State of Disaster

"Efforts to restore and protect portions of its coastal marshes, nearly always without regard for the people displaced by these efforts. With a huge budget and noble intentions, an entire state agency is dedicated to the grand enterprise of restoring the coast. Yet it has deliberately neglected the coastal populations who live and work on the state's soggy margins and who are already migrating landward without assistance. The state's plan seeks to protect cities and industry but sacrifices relatively small numbers of coastal dwellers who have maintained their presence in this perilous place for centuries despite floods, hurricanes, oil spills, and other disasters. This book provides a detailed, historical, and geographic examination of the numerous, disconnected adaptations to coastal hazards, exploring the consequences of such activity for the environment and the region's residents. The science-based modeling of coastal futures foregrounds biophysical processes in great detail, whi le largely ignoring the processes that underlie social and cultural adjustments to changing environmental conditions. The separation of biophysical and cultural processes contributes to plans that inade