The collapse of a section of Newport's Cliff Walk has captured our attention. In a Boston Globe report, Dean Greenstein of Roger Williams University puts this newsworthy event in geologic perspective - our planet is constantly changing, even features that we wish wouldn't change. And, whether or not the collapse of the Cliff Walk was accelerated by GHG-supercharged climate change, it is an unassailable fact that climate change is accelerating undesirable, and in many instances catastrophic, changes to our land and seascapes.
So what are we going to do about it? Brian Amaral, the author of the Boston Globe report, concludes that we "have to plan very purposefully for [a] retreat."
Certainly some retreating may be unavoidable but shouldn't we first exhaust our capacity to make our coastlines more resilient? So far we haven't come close to doing that.
Huge advances have been made in the science of sustainable coastal resilience over the past decade or two but there is still much more to be done. Visit stonelivinglab.org to learn more about that.
In the meantime our mid-20th century "let nature take its course" laws make coastal resilience much harder than it should be, particularly in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Before we write off the Cliff Walk, or Cape Cod and the Islands, or much of the City of Boston, or countless other places, let's exhaust our capacity to make our coastlines more resilient, both in laboratories and in the legislature.
The story of the Cliff Walk has different chapters. There’s the long version, which goes back hundreds of millions of years, with the opening and closing of the ancient oceans forming the rocks in the first place. There’s the short version, when humans built walkable infrastructure and reinforcements over what time and rocks had sculpted. And then there’s the story Thursday, when part of it fell into the sea. “The collapse is a sudden thing,” Greenstein said. “But in the grand scheme of things, it’s a very slow process of the world grinding itself into dust.”
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