Against the Tide: The Battle for America's Beaches Hardcover - 1999

But when storms threaten, coastal construction -- homes and businesses -- takes precedence over the coastal environment. We rescue buildings, even if it means damaging the beach. As Cornelia Dean -- Science Editor of the New York Times -- explains, this pattern is leading to the rapid degradation of our coast. Against the Tide offers a passionate yet evenhanded account of the crisis facing America's beaches -- and what we must do to protect them.

Dean begins the story with the deadliest natural disaster ever in the United States, the devastating hurricane that killed 6,000 people in Galveston, Texas, in 1900. Residents constructed a wall to protect their city, not realizing how it would interfere with the natural movement of sand onto and off of their beach. In the end, the wall destroyed the very beach it was meant to protect. The citizens' well-meaning efforts to protect their valuable shorefront property ultimately cost them their beach and destroyed the town's booming resort business.

Against the Tide shows how similar tales have been retold in myriad ways all along the coast -- from Hurricane Andrew's assault on Florida and the Gulf Coast to the 1962 northeaster that ravaged one thousand miles of the Atlantic shore; from the beleaguered beaches of New Jersey and North Carolina's rapidly vanishing Outer Banks to the sand-starved coast of southern California. Dean provides dozens of examples of human attempts to tame the ocean -- as well as a wealth of descriptions of the sea's counterattack.

With harrowing accounts of natural disasters, lucid explanations of the physics of the beach and coastal ecology, reports of unwise construction, and aclear-eyed elucidation of public policy and conservation issues, this book illustrates in rich detail the conflicting interests, short-term responses, and long-term imperatives that will shape the future of the American coast.

Dean's eloquent book offers practical advice for preserving the stretches of pristine American coast that remain and salvaging stretches damaged by unwise development. Readers of Against the Tide will be drawn to see this nation's beaches in new ways.