Geologist praised as ‘man who saved our beaches’ opposed sea walls

He argued against putting condos, hotels and other heavy infrastructure on vulnerable coastal landscapes. Environmentalists applauded; many others didn’t.

Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist whose blunt and often successful arguments against sea walls and other armor on the saltwater beaches of the United States won him reverence from environmentalists and condemnation from developers and politicians, has died at his home in Durham, North Carolina, aged 90.

As a professor at Duke University, and in books, newspaper articles, town hall meetings and television documentaries, Pilkey made the case that it was a mistake to put condominiums, hotels, roads or other heavy infrastructure on unstable, vulnerable landscapes such as beaches – especially barrier islands, the thin ribbons of sand that line most of the US coast from Cape Cod to Mexico.

Orrin Pilkey circa 2012.

Sea walls or other coastal armor may protect buildings on an eroding beach, he said, but almost always at the expense of the beach. When the sea reaches the wall, the beach is drowned.

And he had little good to say about an alternative – “nourishing” eroded beaches with multimillion-dollar infusions of pumped-in sand.

Although many beach towns would be beachless without these projects, to Pilkey they were disruptive, harmful to the environment and prone to washing out, often with stunning speed. He scorned the cost-benefit calculations used to promote them as “useless arithmetic,” as the title of his 2007 book on the subject put it.

Backers of such projects now typically describe them up front as “sacrificial” – expected to fail in a storm, but designed to protect the buildings behind them. But, as Pilkey argued, in the absence of development, beaches simply shift in response to sea level changes and heavy weather.

“Where there are no buildings,” he would say, “there is no erosion problem.”

Bearded, barrel-chested and about 168 centimetres tall, Pilkey was an energetic and effective advocate – a “crusader on the beach,” as The New York Times Magazine called him in 1988.

In large part because of his urging, legislators in North Carolina passed a law designating beaches and estuaries protected areas in 1972, and a law barring sea walls and other beach armor in 1985. Soon, it seemed, a house or two on the Outer Banks would fall into the ocean after every big storm.

Environmentalists hailed the state as a leader in coastal management. In 2008, the North Carolina Coastal Federation gave Pilkey a lifetime achievement award, praising him as “the man who saved our beaches”.

Pilkey also led the lobbying effort to move the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse when it was threatened by erosion. Real estate agents, builders, politicians and many residents of the area argued for armouring the lighthouse with a sea wall, saying that it would be difficult, dangerous or even “undignified” to subject the beloved landmark to the rigours of a move.

But protecting the lighthouse in place would severely damage the beach landscape, Pilkey said, and eventually leave the lighthouse standing, but walled, out at sea, as happened to the Morris Island Lighthouse, near Folly Beach, South Carolina.

If that was the only alternative, Pilkey declared, “Let the lighthouse fall!”

Drone view of Cape Hatteras Light lighthouse, Outer Banks in the town of Buxton, North Carolina.Credit: Getty

That sentiment “was his battle cry,” David Bush, then one of his graduate students and now a geology professor at the University of West Georgia, said in an interview.

Pilkey’s stance drew outrage, but he and his allies prevailed, and the structure was successfully moved 884 metres inland in 1999. Today it is a major attraction.

“Moving it was easy,” Pilkey said in a documentary marking the 20th anniversary of the move. The important idea, he said, was this: “If you can move a multi-tonne lighthouse, you can certainly move a beach cottage.”

That lesson of retreat was one he hoped people would absorb. But for many, the idea of retreat was positively un-American. In recent decades, coastal areas have seen spectacular building booms.

Many jurisdictions have adopted restrictions on coastal armour, only to see enforcement lag. Still, the North Carolina example has encouraged such efforts and, on the whole, has held up, Pilkey said this year in an interview for this obituary. “One of my victories,” he called it.

Orrin Hendren Pilkey Jr was born in Manhattan on September 14, 1934. His father was an engineer whose work took the family to Chicago, where, Pilkey recalled in the interview, he was “getting into trouble” by the time he was 10. His mother was Elizabeth (Street) Pilkey.

But then the family relocated to Richland, Washington, a move he said was life-changing: “I got into hunting and fishing and arrowhead collecting and skiing.”

At Washington State College (now the University of Washington), he majored in geology. He earned a master’s degree in the subject at the University of Montana, and a doctorate at Florida State University in 1962.

He met his future wife, Sharleen Greenae, at Washington State on a blind date. They were married for 60 years, until her death in 2015. In addition to their daughter Linda, Pilkey is survived by four other children, Charles, Diane, Keith and Kerry Pilkey; six grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.

In 1962, he joined the University of Georgia Marine Institute on Sapelo Island. Initially, his focus was the geology and geochemistry of the continental shelf, work for which he won several research awards. In 1965, he moved to Duke, drawn in part by its larger research vessel.

But his focus shifted in 1969, when his parents, who were living in Waveland, Mississippi, endured a direct hit from Hurricane Camille, one of the most powerful hurricanes to make landfall in the United States, and he went to help them dig out.

“In those days, you could drive right into the hurricane damage,” he recalled this year. “That was so impressive, what ocean waves and tides could do. That drove me to the beach, and I stopped going to sea.”

Coastal research had already been energised by another disastrous storm, the Ash Wednesday nor’easter of March 1962. That storm churned off the East Coast, from Cape Cod to Florida, for days, offering scientists a kind of natural test of the effects of development on beaches. Beaches with few buildings, they concluded, recovered much faster.

That lesson – that it is best not to build on beaches – became Pilkey’s classroom and field-trip theme.

It was also the subject of his book The Beaches Are Moving, written with Wallace Kaufman and published in 1979.

Orrin Pilkey’s The Last Beach.

In 1986, Pilkey founded the Duke University Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, which focuses on coastal geology and hazards, as well as the sustainability of the coastal environment. Among other things, he encouraged the establishment of a comprehensive database of beach nourishment projects.

He retired as a professor in 2001 but directed the program until 2006, when it became a joint venture of Duke and Western Carolina University. One of his former graduate students, Robert S. Young, now directs the program.

The nourishment database is frequently consulted by academics, public officials and members of the media.

But Young said that Pilkey would be best remembered as “a communicator” who successfully – and “very bluntly” – opposed coastal management policies that “destroy barrier island ecosystems to protect private property.”

NBC News’ Jane Pauley, beach erosion expert Dr. Orrin Pilkey, Ocean Isle Mayor LaDane Bullington on board the S.S. Norway, 1986Credit: Getty

He added: “That alone is a gigantic legacy.”

Pilkey wrote, co-wrote and edited dozens of books, including scholarly works and a child-friendly guide to beaches, as well as a 24-book series of state and regional guides to living with coastal hazards.

His latest, Escaping Nature, published by Duke University Press in March, deals with how people can adapt to the effects of climate change. At his death, he was at work on another book, about the international impact of sea level rise; Bush said he and his collaborators would finish it in Pilkey’s honour.

Pilkey said in his interview that people should be thinking now about how to deal with sea levels that could eventually rise by six metres. “The Outer Banks are already incredibly dangerous,” he said, “and they’re still being built up.”

This kind of talk has long infuriated Pilkey’s critics, some of whom have criticised him for crossing a line from science into polemics – a charge he did not deny.

It is important to teach the lessons of the beach, he would say, because “if you can see the ocean, the ocean can see you.”

The New York Times

Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.