January 7th 2009 • HOME •

Testimony at the Oakdale hearings (January 12, 2000) on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' "Fire Island Interim Project"

My names is James Seymour. I am a political scientist at Columbia University,<Note 1> and have a home in Fire Island Pines. Today I am representing ... Fire Island Ecology....

The good news is: How to properly manage a beach is no mystery. The matter has been studied in depth, and there are some excellent books on the subject.<2> The bad news is that in the history of beach management in America the policy-making process has tended to be hijacked by short-sighted real estate and commercial interests.

We've recently had a taste of this in Fire Island Pines. A couple years ago there was a "massive" (although in terms of the natural order, puny) effort to "borrow" coarse sand from in front of a neighboring village to "replenish" our beach, and build fake dunes. <3> This project was financed by a long-term tax assessment on us property owners, pushed through by a tiny group of people who wanted to build houses on newly "buildable" land. Before the sand was imported I frequently commented (to whomever would listen) that "if mother nature wants there to be a beach there, there will be a beach, and if she doesn't, there won't." I hardly realized how right I was: 70 percent of the imported sand washed out to sea so quickly that hardly anyone ever saw it. In the last couple years much more has washed out. (Nature insists that "loans" be repaid according to her schedule!) Probably only ten percent remains, and it may well be that this amount of sand would have washed and blown in during the course of the natural ebb and flow.

The proposed Fire Island Interim Project ($215 million <4>) is simply the Fire Island Pines folly ($3 million) writ large. But if it were merely a waste of money I would not have travelled all the way out here to testify; politicians and bureaucrats will often waste money, and mere monetary waste is not an environmental issue. But this is worse than a mere waste of money.

Fire Island is a dynamic barrier island. It is inherently unstable, though not as unstable as the artificially steepened post FIIP would be. Although nothing can make it altogether stable, if left to its own devices the island will probably do all right. It is only when humans interfere in the natural order that the island becomes threatened. What is most worrisome is the prospect of new structures being put up on land that the FIIP will make "buildable." Anything that encourages building on forward dunes is bad for a barrier island, because structures prevent genuine dunes from forming and surviving. Forward structures endanger the houses that have been more responsibly located. Thus, FIIP will make things worse, not better.

We are in a new century, and whereas the great issues of the past century have involved human rights questions, I believe that the great issues of the next century will be environmental. I am not at all sanguine about the environmental movement prevailing over the less responsible special interests.

There is a limit to how many insults the environment can sustain. I am talking about both micro-insults, such as beach replenishment, and macro-insults, such as global warming. While I do not mean to sound apocalyptic, if we keep going as we are there may be no Fire Island; it could well end up largely under water. And the FIIP would be recorded by future historians as another example of the folly of people who think of the sea as a vincible enemy rather than a powerful partner best treated by accommodation.
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1. Title: Senior Research Scholar.

2. Cornelia Dean, Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches, and Rutherford H. Platt, Disasters and Democracy: The Politics of Extreme Natural Events--especially chapter 6, "Fire Island: The Politics of Coastal Erosion." ( Details on these works .)

3.There is an important difference between fake dunes, which are of no geological benefit, and real dunes made of fine, packed sand, laced with long-rooted dune grass.

4. That is if there are no cost overruns and if the project lasts only six years. But a six-year project would not be cost-effective; there is already talk of beach replenishment going on for 30 years. It is claimed that the longer project would be cost effective, but there are so many "unknowns" that there is no scientific way of predicting that.

5. Of course, if viewed in terms of "opportunity costs" the money is an environmental issue. A much better way to spend some of this money would be to condemn oceanside lots and compensate the owners. Eventually the land could become genuine dunes and thus an environmental asset. Such dunes would also be a financial asset in the sense that society would be spared much in insurance costs.

Updated 10 Jan 00