According to information I found on the interwebs, 44% of the world's population lives in coastal areas. That's a lot of concrete hubris. (And the interwebs never lie, so it must be true.
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I liked the video. It was a nice piece of work - but it's central theme is flawed. It starts off by saying you can't stop mother nature over time, and proceeds to say that we can stop mother nature, we've just been doing it wrong. See, apparently we were doing it with concrete hubris, but what we really needed was to back up a few (or a bunch) of feet, and build with a more ecologically based sand dune and reinforced boardwalk hubris.
Now that I'm done making fun: A well seeded, functioning dune system makes sense on ANY barrier island, including ours. Hell, even as bad as Sandy was, the dunes by me came thisclose to holding. By all reports, they made it til around 10:30. Another hour or two, and the tide/storm factors would have backed off enough and the damage would have been kept to a far lesser level, at least on the ocean side. As far as building on barrier island, if there is one core lesson to be learned from Sandy, it's that requiring any new building of living spaces to be above the base flood elevation (BFE) is perhaps the most important factor for protecting property and minimizing loss from future flood events.
