By Erik Hoffner for Mongabay.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for Maine News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

January brought a pair of rough storms to the northeastern U.S. They hit when the tides were high and pushed higher than normal by rising sea levels, setting numerous high-water records and prompting Maine Governor Janet Mills to request a federal disaster declaration. These events, just three days apart, built on damage suffered during another storm during the December 2023 holidays and another during the previous December.

"Extensive" is the word that Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist for the Maine Geological Survey, chose to describe the most recent damage during an interview with Mongabay. He pointed to an estimate that 60% of Maine's working waterfronts were severely damaged. "We saw numerous seawall failures and erosion of anywhere between 15 to even up to 30 feet [4.5-9 meters] of coastal sand dunes, and massive bluff failures also," Slovinsky said.

The common response to busted docks, condemned houses, shrinking shorelines, disappearing dunes and faltering bluffs has been to bolster the shore with 'hard' infrastructure like concrete jetties and breakwaters of imported boulders. But those interventions are expensive, carbon-intensive, and ultimately ineffective due to continual sea level rise.

Increasingly, agencies like Slovinsky's have been experimenting with a more natural and possibly more effective approach called living shorelines. The U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) defines these as "projects that connect the land and water to stabilize shorelines, reduce erosion, and provide valuable habitat that enhances coastal resilience."

Such projects often take the shape of phalanxes of buried Christmas trees that shore up dunes, mesh bags of shells placed to protect mudflats from erosion, and salt-loving grasses and shrubs planted to stabilize nearshore areas.

Development of living shorelines is widely credited to the late Edgar William Garbisch Jr., a chemistry professor turned wetland restorationist who piloted the approach's early methods and philosophy during the early 1970s in Chesapeake Bay. The aim is to protect coastal ecosystems like marshes and beaches with natural assets that create habitat while anchoring the shore. This method has gained increasing traction along much of the U.S. East Coast, from Georgia on north, as communities have begun to confront the impacts of human-caused climate change, including worsening storms and sea level rise, which is set to increase a further 0.6-1.2 m (2-4 feet) by 2100.

While Maine's official experiments with such interventions at places like Popham and Pemaquid beaches have seen varying levels of success among their dunes and marshes, one Belfast area entrepreneur is innovating new ways of leveraging the living shorelines concept to protect another ubiquitous coastal feature: sandy bluffs.

On a recent morning, contractor Paul Bernacki showed a Mongabay reporter around his latest project site on the Blue Hill Peninsula in Midcoast Maine, where a homeowner had hired him to preserve an eroding bluff along 2,000 ft (610 m) of shoreline. His vision for shoring it up differed greatly from others the property's owner initially approached: "The engineers and their contractors wanted to kill all the trees on the shore, move the bank back 10 feet [3 m] at the top, and then pile 200 truckloads of rocks all the way around," he said.

"Their solution to stabilization is to kill nature. Is that technically feasible for the whole coast of Maine?" Bernacki asked.

He said he doesn't think so, and his team has been pairing a fresh take on the living shorelines best management practices with power tools to shore up this crumbling cliff and its line of oak trees and house in danger of tipping into the salt pond below.

The home is perched on one of Maine's many so-called "erodible bluffs." Despite the rocky shore postcard pictures, 40% of the state's coast is classified as this mix of sand, rock and vegetation that's vulnerable to wave action and scouring by wind-driven blocks of ice. Bernacki's team shores up land like this not with imported rocks, but with natural and often local materials.

Among these are logs (sometimes including drift logs) and salt-tolerant plants often germinated from regionally wildcrafted seed stocks, plus imported materials like coconut fiber-based coir landscape fabric shaped into long tubes and filled with a matrix of soil and organics. These tubes, affectionately called "Tootsie Rolls," are positioned behind rows of logs pinned down with rebar to form tiers and planted with salt-loving grasses like northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) or broomsedge (Andropogon virginicus).

Seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens), swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) and white yarrow (Achillea millefolium) are also planted, and on the bluff above these, perennial shrubs like winter berry (Ilex verticillata), Virginia rose (Rosa virginiana) and beach plum (Prunus maritima). Finally, rocks are placed among the logs to break up waves and scouring ice, until the plants' roots get established.

This increasingly popular approach - which looks attractive while creating habitat for birds, bugs and nearshore creatures - often costs less than the imported rock or manufactured cement of seawalls and breakwaters, while being as effective or better. NOAA estimates that living shorelines can cost less than hard shorelines, both in terms of installation and maintenance, with costs ranging from less than $1,000 up to $5,000 per linear foot ($3,300-$16,400/m) of shoreline. Installing hard options, by contrast, typically ranges from $2,000 and up per linear foot ($6,600/m), according to The Maine Monitor. Maintenance of living shorelines costs about $100 per foot ($330/meter) annually, according to NOAA, while repairing hard shorelines costs from $100 to $250 per linear foot ($330-$820/m).

While some say it's a winner on cost, that's also likely in terms of carbon if one considers a life-cycle analysis of living shorelines, which is where Bernacki stresses the big difference lies. "The carbon footprint of our work is minimal for the dollar," he says.

Following the recent storm trio, he reported that his team's current project withstood the elements well, with no damage to the newly established structures or the bluff, which was also helped by the site being more protected than if it were right on the bay. Still, some of the less salt-tolerant plants higher up on the bluff were inundated by the tide, and may need replacing if they don't green up in the spring.

Perhaps because Maine has been slower than other states to enact broad regulations for the various situations that living shorelines could apply to, like erodible bluffs, such private- and contractor-led efforts are getting greater attention from landowners, said coastal geologist Slovinsky. "I've had more people than ever in the last couple of years call and say, 'Hey, my bluff is eroding, but I don't want to build a seawall, what do I do?' So, I point them to our coastal property owner guide that I wrote a couple years ago," he said.

In nearby New Hampshire, which has worked living shorelines into state regulations already, there's a similar level of interest and several projects underway at sites like Cutts Cove in Portsmouth, which also weathered the recent storms well. And, like Bernacki's team, they've made an effort to incorporate naturally available and sometimes free resources found onsite in their construction, like local plants, tree stumps and drift logs.

"The thinking is that over time, as the tree stumps and drift logs decompose, the near vertical riprap sill will slowly shift into a more gradual and natural slope," said Grant McKown, a coastal habitat research associate for the Jackson Estuarine Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, via email. "Additionally, the use of drift logs and trees in the sill construction enhances the physical heterogeneity of the sill, providing additional refuge for nekton (mobile aquatic animals) during high tide and additional surface area for macroalgae (like Fucus and Ascophyllum) to colonize," he wrote.

Is it enough to successfully hold back the rising tides, though?

Back in Maine, results vary. One Freeport-area homeowner reported in January that their $40,000 living shoreline had been washed away. But while Bernacki's current project fared fine, he was philosophical on the question: "Success to me is restoring this habitat - instead of destroying more habitat to protect property," he said. "That, you really can't justify."

So, everything is on the table after the recent spate of storms, including the old standby, Slovinsky said: "One of the things I'm pessimistic about is the response that we're seeing thus far from these storms: more rock," in the form of rapidly rebuilt seawalls and breakwaters.

It's probably going to take advocacy and many more contractors to push his state to roll out a regulatory regime for naturally protecting its iconic shore, both for official and private projects. But momentum is building among Maine's landowners, at least, who are increasingly willing to spend more for waterfront property despite sea level rise: "I'm getting a new call once a week," Bernacki said.

So, like the wetland plants sown by his crew, the number of landowners interested to employ natural solutions, rather than piling up yet more rocks against an ever-rising tide, is also growing.


Erik Hoffner wrote this article for Mongabay.


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Environmental groups in Arizona say they've faced challenges in advancing environmental protections, and that could now become even harder under a second Trump presidency.

Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon Chapter, said during his first presidency, Donald Trump rolled back a number of environmental rules, withdrew from the Paris Agreement and deepened reliance on fossil fuels. She expects Trump to disrupt clean-energy and climate-action progress made under the Biden administration.

"There is a big concern that President-elect Trump will try to reverse full throttle. I don't think he will be able to do that because there will be, at least on some things, enough bipartisan support that he won't be able to just get rid of everything," Bahr explained.

Bahr added while the Inflation Reduction Act will likely be a target for the incoming administration, it is important to remember much of the funds in the legislation have already been allocated to help communities make clean-energy investments.

Bahr said Arizona is already experiencing hotter and longer summers and that could intensify if not addressed, translating to higher energy bills and more deaths each year from the extreme heat.

"The cost of not doing something is much greater than the cost of doing something. Not to mention that clean energy, solar and wind, they're cheaper than fossil fuels. So economically, it just makes sense to do that," she continued.

The transition to clean energy will save the average family up to $7,200 per year in energy costs and another $1,500 per year in health-care costs, according to the Sierra Club.

Bahr says investing in clean energy and climate action goes beyond securing a prosperous future for humans, but encompasses habitat conservation and preservation for species of all kinds.

"One election does not mean that we are not on the right track with what we are asking for. Don't take it as a repudiation of everything that you believe in," she concluded.

As Minnesotans click the "purchase" button when shopping online for the holidays, they're urged to consider two things: toys from overseas suppliers that don't meet safety standards and how e-commerce affects the environment. In its annual toy safety report, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group says loopholes in shipping enforcement allow too many unsafe and illegal products, including those designed for kids, to flood the market.

Teresa Murray, PIRG's consumer watchdog director, said items shipped in bulk that fall below a certain value threshold often avoid scrutiny from U.S. customs officials, and that means for now, shoppers have to be extra vigilant.

"We've also gotten used to how easy it is to shop online, but when people are shopping online, they just need to be super, super careful. Take a few minutes and figure out where that toy is coming from," she said.

Murray added that there are concerns about some toys containing lead or other toxins or having small parts that easily break off, and added that the good news is, there's a bipartisan tone in Washington, D.C., to address the issue. Meanwhile, sustainability experts warn the massive growth in e-commerce leads to more distribution centers in rural areas, increasing trucking distances and exacerbating carbon emissions.

Another concerning trend in the report is the persistent illegal online sales of recalled toys. Murray said brick-and-mortar retailers are more committed to keeping those items out of circulation. Beyond protecting your family and the environment, she suggests replacing digital purchases with in-person shopping might help the economy, because you're fighting back against counterfeit products.

"Frankly, it hurts U.S. companies and U.S. workers when you have these brands that have built a reputation and somebody - you know, it could be domestic, it could be international - and they're making a product that looks just like yours," she explained.

As for e-commerce waste, Minnesota recently adopted a law that incentivizes producers to scale down their use of packaging that often ends up in landfills. A handful of other states have taken similar steps. And online shopping giants like Amazon have highlighted efforts to phase out packaging elements deemed unfriendly to the environment.


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A nonprofit group that tracks oil and gas development has created an interactive map to show how close CO2 pipelines in Great Plains states come to environmentally and ecologically sensitive areas.

The map includes Indigenous land that hasn't been included in similar previous projects.

Ted Auch, Midwest program director for the FracTracker Alliance, said it focuses on Indigenous areas but goes further, showing in detail how close proposed CO2 pipelines would come to soybean and ethanol facilities, for example, but also to private land.

He said the interactive map is an improvement over existing ones.

"Which is to say that you could look at it as a static image, but you can't interact with or manipulate the data in terms of, like, scrolling in, scrolling out, finding addresses - you know, that kind of thing," said Auch. "It's available as a PDF or a JPG. So, what we've done is, we've taken that stuff and we've digitized it and we've included it on this map, so that people can actually - spatially and in real time - interact with the data itself."

The Great Plains Action Society says CO2 pipelines pose risks that disproportionately affect Indigenous communities and people of color.

Auch said FracTracker is working on another version that takes a deeper look at the proximity of pipelines to the Winnebago reservation south of Sioux City.

Energy companies say the pipelines are a safe and effective way to capture carbon from industrial processes, and store it underground, reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Auch said the interactive map will give farmers and other landowners near the proposed pipelines what they need to understand what's happening on their land, leveling the information playing field with corporate interests.

"You have these large, multinational corporations, and then on the other side of the ledger are small, medium-sized frontline or Indigenous groups that either have small budgets or no budgets," said Auch, "and don't have the capacity, the time, or the expertise to develop maps to inform their organizing activism or advocacy."

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in Omaha is making a livestream available as it hears oral arguments today in a case involving Iowa landowners affected by CO2 pipeline proposals, some of whom face seizure of their property by eminent domain if the Summit Carbon Solutions project moves forward.




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