Op/Ed Draft: "Owning coastal property might put you on the rocks" - Eli Lazarus
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
For the Portland Press Herald (Portland, Maine): ~500 words
Opinion: Owning coastal property might put you on the rocks
Despite countless examples of the risks inherent in owning ocean-front property, many coastal landowners still seem surprised when nature comes to collect.
This August, the Maine Public Broadcasting Network will rebroadcast a 2009 documentary video produced by the Maine Sea Grant entitled, "Building a Resilient Coast: Maine Confronts Climate Change." Between 2007–2008, the Maine Sea Grant, in cooperation with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, the Center for Research and Evaluation, and the Maine Coastal Program, surveyed and interviewed nearly 600 coastal property owners and town officials in southern and midcoast Maine. In the technical report on the project, property owners describe different measures they took to limit destruction from shoreline erosion: raising seawalls; armoring with rocks; digging diversion ditches; trucking in sand to replenish overwashed dunes. Because waves and storms are an inevitable part of living on the Maine coast, those stabilization structures will always require maintenance. That's a fact of coastal ownership as inescapable as animal chores on a working farm—the work is part of the deliberate choice to live there.
But a number of the respondents to the Maine Sea Grant survey feel the burden of maintaining their sea-sprayed real-estate is too much. Rather than accept low-interest loans for damage repair, most property owners want direct financial grants or want the government to pay—even though passing such responsibility for damage only passes the buck to their inland neighbors. The owners say that permit restrictions on repairing storm damage are unfair, and the overwhelming majority feel that state and federal governments are impinging on their property rights. The majority don't trust the risk-awareness information provided by local, state, or federal agencies. They dismiss information from the University of Maine and Maine Geological Survey as having an "agenda," and deem the Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers untrustworthy.
If not scientists, whom would the owners likely consult to learn what they could or couldn't do with their waterfront property? Who in this cast of players doesn't have an agenda? "Realtors," according to the technical report, topped the respondents' list.
This kind of willful naïveté about the real cost of owning coastal property is disappointing, and doesn't bring towns, states, or the federal government any closer to finding equitable solutions to the problems driven by permanent development along dynamic shorelines. Resilience of Maine's coastal communities will come with adaptation to, and allowance of, natural variability—not from staunch refusal to admit our personal responsibility for the private land we occupy. Straight answers about the potential impacts of coastal change are available and accessible, even if they aren't the answers many coastal landowners want to hear. Buy an ocean-front lot, and the hazards of erosion, storm vulnerability, and property loss are part of the deal. Nature doesn't care who pays for damages or how high the assessment runs—but your neighbors do.
About the Author: Eli Lazarus is a coastal geologist and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maine.