These places are built on marshlands and surrounded by water.
This thought has persistently confronted me throughout my years of walking and photographing the coastlines of Jamaica Bay and Staten Island. They are on a slow, seemingly unseeable, course toward becoming uninhabitable places. The overwhelming destruction of Hurricane Sandy is still evident nearly ten years later, but it is the never-satiated tide that, day after day, erodes the coast. Local governments have implemented various mitigation strategies—sand bag barriers, elevated houses, redesigned drainage systems, and even trucked-in sand to renourish coasts. Some neighborhoods have been bought back by the city at pre-Hurricane Sandy prices, leaving nothing but spray painted lot numbers and severed connections to the grid that sway in the wind.
A wall of any size can be built with enough resources and technology, a fact that is disturbingly apparent as one walks through the different coastal neighborhoods of New York City. Capital protects capital.
I only hope that our inevitable retreat from these coasts is dignified and equitable.
Excerpt from S.L. Dorobek’s essay, An Unconcerned Nature:
We also need to admit that we have gotten ourselves into this situation and our accounting of our behavior is long overdue. The stakes have become much higher, our choices more critical, and our margin for error diminished. While we dither and deny, Nature proceeds into the future according to its own laws, influenced by our behavior, but unconcerned for our needs, habits, and desires. Nature will simply continue until it finds a new balance, a new way of operating.
