In a place where conservation is like “washing your hair,” New Zealand’s beach care groups change what it means to protect the modern coastal ecosystem.
Extreme storm erosion is frightening. In just a few hours, beaches are radically reshaped as dunes are cleaved to a fraction of their previous size. Truckloads of sand vanish into the ocean, cutting once-gentle slopes into sharp cliffs.
Like many islands across the world, Aoeteroa in northern New Zealand faces many threats to its shoreline. Rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and aggressive coastal development have long plagued beachgoers. About a quarter of residential areas on the coast experience periodic or chronic erosion, where homes are often built dangerously close to the sea. Now, panicked property owners urge conservationists to ‘stop the erosion.’
The desire is understandable. But the idea that erosion can be forcefully ‘stopped’ represents a fundamental misunderstanding of beach ecology — and it’s a big reason artificial coastal barriers remain in use despite their destructive reputation.
Concrete walls erected between land and sea are notorious for harming the coastal communities they claim to protect. These seawalls tend to shield only private real estate, and often at a great financial and ecological cost. As a result, this “hard infrastructure” erodes adjacent beaches, obstructs public waterfront access, and threatens organisms that depend on tidal habitats.
The island of Aotearoa offers a different model. Coastal restoration groups there have implemented “soft” coastal protection measures that prioritize environmental, aesthetic, and climate justice concerns.
Research from a 2019 study suggests the solution lies in sand dune restoration, with a strange twist. The research centers on “practices of care.” Rather than offering a quick fix, this conservation method aims to cultivate long-lasting relationships between human and nonhuman participants in the beach system. In Aotearoa, beach care groups work closely with native plants to strengthen sand dunes against extreme weather events. These groups, made up of long-term volunteers, have been restoring dunes on the island for years.
The research is rooted in an oft overlooked fact: humans exist within wider multispecies worlds. The beach system consists of dunes, seaweed, beachgoers, and ocean plastic: actors that become entangled in one another, with no one element extricable from the others. This kind of equalizing lens, sometimes called “more-than-humanism,” has led conservationists to reconsider what it means to protect the modern coastal ecosystem. To fight climate catastrophes, they claim, man-made solutions won’t get us very far.
For one, most of the ecological beach system is invisible to humans. The sandy part of the beach is only a small fraction of the total beach system which lies mostly underwater. Cycles of dune erosion and restoration take place across larger timescales than people tend to consider. And while extreme erosion can alter the landscape in a short timeframe, dune recovery takes time.
Aboveground, native plants emerge as critical players in this recovery. Fighting erosion starts by acknowledging that it’s a natural process. While dune plants cannot totally prevent erosion, they can shorten recovery time. Without plant cover, the time between two erosion events is not long enough for the dune to naturally return to its previous shape.
That’s where Spinifex comes in. It’s one of several coastal grasses that emerge as first lines of defense for coastal residents. The runners of these plants trap sediment, which gets redistributed by wind and waves to support and speed dune recovery. By shifting residents’ perspective of their ‘pristine beach’ to that of a complex system—one that includes plants, waves, wind, and human hands—Coast Care volunteers can better adapt to the needs of beaches.
One volunteer likened it to a self-care task. “Some people say that we’re just wasting our time, that the sea will take it, that the public will trample on it or that the plants will die because of climate change.” To her, that’s like saying, “[stop] washing your hair, it’s going to get dirty again.” For many people, dune restoration is a continuous labor of love.
Dune recovery can only be facilitated with appropriate human knowledge practices, along with teams of caring, dedicated people. The ongoing maintenance of Coast Care workers is essential to just, sustainable, and long-term solutions. Human partnerships with the land provide the ultimate protection against erosion: in a way that works with nature, and not against it.