Last night, in the Town of South Kingstown, Rhode Island, the State’s coastal management agency met to hear the Town’s plea to reclassify Matunuck Beach –a natural headland bluff and coastal beach – as a manmade beach. This reclassification, the Town argued, would allow the business and home owners in the village of Matunuck to defend themselves against the rising sea and the erosion that is eating away feet of beach weekly by allowing them to build a sea wall along the beach. With less than three feet between the ocean and the state road, the Town argued that without the reclassification, the peril to its citizens and to the road, which has been there since the late 1800s, was imminent.

Many supported the reclassification and some opposed it. Legal arguments, policy arguments, and economic arguments were all advanced over the course of four hours. But, shortly before 10 p.m., the second to last public witness, advanced an argument that brought a hush to the room of hundreds.

A young woman from Matunuck approached the podium from the back of the auditorium in her jeans and flip-flops. When she began to speak she was visibly nervous and apologetic for not being as comfortable as others who preceded her. Her hands were shaky, her voice unsteady, but her point was resoundingly clear. She had lived in Matunuck for twenty-five years. She loved the village and the people in it. She had grown up playing on the south coast’s barrier beaches. I waited for her to express her support for the reclassification of the beach and the construction of a sea wall to save the town, but she expressed something else.

She thought the Town’s approach and the whole conversation we were having reflected an incredible short-sightedness and that the solutions proposed were short-spanned. She found it hard to believe that people were actually talking about trying to save a house or a road or a business on the grounds that it had been in Matunuck for 50 or 100 years. “The beach and these bluffs and this ecosystem have been here for millions of years,” she said. She expressed her genuine concern that if we allowed for the construction of a wall on this beach that we would destroy the entire barrier beach system and the hope that these beaches would be here for our children.

Here this woman stood, courageously arguing against her neighbors, and perhaps even her own self-interest to save the beach for the future. I remember thinking to myself, “so this is what climate change and sea level rise looks like when we add people to the equation.” It is people, not policies, that will have to make the hard choices between the long-term interests of a community and their own private interests. Neighbors from close-knit communities will disagree on both solutions and outcomes. Governments will have to balance long-term economic sustainability with immediate financial crises.

If we wait to respond to the inevitable, these scenes will begin to play out more often throughout our New England communities. But, if we’ve grown tired of waiting for the choices to be thrust upon us, there is something we can do about it.

We can begin to identify the strategic solutions that allow for bearable economic costs, minimal and organized relocation, and sustainable resource protection measures. We can protect our own interests and the longer-term interests of a broader community.

New England Deserves A Healthy Ocean

A healthy ocean provides New England with so much—a place to relax with our families, a good living for those in the fishing and tourism industries, and habitat for an amazing array of sea life.  With the right planning, they could also provide us with clean renewable energy from offshore wind and solar power, and create thousands of new jobs for New Englanders–the health of our coastal waters and the habitat they provide for ocean wildlife sustainably brings $16.5 billion to our region’s tourism and fishing economy every year.

In order to sustain healthy coasts and oceans, and the economies of coastal communities that depend on them, we need your help to encourage our New England Governors to work together with federal, tribal and state agencies to implement a National Ocean Policy.

The National Ocean Policy (NOP) builds on the success of ocean management plans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island by bringing together coastal business owners, fishermen, scientists, the shipping industry, conservationists and other ocean users and the many government agencies charged with managing our ocean resources to create a sustainable plan for our ocean’s future. The NOP calls for immediate steps to protect critical marine habitats, ensure a sustainable future for our fishing industry and coastal communities, reduce coastal pollution and promote the responsible development of offshore renewable energy.

If we are going to preserve our beaches and coastline, protect marine life and promote the growth of our sustainable ocean economy, we need a strong National Ocean Policy. That is why it is so important that you write your Governor today to urge them to support this policy, and healthy oceans for all.

The new storage tunnel will result in significantly cleaner water for beachgoers at Carson Beach in South Boston. Photo credit: bostonharborwalk.com

It’s been a busy day for South Boston on several fronts – but the dawning of a new era for a transformed Boston Harbor and the environmentalists, legislators and other officials who have been fighting for a clean harbor for nearly three decades. Today marks the opening of a massive sewage holding tank – called a CSO (combined sewer overflow) storage tunnel -  under South Boston that will store gallons of stormwater that would normally overwhelm the city’s sewer system and cause untreated sewage to be released into Boston Harbor. The change will make the beach “one of the cleanest in America” and bring the rate of beach closures down from eight per summer to one roughly every five years, according to this front page article in today’s Boston Globe.

It’s the gratifying ending to a story in which CLF has played a lead role since the beginning. Twenty-eight years ago, CLF filed one of the key lawsuits ordering that the harbor be cleaned up. Today, CLF’s Peter Shelley is one of the only original lawyers involved in the massive and long-running court case who has seen it through to fruition.  Key participants in this morning’s ribbon cutting ceremony for the new storage tunnel came on to the scene decades after the filing, in 1983, of the still-pending case that still bears the label Conservation Law Foundation vs. Metropolitan District Commission (the now-disbanded state agency that used to oversee the water and sewerage systems of Greater Boston).

The ceremony today reflected back on the long struggle to clean the harbor but, appropriately, also looked to the future.  Frederick Laskey, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), the state authority created to execute on the massive harbor cleanup, spoke eloquently about the collaboration between governments, business the advocacy community and the neighborhoods that was needed to execute on a vision of a cleaner harbor and beaches. Laskey especially noted the courage of the representatives of the many municipalities in the Greater Boston region in accepting the regional nature of the project and the need to spread the cost of creating swimmable beaches and a clean harbor across the whole metropolitan area.

State Senator Jack Hart, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Richard Sullivan (who also serves as Chairman of the MWRA Board) and  Department of Conservation and Recreation Commissioner Edward Lambert echoed Laskey’s remarks, emphasizing the importance of community collaboration and the value of clean beaches.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns, who today presides over CLF v. MDC and the continuing harbor cleanup, discussed the hard work needed to get to this day and offered a tribute to the vision of Judge David Mazzone, who had previously handled the case. In 2004, during his final illness in 2004, Mazzone handed the case over to Judge Stearns, conveying his belief that a CSO tunnel was needed and “could be completed by May 2011” for the cost of less than $250 million (in this morning’s speech, Stearns noted that the project came in right on that schedule and in fact under the initial cost estimate).

EPA Regional Administrator Curt Spalding spoke about the difficulty of executing on a project of this magnitude and the importance of core environmental laws like the Clean Water Act, which he proudly noted was championed by another Rhode Islander, Senator John Chafee, that provided clear direction regarding our national policy and the need to create clean and swimmable waters.

Thanks to the tenacity of CLF and others, today’s parents don’t have to worry that a day at the beach could make their children sick, and a new generation of kids won’t have beach closings put a damper on their summer days. But our work is nowhere near complete.  Yes, we need to continue to ensure that the right infrastructure, like this CSO structure in South Boston, is in place to treat our stormwater appropriately. But even more importantly we need to build and manage our buildings, our land and our roads in a way that recaptures as much rain water as possible.  We need to treat rain and snow as the precious resources that they are, moving away from a view that these gifts from above are a waste product that needs to be treated and shunted off into the sea. With those notions in mind, Massachusetts will continue to set an example for the region and the nation of the right way to restore a precious community resource and iconic piece of New England’s history.