CSM: What Jamaica Bay can teach us about coastline development
Source: Christian Science Monitor
This is fascinating stuff about how building on the coast has threatened not only the environment - but the living conditions of everyone who builds on the coast. (This is a total chicken and egg problem that ends with "no chickens and eggs" should be permitted on the coast.) The wetland discussed in the article is in New York, but as the writer explains, it transcends that region to all coastal areas:
If we view cities as densely populated areas surrounded by increasingly less populated and wilder land, then New York’s Jamaica Bay wetlands present this phenomenon in reverse. The 39-square-mile saltwater marsh at the far eastern edge of Queens and Brooklyn is a piece of nature engulfed by the country’s largest metropolitan area. Since the mid-1990s, the marsh, which hosts a multitude of fish and bird species, has been disappearing at an accelerating rate.
“Something has dramatically changed,” says Dan T. Mundy, a battalion leader for the New York City Fire Department and a lifelong resident of Broad Channel, Queens, an island community in the bay. “The marsh has lost its ability to hold itself together.”
Scientists have a list of possible culprits. None – excess nutrients and the hardening of the bay’s shoreline, for example – is mutually exclusive. Indeed, the combination of several factors – what one scientist calls “a destructive synergy” – is likely behind the marsh’s degradation.
“We don’t think there’s necessarily a [single] smoking gun,” says Kim Tripp, director of the National Park Service’s Jamaica Bay Institute. “There’s basically been a snowball rolling downhill, and now it’s an avalanche.”
As such, the bay is something of a case study for the predicament of coastal wetlands in the United States and the world in general. Often, there’s not enough space for both wetlands and the sizable coastal population (53 percent, in the US) to coexist. Wetlands are drained, filled, and hemmed in by sea walls and bulkheads. Sediment deposition, necessary to counterbalance natural erosion, halts. With sea levels rising due to human-induced global warming, the wetlands, which could migrate inland in a pristine environment, drown.
Here is the statistic that will jump out to Louisiana residents:
Scientists and residents alike would like to avoid total marsh loss for a slew of reasons. The spongy soil, topped by tall grasses, buffers against storm surges. Many think that hurricane Katrina would have been less devastating had the Gulf Coast’s wetlands been intact and able to slow and absorb the storm surge. (Wetlands lining the Mississippi River could once soak up 60 days’ worth of floodwater, says the Environmental Protection Agency; what now remains can only hold 12 days’ worth.) A glance at a New York City flood-preparedness map shows that large swaths of Brooklyn and Queens directly behind Jamaica Bay are vulnerable to storm surges of only a few feet.
[Post pic of Jamaica Bay.]
