The World in a Grain

by Vince Beiser

  In 1916, Fisher opened another continent-straddling road, the Dixie Highway, linking the Midwest to Florida. As intended, it brought more visitors to the state. Fort Lauderdale opened its first tourist hotel in 1919.26 Fisher was after a bigger prize, though. He set his sights farther south, buying up hundreds of acres of sand-fringed swampland near Miami. “Fisher’s Folly was a vermin-infested swamp on the ocean side of Biscayne Bay,” writes T. D. Allman in Finding Florida. “This boggy wilderness, he decided, was going to be to people with automobiles what Palm Beach was to those with private railroad cars.”27 Fisher tore up the mangroves, dredged millions of tons of sand and mud up from the bay, filled in his land until it was solid enough to be built on, and proclaimed it Miami Beach.

  It was an audacious bit of mega-scale landscaping, but not an unprecedented one. Some of the world’s most famous beaches were similarly created or expanded with a mass relocation of sand from elsewhere. A century ago, Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach was a narrow ribbon of sand fringed by marsh; it was beefed up to its current expansive size with grains barged in from other Hawaiian islands,28 and at one point in the 1930s with sand shipped from California. Today it still requires regular renourishing. Many of Spain’s Canary Island beaches were just rocky coastlines until developers dumped tons of sand imported from the Caribbean and Morocco on them.29 Half a dozen of the beaches in Barcelona, Spain, were manufactured for the 1992 Olympics. It is such an established practice that Paris now builds a beach on the Seine for a few weeks each summer.30 (Meanwhile on the southwestern French coast, locals have been protesting for years against beach sand mining.)

  Fisher bedizened his prefab paradise with a fancy hotel and casino, not to mention a herd of cows to supply fresh milk to the guests and a baby elephant to pose for pictures with them. He opened a yacht harbor and polo fields and hosted speedboat races. Business boomed. By 1925, Fisher’s Florida holdings were valued at over $100 million—more than $1.3 billion in today’s dollars.

  But the following year, a hurricane packing 130-mile-per-hour winds bore down on southern Florida. The howling winds and surging waves smashed the walls of Fisher’s hotels and flooded their lower floors, sweeping smaller buildings away completely. Scores of people were killed. All those northerners and others who had been rushing into Florida suddenly had second thoughts, and the real estate market swooned. Three years later, the stock market crashed, and with it Fisher’s fortunes. He died ten years later, a near-penniless alcoholic.

  Miami Beach, of course, went on to a much more glamorous and lucrative future, and so did Broward County just to its north. Fort Lauderdale was famous for years as America’s spring-break capital, a title it has worked hard to shed since 1985, when a record 350,000 students overran the place. The city now prides itself more on its yachting facilities.

  Today the beach-based permanent vacation lifestyle Fisher did so much to help popularize is central to Florida’s economy and identity. Tourism is the top industry in the unsubtly nicknamed Sunshine State. Broward County alone pulls in 14 million tourists to its beaches every year, reaping some $6 billion. Statewide, 71 million tourists visit the state each year; some 23 million of them come primarily to spend time on its beaches, generating more than $41 billion in direct and indirect revenues, according to a 2000 study.31

  Flagler and Fisher opened the way to southern Florida. But it was the interstates that really brought the masses. The I-95 interstate highway funneled people straight down from the big cities of the East Coast, the I-75 brought them in from the Midwest, and the I-10 from everything west of the Florida Panhandle.

  These developments interlock, like sand grains interlocking to form concrete. The glamorization of the sandy beach gave rise to cities like Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale. Roads built of sand made it possible for people to drive to them. Concrete made it possible to build whole cities in the middle of nowhere to house them all. Later, concrete built the vast theme parks—Walt Disney World, Universal Studios—which attracted even more people. Sand abetting sand abetting sand.

  In any beach resort, sand underpins the whole tourist economy. Sun and sea are great, but without a soft sandy beach, at best you’ve got one of those moderately charming Mediterranean towns where you can sunbathe on a rock or a concrete breakwater. That’s not a draw for millions of tourists. Sand transforms a place that’s merely hot and adjacent to the sea into a universally desired destination. Add sand, and suddenly even the muggy, malarial coast of South Florida is worth a fortune.

  Countless other places around the world, from the Black Sea to the Bahamas, depend on the money brought in by outsiders seeking that magical combination of sun, sea, and sand. Hawaii would just be a big pineapple plantation without beaches. Fiji’s gorgeous shores attract $1 billion worth of tourists each year—more than the tiny Pacific nation makes from its top five exports combined.32

  Increasingly, though, beaches are also coming to be valued for something else that might prove even more important than tourist revenue. These seaside armies of sand are a powerful protective force for the people living near them. Beaches are bulwarks that can protect lives and property from storms and rising seas in our climactically imperiled world. Coastal protection has become one of the main justifications for beach renourishment, and with good reason.

  All the while that climate change has been accelerating, more and more people have been settling on the shore. Especially since the 1960s, Americans have flocked to coastal communities not only for vacations but to live full-time. Ports, fishing towns, and empty spaces along the coasts have turned into seaside suburbs and retirement communities. Between 1990 and 2010, a Reuters analysis found, about 2.2 million new housing units were built near America’s shores, many of them in areas considered most imperiled by sea rise. A third of them were in Florida.33

  If you think that’s a bit crazy, consider this: The US government encourages it. Washington subsidizes local governments and homeowners who build in imperiled coastal areas to the tune of billions of dollars34 in the form of insurance guarantees, disaster bailouts, and other protections.35 Taxpayer-funded beach nourishment also has the perverse effect of shoring up property values, a recent study found.36

  There’s $4 billion worth of upland infrastructure—hotels, homes, and other structures—just on the barrier island off Broward County’s shoreline. All told, an estimated $1.4 trillion worth of real estate lies along America’s shores. All of it—along with countless billions more in coastal communities in other countries—is endangered by the rising seas, more powerful storms, and more frequent “king tides” spawned by the changing climate.

  America’s densely populated eastern seaboard is already seeing increased flooding,37 not to mention more severe storms. When superstorm Sandy assaulted the East Coast in 2012, it killed 159 people, damaged or destroyed at least 650,000 homes, and caused some $65 billion in damage.

  The storm’s impact was at its most severe in areas where beaches had eroded, leaving little or no buffer between cities and the raging wind and waves. On the other hand, renourished beaches in New York and New Jersey prevented an estimated $1.3 billion in damages that would have been caused by Sandy, according to the US Army Corps of Engineers.38

  Sand dunes, it turns out, are also good defenses. For decades, developers have bulldozed sand dunes to create more usable beach space and unobstructed views for hotel guests and condominium dwellers. But over time, experience has proven that natural dunes, when they are left in place, can be very effective at protecting those buildings. “Post-Sandy, every coastal community has changed its opinion on dunes,” says Nicole Sharp. “People really recognize the storm protection they provide.” Naturally occurring sand structures defending human-made ones.

  Given both their economic and defensive importance, protecting beaches is of the utmost importance to Florida, as well as the many other places around the world that have linked their fates to the shifting sands of their shorelines.
In many places, beaches are reinforced by “armoring” them with stone or concrete seawalls or groins, solid structures sticking out from the beach. These have fallen largely out of favor, though, since research has found they often end up worsening erosion over time by strengthening currents, reflecting waves back onto beaches, and blocking the incoming flow of natural sand.

  Which brings us back to beach nourishment. Beaches have been artificially bulked up with sand from elsewhere since at least as far back as a Coney Island project in 1922. The practice came into widespread use in the mid-1960s after a particularly potent storm frayed New Jersey’s beaches.39 Broward County has been doing it since 1970.40 Remember the “inexhaustible” supply of beach sand that drew home builders to New York’s Long Island? Those beaches too have had to be renourished. It’s now standard practice all over the world. (It’s not always easy, though. One proposed replenishment project in Mumbai had to be put on hold in 2016 because city officials couldn’t find enough sand.)

  Nourishment, though, is not a cure for beach erosion; it’s a treatment, one that must be repeated regularly. Few replenished beaches last longer than five years or so before they have to be fattened up again. Dozens of Florida beaches have been nourished again and again by now, some as many as eighteen times. More than a quarter of a billion cubic yards of sand have gone into the effort. New Jersey’s Ocean City Beach has been replenished thirty-eight times, and Virginia Beach, Virginia, more than fifty times.41

  It’s an expensive process. Nourishing a beach can cost up to $10 million per mile.42 Broward County alone spent more than $100 million replenishing its twenty-four miles of beach in a multiyear project launched in 2015. More than a few individual beaches, such as Atlantic City, have already racked up tabs of well over $100 million by themselves.

  And the costs will only keep rising. Andy Coburn, a coastal scientist with the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University, calculates that the cost of sand for nourishment has multiplied eightfold since the 1970s. It’s now more than $14 per cubic yard, a figure he projects will continue to rise as demand increases and the most accessible sand gets tapped out.

  Sure, it’s expensive, but beach nourishment, the argument goes, more than pays for itself considering what tourism brings in to local, state, and regional economies. As a straight financial proposition, this is irrefutable. But there are other costs involved that can’t always be priced in dollars.

  Artificial beach building can damage the environment profoundly. Academics and environmentalists have documented how this happens. Geologists Harold Wanless of the University of Miami and Orrin Pilkey of Duke University, among others, have been sounding the alarm for many years about the impacts of beach nourishment on marine ecosystems and habitat. But you’d be hard-pressed to find any critic more dedicated than self-appointed activist Dan Clark.

  Dan is a chubby, ruddy-faced man with a long red ponytail who founded and heads an organization, Cry of the Water, devoted to protecting the local coral reefs. Clark was raised in Wisconsin horse country, where his great-grandfather once trained zebras and horses for the Ringling Brothers circus. When Clark was about eight, he moved with his mother to Broward County, where he discovered his life’s passion, scuba diving.

  “The reefs where I learned to dive in the seventies have been buried,” he lamented. “The last of the good stuff is right here.”

  Clark and his wife, Stefi, scratch out a living taking care of vacant vacation properties and other odd jobs. “We’ll scrub boats, toilets, whatever it takes to make a buck,” Dan said. For the last two decades he has done just about everything short of throwing himself in front of a bulldozer to stop beach nourishment in Broward County. He has filed lawsuits, lobbied government officials, made a nuisance of himself at community meetings, and made sure the local media hears from him every time the subject comes up. “I’ve been fighting for nineteen years,” he said proudly.

  There’s no question that there are ways beach nourishment can harm wildlife and the environment. In Florida, the victims everyone seems most concerned about are the endearing sea turtles that clamber out of the Atlantic from March to October to lay their eggs on the beach. Broward County allows beach nourishment to be done only outside of those months so as not to impinge on the turtles’ nesting season.

  The new sand also has to match the characteristics of the naturally occurring sand, lest it put off the turtles. If the grains are too sharp, the turtles might avoid them; too dark, and the beach will get too hot and damage the eggs. The slope of the beach also can’t be too steep, or the turtles might not be able to climb them. Eastman’s crew even tills the sand with huge rakes after it’s been put in place, to make sure it’s not too hard-packed for the turtles to clamber over. But even with all this consideration, a handful of endangered loggerhead turtles were accidentally killed in 2015 by a trawler that was sucking up sand to spray onto Palm Beach County’s shore.

  Beach sands are home to a multitude of other creatures, above and below sea level. Besides the obvious visible ones—clams, crabs, birds, plants—they also shelter all kinds of nematodes, flatworms, bacteria, and other organisms so small they live on the surface of individual sand grains. Despite their tiny size, many of these creatures play an important role in the ecosystem, breaking down organic matter and providing food for other creatures, including fish.43 Dumping thousands of tons of imported sand on top of these organisms can be lethal to them. A 2016 University of California study found the population of marine worms and other invertebrates on San Diego beaches fell by half after a beach nourishment project.44 Another recent study in South Carolina found major drops in populations of bugs, worms, and other organisms living on the ocean floor in areas that had been dredged for beach nourishment.45

  The coral reefs that lie just off the southern Florida shore are another contentious issue. They have been directly damaged in the past by dredging ships trolling for sand—which is why Miami-Dade and Broward Counties no longer allow that to happen. But the most stubborn problem is turbidity, the clouding of water by stirred-up sand. Sand suspended in the water can block light from reaching the corals, and when the grains settle, they can suffocate the reefs and whatever creatures are living on them. Clark showed me a sheaf of laminated underwater photos he’s taken over the years. One batch shows corals covered with a thick layer of silt, as if they’d sat for years in a long-unvisited attic. “Even what doesn’t get buried gets affected by the silt and sediment,” said Clark. In 2016, another nourishment project under way in neighboring Palm Beach County had to briefly shut down several times because the water’s turbidity levels rose too high.

  Dredging sand from the ocean floor generates the most turbidity, but even the grains hauled in by truck cause some. No matter how it is delivered to the beach, some of that freshly placed sand—more loosely packed than natural beaches—inevitably gets swept into the water. In Southern California in 2016, sand from a renourishment project drifted into the mouth of the Tijuana Estuary, clogging it so badly that when it rained in Tijuana, the estuary filled up with fish-killing sewage.46

  Contractors like Bernie Eastman are required to hire third-party consultants to regularly check the turbidity levels they stir up. That’s not good enough for Clark. He believes consultants cherry-pick their samples, taking water from the edges of the sediment plume, rather than from its center, where the sand is most densely concentrated. “You can make the case that a football field is white if you only take samples from the lines,” he likes to say.

  “The consultants have lots of pressure on them to keep the project running,” added Ed Tichenor, an environmental activist who does more or less in Palm Beach County what Clark does in Broward. “They’re getting paid eight hundred dollars a day. If they keep shutting the project down, they won’t have a job.”

  This is a consistent problem facing anyone trying to figure out the impacts of any process that affects the
environment in complex ways. There’s always the question: How reliable is the data? Who gathered it? What is their motive? If you’re suspicious enough, practically no one can be trusted not to skew the results.

  Clark does his own testing. More than once, he said, he’s put on an orange safety vest, tucked his hair under a hard hat, and bluffed his way through a work crew to take a sample of sand right off a truck to see if it meets the county’s specifications. Sometimes he goes out in his fishing boat to take samples of seawater to check its turbidity. Most often, he takes samples from just off the beach. I followed along one day as he and Stefi set out with a bagful of empty plastic water bottles, Sharpies for labeling, and a tiny wrist-mounted GPS unit to record the location where they took each water sample.

  We strolled down to a section of newly placed beach that Eastman’s crew had completed a couple of days earlier. Clark waded into the water, getting his boots and pants cuffs soaked. He filled up one of the water bottles and brought it back to show me. It was so clouded with silt that it looked like chocolate milk. “They’re not washing it. Not nearly enough. Thing is, they have the ability to do it, but it costs,” said Clark.

  About half a mile farther south, the renourished area ended and we were back on native sand. Dan filled up another bottle. The water in this one was almost completely clear. He shook it to show me how quickly the sand settled back to the bottom, leaving the water clear again. The samples from the nourished areas were still a semi-opaque brown, and there was a film of bubbles forming on top, like the head on a beer. “That might be phosphates causing those bubbles,” says Clark. Another potentially damaging contaminant.

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  The only real way to completely avoid the pitfalls of beach nourishment while also saving coastal cities is to move those cities inland. Retreat is a radical notion, but it’s one that a number of researchers are actively promoting.