Changing Coastline

About Ethnography

Last winter, when I was conceiving my Senior Project, I had just come back from Southern India where I had spent the Fall semester traveling for several months observing the Indian response to coastal erosion, which was often to build more transient structures that could be disassembled and reconstructed in a more stable location if necessary. In contrast to that, I witnessed that winter a neighbor’s home on the Cape be picked up and moved back after losing 40 feet of beach practically overnight as a bad winter storm had carved away a large chunk of the dune that had been their front driveway. In an elaborate and exorbitantly expensive process, their 83 ton home was lifted with a large crane and placed on a new foundation several yards away from the cliff face, where they will hopefully be able to remain for several more decades. I saw in these contrasting models a difference in how each community developed along the ocean because of their responses to erosion. This lead me to question how the approach on the Cape has occurred as a result of the unique landscape and ecosystem that the Cape Cod National Seashore, which was established in 1961, aims to protect.

Through my ethnographic fieldwork I have been documenting in particular the impact that erosion has for residents, focusing on the relocation of homes and other structures. Coastal erosion is an inevitability for residents who live directly on the coastline, and it can be difficult and costly to come to terms with. The process of relocating houses has been part of the Cape’s architectural tradition since European settlement and is conducted in a way that is particular to the culture of the Cape. In light of this, I have been investigating appropriate technologies that can be implemented to reduce the impact of erosion for residents, utilizing soft solutions, which refer to a toolkit of protection practices that work with the preexisting elements of a shoreline rather than a hard engineered solution, which depends upon artificial structures to manipulate coastal interactions.

This summer I received an internship to work for the Cape Cod National Seashore as a cartographic technician at Highlands Center in Truro. Through this position I was able to gain an emic perspective into the federal entity that is responsible for the decision making that occurs surrounding coastal management on the Cape. Working to create maps every day using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) allowed me to investigate a topic of growing interest to me: the dynamic nature of the ocean and its interaction with the coastline and the people who live there.

The scientific dynamics of coastal change remained abstract to me however until I discovered surfing. I discovered a synergy between oceanic science and surfing, in which one could not be fully understood without the other as the concepts that I was learning both in the field and in the classroom became tangibly understood from the perspective of sitting on a surf board. Additionally it was through surfers and the local surfing community that this project began to take form.