Mike DiGirolamo (narration): Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your cohost Mike DiGirolamo. Bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today’s guest on the newscast is Peter Slovinsky. A coastal geologist working for the Maine Geological Survey. In this conversation, he checks in with me about how coastal communities in the U.S. State of Maine are adapting to sea level rise with a nature-based solution called living shorelines The concept was originally developed in the mid 20th century, but Sliwinski, and his team have been putting their own spin on it in some quite effective ways. Mongabay’s own Erik Hoffner wrote the original story in April of this year. Here at Sliovinsky details more about this approach to building erosion, resilient, coastlines, incorporating a variety of techniques using plant matter, like driftwood holiday trees and other materials to buttress shorelines from the effects of storms, erosion, and sea level rise. We talk about the benefits of using this approach versus concrete seawalls and why the former is generally more cost effective and better for habitats. And lastly. He shares his thoughts on other climate adaptation measures communities need to be considering and what changes he thinks need to happen now. To protect them from the impacts of climate change.

Mike: Hi, Peter. Thank you for joining us today. Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast.

Peter Slovinsky: Thanks, Mike. It’s a pleasure to be here on our different time differences.

Mike: Joining us all the way from the great state of Maine. And how is it over there today?

Peter: Today was a pretty, we’ve had a pretty nice stretch of weather. Our humidity is down a little bit. It can get really humid in Maine. And I’m not sure what degree centigrade where we are, but today was about 82 degrees Fahrenheit. So

Mike: Wow. Yeah, it’s definitely not that warm down here where I am. But we are going to talk about a little bit about Maine’s living shorelines, but so just to start with so you can get us up to speed. And for listeners who aren’t familiar, can you tell us what are living shorelines? How are they being implemented and how do they help us adapt to sea level rise?

Peter: Sure. Living shorelines are a tech, a variety of techniques, some call them nature-based solutions also. So, there’s…living shorelines kind of falls into the category of a nature-based solution. But it’s a technique that uses natural materials. Usually there’s an integration of some kind of vegetative material in that to typically slow down coastal erosion or mitigate for some flooding. Or a combination of those two, especially when it’s used along the coasts, but the whole concept of them is that they mimic what’s occurring in the natural environment, as opposed to, you know, going down the path of what we call green–that’s in the ‘green infrastructure’ is what we call living shorelines–but the green/gray mix that can also be a living shoreline where you’re kind of mixing soft solutions with harder solutions like the use of logs or rocks to create a sill. But they’re the opposite of what we call ‘gray infrastructure,’ which is your typical bulkhead or riprap seawall or something like that. And one of the keys that they allow is they allow the connection, contiguous connection between the upland and the wetland, while these other techniques, these gray techniques, create a literal physical barrier between those two so that there’s very, very little exchange of say sediment between the upland and the wetland or between the wetland and the upland. And also, it’s a lot harder for critters sometimes to go from point A to point B or from upland to the wetland or wetland to the upland.

Mike: And yeah, so that’s really key to point out that, gray versus green infrastructure. So, what is the main benefit that we’re getting with this infrastructure versus a concrete seawall?

Peter: Sure. I touched on that a tiny bit. One is again, you’re maintaining the continuity between the different habitat types which is really important when you’re thinking about it from the standpoint of, for instance you’ve got a let’s say a mud flat or a coastal wetland that is adjacent to a coastal bluff this is just an example so that the coastal wetland is dependent upon sediment from the erosion of the coastal bluff. To actually maintain itself in the face of coastal storms in the face of sea level rise and things like that. If you’re putting in a hard barrier, say, to protect property that’s on that bluff, you put in a hard barrier, that cuts off that sediment supply. So that, you may be, and this is one of the things we’ve experienced in Maine, is our regulations actually say you’re not supposed to do work in the intertidal zone where, you know, there are protected habitats like coastal wetlands and things like that. So, it’s okay to do your work on the upland side. On the bluff. But what that’s missing is that connection between those two habitats and the fact that that coastal wetland or that mud flat or that clam flat, that sandy beach, whatever it is, depends, at least in part, if not wholly on the adjacent upland habitat to gain its sediment. So, the example I gave with the coastal bluff adjacent to the wetlands, that wetland is dependent upon this coastal bluff and the erosion of this coastal bluff to actually maintain its sediment supply to keep up with sea level rise. And if we put a hard barrier in the way we’re maybe, say, armoring this section of shoreline and protecting it from erosion, but at the same time, what we’re doing is we’re limiting the supply of sediment to that adjacent resource. And at the same time, that adjacent resource in response to sea level rise is migrating landward in response to sea level rise, because, in an undeveloped world, in a world where we don’t have barriers the natural systems that we have known for millennia, their natural response to sea level rise has been to migrate inland and upland, in response. So, when you put a hard barrier like that in the way, this feature that is trying to migrate cannot move anymore. Even if its sediment supply isn’t interrupted, so the living shoreline techniques, you know, work a lot more with the natural processes in terms of trying to maintain that connectivity between the upland and the wetland. And at the same time, some of the work that occurs with these living shorelines per se actually has to occur down below. Down here to try to help protect everything above it. So, it maintains that connectivity, maintains the natural habitat while, you know, the barriers that we put in place, which we are very, very good at, in general really do only one thing, and that’s to protect the adjacent upland from erosion. And what we’ve also found is that given the, the coastal storms that we’re experiencing and also the given rates, given the rates of sea level rise that we’re experiencing, that some of these structures that have been put in place actually don’t perform all that well. They get outflanked. And, when they get outflanked, it means basically what happens if you put a stretch, say 100 feet or, you know, 30 meters of wall in, the ends of that erode faster. So, then you have walls that pop in on both sides. So, you just get a you know, it, it kind of perpetuates itself. So that results in more armoring of the shoreline potentially. And, you know, in some cases that’s what’s needed to actually stop the erosion, but the, the living shoreline approaches typically lead to a lot less of that end effect erosion. We’ve also seen that some of these structures, I mean in, I’m, I’m not sure if folks are aware, but in um, December and then in January of 2024, Maine experienced it’s largest coastal storm since the seventies, and it actually resulted in record setting water levels and record setting erosion, damage, and also flooding along its coastline and we also saw a lot of a lot of structural failure of these different kinds of bulkheads and seawalls.

Mike: And just real quick, I believe it’s cheaper than building seawalls too, correct? And also, it’s less carbon intensive. Can you elaborate more on that?

Peter: Yeah, so that’ll, that’ll actually depend on the technique, that’s utilized. What we’re finding, at least in some of the case studies that we have going here is the price is in general comparable to seawalls w and in some cases, depending on the technique, it can be slightly more expensive, but in general, it’s slightly less expensive. But there it’s in the same ballpark, but it also depends on the technique. It depends on the site, you know, for instance, like you have to barge supplies out to an island to actually construct your, what you’re constructing, if you’re going to do that, that automatically jacks up the price of everything versus is there a very easy site access where materials can be brought in, you know, do things have to get regraded or are you not regrading in terms of is it a really steep bluff? For instance, it has to get regraded back that adds additional cost. So, the techniques in general are… it is safe to say that in general, it’s cheaper, but somewhat comparable. And we have seen some techniques that are being employed where the actual cost is comparable or slightly more, slightly more expensive. One of the things to think about with these approaches is it’s kind of like owning a garden. You have to love it and you want to, you have to, you have, you will have to maintain it. So that sometimes is what people think of when they’re “all right I want to do a one and done on this.” You know, for instance, I want to protect my property once and that’s it I don’t want to have to come back and revisit this all the time and they think that that bulkhead is what will do that. Yet again, like I said, we’ve seen failures of those systems, and the repairs of those systems is very very expensive while the repairs/maintenance of a living shoreline generally is a lot less expensive because you’re maintaining vegetation. You’re, you know regrading something. So again, it needs some TLC as opposed to your, you build it and it’s done, but the maintenance costs in general are less than the maintenance costs if you have failure of a seawall or a bulkhead or something like that.

Mike: Yeah. I like that idea of thinking of it as tending a garden rather than maintaining a seawall.

Peter: Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of the, and that’s kind of the approach that the way people think about this is you know, some people they see erosion occurring and they’re like I have to stop this right away because it’s eating into my property while other people you know approach it differently and everything is case by case, you know, if you’re 30 feet from the edge of eroding shoreline you’re gonna have different decision making than if you’re 150 feet away from the edge of a eroding shoreline. So that also has to be factored into the considerations of what would be most appropriate. And also, regulations, of course, come into play. I mean, I’m not sure what they are in your area, but in Maine, in some areas you cannot build new seawalls. For instance, in our coastal sand dune system, which only accounts for about 2 percent of our shoreline, but you can’t build a new structure because it’s a regulated resource and it’s been recognized that hard infrastructure in a dynamic system like sand dunes and beaches doesn’t make sense because of the end effect erosion, because of reflected wave energy, because the fact that, you know, these hard systems in a very, very dynamic environment typically don’t result in good things for the natural environment. So, you can’t build those structures, in Maine along our coastal sand dune slash beach system shoreline. So, you have to turn to living shoreline techniques in those areas.

Mike: So I just want to dig in really quick to the mechanics of putting holiday trees into a dune, how do you do that exactly?

Peter: Sure. I mean, there isn’t a written technique, I guess. So we did some research when we kind of proposed these projects in Maine and found a couple of cases where, at least in in the U.S., in some of the Southeastern states, it was kind of pioneered and has been taking place since the fifties and sixties in some locations. So, we kind of reached out for guidance on, you know, scientific guidance as to how they’re doing things like now we’re just throwing stuff in the dunes. So, there isn’t really a written book about how to do these things, but the way we approached it was we have tried this technique at several different locations. The first one was a pilot technique and what’s called a small pocket beach system. So, uh, Maine has large, long, contiguous, sandy beach systems. And then we have pocket beach systems, which are smaller beach systems bound by like rocky headlands, which I’m sure down in Australia, a bunch of those as well. And we tested this technique there first, and basically the way we designed it was, and this actually came from, I was walking down my road in, in early January, and that’s when they do bulk pickup of Christmas trees.

Mike: Huh.

Peter: And I was thinking, wow, that’s a lot of trees. I mean, every house has a tree on the corner that is going to get picked up by public works and get taken to the dump and shredded or whatever they do, chipped, whatever they do. And I was just thinking, you know, maybe there’s a better way to use these things. So, we kind of designed this pilot project to, to go into this pocket beach using discarded Christmas trees, working with a local community. And it was really a good test case because it’s a location where you don’t have that much sediment transport, especially windblown sediment transport or aeolian transport is what we call it. So literally, you think about it, you’re walking down the beach, and the wind is blowing really hard, the sand is whipping you in the face. That’s what we’re trying to capture when we’re using Christmas trees or discarded holiday trees. And in a smaller system, you don’t have literally the amount of, a big amount of beach for the wind to blow against to move sand from point A to point B. So, if we could prove that we can trap sand in a small system, we know it would work better in a larger system that has a larger contiguous expanse of, say, dry beach that the wind can blow against. So, our first test was in this small pocket beach, and um, after, it was a place where the dunes, had been eroded pretty badly and flattened. And at the same time there was a, believe it or not, a buried sewer main in the dune that blew.

So, they had to repair it anyway. The idea was to try to trap sand on top of the repaired sewer main. What we did is we basically collected Christmas trees from the community and went out and dug a very, very small trench. You know, maybe about this deep just to kind of settle, settle the tree into. And then you literally stack them tip to tail parallel to the shoreline. So not perpendicular, but parallel to the shoreline. The idea is to mimic the way a natural dune ridge would form in terms of its height and also its space from another dune ridge. So, we put in several rows of these trees, again, shore parallel, going along the shoreline, so parallel to the beach going out towards, towards the shoreline. Not too far, because if you go too far, the tides will just come in and wash into the trees and wash the trees away. And we were fortunate enough to have a pretty big storm the week after we put these things in and that storm, first of all, did provide some windblown sand transport, but even more importantly, there were waves that broke on the beach and we put the trees in just the right spot so that they formed a little, little, like on the upper part of the beach, so the wave would break out here and kind of wash up. It would hit the tree and deposit all its sand in the tree. So, uh, we caught a lot of sand using that technique. So that was our first demonstration of that. And then once we found that it actually works on a small beach, we decided to expand it to a much larger state park in an area about an hour north of Portland, Maine, if anybody’s ever been there on the open coast. It’s a much larger beach system. It’s called Popham Beach State Park. And there we work with park staff and set up a Christmas tree recycling program and announced it on social media and, it picked up. And before you know it, we had a thousand trees dropped off.

Mike: That’s a lot of trees.

Peter: Yeah, our goal was to get about 500. And so, we got double that. And then, so we decided to test that technique over at this much larger state park and did the same technique where we put rows of trees in parallel to the shoreline. And this place, this is after the January, 2024 events where we, we, all the dunes there were literally just flattened and there was nothing left. It was not no remnant of a dune at all. And we constructed that in March of 2024 put our rows in and we’ve been monitoring it over, you know, since then. And I’m happy to say that one side of the installation where the winds have been blowing a little bit weird this year. So, one side of the installation has done really well in terms of trapping sand. We’ve, we’ve grown probably about 100 to 125 feet of dune. Landward to seaward. And in another area we’ve grown about probably about 50 percent of that. Probably just about over 60 feet or so. And uh, so we’re pretty happy with the results so far and we’re going to be monitoring it and keeping an eye on it for the remainder of this year and into the winter.

Mike: So, you had mentioned to me earlier that you were experimenting with some new techniques. Was that part of what you just mentioned here? Or are there some new techniques, that you still have in the pipeline that you’re testing out?

Peter: Yeah, that was, that was one of the newer techniques. That, we’ve been trying. We’ve also in the sandy systems, we’ve been trying driftwood. So, after coastal storms, you know, there’s driftwood that’s literally just washed up on the beach. And instead of, you know, a park or whoever just going in and removing all of that driftwood, we said, well, can’t we orient that in a way where it can trap sand, just like you orient Christmas trees? And what drove that was I was walking one of the beaches, a small pocket beach, and there was a large tree, you know, pretty big diameter tree that was washed up. And right behind it, there was a sand dune forming. I said, well, why don’t we try this? So, we decided to try that. And this was actually before we tried the Christmas trees. We’ve tried this technique in 2023 at the same place, Popham Beach State Park. And that is adjacent to a very large river system that goes all the way up into the state of Maine. So, it gets a lot of trees that wash down the river during storms. And I mean, it’s an endless supply of driftwood, basically. So, we did the same technique and that turned out to work really well. And we also tried that technique in a small pocket beach in another community that got devastated by the storms. And that has performed really, really well there as well. Same thing, you’re literally taking the trees and you’re orienting them shore parallel. We took some of the branches and we cut them in about 8-to-10-foot lengths and also oriented them shore perpendicular. So, they’re just kind of like sticking out just from the edge of the eroded dune. We took branches from the pine trees, because that’s mostly what we have, fern pine trees up here and just kind of like stacked them in an area of the dune and just let nature take its course. And the windblown sand, wave deposited sand, just started building up on these things and I’m happy to report that you we’ve also trapped a lot of sediment that way. So, really what we’re trying to do is trap sand and mimic the formation of sand dunes

Mike: It sounds like uh, you’ve had a lot of success in the areas, that you’ve trialed. But I’m kind of curious, how would this work say like in a more urbanized area? Could it work there? what’s, your take here?

Peter: Yeah, I think some of the techniques are transferable to other areas including urban environments. So back in 2012, there was a very, very large tropical storm. Well, it was a hurricane that became extra tropical that hit the New York and New Jersey shorelines called super storm Sandy. And after that, it was nature-based solutions slash living shorelines really took off, even in urban environments of New York and New Jersey. Things like dune restoration, things like taking existing riprap walls that were sloped like this. Or, you know, steeper like this and was all rock taking those and building terraces out of them and then putting plantings of different water loving species in the middle of those. That’s even considered a living shoreline technique. It’s more of a gray/green technique. But what was learned from all that is that even integrating some of this vegetation does a good job at helping attenuate wave energy. But the longer you stretch these things out, you know, instead of a steep slope like this, if you have a shallower slope with some of these terraces, that does a pretty good job of breaking up wave energy, not only from the standpoint of the fact that the wave has to encounter one tier, then a second tier, then a third tier. But if you’re integrating vegetative plantings into that the vegetation, marsh vegetation is very, very effective at attenuating wave energy. Like 50 percent of wave energy is broken up in the first 50 feet of marsh, for instance. I mean, that’s a big decrease in wave energy, if you’re thinking about it, just a little 50-foot section of marsh can break up 50 percent of wave energy. Urban techniques include something like just greenifying these walls. We’ve also seen and considered some techniques where if you have a wooden bulkhead, for instance, there are ways to build compartments into those bulkheads so that there’s more habitat for critters as the tide comes in and out. That’s not so much for wave attenuation or anything like that, but it’s just creating better habitat at what’s there. And in riverine environments and there have been techniques that have been used for a long time in stream and river restoration, where naturally occurring wood is integrated into designs. For instance, to break up currents along a river, you put, logs out into the river, and it not only breaks up the currents, but it also creates fish habitat. So those techniques also, we’ve seen integrated into some areas of the urban environment, where you’re literally just kind of greenifying a section of river by creating habitat for some of the different critters that live in those rivers, even in urban environments. The whole concept of living shorelines really sounds like it’s all green. It doesn’t. It goes from the whole spectrum. It goes from, yes, vegetation only to mix of vegetation with some kind of structures to mix of vegetation with harder structures all the way to the spectrum of the gray where you’re talking about, you know, just solid riprap walls and vertical bulkheads that are made of wood or metal or something like that. But what we’re talking about is that three quarters of the spectrum that goes from all vegetation to literally, like I said, tiered approaches where you’ve got like a row of rocks, then a tier of vegetation another row of rocks and a tier of vegetation that kind of helps create the habitat, yet also really, really lends itself to attenuated wave energy at the same time.

Mike: You know, since we’re on the subject of discussing other techniques and other solutions and you know, maybe you’ve already mentioned them, but like, what are some other coastal climate solutions or adaptation techniques that you think really need to be explored more? I mean, other than the seawalls, obviously, and then other than living shorelines, that have yet to really be taken on. Are there any that you think that we should really be exploring that are much more cost effective and less carbon intensive?

Peter: Yeah, no, that’s a great question, and it’s something that comes up all the time here in Maine when I’m having discussions with communities or even with the state legislature or decision makers at the upper echelons of the state, and it really comes down to there are only a certain number of things we can do anyway in the coastal environment. And they really, they come down to the following. One is do nothing. That is the most cost effective, typically and is the easiest to implement. That is, you know, that’s up to everybody’s level of risk in terms of understanding their vulnerabilities, making decisions of, I’m okay with the level of risk given where I am in my ownership of coastal property, stuff like that. You know, how far is the house? Do you flood? Do you not flood? Is it eroding? Is it not eroding? But do nothing is always an alternative that should be considered in looking at all these things. That’s the first one. The second one is, I guess, what we call ‘accommodate,’ and that is let accommodate design something to accommodate for flooding, to accommodate, for erosion. An example of that is you know, taking a house and elevating it. For instance, let’s say it’s in a floodplain. You take that house and instead of it being on the slab on foundation, you elevate it above and it can accommodate flooding, you know, so it’s a way to accommodate for the hazard. A link to that is, what I would call adaptation. So, accommodate and adapt as I kind of put those two together. And that could be something like creating greenways. This also relates to the accommodate. So, creating greenways adjacent to rivers to creating parks adjacent to vulnerable coastal areas, instead of having high density development, for instance, in these areas move people out of harm’s risk and let’s get them accommodations, create accommodation space for flooding by going through adaptation. The next one is what we call ‘protect’ and protect to me really means we’re deciding to hold the line. And that’s what we’re talking about. The gray infrastructure and implementation of that, but it can also include green infrastructure. So, protection in my mind, at least in a coastal setting, for instance, could be where somebody has a dune, that dune gets eroded and they decide to restore that dune by either bringing in sand and planting it or implementing a living shoreline at that location or let’s say, you know, they conduct beach nourishment, for instance.

Mike (narration): If you’ve ever visited a beach and seen large ships pumping sand from the bottom of the seabed and then shooting it outwards towards the beach. That’s what beach nourishment is moving sand back onto a beach that is eroding or sinking.

That is a protection strategy, but at the same time, it’s kind of like an accommodation strategy because you’re maintaining the natural system that’s there. So that’s kind of protect. And there are some areas in response to sea level rise and coastal storms that communities are going to make the decision to protect. For instance, in Maine, one of the big things that’s being considered right now is our working waterfronts. You know, Maine has a huge fishing industry that brings in billions of dollars to the industry, hundreds of millions to a billion dollars. And it needs to be on the water. It’s water dependent, you know, so there are some areas where you’re going to be, you’re also going to be adapting, let’s say, electrical infrastructure on piers and wharves. You might be raising some wharves and piers, but they need to be on the water. So, you’re going to also be protecting certain aspects of those. And the last one is the one that everybody loves and that’s ‘retreat.’ That is we’ve taken enough where we understand the vulnerability and we cannot accept the risk of where we are, and we are going to retreat from the hazardous section of shoreline. It’s not a popular decision, but it’s one that communities are thinking of more and more in their response to coastal storms and sea level rise. And even individuals are thinking about this. So as an example, after the storms in January that we had, so we had two back-to-back storms on one was on January 10th, and the second was on January 13th. So, we kind of had this one-two punch that caused hundreds of millions of dollars in private and public infrastructure damage. Just public piers was upwards of 75 to 80 million dollars in damage. That’s not counting private homes or private infrastructure. And right after that, you know, we started getting requests for walls requests for building dunes and things like that.

But we also got a lot of requests for, “Hey I want to move my house up. And I want to move my house back. I’ve got room on my lot. I can do it. And I want to go back as far as I can.” And this is interesting because it’s not something that we as a state had considered in terms of somebody voluntarily wanting to go back.

Mike: Yeah.

Peter: Yes, that’s something we consider, but voluntarily retreating is something that we had not considered. We had considered if a house was damaged in a storm if more than 50 percent of the house, you know, burned, for instance, then if you’re rebuilding it, it had to go back. But voluntarily picking up a house and just moving it is not something we had considered, but so that last one, that retreat can be done on an individual property basis or it can be done on an entire community basis. Much harder, of course, on a community basis, but it’s something that’s being considered in certain areas of the U.S. And I’m sure other areas in the world just because of the, given the vulnerability and level of risk that some of these areas have. So that’s kind of like the gamut of responses and living shorelines falls into that protect slash accommodate slash adapt section.

Mike: Yeah.

Peter: But they don’t have to be implemented all or one. I mean, to me, a community, or even an individual property, can try several of these different techniques at the same time.

Mike: I wanted to ask you about that. It seems interesting because uh, that you mentioned that people like the idea of retreating because I also kind of heard you say in there that it’s historically at least not been a very popular idea. What do you think? What do you think caused that switch then? Or was there a switch?

Peter: Honestly, at least in the cases I’m thinking of it was seeing what happened to their neighbor’s properties. And understanding the risk that they had, the vulnerability that they had, and that their risk tolerance for that was low. And they had the means and the ability to retreat. Some, some folks will not have the means or the ability to just retreat. In other words, their, their lot might be too small, financially knowing they might not be in a situation where they can afford to move a house. So, a lot of this whole response to coastal hazards. I mean, this could be a whole other discussion, but it gets into equity. Those who have typically can either afford to take the risk or have a much higher risk level or can adapt, accommodate, or retreat much quicker than people who don’t have a certain financial stability in their lives. You know, it really comes down to a question of equity as to how this happens. Because I’ll tell you right now, the majority of the properties that wanted to retreat or to adapt could afford it.

Mike: As a scientist who has been working on studying the impacts of sea level rise for quite a while now, what concerns you the most about it? What scares you?

Peter: Wow. That we’re starting to see What we said was going to happen happening that I mean, that’s good to hear as a scientist, but it’s also very very frightening. The rates of sea level rise that we’re experiencing right now at least in Maine are two to two and a half times what we’ve seen for the long-term historical average, and it’s what we said would happen, and looking at the future, even small amounts of sea level rise have significant impact. And Maine, you know, here we are talking about Maine, for instance, but think of a country like Bangladesh, which is, most of it is at sea level, or just above sea level, or some of the island nations. In the South Pacific that are on barrier reefs you know; they don’t have any place to move. Several things scare me. The fact that we’re seeing what we thought was going to happen happening. The numbers associated with the potential scenarios moving into the future. You know, even if they’re not that big, for instance, Maine is planning for one and a half feet of sea level rise by 2050 and four feet by the year 2100, right now. If you look on a map, what is inundated with that, even in Maine, it’s staggering. So, you think about these low-lying countries and how they have to adapt. That is frightening. So that whole thought, I guess, blends itself together. And you know, that also ties to what I said earlier in terms of the equity problem and that also is frightening to me. You know, people who have very little means have to try to adapt and they’re not going to be getting help. From their state or their government or whatever. And it’s when whole communities have to get up and move or, you know, whole communities are constantly being inundated, something has to happen. And the whole question of equity is something that we’ve been integrating into a lot of our discussions here in Maine, because we do have a lot of, I’ll call them haves and have nots mixed together along our shoreline. And it’s the haves right now that can be adapting and the, have not literally, I mean, they’re going to be forced to retreat by moving at some point because number one, the value of coastal property is getting so high. I mean, that’s not unique to Maine. We, as humans love the ocean or the lake or the river, whatever it is. So, we’re drawn to water. But we place a lot of our own infrastructure in very at-risk areas because of that. And these are very dynamic environments and they’re not made to have either a road running through them, or a lot with boundaries per se, because nature is constantly moving and shorelines in general, you know, you think of coastal beach and dune formal shorelines, they’re constantly eroding here, accreting here and then on coastal bluff shorelines or coastal bank shorelines that they don’t reform in our lifetime. So that’s a geological feature that we’ve seen now that is eroding one way. So, anyway, those are the things that frighten me as well as to sea level rise. It’s not, I mean, like I said, a state like Maine, yeah, we’re going to have a lot of impact. It’s nothing compared to what other states other and other countries are going to have to deal with

Mike: By contrast then, what gives you the most hope?

Peter: Several things give me hope. Seeing people’s response to number one, get us as a scientist, getting the word out having people understand risk vulnerability. And be able to integrate that into their decision making, whether it’s at an individual level or a community level or at a state level, that gives me a lot of hope because, you know, as a scientist, sometimes we can be brought into politics quite a bit whether or not, you know, we want to be, and it’s gotten, the political divide in, in the United States is, you know, is very, very high, but when we’re talking about these issues it kind of goes away. You don’t have to tie it, I mean, necessarily to climate change, even though a lot of the things that we’re seeing are being driven by climate factors, it’s still something that has to happen regardless. So that gives me hope there. There’s common ground. The responses that I’ve seen. at various different levels give me hope and the interactions that I’ve seen amongst different people, the way they reach out to each other at a time of need gives me hope. The fact that we’re very adaptable, more adaptable than we think gives me hope. Our species has adapted to sea level changes in the hundreds of feet in the past. Okay. So we’re going to adapt in some way or another to what I’ve been discussing. Whether it’s, you know, the do nothing, accommodate, adapt, protect, or retreat. We’ve done it in the past and you know, we have certainly kind of marked our boundaries of certain places and things with cities on the water and things like that. But we will have to adapt at some point.

Mike: And this is my last question for you, Peter, but what kind of large systems change do you want to see happen like right now? Like what’s the biggest thing you think we need to get out of our own way. And also, what can people listening do to help move that forward?

Peter: I’d like us…I’d like to see us achieve our climate goals, as the world. , you know, each state and country doing its own thing is great, but it’s really a global problem. And having the having countries come together and talk about it and set goals is great, but actually achieving those goals is another thing. So, to me, if we can really buckle down and achieve those goals. I think that would be the best thing we can do for ourselves and our future generations.

Mike: Peter, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure speaking with you.

Peter: Likewise, Mike was, it was great set of questions. And I always have good time talking about this stuff. So, thanks for having me on.

Mike: We appreciate it.

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