Growing up, I always imagined the beach to be a natural place. I think it’s safe to say that this sentiment may be pretty common among many beachgoers. It’s easy to think of the beach as being somewhat “natural,” or at least close to that thing some people call “nature.” This is a short piece, so I won’t go down the what is nature!? rabbit hole for now. By natural I mean something along the lines of “not caused or created by human intervention.” So here’s the thing: many beaches are actually far less “natural” than many people assume or know.

I’ll give you an example. Take the beaches of Oceanside, California, where I spent some time doing research this past summer. Oceanside has nice beaches, and lots of people like to visit them. Those beaches bring in tourists, and money. They are also very popular for many local residents, for a variety of uses and purposes. But let’s look back at the more recent histories of Oceanside’s coastline, starting with the first large-scale human-induced coastal changes in the late 19th century.

In 1888, a 1000-foot wharf was built in Oceanside. In 1890, the wharf was destroyed and rebuilt; this structure was in place until around 1920. In 1922, Lake Henshaw was dammed, which resulted in a severe reduction in sand supply. In 1927 a new pier was built, this one at the location where there is still a pier today. Then, in 1942, the Federal government built the Del Mar Boat basin, a process that also included the dredging of 1.5 million cubic yards of sediment. Another 220,000 cubic yards of sand were dredged from the entrance channel of this boat basin in 1945. Another dam, this one at Vail Lake, was completed in 1949. During the same year the city put in a 1000-foot stretch of riprap south of Oceanside pier. In 1952 two groins were installed. In 1957, another 800,000 cubic yards of sand were dredged and placed on downcoast beaches to alleviate erosion problems. The city installed a small groin at the mouth of the San Luis Rey river in 1961 (see Image 1), and a small craft harbor was completed in 1963. This process included the dredging of 2.9 million cubic yards of sand that were placed on beaches to the south. From the 1970s until 2001, more than 8 million cubic yards of sand were pumped onto Oceanside’s beaches.[1]

That was a ton of information, to the point of overkill, but I’ve included all those details to make a point. Oceanside’s beaches, like many beaches around the world, are not simply pristine, untouched natural spaces. They are the results of human interventions that led to cascading effects: The dams and harbors severely reduced the sand supply of downcoast beaches (Kuhn and Shepard 1984), resulting in coastal erosion and shorter beaches over time. As beach tourism demand and popularity grew, cities such as Oceanside sought to maintain their sandy shorelines (and protect coastal properties), often through a combination of armoring (i.e. seawalls, riprap, etc.) and the artificial nourishment of beach sand.

If you look closely at the aerial image of Oceanside’s coast (see Image 2), from left to right you can see 1) the 1942 Del Mar Boat Basin; 2) The small boat harbor that was built in the 1960s; 3) the groin at the mouth of the San Luis Rey River; and 4) the Oceanside pier further down the coast. Notice that there is sand built up on the upcoast sides of these structures (especially the boat basin, harbor, and groin), and that the sandy beaches dwindle as you move to the right. These days, the southernmost coast of Oceanside has little to no sand whatsoever (see Image 3).

Such patterns are not uncommon. Today, around 240 km (13.9%) of the state of California’s coastline is armored; in southern California alone that percentage jumps to 38% (Griggs and Patsch 2019). This percentage has grown substantially in the past few decades: in the early 1970s, only around 2.5% of California’s 1760km coast was armored (Griggs and Patsch 2019). Why all this armoring? It’s due to growing coastal populations, increased development, patterns of coastal management, and of course other factors, such as slowly rising seas.

This brings me back to the question of nature. Who cares if the beaches in Oceanside or any other coast around the world is a product of human intervention? Why does any of this matter? Well, around 3 billion people live within 100 miles of a coastline today (Griggs and Patsch 2019), and this isn’t going to change anytime soon. There is indeed a tremendous amount of investment, attachment, and entrenchment in these coastal spaces. And those rising seas aren’t going to be stopping either. What this means, in the future, is that there are going to be many, many more conversations—and conflicts—about sea level rise, erosion, and what should be done. Some of these conversations may be framed in terms of trying to conserve or save natural spaces; in some cases this kind of framing is perhaps appropriate. But in others, where humanity and nature are entangled in more of a complex admixture (which is likely more often then we might assume), the question may rather be more along the lines of whose beach and which nature (as Gesing 2017 puts it) will be protected, created, or maintained. This distinction matters, especially as humanity slowly grapples with the “politics of the anthropogenic” (Sayre 2012)—including those rising tides—in the coming years.

References

Gesing, F., 2017. Whose Beach, Which Nature? Coproducing Coastal Naturecultures and Erosion Control in Aotearoa New Zealand. In Environmental Transformations and Cultural Responses (pp. 125-156). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Griggs, G. and K. Patsch, 2019. California’s coastal development: Sea-level rise and extreme events—where do we go from here? Shore & Beach, 87(2), 15-28. https://doi.org/10.34237/1008722

Kuhn, G.G. and Shepard, F.P., 1984. Sea Cliffs, Beaches, and Coastal Valleys of San Diego County: Some Amazing Histories and Some Horrifying Implications. Univ of California Press.

Perdomo, G.A., 2004. Developing a Seawall Algorithm for the Dnr Model with Application to the Oceanside, California, Coastline (Doctoral dissertation, University of Florida).

Sayre, N.F., 2012. The politics of the anthropogenic. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, pp.57-70.

United States Army Corps of Engineers. 1991. State of the Coast Report, San Diego Region: Coast of California Storm and Tidal Waves Study, Volume II-Appendices, Final.

[1] All the details from this paragraph are based upon the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (1991) and Perdomo (2004).

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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In this series of posts, I provide an account of my new relationship with the American Geophysical Union (the largest community of earth & space scientists) as an anthropologist who is doing inter-disciplinary research in the Lumbee Tribe after Hurricane Matthew (2016). Thank you to Matthew Thompson for inviting me to write with Anthrodendum.

In recent years, anthropology has joined many other academic disciplines in accusing humans of destroying the earth. This destruction has been summed up in one word: “anthropocene”. The word “anthropocene” has a mysterious history. Wikipedia contributors have created a fairly accessible article that sheds light on the origins of the word. One of the most interesting origin stories is that “anthropocene” was sort of an accident that jumped off the lips of Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen in the early 2000s. An article in Smithsonian magazine documents how “anthropocene” subsequently became fashionable in the planetary science community. Afterwards, British scholars in the journal for the Geological Society of America (GSA) asked readers to consider the term “anthropocene” – which is literally a mashup of  “human” & “new” –  as the official label for the planetary epoch within which we now live.

Here, I want to draw attention to something. There are two (2) assumptions within conversations about “anthropocene” that I cannot ignore:

• There is an assumption that changes in the earth are the created by all humans who are equally present.
• There is also an assumption that we all had/have equitable opportunities to affect, craft, & enact policies regarding human vulnerability.

Although anthropologists have been talking about the anthropocene, I’m not sure if we have been talking  within it.

To be within the anthropocene means that we fully realize that the naming of a planetary epoch is, like many other things, a colonial process. Sidney Mintz (an anthropologist) prefaced his book Sweetness & Power (1985) with a poignant quote from J.H. Bernardin de Saint Pierre:

“I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them.”

Mintz began Sweetness & Power this way because it had become quite apparent in his fieldwork that Europe (and subsequently America) took the lead in a global endeavor to exploit brown and black peoples for the sake of stripping the Earth of indigenous natural resources & cultivating crops through the enslavement of those brown and black peoples. Mintz’s text was formidable in that it called out the capitalistic processes that were owned by White entrepreneurs & that placed inequitable pressure on non-White people to accept changes in land & reinventions of their diets.

For example, Mintz pointed out that, in the early 1900s, sugar was being “pumped” into the crevasses of many poor communities. As a result, sugar became associated with “the good life” (pp. 188-190). In indigenous communities today, the “good life” has become epidemic rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease that are catalyzed by sugary (sugar-like) substances. Sugar replaced other (perhaps indigenous) sources of calories. Mintz asserts that sugar contained more calories per unit of land harvested than any other crop, a reality which led to the rise of corporations like Nestle that have turned the hyper-harvest of sugar into its current global domination of consumable goods. (Nestle is accused of hijacking water throughout the United States.)

This story of food-centered corporations hijacking land & water parallels stories of other corporations that aim to use particular sections of the American ecosystem to advance their profits against the cultural and biomedical needs of vulnerable and/or indigenous community members. Recent stories about Chemours (formerly Dupont) illustrate conditions within which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has turned a blind eye toward corporate poisoning of ecosystems in eastern North Carolina. In other news, the state of North Carolina recently approved the advancement of the Atlantic Coastal Pipeline through eastern North Carolina, which allows natural gas companies to systematically target many of the state’s Native American communities.This type of collusion between federal, state, and local powerbrokers – vis-a-vis Native America – is not new.

Consider the disappearance of particular animals in the United States within Native American territories. Before the 20th century, the U.S. federal government sponsored the annihilation of herds of buffalo – effectively annihilating the ecosystems of various tribal communities in Native America. These sorts of policies continued into the mid-20th century when the federal government had a hands-off approach to financial practices in and around Native American farming communities. In North Carolina, laws protecting the fair sale/trade of land were positioned to advantage White landowners. White land owners would employ Native American sharecroppers and they (the White land owners) would demand that Native American sharecroppers purchase and use an overabundance of pesticides on the lands that the sharecroppers farmed. By the 1960s, the pesticide of choice was DDT, which was pushed by federal agricultural programs as a global cure-all in an era where jungles in Vietnam & swamps in the U.S. South were being cleared for reasons that we still don’t fully understand. Native American ecosystems throughout the U.S. South lost important animals like rabbits, raccoons, & quail. Even after the large-scale denunciation of DDT as a pesticide of choice across the United States in the late 1960s, ecosystems in North Carolina’s Native American communities have never been restored.

So, yes, as we enter into the “anthropocene”, we might find that the term remains wanting. We must consider what it means that the “anthropocene” possesses assumptions that we are equally present and that we equitably participate in the business & governance of the planet when both assumptions are wrong. Indeed, we must acknowledge that in our collective conversation about a changing planet, our goal ought to be to set the stage for purposeful human conversations about how we see the planet differently.

To be continued…

David Shane Lowry

David Shane Lowry, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT. In this role, David is leading a new conversation at MIT about the responsibilities of MIT (and science/technology education, more generally) in the theft of American Indian land and the dismantling of American Indian health and community. Since 2013, David has lectured across the United States – roles in which he has become well versed in conversations at the intersection of race, (health) science & popular culture. His first book, titled Lumbee Pipelines (under contract with University of Nebraska Press), explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions to create opportunities that are both uplifting and oppressive. His second book, titled Black Jesus, is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. It began when David realized that he and Jordan shared the same anthropology advisor at UNC … 23 years apart.

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