the (intermittant) shifty shore series begins

Winter weather makes walking the shore more difficult. While we're indoors I'm going to start a series on our shifty shoreline and its social and natural history. This will be an occasional series as time and research dictates.

(the two photos are of Scotts bluff an actively eroding pile of glacial till near my home-the pinacle in the left photo shows in left side of photo above)

Ecology is about connections. In late December my good friend Roland launched a Civil Disobedience action at a Scotts Bluff home building site. He did so because he wanted people to understand the connection between luxury resort home construction on the lake shore and the relentless fraying of the tapestry of life that continues to thin as threads are broken and lost.

How do you make people see that there are connections between their personal lifestyle choices and the general well being of our planetary life support system? I'm going to give it a shot though I'm not optimistic about any impacts or understanding that may result.

The shore of a great lake, like that of an ocean, is a shifty restless piece of real estate. It's dynamic and inherent instability makes it an interesting place. That's part of its appeal as a home site. But no homeowner wants to see his house be washed away by that shiftiness. So inevitably human ingenuity comes to the rescue and the beach is “armored”, locked away and entombed beneath a pile of large rocks. Now you have a view but no more beach. Problem is, your neighbors or public shoreline lands nearby also don't have a beach if enough homeowners go the “hardening” route in order to protect their own little piece of paradise.

On Lake Ontario, as elsewhere, material eroded from the shore becomes the beach. It then is moved along on the south side of the lake as “drift” carried generally west to east. Seawalls that stop erosion also shut down the beach formation process. Any unarmored land, once it loses its beach, will erode even faster since the waves strike directly upon the foot of the shore. So the more you “harden” the worse erosion gets for unprotected land. No one, shoreline owners and the general public alike, gets to enjoy a beach either.

For the rich guy with his “trophy house” who doesn't care about anything but a view, this may be acceptable. But for those of us who cherish walking along the water's edge, the world is a poorer place for no longer having beaches. And as we shall see, the vanished beach literally makes us poorer, too, as it usually ends up costing the taxpayers (many of whom don't own waterfront property) a great deal of money.

In posts to come we'll look at how some other communities are trying to deal with and “manage” beach erosion. There have been some truly spectacular foul ups in this endeavor. Guess who is paying for them?