Book description
Americans love to colonize their beaches. But when storms threaten, high-ticket beachfront construction invariably takes precedence over coastal environmental concerns-we rescue the buildings, not the beaches. As Cornelia Dean explains in Against the Tide, this pattern is leading to the rapid destruction of our coast. But her eloquent account also…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Against the Tide as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I think Cory Dean, who was the long-time science editor for the New York Times, was perhaps the first to delve into the now well-documented and diverse impacts of the multiple human efforts to engineer and control our shorelines.
She visited dozens of threatened coastal communities and interviewed countless coastal geologists, engineers, elected officials, and citizens in order to better understand why decisions were made to modify shorelines in individual communities, more often than not, with predictable and damaging impacts on beaches.
In lively and engaging prose, she clearly explains each setting and location and why things went awry when…
From Gary's list on The best books on the crisis at the shoreline.
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