Coastal places are liminal spaces, places that experience dramatic change and one of the first places to bear the impacts of climate change. In some instances, communities along the coast have had to relocate due to the effects of climate change while others hope to adapt faster than the environment around them changes.
This project invites you to explore coastal communities on the pacific coast of North America. Through conversations with beachcombers and beach surveyers, themes such as change, erosion, tides, death, and upwelling emerge. This project explores the attachments that people have with place and how scientific exploration connects us to place.
This project came out of a collaboration with the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST). Research led by Dr. Julia Parrish and Dr. Ben Haywood highlighted some of the different ways that people are attached to place and asked how this might influence their understanding of the natural world. In the clip below, you can hear more about COASST and how I became involved in this project.
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. -Marie Curie
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose
On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls
Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,
That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.
The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.
The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,
The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.
The generations of the bird are all
By water washed away. They follow after.
They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.
Without this bird that never settles, without
Its generations that follow in their universe,
The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,
Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land
To which they may have gone, but of the place in which
They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,
In which no scholar, separately dwelling,
Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,
Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.