Welfare with an ocean view.

• Author: Meyer, Theodoric
• Position: The Last Beach - Book review

The Last Beach

by Orrin H. Pilkey and J. Andrew G. Cooper

Duke University Press Books, 256 pp.

The federal government spends billions replenishing beaches for the affluent. The bill will soon skyrocket thanks to climate change.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the federal government pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to pump more sand onto beaches in New Jersey and New York devastated by the storm. It was not exactly a new idea, write Orrin H. Pilkey and J. Andrew G. Cooper in their new book, The Last Beach. The federal government has been pouring money into keeping the nation's beaches stocked with sand since the 1960s, and the tab has grown substantial. Since 1970, Pilkey and Cooper point out, the U.S. has pumped more than 370 million cubic yards of sand onto beaches around the country, at a cost of more than $3.7 billion.

Such efforts have proved popular with residents of beachfront communities. But Pilkey, who is a professor emeritus of geology at Duke University, and Cooper, a professor of coastal studies at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, argue that the effort is increasingly futile at a time of rising sea levels, when each fresh infusion of sand lasts only a few years and the cost of replenishing beaches has risen sharply.

Consider, for instance, how often some American beaches have had to be replenished. Wrightsville Beach, near Wilmington, North Carolina, Pilkey and Cooper point out, has had more sand added to it nineteen times since 1965. Carolina Beach has been restocked twenty-eight times. Hurricane Sandy made even more federal money available for replenishing beaches. To take one example I discovered in my reporting for ProPublica: contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers added more than 1.8 million cubic yards of sand to the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 2013, with the American taxpayer footing most of the $18 million bill. It wasn't the first time the town had benefited from federal largess. In the past twenty years, on nine separate occasions, Washington has moved nearly twelve million cubic yards of sand to Ocean City beaches, according to data compiled by Western Carolina University's Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, to the tune of $40 million.

The Last Beach is a broad survey of the threats facing the world's beaches as sea levels inch up and after decades of unrestrained building on coasts from Miami Beach to Malaga. "Beaches in nature are almost indestructible," Pilkey and...