‘In the Shadow of the Seawall’ tackles coastal land use dilemmas in the age of sea level rise

The Earth is warming, prompting existential questions for the more than three billion of us living on the world’s coasts. Rising sea levels are chipping away at habitable land, affecting livelihoods, damaging infrastructure and contaminating groundwater. This instability is expected to force a reckoning: How much time, energy and resource will we spend trying to maintain life and business as we know it in the face of unrelenting climatic change? How might it shift how we relate to and value the coast?

In addition to raising those questions and others like them, for UC Santa Barbara sociologist Summer Gray, rising seas do something else: They expose age-old social injustices and inequalities and offer them up for examination. In her first book, “In the Shadow of the Seawall” (University of California Press, 2023), Gray takes two communities that are on the front lines of sea level rise — the Maldives, an island country in the north-central Indian Ocean, and Guyana, an Atlantic Ocean-facing nation in the northeastern corner of South America — and studies how seawalls serve as a point of conflict between rich and poor, colonizer and Indigenous, powerful and powerless.

be traced all the way back to the days of European colonization, when taming the ocean was a sign of progress and power. Generations later, though both countries have since achieved independence, their populations are still locked in the same patterns of economic dependence on these structures — the growing amount of money and effort required to maintain them in order to support economies and land uses that have grown around them.

“They also symbolize entrenched patterns of centralized development and engineering paradigms that are deeply ingrained and almost impossible to reverse,” Gray said. While they are effective at stabilizing land and preventing coastal erosion, they come at enormous human and environmental costs and, ironically, further exacerbate coastal vulnerability, she continued. It’s a sunk cost fallacy that is emerging in coastal cities everywhere as they grapple with encroaching seas.

swinging barrier in progress that is meant to protect New York City from future storm surges. Along with the estimated $119 million price tag, the project raises concerns over whether the finished product will even be effective, let alone be worth the unintended consequences.

Against this backdrop, Gray brings out the concept of placekeeping, a place-sensitive approach to climate change adaptation. Going farther than conventional notions of adaptation, which often involve well-intentioned but rather blunt strategies to invest in coastal armoring or conduct a managed retreat, placekeeping is holistic and hyperlocal, beginning with understanding coastal vulnerability within place-specific social and historical contexts.

Indeed, placekeeping strategies would differ from coastal community to coastal community, as the populations “assert their autonomy and shape life-affirming pathways amid environmental disruption,” according to Gray. It could mean a thinning of the land use in vulnerable areas; it could mean relocation. But it could also mean better public transit to enhance access and mobility, as well as nature-based resilience measures and innovative and just social and economic solutions.

“Ultimately, at its heart, placekeeping reflects a deep-seated yearning to uphold our ties to and presence within the places we call home while recognizing that this desire is embedded in relationships of power,” Gray said. “I wrote ‘In the Shadow of the Seawall’ as a corrective to the simplified and sensationalized narratives that dominate both popular and academic climate change discourses.

“My hope is that the book will awaken the sociological imagination, inviting readers into a world where the complexities of seawalls, placekeeping and adaptation, challenge assumptions and contribute to a more connected understanding of the struggle ahead.”