New Books In Environmental Studies

The acclaimed Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron writes that the idea for his newly reissued book, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics where the Land Meets the Sea (Red Deer Press, 2014), occurred to him when he was interviewing a “lean, laconic, geologist,” named Bob Taylor who works at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “A beach stores sand in dunes behind it,” Taylor said. “When it’s attacked, it draws material from the dunes for itself and for building a protective shoal or bar offshore. When it’s less stressed, it takes sand and gravel from offshore and stores it back on the beach and in the dunes.” “You talk as though the damn thing were alive,” Cameron said. “I think of it that way,” said Taylor. At the time, Silver Donald Cameron thought of it as a vivid metaphor. But, in his newly revised version of The Living Beach, he argues that it’s true: the beach is alive with the right to be prot