This Land, Your Land

Miller-McCune magazine in a November feature profiles a pilot project at the 154,000-acre Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge to determine whether man can slow rising sea levels and the inevitable loss of land and habitat.

The world's sea level has been stable for about 5,000 years, Jim Morrison's 2,600-word report says, but "today, melting glaciers and rising sea waters have accelerated the transformation, making larger areas vulnerable to flooding, erosion, saltwater intrusion, and loss of wetlands and biodiversity."

At the Alligator River site, the Nature Conservancy has built oyster-shell reefs to slow currents and lessen the impact of waves to stave off erosion. Other efforts include filling man-made drainage ditches and installing gates in others to slow the advance of salt water, and planting salt-tolerant trees such as bald cypress and black gum.

Orrin Pilkey, the Duke University professor who is well-known for his warnings about the vulnerability of North Carolina's coast, says the state should plan for a rise of 7 feet. Meanwhile, models demonstrate that a 1-foot rise in sea level would flood up to 469,000 acres of the Albemarle Peninsula, the article says, and a 20-inch rise might inundate nearly 750,000 acres, more than a third of the peninsula.

Morrison quotes an independent report co-written in 2008 by Jim Titus, an EPA expert who has been considering the dangers of sea-level rise for three decades. About North Carolina, Titus concludes "there is no explicit plan for the fate of most low-lying coastal lands as sea level rises."