Will Rising Seas Drown the California Dream?

By Francis Wilkinson | Bloomberg,

To reach the compact, almost unseemly natural bounty that is Stinson Beach, California, you take a serpentine route across Marin County, on Highway 1, past the redwoods of Muir Woods National Monument, over the glistening rock and chaparral and coastal scrub of Mount Tamalpais. The Mill Valley and Mount Tamalpais Scenic Railroad, long defunct, is said to have incorporated 281 “hairpin curves” on its eight-mile trek to the summit. Highway 1 seems to have at least as many. The road features periodic turnoffs for slow-moving vehicles, including county buses, along with frequent signs encouraging their use once a backup reaches precisely five vehicles. The regulation, like the unrelenting beauty, is quintessentially Californian.

No one drives fast here. First, because you can’t. Second, because who would want to? Sun or shade dominates alternating curves. Hiking trails shoot off in every direction. On the downward slope of the mountain, heading west, you get your first, faint, whiff of sea air. When you reach the driveway to enter the overlook for Muir Beach, in Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the third national or state parkland you traverse on this short drive, you’d best take it. From the parking lot, you can walk a path to the edge of the cliffs, where a panorama of raw power awaits. You can’t see Stinson Beach from here; it’s hidden by the cliffs to the north. But if you follow the mountain down you will reach the source of Stinson’s beauty, and of its eventual demise: the Pacific Ocean.

Water commands one side of Stinson’s narrow spit of sand, which is incongruously angled so that the sun appears to rise over the South Pacific. The other side is dominated by the mountainous parklands rising eastward into the sky. Bolinas Lagoon, to the north and east, provides additional scenic buffer. You can drive to San Francisco in an hour from here, or walk off the gleaming beach, sand still in your shoes, and five minutes later be climbing a mountain trail, the air growing cooler and more fragrant with each step.

Stinson Beach is, not surprisingly, extremely wealthy. Zillow pegs the median home value at around $4.4 million. A quick check of the Internet shows you can spend a lot more. Marin is likewise a perennial on the list of America’s wealthiest counties. California, for all its natural hazards and inequality and persistent poverty, is itself a store of vast riches, many of them created and quartered in nearby Silicon Valley and San Francisco. As a civic entity, Stinson is a tiny Matryoshka doll nestled within two larger dolls — all three stuffed with wealth.

Yet neither California’s wealth nor its commitment to activist government is sure to protect Stinson Beach or other low-lying coastal towns from the rising sea. The ocean here is expected to rise 5 or 6 inches by 2030. Then it ramps up rapidly, rising perhaps 7 feet by 2100. There’s no telling when it stops.

Whatever California’s coast has experienced in the past century will be nothing like the inundation that marks this century. The only guesswork concerns exactly how high the water will go. That depends in part on global carbon emissions; in part on how sinking or rising land interacts with an aggressive sea; and in part on the fate of unstable stores of ice in faraway places.

I emailed Gary Griggs, a professor of earth sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a revered dean of California coastal studies, for a mini-tutorial on how he factors melting ice into the sea-rise equation. The planet’s ice is in basically three places, he told me: mountain glaciers, Greenland and Antarctica. If the mountain glaciers melt, global sea levels would rise by nearly two feet; if Greenland melts, that’s another 24 feet or so; and if Antarctica goes, that’s an additional 190 feet.

Griggs continued:

Those massive glaciers/ice sheets in Antarctica are being held back primarily by floating ice shelves, which are acting like corks in champagne bottles. Take the cork out and the glaciers will speed up. What is being documented is that a warming atmosphere is melting those floating ice shelves from above and a warming ocean is melting them from below, increasing their instability. And the fronting ice cliffs can only stand at certain slopes before they collapse, and the floating shelves can only extend so far out before they break up.

When ice breaks up, the warming atmosphere and warming water devour it like sharks attacking chum. It simply disappears, until it shows up thousands of miles away on someone’s beach or front yard. Ice is the most unpredictable element of sea rise, and it’s possible its course will be less catastrophic than many experts suspect. Even so, you don’t need much melting to register serious problems. A foot or two of vertical rise can translate to hundreds of feet of horizontal flooding. And, of course, the sea is rising even without melting ice.

Under current projections, two-thirds of Southern California’s famed beaches could be mostly underwater by 2100. Without extraordinary technical ingenuity and political coordination, Stinson Beach will likely be gone, too. According to a Marin County report, nearly 70% of Stinson’s residential parcels will be “vulnerable” to flooding by the second half of this century.

There is no organic way to turn back the ocean, or block its inland advance. California towns that have erected sea walls, or adopted other coastal “armoring,” have spent large sums to achieve mostly dubious, often short-lived, results. The California Coastal Commission strongly discourages sea walls, groins, revetments and the like, and makes it difficult to mount such structures. A 2015 report from the environmental law and policy program at Stanford law school explains why:

A common perception is that seawalls and revetments protect the coast. Although such armoring structures may temporarily protect property from encroachment by the sea, on beaches undergoing long-term erosion, armoring structures accelerate erosion of existing beaches and coastal habitats. … Put simply, when placed on an eroding or retreating beach, armoring structures will cause that beach to narrow and eventually disappear. Wave energy reflecting off of shoreline armoring structures also undercuts the beach and can hasten coastal erosion in front of the structure as well as on neighboring properties, harming those properties and stimulating yet more armoring.

Dredging and pumping sand has been an effective but costly remedy for erosion at some beaches. Cape May, New Jersey, has been getting its beach replenished at taxpayer expense for a century. But San Diego County spent millions on beach replenishment, only to see the new sand quickly surrender to the sea. Replenishment becomes even more problematic in the face of relentless sea rise; it’s hard to pile sand on a beach that’s increasingly underwater.

Among ecologists, “managed retreat” is a phrase that has gained currency in recent years. But it’s no coincidence that scientists and environmentalists are far more likely to use it than politicians. Who will retreat? To where? Who will have authority to manage that? How? If you somehow convinced all of Stinson to move back from the sea, the town would quickly run smack into a mountain. There is no secondary beach to retreat to. And what of the owners of $6 million beachfront homes, a politically powerful cohort accustomed to getting its way? They will demand compensation. Who will pay? How? How much?

As a wealthy community with an active and engaged government that long ago recognized the threat of sea rise, Stinson Beach is much better positioned to face an uncertain future than most places in the U.S. Yet climate change introduces such a range of complexities that envisioning the future, let alone properly predicting and planning for the one or more scenarios that ultimately prevail, can seem like a game of chance.

Stinson Beach has just about every advantage to master the challenges of sea rise. It’s just not clear how much that will matter.

***

Marin County Planning Manager Jack Liebster is the kind of public employee who rewards whatever faith in government survives in the 21st century. Liebster, who is 71, studied under Griggs and spent more than a quarter century at the California Coastal Commission before joining Marin’s combat against sea rise. On the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in January, Liebster drove his 2010 Toyota Corolla over Mount Tamalpais to meet me at Stinson Beach.

California is far ahead of many coastal states in factoring climate change into public policy. But perhaps no other state, even Florida, has so much at stake. Two thirds of California’s 39 million residents live in coastal counties. The state’s western edge supports some of the richest real estate and infrastructure in the U.S.

In 2008, then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an executive order stating: “California must begin now to adapt and build our resiliency to coming climate changes through a thoughtful and sensible approach with local, regional, state, and federal government using the best available science.” The California Coastal Commission, which dates to the early 1970s, began working on sea rise in the 1990s and issued its first policy guidance on seal level rise in 2015. Marin has been conducting its own vulnerability assessments and sea-rise reports for years. Stinson has been the site of numerous community meetings on various aspects of sea rise.

The problem on this stretch of Pacific coast is not politically driven denial. It’s that sea rise is hard to accommodate and even harder to repel — no matter how squarely you face it. “I don’t think there are simple, easy solutions to this,” said Jeff Loomans, a retired venture capitalist who has a home in Stinson Beach. “It is going to take coordination among the government, private land owners, water districts, the local park systems. I mean, it’s a heavy lift, but the good news is a lot of these groups are very, very collaborative.”

Loomans, however, pointed to a fundamental challenge that even the best-prepared locales confront: “There can’t be just one plan,” he said, “because things change over time.”

You can see just how complicated beach life can get at the end of Calle del Onda, where I met with Liebster and Peter Sandmann, a lawyer who has owned a house in Stinson Beach for four decades.

Aside from the homes perched in the mountains, most of Stinson Beach is wedged into a single block between the water and the road. You can walk from road to beach in less than a minute. At one end of the beach is Seadrift, a private, gated community founded in the 1950s “for the wealthy families of San Francisco.” Beyond that are the bluffs of the neighboring town of Bolinas. Those bluffs are eroding; half a dozen oceanfront homes have been lost.

At the other end of Stinson Beach is a federal beach with public parking. In between are what is known locally as “the calles and patios” — narrow, low-lying, streets running perpendicular to the beach. The calles and patios are packed with cottages — about 1,800 square feet seems typical — on both sides. These are the most vulnerable homes in town.

Where Calle del Onda meets the beach, evidence of survival mode appears. Beachfront homes here are not at the beach; they are directly on it. To the south is a house with its own sea wall, about 8 feet high, encompassing its oceanfront side. When a high tide rolls in, water is displaced sideways toward neighboring homes. On the north side, a home is lofted atop concrete pillars about 20 feet high, giving the appearance of a spaceship hovering above its squat neighbors. You can see the high tide line beneath the house.

Liebster spends a lot of time trying to figure out how to keep homes here from being flushed away in the decades ahead. The county, he said, is assessing a range of options. One possibility is to elevate the road that runs along the lagoon, to prevent water from sneaking in the rear. As the sea rises, the lagoon will not only rise but also go from wetlands to deeper, open water. Highway 1, which hugs the lagoon to the east, may also have to be raised or rerouted; it’s already subject to nuisance flooding.

On the ocean side, new dune construction might protect houses from waves. (Seadrift has its own rock and sand revetment facing the ocean.) The county has selected a consultant to advise it on techniques to blunt the sea’s attack, but it’s difficult to know how well various efforts would work, or for how long.

The politics of spending large sums of money to protect dozens of multimillion-dollar houses from nature is bound to be a bit fraught. In Jeff Goodell’s sea-rise epic, “The Water Will Come,” the author quotes Peter Byrne, director of the Environmental Law and Policy Institute at Georgetown University, delivering a blunt assessment: “There has to be a limit to how long the public will pay for protecting beachfront property when we all know it is going underwater anyway.”

Marin County is collecting data on beachgoers — the better to make the case that saving Stinson Beach is about far more than preserving the ocean views of the very wealthy. “What we’re working for is clearly in the common interest, the public interest,” said Liebster. “In the summer this beach is covered with people.”

Collective action and private property can make for an awkward dance. It makes no sense to build new structures on a beach that will soon be drowning. Yet local authorities have been tussling over the future of a beachfront lot on Calle del Onda that has been vacant since 1983, when fire destroyed a house there. Someone, after all, owns the lot. And beachfront property in Stinson is anything but cheap. As long as the beach is still there, who can deny the owner the full value of the property?

No one, according to Steve Kinsey, a former member of the Marin County Board of Supervisors who represents the owner. And to extract the full value of the land necessarily entails the ability to build a house for sale or rent. “If you believe that over the next 70 years all those homes will need to be removed, a precautionary approach would say, ‘Why do you even begin?’” Kinsey said in a telephone interview. It’s a reasonable question. But neither California nor U.S. law “allow taking of an individual’s property without just compensation,” he added. “So then you get into the conflict of property rights and constitutional rights versus long-range planning. And we’re going to see that up and down the coast.”

Buying out litigious multimillionaires, one by one, is a recipe for chaos and dysfunction. Given the value of California coastal real estate, it’s also preposterously unaffordable. In a remarkable feature for the Los Angeles Times, Rosanna Xia offered a tour of the state’s coastal crucibles: the town of Pacifica, where an apartment building tumbled off an eroding bluff; Del Mar, where wealthy residents refuse to retreat but have no sure way to defend their homes; Gleason Beach, where exposed rebar and concrete mark the graves of once ocean-view homes; Imperial Beach, hammered by violent waves with no rescue in sight.

After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, New York State engineered a “managed retreat” in a few of the most vulnerable neighborhoods. The state bought out 300 parcels on Staten Island, for example, for $120 million. That sum is almost quaint in the context of California, Xia noted, perhaps sufficient to purchase “10 or so homes in Malibu.”

***

I went back to Stinson Beach one quiet morning after the three-day holiday weekend. Most of the kids, dogs and surfers who rambled along the sand or sought to harness the waves were gone, leaving this soulful sliver of sand rocking gently in its sunny, salty cradle. It was a lovely day, January cool, and with the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean as company, I thought about the unsettling changes to come.

The beach is a relatively new phenomenon. The Garden of Eden, notably, doesn’t include one among its plentiful sources of beauty and joy. For centuries in the West, the sea was identified not with paradise but with hell. For most of European history, the French historian Alain Corbin wrote, “The ocean, that watery monster’s den, was a damned world in whose darkness the accursed creatures devoured one another.” Even seafaring people built homes that faced inland.

The modern beach evolved from the pseudo-science of 18th century British and continental quacks who prescribed sea immersion at Brighton and elsewhere, calibrating timing and location for optimal health effects on the leisure class. Beach culture arguably reached its apotheosis in 20th century Southern California. Surfing, “Gidget,” “Beach Blanket Bingo,” the Beach Boys, the Ventures, even the Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1970s: All gave the beach a starring role in American culture.

But the beach has evolved again. It’s no longer a kingdom of wild teens and Bohemians; the United States of Real Estate long ago commandeered the coasts. Beach bums have given way to affluent professionals. Last fall I watched surfers in La Jolla, above San Diego, tuck their boards into custom Mercedes vans. Yet the realignment of beaches with wealth and status have hardly made them less central to the identity of California.

It’s difficult to contemplate California without beaches. When I told Gary Griggs I was having trouble envisioning what sea rise would do to the state’s beaches in this century, how some would move while others would simply cease to exist, he said, “I am also having trouble visualizing the California coast several decades into the future.”

In an email, he continued:

In the absence of any human development the shoreline would continue to migrate inland/landward as sea level continues to rise. At the end of the last ice age ~20,000 years ago, the shoreline of California was out at the edge of the continental shelf, 10-30 miles to the west depending upon where you are, and there were beaches out there then. As ice melted and the ocean water warmed and expanded, sea level rose globally about 400 feet and the shoreline advanced, moving the beaches eastward or inland.

This will continue to happen in the decades ahead where there is no development, seawalls, revetments, buildings or highways in the way. But 14% of the entire California coast is now armored, 38% of the southern California coast is armored, so the beaches can no longer migrate inland. As a result of these barriers, the beaches will gradually be flooded and will be lost…. This is one of the issues the state will need to deal with, as well as what to do with all of the development and infrastructure that is in the way.

No one knows for certain how this massive change in geography, the sea’s usurpation of shoreline and houses and roads, will take place. The question of how it will alter a culture that variously takes beaches for granted, or worships them as nearly sacred, is even harder. “Certain people are going to win in some places, certain people are going to lose, certain areas are going to do better than other places,” said Laura Marsh, the California policy director for the Surfrider Foundation.

The Surfrider Foundation is part of a collection of nonprofit organizations focused on influencing the state’s response to sea rise. The degrees of fatalism about that task vary among the groups. Like many, Marsh’s group views itself as a public advocate. The paramount goal, she said, is to “preserve the beach for the public.”

There was a time when that goal was strictly a political matter, resolvable in clearly defined political arenas. It’s still a political question, but one in which the earth’s most awesome forces, jacked up on industrial emissions, may exert an irrefutable claim. “California’s amazing,” Marsh said. “The beach here is 100% supposed to belong to the public, and our representatives are supposed to be protecting the public trust. That’s what we entrust them to do.”

From below San Diego to above San Francisco, the state is indeed graced by beautiful and transcendent beaches. But up and down the coast, evidence is mounting that many such beaches are unlikely to be preserved, regardless of the best intentions or most competent efforts of their would-be guardians. That transformation, at first gradual and then furious, will alter Californians’ relations to the sea, to their state, and very likely to one another, in ways that promise to be disorienting and profound.

I asked Marsh what California would be without the beach.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Arizona?”

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson writes about U.S. politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously executive editor of the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.

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