CASE STUDY: EAST BAY Burdened with major infrastructure vulnerabilities but blessed by the shoreline’s shallow offshore terraces, LEAP imagines a 2,000-acre expansion of open space and habitat in the region’s underutilized embayments, a massive enhancement in green space grafted to the scaffold of the artificial urbanized edge.
As the bay rises, our surviving marshes will drown without approaches intended to help them keep pace with rising waters. LEAP is not a coincidental title for this endeavor: one would logically assume the way to gauge progress and to test and identify adaptation and resilience measures in the
bay—in physical structures and landscape buffering, in marsh plain nourishment and sustainability strategies, and in ecosystem expansion and enhancement—would entail deploying multiple low-impact proofs of concept projects. That logical expectation belies the stagnancy of our regional response to a slow-moving catastrophe. The ironies run deep in the sluggish waters of regulation, protection and traditional restoration circles of the bay. One of the worst is surely the ethical ramification of our generation’s inaction. Political reluctance to challenge outdated and insufficient measures, many aimed at and born of progressive environmental ideals, will doom future generations and the ecologic systems caged by current intransigence. This is an absurdly antithetical fate for a place whose concern for social and environmental justice is undeniable.
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to the built environment that hugs the shore so tightly. Without proactive environmental engineering measures to restore and build the live edge, and the political will to advance these approaches, our marshes will drown and our mudflats will become open water—the most dangerous condition to cope with for any shoreline society. By embracing novel, naturally-informed shore forms, extant marsh plains can be strengthened and expanded, and new marsh plains can be constructed in the shallow terraces of the bay.
GU : ISSUE 05