands, either. A wetter, wilder New Jersey will probably be to their liking.
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