The New Yorker:

Daniel Pullen offers beautifully composed and striking images of the destruction that climate change has brought to his lifelong home.

By Bill McKibben

Even without climate change, the Outer Banks—a nearly two-hundred-mile stretch of barrier islands between the mainland and the Atlantic, running from just north of Roanoke Island, where the British first settled in 1585, down the North Carolina coast—are precarious. The islands want to move, as waves and wind push sand from the ocean edge to the leeward or sound side. You could see the whole process explained on this National Park Service sign if it weren’t half covered with sand by the very processes it describes.

And now, as the sea level creeps inexorably upward and warmer oceans brew stronger storms, the dynamic intensifies. It’s one of the planet’s many physical dramas in this era of climate-induced upheaval, but on the Outer Banks—a strip of sand a few miles wide, at most, which is visited by millions of tourists each year—this pageant is particularly pronounced. Daniel Pullen has had an unobstructed view of this scene his whole life. Now forty-nine, he grew up in the town of Buxton, where a nineteen-seventies-era Navy base exacerbated coastal erosion by building a series of jetties to widen the beach, setting off a small boom in unwisely sited houses that are now being steadily reclaimed by the ocean. (Five more fell into the sea the week we spoke.)

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