ACCOMMODATING UNCERTAINTY

Nomadism and the Coastal Commons

On September 21, 1938, one of the most destructive, powerful, and deadly hurricanes to ever strike southern New England made landfall.1 In addition to causing widespread devastation to cities like Providence and Newport, the storm destroyed the village of East Beach in Westport, Massachusetts. The East Beach community was constructed on a barrier beach that extended between the calm tidal salt marshes of the Westport River and the waves of Buzzards Bay. The small village included a store, a church, a post office, 120 houses, a dancing hall, and a bowling alley.2 Every building in the village was destroyed during the hurricane.

Following the 1938 hurricane, East Beach was subsequently hit by hurricanes in 1944 and 1954, at which point the town of the town of Westport made the decision not to allow homeowners to reconstruct permanent structures and houses within the area. It was before the 1988 Stafford Act, which commits the federal government to pay 75 percent of the cost of rebuilding roads, bridges, and other damaged infrastructure after a natural disaster.3 It was also before the National Flood Insurance Program was created in 1968, offering premiums below market rates for homeowners in flood prone areas.4 Homeowners impacted by the hurricane may not have had the resources or insurance to rebuild and the federal juggernaut that subsidizes rebuilding in flood prone areas was not yet in place to bail them out.

The Rules of Resettling

Since then, Westport has maintained the deed restrictions that prevent permanent structures from being constructed on the barrier beach. In 2022, on a bitter cold January day, I walked down the road that was once the spine of the East Beach village. The cold wind blew off the bay and picked up anything that wasn’t frozen to the vacant gravel lots that line each side of the road. It was a peculiar scene: decks without buildings, lonely auxiliary sheds, fences interspersed demarcating property lines and providing privacy to vacant spaces, and metal tent structures with no shade awnings casting long shadows on the gravel.

During the winter, East Beach Road is quiet, except for the sound of the waves breaking and the occasional sandpiper or seagull that passes overhead. Missing are the eighty or so trailers that reside here in the summer, most waiting at a farm a mile away where they get stored in the off-season. Come May, the road slowly gets reinhabited as the trailers return to their lots to match up to their decks, electric boxes, and fences. Residents start walking the street greeting neighbors and friends as the community comes back to life.

What Can We Learn from East Beach?

Climate models and scientific reports increasingly show that tens of millions of people in the United States and around the world will be flooded by sea level rise, many places annually.5 How to prepare and plan for storms, and rebuild after, are increasingly important challenges. East Beach presents a case study to explore questions about climate uncertainty, accommodation, retreat, and resilience. While not to be misinterpreted as a solution, it still provides a valuable lesson for how to accommodate and adapt to the migrating landscapes of the Anthropocene through nomadic resilience and the coastal commons.

Nomadic Resilience:

Inhabiting Migrating Landscapes

Climate change threatens many of our permanent settlements: inundated coastal cities, desiccated Sun Belt communities, forest towns engulfed in wildfires. Facing increasing natural disasters, communities often have to make the hard decision to resist, accomodate or retreat. Within coastal environments, resistance includes shoreline armoring through the construction of dikes, seawalls, bulkheads, and elevating land surfaces.6 Accommodation can mean developing coping strategies that enable continued human inhabitation in spite of increased hazards.7 Retreat includes moving people and structures away from the coastal edge, allowing wetlands and beaches to migrate as seas move inland, and preventing new construction in vulnerable areas.8 Depending on the specific coastal dynamics, in some places it is often only a matter of time until retreat is the only remaining option.

Underlying these decisions is an important ethical question: which communities will be protected, and where will people be given the option, or forced, to retreat? Existing data

Various forms of nomadism, pastoralism, and transhumance have been strategies used by Indigenous communities throughout history to accommodate and adapt to extreme climates and access to resources.11 Whether migrating in the desert to find water, across mountainous landscapes to find good pasture for animals, or between winter and summer territories in search of food sources, communities around the world continue to live nomadically. However, colonization, capitalism, and the commodification and privatization of land has led to the enclosure of the commons globally, making this form of nomadism increasingly difficult.12

The East Beach community represents a form of contemporary nomadism that can increase resilience within the context of climate uncertainty. This model can allow for individuals to remain connected to a place and their community, but move out of harm’s way during risky seasons. While this model is predicated on the assumption that people shows that it is often class, race, and political power that answer this question.9 These are very challenging emotional and financial decisions for individuals and communities to make. There are some communities where people want their properties to be bought out but the resources don't exist to do so. There are other places where people are resistant to letting go of their homes and communities. The concept of home and attachment to place is deep in many people's individual psychology, sense of identity and belonging.10 While there are the financial losses associated with retreat, there are also the emotional losses of leaving a cherished home, landscape, and community behind. can afford a second home, there may be ways to adjust the model to adapt to other contexts. For example, could this form of seasonal habitation allow for a transition for communities that are resistant to retreat? Could the property be used by previous community members at no cost but rented to others to help subsidize the buyout program or to help fund the maintenance of the commons? Architecturally, it presents a unique opportunity to explore modular housing that is semi-nomadic but still rooted in a specific local vernacular architecture that reinforces the regional sense of place while providing new ways to be in community.

Claiming the Coastal Commons as a Space of Resilience Rivers, coastlines, and oceans are among the last remaining resources still held in common by the people. The commons can be defined as something shared and protected by a community, to be kept open and protected for future generations. Within coastal areas, the Public Trust Doctrine guarantees right of access to tidal waters and shores.13 Along the coastline in Massachusetts, where East Beach is located, the land below the low water line is considered a commons and the public has access to the wet beach for hunting, fishing, and navigation.14 habitat and recreation during the off-season. This model also provides clues for how we may inhabit other landscapes subject to the uncertainty of climate change—the seasonal retreat from landscapes in California that are fire prone in the summer months, for example, or the creation of the resilience hydrocommons along rivers that are prone to flood.

As coastal residents face erosion, they often try to resist it by hardening the coastal edges. This creates a defined edge between the land and water, turning what was a gradient—from wet to dry and land and water—into a hard line. This depletes the rich intertidal zone where the majority of ocean life exists. It also leads to the loss of public access to the coastal commons by removing the intertidal beach zone.

If there is anything we have learned during the past few years of C OVID -19, increased climate disasters, and political upheaval, it is

Exactly where the boundary exists that demarcates our watery commons from the privatized land should be re-examined, as that line continues to fluctuate with the uncertainty of climate change. As sea levels rise, tide lines migrate landwards, properties erode beyond repair, and the increasing number of weather disasters make rebuilding in flood prone areas economically and practically impossible. This shifting boundary presents an opportunity to reimagine and reclaim the coastal commons as a political, social, and ecological strategy for building coastal resilience. Beyond just asserting existing laws—infringed upon every time a property owner hardens their coastline— we can go one step further and expand the commons along our coastlines to create a zone of resilience, a space where we make room for the floods. A space that allows for the species that have been squeezed between the rising waters and the fixed permanence of human settlement to be given space. A space that reasserts public access to our water commons and fights back against the enclosure of the coastal commons. And possibly, a space that can be designed to allow for seasonal use by the communities that once lived there—a space of memory, a space to return to, a space to gather.

The Future Is Unknown, and That Is Okay

The East Beach case study suggests the possibility to accommodate a shifting coast line while still allowing for a certain level of human settlement. It is a model of adaptation and accommodation that accepts and embraces community attachment to place and the desire to live in coastal environments.

It suggests a temporal way of thinking about settlement that responds to the reality and uncertainty of the Anthropocene. It may help lead to an easing into the need for retreat and the associated emotional and psychological challenges of these decisions. It allows us to think seasonally about how landscapes can be used and inhabited differently in the summer and winter, and how they can be designed to support human use during part of the year and

Notes how to inhabit a space of great uncertainty. It can be debilitating to make decisions within so many unknowns but it can also spark immense creativity, as we are forced to reimagine life as we know it. In the coming decades, many more of the things we take for granted will be questioned. It will require flexibility and the ability to be opportunistic in the face of change to assert what is best for humans and the more-than-human species that depend on this planet. Within this space of uncertainty, rather than reinforcing our failing systems, there is an opportunity to think creatively to move past the binaries such as resist | retreat, public | private, nature | human, land | water. This model suggests an opportunity to shift our mindsets from one of rigidity to one of flexibility. It could allow us to find peace with climate change, uncertainty, and the shifting landscapes to release our desire to control—with the understanding and acceptance that nothing is permanent, but we can still call it home. ○

1. National Weather Service Boston, “The Great New England Hurricane of 1938,” weather.gov/box/1938hurricane.

2. Westport Historical Society, “East Beach Before the 1938 Hurricane,” 2013, wpthistory.org/east-beach-beforethe-1938-hurricane.

3. Theodoric Meyer, “Four Ways the Government Subsidizes Risky Coastal Rebuilding,” ProPublica, June 19, 2013.

4. Meyer.

5. Mathew E. Hauer, Jason M. Evans, and Deepak R. Mishra, “Millions Projected to Be at Risk from Sea Level Rise in the Continental United States,” Nature Climate Change 6 (July 2016): 691–95.

6. James G. Titus, Rolling Easements (Washington, D.C.: Climate Ready Estuaries Program, US EPA, 2011).

7. Titus.

8. Titus.

9. Karen M’Closkey and Keith VanDerSys, “For Whom Do We Account in Climate Adaptation,” in Carolyn Kousky, Billy Fleming, and Alan M. Berger, eds., A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2021).

10. Vanessa A. Masterson, Richard C. Stedman, Johan Enqvist, Maria Tengö, Matteo Giusti, Darin Wahl, and Uno Svedin, “The Contribution of Sense of Place to Social-Ecological Systems Research: a Review and Research Agenda,” Ecology & Society 22, no. 1 (2017).

11. Roger Blench, “You Can’t Go Home Again: Pastoralism in the New Millennium,” (London, UK: Overseas Development Institute, 2001).

12. Blench.

13. The public trust doctrine can be traced to Roman Law and is the basis for public trust laws and doctrines in the United States. It is the legal principle that asserts that the public has the right to certain natural and cultural resources and that it is the government's responsibility to maintain these resources for the public’s use. See coastalreview. org/2016/09/public-trust-doctrineowns-beach/14

14. In some surrounding states such as Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and New York, this public ownership (not just access) extends to the wet beach below the high water line. In some states such as Washington, Louisiana, and Hawaii coastal commons include wet and dry beaches. See Titus.