This presentation is part of the Supporting Sediment Transport organized session.
This presentation will cover some recent examples of work around the Great Lakes that prioritizes more sensitive and contextual approaches to sediment management that aim to work with coastal forms and processes to protect, enhance, and leverage the ecological and cultural values that make coastal landscapes valuable. These approaches address the tendency for coastal management decisions to “improve” toward the most efficient and transferrable possible outcomes as opposed to the most strategic and contextually sensitive. Coastal management features and initiatives should instead be understood as an extension of the cultural attitudes of a particular place in response to a set of coastal conditions or challenges specific to that place. Otherwise, coastal management, understood as a universal and transferrable collection of efficiency-motivated strategies, threatens to sacrifice the local conditions that make places special to residents and visitors. This one-size-fits-all motivation also closely aligns with the prevalent funding mechanisms that prioritize large capital projects designed and scaled to address a worst-case modeled scenario. While often providing the protection planned, these strategies are large, expensive, and often lack monitoring or adaptation funding needed to both demonstrate efficacy or respond to unplanned conditions. By way of example, this presentation will look at a collection of projects that have attempted to prioritize more strategic and adaptive practices of coastal management, particularly in relationship to existing coastal processes such as sediment transport, and including practices understood as “natural and nature-based approaches”. Additionally, it hopes to set the stage for a larger conversation about the challenges to such approaches and how they can be addressed. Underpinning all of this is a simple assumption that coastal landscapes are not just important things, but what makes them important is the relationships these places engender. Coastal management is not something done to protect something else, but instead is part of the important thing itself and would benefit from acknowledging its place as a cultural and ecological project – a project that has the ability to reinforce and celebrate what we all love about coastal landscapes and what makes them different from one another.
