TCNJ

18 SPRING 2016 When did shore tourism start? Both Long Branch and Cape May can actually document tourism—elite tourism—back to the late 1700s. It's easy to spin in circles trying to decide whether rebuilding after Sandy is smart. Last year, to refill Monmouth and Ocean County beaches with sand, the federal government spent $168 million. The amount of money we dump into it is insane. It makes no sense why we keep doing this to ourselves, but this is part of my argument in the book: You can't treat these things as engineering problems. These are social decisions, and one of the big problems I see is that we don't think about it that way. We say, "OK, we need an engineering solution." Well, the only engineering solution for a barrier island is to not build. That's simply never going to happen. We talk about things like elevation and hardening of personal property. You know the assumption is, "We just need to build a bigger berm." What we need to understand is why we make the decisions that we do about rebuilding when we know we're going to have to put millions, if not billions, of dollars into mitigation both at the public and private level. "Build a bigger berm." That could be a bumper sticker. There was an article in Science on April 1 about how the future of environ- mental studies requires the incorpora- tion of social science. The science is actually less mysterious and easier to understand than the social science. That's not to say that science is easy— it's just that, with environmental issues, what we generally don't understand is why people continue to make decisions that they do often in the face of pretty unequivocal scientific evidence. Why don't we base decisions more on science? I was talking to my TCNJ colleague Nate Magee, a professor of physics who studies global warming. He said there's really no debate anymore in the scientific community about climate change and it makes scientists absolutely crazy that they have such clear evidence and nobody does anything. [For more about Magee, see page 26.] Did you find it in any way difficult to write the book given the stage of climate change we're in— foreboding projections, yet this lack of movement? Most of what we're going to be doing is not stopping climate change, but adapting to it. "What do we need to do to address climate change?" is the wrong question. It's happening. There's irreversible damage that's been done. In the past 100 years, the sea level in New Jersey has increased almost 12 inches. We were talking about the fact that humans tend to trust that things are OK despite the potential harm in everyday life. In your book, you write about sociologist Anthony Giddens' concept surrounding this, which he calls "ontological security." Rollercoaster redux Seaside Heights is weighing the expansion of Casino Pier, damaged during Sandy.

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