Dune ‘mitigation’ no pretty picture

The big excavators came to the beach this week, not via an access road but over the dunes from State Highway 361. So close were they to the foredunes that they could easily have extended their reach to excavate the beach itself.

What they are doing is “mitigation” to compensate for the flattening of dunes to accommodate the massive Cinnamon Shore development on the Gulf side of the highway. I say massive, not in a pejorative sense, but to tell it like it is. The mitigation is to “restore” the dunes; dunes that do not need restoring as they weren’t there in the first place. Some say that the first line of dunes are the “trash dunes,” built by the years of beach and driving lane management; “trash,” not because of there being garbage incorporated in the dunes (there may well be) but because the mixture of sand and vegetation is not as consolidated as natural processes would build.

Because we have not had any significant dune erosion for years, these dunes are far from being trash because the vegetation is profuse and binding. Last week I rescued a kite that was flying above the dunes, its string caught on sunflower bushes. To get to the sunflowers, I had to find a trail along the ridges without trampling the vegetation. To stop and look at these dunes in the hot summer sun was like a vision into coastal diversity: Butterflies, dragonflies, bees, grasshoppers, spiders, lizards, flowers, vines, prickly pear cactus, even the yellow rose of Texas. To contrast the ancient with the modern, my cell phone beeped while I was struggling to reach Spiderman (the kite). I found myself among the sunflowers with sweat dripping from my brow, talking to a gent in Germany who wanted to sell me some software.

Big dump trucks had dumped a pile of sand in the trough between the first and second lines of dunes, and the excavators were spreading this out, covering those flowers, bees and butterflies and even the sea oats. Ironically, Sea Oats Group is the name of the company doing the project. The South Jetty called this excavated earth “dirt.” Is it dirt? Our island and its prairie-like cover has been around for several thousand years, and the vegetation and the soil may not have changed much in all those years although cattle grazed here and there were more active dunes in the last century. I prefer to think of it as good sandy soil rather than dirt.

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Ever wishing to be topical in these columns, in honor of the Olympic Games I looked back at my records to find that 44 years ago almost to the day, I was in Rio de Janeiro, returning from a cruise aboard the Wood’s Hole research vessel Atlantis II. To get there I had traveled from New York to London on Pan American Airlines, London to Lisbon on British European Airlines, Lisbon to Luanda on TAP (Transportes Aereos Portuguesas), by sea on Atlantis II to Salvador de Bahia, Brazil and then to Rio on Cruzeiro do Sul Airlines. Except for TAP all those airlines are now defunct.

I think I got on a training flight to Luanda. It was TAP’s first flight of the new 747 and it was almost empty except for a lot of flight attendants. There was a horrible noise coming from one of the engines but we obviously made it. The Cruzeiro was the most adventurous. They flew too fast, and too low but afforded spectacular views of the Christ of the Andes and Sugar Loaf. Some memories of Rio at that time: The wavy pavement design along Copacabana can make you dizzy, the taxis were all Volkswagen Beetles with no seat on the passenger side and the door removed to make entrance easier, the favelas were very close to the luxurious Copa hotels, and the announcer at the airport had one of the sexiest voices ever.

Tony Amos is a University of Texas Marine Science Institute research fellow and director of the Animal Rehabilitation Keep, or ARK.