A living shoreline near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The native grasses and sandy shore provide habitat for terrapins, the University of Maryland mascot. (Photo by Tamara Keith)
Scientists are pretty certain climate change is going to cause the sea level to rise. It’s
happening already, actually. In communities around the Chesapeake Bay, people are
getting a sneak preview. Tamara Keith reports some people there are trying to work with
nature rather than resist it:
Transcript
Scientists are pretty certain climate change is going to cause the sea level to rise. It’s
happening already, actually. In communities around the Chesapeake Bay, people are
getting a sneak preview. Tamara Keith reports some people there are trying to work with
nature rather than resist it:
(sound of kids planting)
It’s been raining in Woodland Beach. The community is just off of the Chesapeake Bay
in Maryland. The ground here is so soft you sink into it. Mud is everywhere. And that’s
just fine with the volunteers planting native grasses on a sloping hillside.
Stephen Hult is trying to keep things in order.
“And when we plant them we want them all the way down. I’m telling everyone twice.”
Hult heads up shoreline restoration projects for the local property owners association.
And there’s a lot of shoreline to restore.
“The shoreline, in parts of the community since the 1930s, have eroded 20 feet. Year to
year, one barely notices, but if you look at aerial maps of what it used to be like
compared to what it is, it really is quite dramatic.”
There’s been tons of erosion here. The land all along the mid-Atlantic coast is also
slowly sinking. Combine that with global sea level rise and you get erosion in overdrive.
Hult says the community is trying to restore the beach with rock and dirt and sand and
grasses to hold it all together. This is what’s called a living shoreline.
“We have now, with this project it will be well over half a mile of living shorelines that
we’ve installed.”
It’s a relatively new concept, a more natural approach to the gnawing problem of
shoreline erosion. Living shorelines create buffer between the water and homes. They are
kinda like the tidal wetlands that used to be here – before property owners started building
sea walls, also called bulkheads.
Jana Davis is associate director of the Chesapeake Bay Trust. It’s one of the organizations
funding this shoreline restoration. And Davis also happens to live here.
“It’s a wonderful alternative that provides just as good shoreline protection while also
providing a lot of really important habitat benefits that a bulkhead or rock sea wall does
not provide.”
Good for wildlife, and she says, it’s adaptive in the face of sea level rise.
“If sea level were to rise another foot, for example. The marsh could kind of migrate
inland, whereas if you had a bulkhead obviously there’s no migration because it can’t
move.”
But most of the people with bulkheads are NOT buying it. They want to protect their
property from the sinking land and rising water, and a lot of them don’t think a bunch of
rocks and grass are going to cut it.
Kevin Smith is chief of restoration services for the Maryland Department of Natural
Resources.
“There’s many places you can go and look at miles of shoreline and not see any natural
shoreline at all. It’s all armored off.”
Smith met me at a nature center along the bay. A few years ago, a stretch of bulkhead
here was replaced with a living shoreline. The natural ebb and flow of these shorelines
has made some property owners skeptical. They want the shoreline to stay put.
“If these types of projects don’t protect that shoreline from erosion, then homeowners are
not going to want to do it.”
But Smith insists these projects do work, and long term they’re going to be more
sustainable and more flexible than bulkheads – which over time will lose the battle
against the constant pounding of the rising sea.
For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.