Leave it as it is.

These words of Theodore Roosevelt’s rang out at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

Leave it as it is. It is a good phrase. A strong phrase.

But it, like Theodore himself, requires some deconstructing for our time.

When TR declared “leave it as it is” at the Grand Canyon and expressed a similar sentiment about the other national parks and monuments he would save, the “is” he had in mind was one that has been called into question of late. Some recent environmental scholars believe it was somewhat mythic, if not entirely fictional. The “is” for Roosevelt, and for the other conservationists of his time, John MuirÌęincluded, was a pristine ideal of an unpeopled nature, of a place that existed without us—that is, without humans—an empty Eden. But this was not the North America that Europeans found when they landed. This was not the “is” that was.

What Europeans found was a land where human beings, in numbers much larger than we were once taught as schoolchildren, had been living, loving, procreating, working, and dying for thousands of years. Though there were plenty of places that we would consider “wild” and relatively unpopulated, many of the lands we would come to call “wilderness” were in fact landscapes that humans had manipulated and manicured by farming and fire for hundreds of generations. They were also lands that were extensively used as hunting grounds, summer grounds, winter grounds. If you wanted to call this—human beings working in a sustainable fashion with the animals and plants they lived amid—“pure,” you could. But what you couldn’t call it was uninhabited.

A couple of influential books on this subject have come out in the last 20Ìęyears, includingÌę, by Mark David Spence, and , by Mark Dowie. They argue that in our romanticizing of nature as a place apart, a place without people, we have created a kind of willful amnesia about the people who were actually living here when Europeans landed on this continent. Obviously, the first settlers were aware that the woods were anything but empty. Spence argues that up until the Civil War, Americans thought of “wilderness” as being virtually synonymous with the “place Indians were,” that the presence of Indigenous people was part of what made a place wild. Back then the country could be thought of as virtually infinite, and the Indians existed “out there,” but as America pushed onward after the Civil War, the Indigenous people were no longer seen as part of wilderness but as the enemy, the thing in the way. And at that very moment, two coincident and not unrelated movements were growing. One was the idea that Indians belonged on reservations. The other was that we needed to preserve some of the wilderness we were spilling over onto, and that we should do this by creating parks.

Both of these newly conceived places were segmented off from the rest of the land, like islands, and to those doing the segmenting, it was clear that Indigenous people, forced onto one type of island, should be forced off the other. “Reservation” was in fact the general name for both the places the country wanted to put Indians and the forest preserves and other “saved” lands that were being set aside. The motivations for the two movements, intertwined and obvious then, seem strange and ironic a century and a half later. With the frontier closing, our romance with big monumental nature grew, as did the fear that our national vigor was fading. Wouldn’t we shrivel and grow weak and overcivilized (and somewhat European) without wild lands? “To protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation’s most sacred myth of origin,” writes the environmental scholar William Cronon in “The Trouble with Wilderness.” He adds: “The myth of wilderness as ‘virgin’ uninhabited land has always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home. Now they were forced to move elsewhere, with the result that tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in its pristine, original state, in the new morning of God’s own creation.”

Yellowstone, our very first national park, was a prime example. Created in 1872 by Congress and signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant, it became a template for all parks to follow. The story we were told about Yellowstone, and that we told ourselves, was that it was an “empty” place, the superstitious Indians supposedly spooked by the geysers, but as Spence argues, it had long been the hunting grounds of many tribes. The same was true of the tribe that gave Yosemite its name, but in John Muir’s eyes, and Roosevelt’s, what had been long inhabitation was viewed as encroachment. Muir liked his nature solitary, and while he marveled at the majestic views, he famously found the local Yosemite Indians “dirty.” You didn’t live in wilderness. It was where you went to get away from where you lived. To a place empty of people. A place that matched the increasingly refined and romantic notion of what nature was.

Where does this leave us today? For some it has led to a questioning not just of the history of our parks but of their present value. Rather than consider them as being what Wallace Stegner, citing Lord Bryce, called “America’s best idea,” they are now painted by some as poorly managed biological islands, tourist traps where Native people were expelled and where a false Edenic ideal of nature is promoted.

In , Dina Gilio-Whitaker distills this view of the history of the parks: “When environmentalists laud ‘America’s best idea’ and reiterate narratives about pristine national park environments, they are participating in the erasure of Indigenous peoples, thus replicating colonial patterns of white supremacy and settler privilege.”

As I drive into Yellowstone, I wonder: Am I simply clinging to an old romantic narrative, and worse, a romantic narrative based on a lie? Add the doom of climate change to the mix, and why fight for wilderness at all?

Steeped as I have been in Theodore Roosevelt’s life and work, I bristle at the concept that conservation is dead. But I have to admit that it is no longer possible to regard Yellowstone in the manner that Roosevelt did. I, and the four million other visitors, and our millions of cars, make that impossible.

In the midst of my panic and anger, I reach for the concrete, for anything solid to hold on to.Ìę“For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People” is what the sign above the arch says. But Roosevelt’s secret agenda was to preserve the park not just for the people but for the thousands of animals and plants and lichen and fungi. I am reminded of my friend Dan Driscoll, who battled for years to have bike paths put in along the Charles River in Boston, but whose secret agenda, an agenda that would prove largely successful, was to return native plantings to the riverbanks. He knew this wasn’t a perfect solution. He accepted that, as limited creatures, ours were only limited and partial steps. “We are all hypocrites,” he told me. “But we need more hypocrites who fight.”

Seen from a car, Yellowstone can seem like a disaster. But the caricature of a park is not the park. Only 1 percent of Yellowstone is made up of roads; 99 percent is the realm of the elk, bear, wolf, and cougar. Actual wild animals. That’s what Roosevelt loved about Yellowstone, not the geysers, and that’s what he wanted to save. And he did. I remind myself that there are 4,500 bison, 500 wolves, and 10,000 elk who don’t care what we humans think.

We can and should be critical of Roosevelt and his contemporaries for their expulsion of Native people from the national parks and monuments. It was part of a greater genocide, our original national sin. But while we are being critical of Roosevelt and others for not stepping out of their time, we should not fail to step out of our own. Take one step back and we can see a crowded, fractious world of Homo sapiens, battling as always for power, status, resources. But take another step back and the picture is less anthropocentric and even more dire. At this very moment, every second of every day, we are guilty of our own brand of biocide, destroying not hundreds or thousands but millions of creatures that we share this planet with. This is no exaggeration. Barely a day passes when we don’t wipe out a species, often a species that has never been categorized. We are killing the living world. We forget that we ourselves are just one sort of animal, though an animal that seems hell-bent on wiping out all others. We are the Borg on Star Trek, assimilating all. This is not just morally indefensible, and species murder, but it is very likely species suicide for us. Climate change, sure, that is part of it. But so is the larger destruction of the biosphere and most of the animals on earth.

This is where Roosevelt, whatever his flaws, remains relevant. Over a century ago he got it in a way most of us still do not get. He saw where we are heading. If you had asked the 14-year-oldÌęTheodore what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would not have answered statesman or soldier or author or even president, but a naturalist like his hero Charles Darwin. While Roosevelt was limited by the myopia and racism of his time, his training as a young scientist, combined with days in the wild, seems to have occasionally freed him from a larger limitation: Anthropocentrism. The inability to see beyond the human. It is this belief, that all of the great creation revolves around man, that is dooming the planet.

It may seem funny to say about a man who was by all accounts confident to the point of conceited, but Roosevelt possessed a larger humility. Call it “species humility.” Studying and hero-worshipping Darwin as a young man certainly didn’t hurt. He understood that we Homo sapiens are just, inÌęE. O. Wilson’s words, “a fortunate species of Old World primate.” And for all his self-centeredness and egotism, he seemed to understand this primary insight: that the world is more important than we are.

We are right to question Theodore Roosevelt. But we are also right to question our questioning, particularly on the subject of preservation. As with TR, so with the parks and monuments he championed. Parks work. Whatever its limitations, and murky history, Yellowstone remains the largest wilderness in the lower 48 states and the one place where all the large mammals that were here when Europeans first came to this continent still roam with at least relative freedom. While the wolves were reintroduced by humans, the cougars, who had also been wiped out in the park, reintroduced themselves. Secretive and stealthy, they slid into the back spaces of the millions of preserved wild acres. Which meant that Yellowstone once again has its three great carnivores, the most charismatic of the charismatic megafauna: mountain lion, grizzly, wolf.

While acknowledging that it was once the Native hunting ground of tribes, we need to put this in the context of the times and remember what the realistic alternative to conservation might have been. It is unlikely it would have been happily allowing Indigenous people to go about their business. The rapacious pace of westward movement brought with it a force that downed forests, despoiled rivers, stripped vegetation, and killed animals, a force that is still very much with us. Tribes in Yellowstone would have been mowed down as surely as tribes in the Badlands. The hunger of settlers surging west rivaled that of locusts descending on a field. And in many cases, the eviction of Native peoples occurred not because of the creation of parks,Ìębut before the parks were even created. The choice, then, was not between a park and a Native settlement, but between parkland and private land.

John D. Leshy, a public-land expert and frequent visiting professor at Harvard, pointed this out in his at the University of Utah: “How the U.S. acquired clear title to these lands from foreign governments and tribes is a complicated story and, especially where Indians are concerned, certainly one with a dark side. But it took place largely in advance of, and separate from, the movement to keep significant amounts of public land permanently in U.S. ownership.”

What if parks had not been created? There was no obvious reason they should have been. After all, it had never happened before in any other country. Where would we be then? While parks and other preserves might have been wrongly romanticized and, to some extent, built on false principles, they were, on a practical level, an attempt, an often desperate attempt, to stop our hunger from despoiling our last beautiful places. And whether or not our parks are “America’s best idea,” the idea of putting land aside, of not developing it, was inspired. Scholars can sneer at parks if they like, but without them and the habitats they provide, thousands more species would have been lost. If it was an idea mired in the prejudices of its time, it was also one that looked beyond those prejudices toward the future.

I believe that the park ideal, the public-land ideal, still has something great and bold in it. We need to acknowledge its historic flaws and current limitations. But if we reimagine it, we can make it newly relevant for our own times. Bears Ears National MonumentÌędoes just this. Bears Ears was the first national monument to fully grow out of the thinking, support, and political power of Native American tribes. This is why its proclamation, at the very end of Obama’s presidency, was such a clear moment of hope. And why its massive reduction, by 85Ìępercent, under Donald Trump, was so painful for so many. If America’s national parks are “our best idea,” Bears Ears was a better idea. Whatever the limited attitudes of those who created parks, something akin to a Native American attitude toward the landÌęand its sacrednessÌęhad always been floating around in the minds of those who fought to preserve this country’s public lands. This was true even if their behavior when it came to actual Native Americans didn’t reflect this. But until Bears Ears, actual IndigenousÌęthinking played little part in the creation of our national monuments. Our policy toward public land had mostly ignored those who had lived longest on that land and for whom that land was sacred. The proclamation of Bears Ears as a national monument was the first step in recognizing the wrongness of this and of putting forth a new vision. Trump’s destruction of this ideal was a bitter assault on this vision.

But that doesn’t mean that the vision has faded. We need to hold to that vision and to remember that preserving land is not some antiquated idea that plays no role in the current fight. We need some places that are not shattered, fracked, and torn apart. We need to let places heal, not just to save our present but in the hopes of a future different from the one scientists tell us is coming. And as we look toward the future, we shouldn’t abandon the past.Ìę

One of Theodore Roosevelt’s great legacies, not as great as the land itself but far from insignificant, was giving us a story to tell ourselves about this country and its land. To revise Roosevelt’s story for our time, we must take what was best about it, discard what doesn’t fit, and add the new. What Theodore Roosevelt left us with was a story of wilderness and wildness. It’s a damn good story, one that has worked quite effectively for over a century. There are flaws in the story, some due to the times he lived in and some due to his own biases. Roosevelt is dead, and so he can’t revise his story. That is up to us. We need to tell a new story about wilderness for a new time. With any luck, we can tell a story half as inspired as his. We likely won’t. But we must try. We owe it to the land and to the animals and to our children to try.

Copyright © 2020 by David Gessner. From the book , by David Gessner, to be published by Simon &ÌęSchuster, Inc on August 11. Printed by permission.

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It all starts with . This is the origin story—when separates himself from the pack and becomes just Beau in ultimate circles. Watch the video at normal speed and you ­almost miss it. But slow it down and you can see the moment unfold. A player in a yellow jersey throws the disc half the length of the field—some 35 yards. One of his teammates is chasing it down, running at full speed, stride for stride with a defender in a black shirt and white baseball cap. They close in on the disc as it arcs and floats down. Then, suddenly, another player in yellow ­appears—Kittredge. He’s taller than the others and moving faster, but he’s out of position, the defender blocking his path. He has no chance. Kittredge jumps anyway, and an astonishing thing happens: his legs are now on either side of the white baseball hat. At the peak of his leap, he catches the disc, then lands in front of the man who, a half-second before, he wasÌębehind. He pauses a beat, then, as surprised as everyone else, turns to the sideline and asks, “Did I go over łóŸ±łŸ?”

24 Hours With Beau Kittredge

The fittest athlete you’ve never heard of is an ultimate Frisbee player. Here’s what a day in his life looks like.

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Yes.

The play happened in 2006, two years ­after Kittredge led the University of ­Colorado ultimate team to its first national collegiate championship. At six-foot-four and 205 pounds, with a 39-inch vertical leap and a 400 time of 47.4 seconds, he was the arche­type of a new kind of athlete that now increasingly defines the sport. In recent years, a game that used to be confused with that thing you play with dogs has undergone a significant transformation. Universities are pouring tens of thousands into ultimate programs for both men and women, while has spawned teams in 24 cities across the United States. Some seven million people play ultimate worldwide.

For more than a decade, Kittredge has been the sport’s Michael Jordan, winning championships and capturing MVP awards. At 34, he remains the most dominant player, though a younger generation of rising stars are poised to surpass him. They train like Olympians, many following regimens that Kittredge pioneered.Ìę

When Kittredge made the Catch, he was seen as the culmination of decades of growing athleticism in the sport. Today we know better. He was a glimpse of its future.

Every sport needs a legendary ­founder, its , and ultimate’s was , the Hollywood producer who would give the world Lethal Weapon and The Matrix. In the summer of 1968, Silver was a brash high school student from Jersey whose parents sent him to smart-kid summer camp at a prep school in western Massachusetts. There, on the campus of Mount Hermon, ­behind an imposing gray dorm that looked like it could have been built by Josef Stalin, was a slightly elevated field where a ­counselor named ­Jared Kass taught Silver and other boys a game with a Frisbee that ­resembled touch football. Silver brought it back when he returned to Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, that fall. The earliest games were played at night in the high school’s overflow parking lot. The ­decidedly social and co-ed contests often lasted until the police came, after nearby residents complained about the noise. It was a major hangout for geeks: members of the football team drove by and threw eggs at them.

Silver and friends stuck an adjective in front of a brand name and suddenly there was something called ultimate Frisbee. (The “Frisbee” would be dropped in the late eighties.) While the founder left the game behind, others took it with them to college, becoming what Silver would call “the Johnny Apple­seeds of ultimate.” A real sport emerged, with teams of seven playing on a 70-yard field with two 25-yard-deep end zones. When a player caught the disc, he or she had to establish a pivot foot and throw it within ten seconds. If it was dropped or knocked down, play instantly changed direction, ­offense becoming defense.Ìę

By 1975, Princeton, Rutgers, and Tufts were among the 30 colleges to have teams. Few schools offered funding, so players piled into cars and traveled around the northeast for weekend tournaments, usually crashing on the floor of a friend’s place for the night. There were no coaches, no managers, and no trainers, but there was lots of partying and just enough organization to keep the events going. When Rutgers players began wearing numbered jerseys, the entire Tufts team responded by donning shirts with “3” on the back. Soon, ultimate sprang up on the West Coast, but it was a slightly different game; the two versions evolved independently, like bands of Homo sapiens living over the hill from tribes of Neanderthals. The best players, East and West, kept playing after college on club teams with names like the ­Hostages and Rude Boys, competing in a national championship organized by the newly formed .

The grainy film that remains from that first decade, of players with long hair and short-shorts, does not reveal a record of stunning athleticism. There were still nerds aplenty, and hippies, too, with the wafting smell of pot giving the game its signature aroma. But there were exceptions, like , a D-1 basketball ­player from Bucknell who had been ­recruited by hoops legend , then quit in his jun­ior year when a new coach took over. Edwards discovered ulti­mate and gathered a band of disgruntled varsity athletes to form the Mudsharks. He showed people what things could look like when someone capable of a reverse dunk went up for the disc.Ìę

“When my team was in trouble, they’d just put it up to me in the end zone,” Edwards says now. “But I learned quickly that this was a really demanding sport with all that ground you had to cover.”

The game back then was still relatively primitive, with players disdaining set plays in favor of a more mystical sense of “flow” and training almost entirely by scrimmaging. But the best athletes had an early sense of the possibilities—the way you could throw a disc at an infinite number of angles, causing it to hang in the air, arc around a defender, blade overhead in a vast parabola, or even rise from just above the grass into the hands of a sprinting teammate. There was a bumper sticker at the time that read, “When a Ball Dreams, it Dreams it’s a ­Frisbee.” That got at it a little. The physics of it.

In the eighties, when I ­beganÌęplaying, a less groovy sort of ultimate took hold, with points mattering more than flow. There were still no coaches, but teams ­adopted drills and track workouts. This culminated in a tough-­minded club team called New York, New York, which won six national championships and was featured in Sports Illustrated. Ultimate, according to the article, required that a player “have the quickness of a basketball point guard, the ­finesse of a hockey center, the blocking techniques of a football guard and the reactions of a soccer goalie.” The exploits of New York, New York were recently exhumed in , a documentary made by Dennis Warsen, the Beau of his day, and narrated by Alec Baldwin.

By the early nineties, the athletes were getting better and hundreds of colleges had teams, but the sport still refused to grow up. This came to a head when Jose Cuervo sponsored some ultimate tournaments for the best club teams. Dee Rambeau, a great ultimate player who also ran track at SMU, had been involved as a promoter in the early days of beach volleyball. He set up a series of ultimate tournaments for Cuervo with cash prizes and the hope of real TV coverage.Ìę

But many players rebelled, balking at wearing numbered uniforms and insisting on smoking joints on the sideline. At one tournament after-party, the sponsors offered free tequila for a couple of hours, then tried to close things down. Players climbed over the bar and poured themselves shots. Ultimate clearly wasn’t ready for prime time. “If you can’t sell the sport to a tequila company, who can you sell it to?” Rambeau asked.

The first timeÌęI saw Beau Kittredge play was at club nationals in Frisco, Texas, in 2015. I hadn’t been to a real ultimate tournament in two decades, and everything looked cleaner and shinier. A legitimate stadium, players in uniforms, and sideline boutiques selling discs and workout clothes. All the teams had coaches, and many had trainers.Ìę

It was all part of a recent, broad maturation of the game. In 2012, a bona fide professional body was created, the American Ultimate Disc League, and colleges were taking the sport seriously. At Harvard, the men’s and women’s club teams now have endowments of $250,000. Just a few months before the Frisco tournament, the International Olympic Committee recognized ultimate as a contender for the Summer Games.

I was immediately struck by the athleticism of the players—how fast they moved, the accuracy of their throws. But then the wind came up, causing things to get sloppy, and I thought, Maybe I can still do this.

That dream died as I watched the semi­finals. Kittredge’s team, the , which arrived at the nationals having won the championship three out of the previous five years, took on a Chicago club called the Machine. They played at night, ­under the lights, and it was clear that this was a different sport than the one I remembered. Kittredge cruised around the field shark-like, only deploying his speed when needed. There was something restrained about his game, coiled—“power in repose,” as John Keats put it. He displayed similar control during team huddles, keeping to the outer edges instead of going in for a lot of jumping around and high-fiving.Ìę

“I’m not that rah-rah,” he explained when I asked him about it on the sideline. “I guess I feel my energy could be spent in better ways.”

When he wasn’t playing, Kittredge came across as a little removed from everything—a step back. The one exception was when he talked trash to his teammates. Suddenly, his whole character would light up. When I pointed this out to him later in the tournament, he laughed: “It’s just another way of showing people you care for them.”

Late in the semifinal, Kittredge ran long for a throw into the end zone. Unlike in his famous YouTube catch, this time he was going up against two athletic players, one of them his height. The defenders had a bead on the disc, but Kittredge took his speed up a notch and then, most impressive, jumped with his off foot and calmly plucked the disc out of the air with his left hand.

As I would learn, he had practiced that play—right-foot jump, left-hand grab—thousands of times. That kind of repetition, unheard of in ultimate until somewhat recently, has become essential as the game has evolved and players have focused on specialized skills. While Kittredge had great throws, there were guys on his team who had even better ones, so he had accepted his place as go-to receiver. “People think he’s a superstar,” Mike Payne, the Revolver’s coach, said after the game. “But he is really the best role player on the team.” And, Payne added, he works harder than everyone else.

Growing up in Fairbanks, Alaska, in the eighties and nineties, Kittredge had a difficult home life. He funneled his frustrations into sports, competing in everything from cross-country skiing to speed-skating to hockey to ultimate, which he started playing when he was ten. After high school, while hopscotching around the lower 48, he helped a friend move to Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 2002. On a whim, Kittredge played in an ­ultimate tournament with a ­local team that ended up winning the final, mostly by hucking deep to him. Players from the University of Colorado wereÌęimpressed and asked him to practice with them. Soon the team offered him an athletic scholarship, one of the first in ultimate history, contingent on Kittredge going back to community college to raise his GPA.Ìę

“He was so much more athletic than the rest of us,” says Martin Cochran, Kittredge’s roommate and teammate at Boulder. “But he also worked out more and really pushed us. He talked shit all the time about how fat and slow and lazy I was. It bugged me, but I got in the best shape of my life.” Living with Kittredge, ­Cochran also eventually came to understand his standoffish personality. “For a lot of people, Beau’s an enigma,” he told me. “He pushes people away to find out who he can trust.”Ìę

Inspired by a book on explosiveness drills for football players, Kittredge and Cochran started spending at least 12 hours a week in the gym. Soon they were doing 360 dunks and could touch their heads to nine-and-a-half-foot ceilings.

But strength only goes so far in ultimate, where players can sprint more than 20 miles over the course of a tournament. So Kittredge turned to the track. While ­doing laps during his senior year, he noticed someone running faster and went over to say hello. It was James Davis, who had been a receiver for Colorado’s 1995 football team and later won the United States indoor championships in the 400 with a time of 45.5. Kittredge said he was looking to get faster, and the two hit it off. With Davis’s coaching help, he was soon running 400’s in 47.4 seconds.

“He’s a freakish athlete,” says Davis. “It was amazing what he did with virtually zero track background.”

Over the next decade, Kittredge would refine his workout regimen into a combination of weights, interval training, and plyometrics. His efforts helped earn him back-to-back MVP awards in 2014 and 2015 while playing for the .

On the last day at club nationals, ­Revolver pulled away from the Seattle Sockeye for their fourth title. Kittredge flew around the field, doing casual 50-yard sprints while his defender tried to keep up with him. But it was his teammate Cassidy Rasmussen who had the play of the game, throwing his body through the air to snag the tail end of a blading disc for a goal.

“I work Cassidy out almost every day,” Kittredge told ESPN after the game. “So seeing him do that sort of thing is like seeing your son do something phenomenal.”

And yetÌęit’s still Frisbee.Ìę

It’s a Sunday in mid-January, and I’m standing on a storm-wracked beach in ­Santa Monica watching Kittredge chase after discs like an oversize border collie. Gulls and pelicans wheel off-shore, and rain slashes across the sand. While I can barely make out the lights of the famous Ferris wheel on the pier, the weather hasn’t stopped , one of the world’s largest beach-ultimate tournaments. (The name is a play on lay out, the ­ultimate term for diving to catch a disc.) There are 160 fields here, filled with thousands of players, stretched over six miles.Ìę

Beach ultimate is a more relaxed version of the field sport. On the first day, one team wore hazmat suits for uniforms. Early this morning, I was in the lobby of my hotel when a player, wearing only shorts and handcuffs, was ushered in by a policeman after spending the night in the clink for partying too hard on the beach.

Kittredge is with Team , named after an organi­zation that promotes the early detection of cancer. It’s funded by Jim Gerencser, an ultimate player from the 1980s who later ­founded Nationwide Auto Services and last year paid Kittredge $50,000 to play for his pro team, the . Kittredge’s ultimate earnings help him afford a room in a San Francisco apartment he shares with Cassidy Rasmussen and a member of the Polish national beach-ultimate team. The three men center their lives on training, though Kittredge has recently been developing mobile video games, an offshoot of an earlier interest in writing children’s books. (He self-published five.) Kittredge failed to ­secure funding for his first game, but he seems committed to the effort. “It’s the first time in my life I love doing something as much as ultimate,” he tells me at Lei-Out.Ìę

Yesterday, E.R.I.C. went undefeated, but today they lose in the semifinals. Kittredge takes the loss surprisingly hard. “I’m ultracompetitive,” he tells me. “I don’t always have fun at ‘fun’ tournaments.”

We retreat to the mustard-colored beach house where a number of players are crashing. As we crack open beers on the deck, I ask Kittredge what drives him to play so much ultimate. “I’m obviously not in it for the money,” he says, laughing. He cites what so many players from across generations do: the community. “All the friendships I’ve made from playing form a network spreading over the country and now the world. It’s almost tribal.”Ìę

Tribal certainly describes the scene inside the house, which is crammed with some 40 drenched athletes. Mattresses and sleeping bags cover every spot not taken by wet clothes. Most of the players are in their twenties, and it’s clear they’re following Kittredge’s lead when it comes to training. Among them is , who learned to throw in the Denver youth leagues back when he was five-two and 100 pounds. He’s now a cut six-four. On the first day of Lei-Out, I watched him throw a field-length fore­hand into the wind for a goal.

Signs abound that Kittredge’s days as the game’s best player are numbered. In February, a pro team, the , signed Marquis Mason, a former wide receiver for the Division 1 University of Wisconsin football team. Jakeem Polk, a star cornerback at Wingate University who for the past two years has played for the pro Charlotte Express, recently had one of his leaping catches on SportsCenter.Ìę

At Lei-Out, though, Kittredge was still king, and opposing teams went all out against him. In the quarterfinal, a young player, as tall and fast as Kittredge, dived Superman-style to tip away a disc just before Kittredge caught it. He celebrated the moment, and maybe the game’s future, by jumping up from the sand, thrusting his arms over his head, and bellowing: “I just got a block on Beau fucking Kittredge!”Ìę

David Gessner’s memoir, , is out in June.Ìę

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THE PROPHET AND I return to the drowned city. Trailing robes behind him, he will point his wooden staff at the places where the waters rose, the subway steps turned into rapids, and the cross streets became fast-flowing inlets. He'll gesture toward the river, explaining how it was pushed back by the winds and tide, how the full moon affected this most modern of places. Four years ago, when he pointed at these same spots and told me what was going to happen to New York City, I only half believed him. Now I believe, along with everyone else. We have seen it with our own eyes.

The prophet's name is Orrin Pilkey, and his day job, for many years, was as a coastal geologist at Duke University, where he started teaching in 1965 and is now a professor emeritus. (Duke is honoring him by building a $6.8 million marine-science center in Beaufort, North Carolina, with his name on it.) In lectures and in 40 books—including 2009's doom-laden , cowritten with fellow coastal geologist Rob Young—Orrin has issued steady warnings about the dangers of living by the shore during an era of climate change. At a time when everyone seems to be using military terminology to describe our battle against the attacking ocean, he has a term of his own: retreat.

“The storms will only get worse as the seas rise and grow hotter,” says Orrin, who at 78 doesn't really have robes or a staff but does sport a prophet's bushy white beard. “This is just the beginning. We need to retreat from the coast.”

Abandon the coast? We're doing just the opposite: these days almost 30 percent of the U.S. population lives by the shore. We've flocked there despite the dangers, treating the wild edge between land and water like it's suburbia, as if shifting sands and rising waters will naturally respect property lines.

Particularly appalling for Orrin is what's happening now in New Jersey, where emotional cries to rebuild at all costs started the morning after Sandy roared through. The $60 billion federal aid package—hastily passed by Congress last winter—specified that a significant portion of the funding should go toward what the bill called the “most impacted and distressed areas.” As Orrin points out, this means using taxpayer money to rebuild in flood zones, on the same spots that were just wiped out. Which is a little like rebuilding on a train track.

I first met Orrin when I moved to a barrier island in North Carolina ten years ago. After enduring two or three hurricanes, I started taking an interest in coastal issues, and one name kept coming up during my research. I called Orrin to interview him in 2007, and he invited me to travel the Outer Banks with him, to examine the places that would be most vulnerable during future storms. We hit it off, and in May of 2009 we took another trip, this time to New York, where Orrin predicted, down to the exact subway stop, what would happen if a major came through.

A few months after Sandy, I suggested a new trip, one that started in North Carolina and took us through most of the worst-hit areas in New Jersey and New York. He was game, and we made arrangements to travel in late February and early March, when winter was lifting and springtime recovery efforts would be moving into high gear.

ORRIN AND I are both early risers and big coffee drinkers, and when I ask if I can show up at his house in Durham at six on the Sunday morning of February 24—our launch day—he says fine, he'll have a pot brewing. An hour later we're on the road, having also picked up Jeremy Lange, our photographer. We head east through the flats of North Carolina toward the ocean. When we are still more than a hundred miles from the shore, the land begins to look sunken, a great bowl of a place filled with pond-size puddles from recent rains.

“People worry about the beach and the cities because that's where the money is,” Orrin says. “But if the seas rise seven feet, this is all underwater, too.”

A hundred different amounts have been predicted for sea-level rise by the year 2100, and Orrin stresses that his is a “working number,” not a prediction. But he believes that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's original estimate of a three-foot rise was too conservative, not taking into account the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. When I contacted Jim Hansen, the former head of NASA's and an internationally recognized climate-change expert, he replied that Orrin's was a “good choice, in my opinion,” as we prepare for what's coming.

Orrin is always hungry, so we stop at a restaurant to gobble down ham and eggs, then fuel up, as is our tradition, on McDonald's coffee. We cross over to Manteo, near where our country's only wild population of red wolves roam, before taking the next bridge to the Outer Banks, the barrier islands that arc into the Atlantic like a fragile shield.

If we're going down, this place is going down first. But that hasn't stopped rampant development, a kind of sprawling, rich-man's ghetto along the shore. South of Nags Head, we pull over at a spot Orrin wants to show us. A dozen or so houses stand out on the low-tide sand; they appear to be migrating into the sea. We walk below them, gazing up at old rusted doors that open to nothing and stairs that dangle in the air.

Orrin points out that this is the third generation of homes to have marched into the ocean here, where the beach has receded dramatically from storm erosion. But new homes are still being built. No more than 50 feet from the ocean, we come upon a concrete septic tank half-buried in the sand, a great square sepulchral tomb of shit. Orrin kicks it.

At first it was thought Sandy would make landfall on the Outer Banks, not the Jersey Shore. If that had happened, the destruction would have been old hat. Back in the 1970s, Orrin and other coastal scientists watched all the houses going up around here and figured that, once the first hurricane blew through, people would know better than to rebuild. Instead, hurricanes became what Orrin calls “giant urban-renewal projects.” The wind would barely die down before new construction started.

We drive south to the famous Cape Hatteras lighthouse, which Orrin and others fought to have moved back 2,900 feet from the eroding shore in the late 1990s, despite the fact that many North Carolinians found the retreat unmanly. “There was one powerful local woman who was virulently opposed to moving it,” Orrin tells us as we approach. “She said, 'Someone is going to get hurt if they move it.' A fellow scientist misunderstood and tried to reassure her. 'No, Mrs. Dillon, we can move it perfectly safely.' I had to explain that that was not what she meant.”

We pull in at the lighthouse and walk from where it was first built in 1870 to where it was moved in 1999. It rises above us like a giant barber pole. “Mrs. Dillon always claimed that moving the lighthouse killed her husband,” Orrin says. “The stress, you know.”

I ask if Mrs. Dillon has also passed away.

“She's still alive. Unfortunately.”

People who build on the beach aren't always thrilled with Orrin's message, since his bottom line is: You shouldn't be here. He tells them that their natural urge to defend themselves, to build a wall or pile up sandbags against the encroaching water, is wrong. That by building barriers they're keeping the beach from doing what it wants to do, what it needs to do, which is to move up and over itself in a slow natural roll that speeds up dramatically when a storm hits. This movement is how barrier islands have always defended themselves from storms, through a kind of elemental rope-a-dope.

We decide to spend the night in Nags Head at the Comfort Inn, a high-rise. The choice of lodging is both ironic and apt, since it epitomizes the kind of building that should never happen along the shore. Buildings like this take away all flexibility, because they can't be moved.

“That's why I worry that Florida is due for a truly epic disaster,” Orrin says. “What can you do when you have hundreds of miles of high-rises on your shoreline?”

Orrin never set out to become a coastal advocate. He was a low-profile deep-sea sedimentologist until the late 1970s, when he did a stint on a research vessel off the Atlantic coast with a fellow scientist named Jack Pierce. During their downtime, the two men played cards and talked, and Jack described to Orrin how people were building vacation homes on unstable shorelines and then expecting the government to bail them out when storms inevitably came. Pierce found this puzzling, but Orrin's reaction was more visceral. He was outraged, and that outrage changed the course of his career.

Orrin began to research the way we arm our shores, and the result was a 1975 book called , his earliest attempt to express his philosophy of retreating from the beaches. He got a lot of responses—many of them very angry, which he didn't mind. “I learned that I really like stirring things up,” he says.

He's been doing it ever since. Even in retirement, Orrin is still fully engaged with coastal issues, rumbling through his days like a middle linebacker. He does this with both gusto and a sense of humor, jokingly referring to himself as “world famous.” During our travels, he points at a sign on the beach that reads DO NOT ENTER and says, “That doesn't apply to us.”

WE SLEEP TO the rhythm of the ocean splashing against heaped piles of sandbags. In the morning, we drive north to the Audubon Sanctuary in Corolla, North Carolina, where Orrin is impressed by the sanctuary's attempt to fight erosion with oyster beds and other soft defenses. Over the long haul, hard defenses like seawalls and rock jetties tend to destroy not just beaches but also the ecosystems of fish, birds, and crabs that help make the islands what they are. One of the high points of Orrin's career came in 1985 when North Carolina, pushed by the state's scientists, outlawed the building of new hard coastal armaments.

Our next stop, two hours up the road past swampy Virginia lowlands, is Norfolk, a place that has become a model for how coastal cities might adapt to climate change. At Old Dominion University, we talk with Larry Atkinson, a professor of oceanography and an old colleague of Orrin's, who outlines what's going on here. Sandy barely grazed Norfolk but still left it under three feet of water. The town is used to flooding: through an unlucky combination of low elevation, subsiding land, and rising sea level, downtown streets are often submerged.

Larry says that he's been impressed by Norfolk's mayor, Paul Fraim. Rather than debating sea-level rise, he has “jumped over it” as a political issue, simply declaring that Norfolk has to prepare for rising seas. In North Carolina, members of the state legislature, pressured by real estate interests, have argued that climate change should not be factored into sea-level rise by state regulators. Virginia has followed suit, with one state senator claiming that the phrase is a “left-wing term” and suggesting it be replaced by “recurrent flooding.” But here in Norfolk, leaders know the problem is urgent, and they have a powerful ally: the U.S. military. Right down the street is the biggest naval base in the world, where a massive project is under way to raise the docks. Here, sea level isn't a conservative or liberal matter but a practical one.

We thank Larry and head north, crossing the Bay Bridge to the Delmarva Peninsula, the big swath of land east of Chesapeake Bay that's home to stunning coastal portions of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. Our plan is to spend the night in Ocean City, Maryland, and then drive to Lewes, Delaware. From there we'll take the ferry across the Delaware Bay and into New Jersey.

Sandy's most publicized damage began just to the north of us, but of course the storm came into being far south of here. Like many tropical depressions, it first boiled up from the ever warming waters of the Caribbean. It started as a tropical depression on October 22, 2012, and by the end of the day was declared a tropical storm, capable of producing sustained winds of up to 73 miles per hour.

On October 24, Sandy hit Jamaica, the first major hurricane to strike that island in more than 20 years, tearing roofs off buildings on the eastern shore. By the time it made landfall in eastern Cuba, 110-mph winds were pushing 29-foot waves, and storm surge added another six feet. Sandy's eastern flank submerged large parts of Haiti, killing more than 50 people.

The Bahamas and Bermuda were luckier: the winds had slowed by then, but there were still massive power outages. After that, Sandy looked to be heading directly toward my coastal home at the mouth of North Carolina's Cape Fear River, but then it bulged eastward, changing from a straight arrow into a crude question mark, arcing eastward before gradually circling back toward New Jersey. By then the winds had slowed, but it wasn't wind speed that would define Sandy in the north but duration, timing, and size.

Sandy would end up second only to Hurricane Katrina as the most expensive storm to hit the U.S. But while Katrina's maximum winds were felt over a coastal area of 300 miles, Sandy's spread out over 900. The shore became, in surfer's parlance, stacked up—tremendous amounts of water pushed toward the beaches, bays, and inland estuaries, unable to recede until the winds slackened. Sandy's huge size and water push, not the ferocity of its winds, are what made it a historic monster.

ON TUESDAY MORNING, the third day of our trip, we drive across the bridge onto Long Beach Island, New Jersey, 30 miles north of where Sandy made landfall. Five years ago, I took a tour of this island with a former student of Orrin's, a geologist and coastal planner named Sue Halsey. Sue showed me how poorly designed the streets were, running straight from the island's ocean side to its bay side, so flat you could roll a bowling ball down them. When a storm hit, she predicted, the waters would rush in and turn those streets into powerful streams.

Which is exactly what happened on the night of October 29. The winds came in from the northeast and turned with the storm, gusting to 80 mph and sustained at 60 for about three hours. Sandy's landfall coincided with high tide on the night of a full moon. Water and sand churned down the streets; houses were bullied off their foundations, left in splinters, knocked clean across the island and out into Barnegat Bay.

We drive to the end of 82nd Street to examine the artificially built seaside dunes. Without the 14-to-16-foot-tall dunes, the damage to the homes would have been much worse, but they weren't placed consistently. Some homeowners refused to sign the easement that allowed dunes to be built in front of their homes, complaining that because of their height they ruined the ocean views.

We run into Dennis and Sean Cleary, father and son, who grew up right here on 82nd. Dennis is a tall man in his late forties who owns a construction business; Sean is heading off soon for the Air Force. Like everyone else, they're still digging out four months later, but unlike most, they rode out the storm.

“I was on the damage-evaluation team,” Dennis says. “When we drove around the next day, we saw no houses where houses used to be. But there was this hissing noise. The gas lines hadn't been shut off yet and were spewing gas.”

They drove down streets covered with four or five feet of sand. Single-lane roads would eventually get cut through the sand, which was piled up in roadside banks like snow.

“This guy didn't sign the easement,” Sean says, pointing at a neighbor's crumpled home. His destroyed house came unmoored and took out the house behind it, which belonged to a friend of theirs.

Since the storm, most locals have gotten the dune religion, but a few still refuse to sign the easements, even though governor Chris Christie has made it clear that huge protective sand barriers up and down the Jersey Shore are a major priority for him. On our drive to the north end of the island, we pass a sign that reads PROTECT YOUR TOWN. EIGHTEEN EASEMENTS UNSIGNED.

“A monumentally selfish act,” Orrin says. “These idiots are still worried about their views.” Then he starts shaking his head. “It's hopeless anyway,” he says.

I ask what he means.

“An island that's flat as a pool table, with only a seven-foot elevation straight across.” To Orrin, dune building is just a stopgap. “Now is not the time,” he says, “to simply hold the shoreline in place without giving some thought to the long term.”

He's right, no doubt, but this fact hasn't given pause to many people.

Back in December, governor Christie and others howled in protest when a group of fiscally conservative Republicans in Congress threatened to slow down Sandy's massive relief bill. But in the fever to do something—”There's no quit in Jersey!”—staggering amounts of money were thrown at the problem, including $5.4 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers to build berms and dunes to protect coastal towns.

“Yup, this place is hopeless,” Orrin repeats, this time with more enthusiasm.

“That's not much of a political platform,” I say.

He smiles. “Of course, it's not to be said out loud around actual people.”

At the north end of the island, we find one positive sight. The beach at Barnegat Light makes us remember why people love the coast in the first place. We walk through acres of dunes carved like sculpture, dotted with beach heather, juniper, and twisted oaks. Wind blows and whitecaps boil, and the dunes themselves seem to be rolling in like steep waves. This beach is not entirely natural, since it has grown thanks mostly to the presence of a jetty to the north. But it is an example of how a human community, by showing some restraint and common sense, can let nature work for them.

At our hotel that night, Orrin joins me for a beer. I ask him about his writing career, and he tells me he's had two main motivators: fame and glory (“of course”) and advancing a cause.

I'm down with the first, not so much with the second. I tell him, perhaps a little pompously, that my goal as a writer is to present the messy complexity of what I see. Earlier today we passed an exit for Corson's Inlet, a protected coastal reserve in Cape May County. Now I quote A. R. Ammons, who wrote a famous poem about the beach there that contains the phrase “no humbling of reality to precept.”

Orrin likes the phrase but asks me to express it in plain English. “It means that reality is messy and rules don't always apply,” I say. “That ideas about a place should evolve from a particular place.”

Orrin gives that a “hmmph.” He doesn't think of writing in this way. In fact, he no longer even defines himself as a scientist. “I'm a scientific advocate,” he says.

Scientists are vital, and Orrin has been a good one, but in this world where scientific truths are often ignored, someone needs to help make them heard. That's Orrin's job. It requires a quick tongue, a thick skin, the toughness to sit in a town meeting where everyone is readying the torches, and the wit to get out of there alive.

THE NEXT DAY, we get a look at Mantoloking, in north central New Jersey, ground zero for Sandy destruction. Our guides are Cathy Totin and her son, Matt, who live just to the north in Point Pleasant Beach. Cathy is out-going, a longtime resident of Point Pleasant and a fount of local knowledge. Matt is a self-described weather maven who studied Orrin's books in college and casually drops phrases like “downdrift erosion” and “wave action.”

We meet them at their small barracks-style home, on a side street 200 feet from the shore. The flooding stopped one house short of them on the ocean side, but they spent weeks digging out, dumping all the sand in the street, where it was then moved by state emergency workers with backhoes and trucks.

“The high tide was everything here,” Matt says. “Eleven feet was our previous record, but this one was 13.5. The full moon accounted for the extra feet.”

“The power was out for weeks,” Cathy says. “Then, finally, I had everything fixed but the cable. One day a Cablevision truck pulled up on the street. I was excited, but the Cable-vision guy went to the back of the truck and took out his surfboard.”

“The waves were really great after the storm,” Matt says.

Matt shows us the neighborhood, where many houses are being built on stilts, the way it's long been done in North Carolina. Matt explains that the zoning here has changed and that homes now must be raised to be insured.

Raising a house can cost more than $100,000, on top of substantial boosts in flood insurance, not to mention the cost of rebuilding itself. But many will decide it's worth it. “One guy up near Mantoloking had his house up on stilts already,” Matt tells us. “Everyone bitched and moaned about the way it looked. But his house survived.”

Orrin's hope, so far unfulfilled, is that raw economics might stop the rebuilding eventually. But the land itself is so expensive—Cathy's postage-stamp lot is worth around $450,000, the house only $150,000—that few are likely to just give up and walk away.

Before we drive down to Mantoloking, we're joined by Sue Halsey, who I last saw five years ago when we toured Long Beach Island. Her license plate—4Dune—announces her beach politics, and she, opinionated and brash, announces herself.

We all climb into Cathy's SUV, chattering about coastal issues until we hit Mantoloking, where all talking stops. Four months after the storm, the place still looks like it was just bombed. Huge mansions lie splintered. Some houses are cracked in half with their innards revealed: TVs, rugs, lamps, books, and furniture.

State police watch from every corner, keeping drivers from stopping, gawking, and looting, which was a problem early on. We park, get a press pass, and walk down the devastated streets. The first house we come to slumps into the bay, half on land and half in the water, and the second lacks a front wall: we peek in at a dining room where everything is shattered except for a still-hanging chandelier. Out in the middle of the bay, a house floats, listing to starboard.

Cathy tells us that when she first saw this wreckage last week, she cried. Orrin isn't crying, but he isn't gloating, either. He has more sympathy with these residents than those of the Outer Banks, since here they had less historical reason to expect such a storm.

Matt says there's always a certain element of randomness to hurricanes. “Look at this house,” he says. “It's untouched. The grill still sitting in the backyard. And now look at this one.” The house next door looks like it's been chopped into tiny pieces by a team of manic lumberjacks.

“The rich got hit the hardest,” Orrin says. “The best houses got it worst.”

It's true. Those who chose to live right next to the sea learned a little about the consequences of doing so.

I wander off alone to the beach, thinking that the ocean isn't really the enemy. No one wants to defeat it, and no one with any sense thinks they can. People build homes here because they love its wildness and beauty. But uncertainty is the reality of the seaside realm. Is it unpatriotic to suggest that respecting a storm's primal force, even getting out of its way, is a better idea than fighting it?

During the thousands of years of human existence, living by the sea has always been a gamble, carrying with it a decent chance of being wiped out. That's why the shore was often merely a migratory destination, a place to move to during the milder months and away from during the stormier ones. We used to build shacks here; now we build mansions. Orrin is saying we should give up on building anything at all. But as someone who lives by the sea, I know it isn't that simple.

THE FOLLOWING morning, our procession rolls into New York City. Sand and empty coffee cups litter the floor of our rental car, which has taken on the feeling of a dark, dank cave.

Four years ago when we traveled here, Orrin noted the particular dynamics of the Hudson River, how if the tides and winds were right it could back up over the wall at Battery Park—which is exactly what happened the night of October 29, just before the lights died. During that earlier trip, Orrin precisely described how the New York subways would fill up—a problem that could be fixed with elevated entrances. More interesting to me was his description of the straight streets crossing the island east to west, how they were good for finding your way in the city but bad for flooding, since they ushered the water in.

“These people don't seem to understand that they are living on an island in a time of rising seas,” Orrin said. “That what happened isn't nearly as bad as what will come.”

“What will come?” is the trillion-dollar question. While few scientists will say that climate change has definitely led to fiercer storms, most will privately acknowledge what common sense suggests: warmer waters will lead to more and stronger hurricanes.

We park on the Lower East Side and walk along Water Street, which during Sandy was flooded by a storm-swollen East River. It's a street that, if Orrin's predictions are right, will be permanently underwater by the end of this century—with or without a hurricane.

I have a friend who lives in Manhattan who says the lesson learned from the storm was New York's remarkable permeability. She was amazed at how the whole place was soaked through and yet up and running a few weeks later. And it's true that lower Manhattan looks pretty good at first—no obvious damage of the sort we saw on Mantoloking.

But look closer and you see clear signs of lasting problems, starting with the rectangular placards in building windows, notices of evacuation and closing and condemnation. As we walk farther south, descending almost to sea level, Orrin points out the water marks on the sides of buildings, five or six feet up. He mentions that many of the city's 14 wastewater plants sit at the water's edge and have outfall pipes at sea level. During storms those outfalls quickly become infalls, sending sewage backward into the pipes, guaranteeing not just deadly disasters but smelly ones. Where we are now was briefly a lake during Sandy, one made up of millions of gallons of water, sewage, fuel, and everything else the sea swept up. We stop and talk to a store owner who confirms this, describing how he watched mannequins from Abercrombie and Fitch bob by in the water.

The administration of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is trying to address the problem of sewage and water treatment, and to push innovative projects like 12-foot-high removable steel walls. On a national level, President Obama is committed to a rebuilding plan that focuses on resilience and green infrastructure. But many of the solutions are vague, and none will do much good if the seas rise seven feet.

Orrin is hungry and tired. We climb John Street and decide to eat at a place called the Open Door Gastropub. We sit down, ready to feast, but then on a hunch I go to the bar and start a conversation with a man who turns out to be the owner. “You gotta see this,” John Ronaghan says, and so we abandon our table and follow him down narrow stairs to a cramped cellar where the water flowed in. I imagine this place on the night of the storm: to get to the olives, you would have had to swim underwater like Shelley Winters in . When the water receded, it was time to deal with the lesser plagues that struck the neighborhood: rot, mold, flood insurance.

“Everything ruined,” he says, adding: “And this is nothing.”

He wants us to see his other restaurant, the Paris Café, which is down on the waterfront near the old fish market. He asks his co-owner, Peter O'Connell, to give us a tour. Workers have been going strong for weeks, but it is still in ruins; during the storm, the water rose above the heads of where his customers usually sit.

I ask the obvious question. What if it happens again? “What if?” he says, thinking it over.”We're taking a shot,” he says.

That's one of the more realistic sentiments I've heard during our whole trip. It contains no illusions about building walls or controlling the uncontrollable. He is not saying we will defeat the ocean. He's saying he will roll the dice and see what comes up. Not a desperate craving for certainty where none exists. But a realistic assessment. A gambler's play.

ORRIN HAS TO get back home, so the next day I see him off at LaGuardia Airport. With the expert gone the trip is over, or so I think. But the next morning, Jeremy and I decide to drive out to Rockaway Beach, the especially hard-hit coastal area of Queens.

Quite by accident, we park by one of the nursing homes that were featured on national news after the storm. The residents were not evacuated, and videos soon surfaced of the nightmare they endured: waves rocking the building, seawater flooding the first floor and shorting out the building's power.

As I walk up the street from the home, I run into a man wearing a hoodie and walking a schnauzer. While he refuses to say his name, he's not reluctant to talk.

“FEMA was horrible,” he says. “Their answer was 'go to a shelter,' but there was no public transportation. It was the apocalypse, like in a movie. Our police station was underwater. If you went up to 130th Street, a row of houses were on fire. Saltwater and sewage in all the houses. No power for weeks. We saw sand in our nightmares.”

He points to his place, a three-decker. We're not in Mantoloking anymore: here the structures are crammed together and include many apartment buildings and, farther east, high-rise projects. Both fire and water ravaged the neighborhood on the night of the 29th, and I am soon walking along the charred blocks, houses completely leveled except for the small debris of human lives: bricks and scattered garbage and rusted-out bedsprings and cinder blocks.

Crowds are gathering along the street for the St. Patrick's Day Parade, which is being held here two weeks before the holiday. Worried about getting trapped all afternoon, I move my car a few blocks inland. It's during the walk back to the beach that I see it. A sign. There it is in huge letters, painted on canvas that is being attached by two men to a fence in front of the Seaside Towers apartments. The sign reads ROCK JETTIES NOW!

The syntax confuses me for a second but then I get it. It means Give the Rockaways rock jetties, and do it now! I hurry toward the men, who are already climbing back into their double-parked van.

John Cori, the driver, is the founder of Friends of Rockaway Beach, and he tells me his message is meant for Mayor Bloomberg, who will be walking in the parade.

“Look up this coast,” he says. “All the other towns have rock jetties. They deflected the storm, slowed down the waves. Then look at our beach. We need protection, too.”

After he leaves, I walk down the beach and see that he's right. Feeble wooden jetties, like rows of rotten teeth, are all that protect Rockaway Beach. Farther down, rock jetties jut out from wider beaches. Those jetties are the kind of beach-altering armament that Orrin rails against but also the kind that Cori wants.

Back along the parade route, I watch kilted men march and bang on drums. When Bloom-berg walks through there are some cheers, some boos. MAYOR BLOOMBERG: MAKE ROCKAWAY'S BOARD WALK A SEA WALL says another sign along the route. The message is clear. The rich may have gotten it worse down on the Jersey Shore, but here the poor are the ones getting screwed.

WHO CAN BLAME people for wanting to defend themselves? Orrin could, but I doubt he would. Walls may destroy beaches in the end, but in the short term they protect homes. How can you tell someone who lost his house that obstruction of the sea is a bad idea?

While I'm glad that people are starting to open their eyes to the dynamics of living by the sea, I don't expect this change to proceed logically. It's natural for the residents of Rockaway Beach to want to wall off the ocean, just as it's natural for the leaders of New York City to start contemplating much larger walls, defensive barriers at the Verrazano-Narrows, Arthur Kill, and Throgs Neck, structures that would theoretically shield Manhattan in the manner of the Eastern Scheldt barrier that protects the Netherlands.

One thing Orrin has learned over the years: try to convince someone not to protect themselves and you're in for a hard argument. The hope of certainty, of protection and security in this world, is powerful. The hope that you can keep out not just the troubling ocean but something a lot more frightening: the constant uncertainty of life on earth.

But walls breed false security even as they are doing their destructive and disruptive work. Hurricanes are defined by uncertainty. Sue Halsey thinks dunes are the answer on barrier islands, but Orrin remains skeptical. Dunes, like walls, allow us to temporarily ignore the rising sea.

It may be unfair that the Rockaways don't get the advantages of richer towns. But in the end hurricanes are quite democratic. And in the end we are all in the same uncertain boat. New Yorkers will now get to experience the uneasy feeling that people in my state get every summer when hurricane season rolls around. Maybe the only realistic philosophy for those who choose to live near the sea is the one Peter O'Connell espoused back at the Paris Café. All you can do is take your shot.

is the author of eight books including, , about the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

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The post After Hurricane Sandy, One Man Tries to Stop the Reconstruction appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The originally appeared on .

As you might have heard, my home state of North Carolina is trying to . Having denied human nature by banning gay marriage, the legislators, feeling full of themselves, want to take on nature itself.

It all started when a group of respected scientists that suggested that it would be prudent to anticipate a one-meter sea level rise along the state’s coastline by the year 2100. Not so fast, said a group of coastal developers, imagining all the soon-to-be underwater land they could no longer sell. With Orwellian brilliance, the developers —not on sea level rise itself (which is, even they might concede, impossible), but on any language that admits to it. And the legislators, exhausted from the hard work of and bashing gays, but still eager, agreed.

One of the small problems, both practical and intellectual, of this approach, is that there may be no more dramatic example of the effects of the rising sea than . [Ed. note: The billÌę passed the state legislature on Tuesday.] Hopefully the legislators don’t go to the beach in the summer, and so won’t be faced with this inconvenient truth. You could say they have buried their heads in the sand, though with regard to the Outer Banks, there may not be much sand left.

“You better see it before it’s gone,” Orrin Pilkey said to me a few years ago, before we traveled the Carolina coast from north to south. Pilkey is a who has long been a galvanizing figure in the coastal battles of North Carolina and beyond. When I first called him, he answered the phone, “Orrin Pilkey, world famous geologist,” and that flair for drama has been fulfilled in his , its most forceful proponent of the science now deemed heresy by the non-scientists.

Not long after we met, Orrin and I took a tour of the Outer Banks from north to south. As we drove through the towns of Whalebone and Kill Devil Hills, Orrin described the basic math of living by the shore: more and more people are building larger and larger homes closer and closer to the sea just as the shoreline is eroding and the sea level is rising, not to mention the fact that coastal storms, including most obviously Atlantic hurricanes, . It was one thing back when a few modest cottages sat out on a spit of sand, another when we started pretending that these migrating sandbars could be divvied up into neighborhoods with set property lines. Orrin and I passed the evidence of this fiction, a tight group of McMansions, suburbia on the sand, in places that had had a few shacks and no other homes when Orrin had first studied the area. Back then the lots were 600 feet back to allow for the retreating shoreline, but now the postage stamp-sized lots sit right on the shore.

Our destination for the night was Nags Head, specifically the , a choice of lodging that was not without a certain poetic justice. Orrin explained that the hotel’s name had changed from Ramada to Armada to Comfort, but that the one constant had been its role as a kind of symbol for him of why you didn’t build any sort of large permanent building along the coast.

“The problem is, you can’t move them,” he said. “And if you can’t move, they aren’t permanent. The sea will eventually drag them down.”

After we checked in, we walked around back toward the water, and I saw that the sea was . The Comfort Inn cantilevered out over the ocean. This was due not to some sort of Frank Lloyd Wright fit of inspiration on its builders’ part, but to nature’s gnawing away the beach below it. Guests at the far end, where we had asked to stay, hung out over the Atlantic and could feel the waves in their sleep. The seaward end of the building had the look of a war-ravaged place.

Obviously there was some irony to Orrin staying at the Inn, which he had written about extensively, and before we had checked in he had worried about being recognized at the desk. He told me that he used to stop here on his annual trip with his Duke geology class, and that one year they had had the good fortune to arrive on the night the swimming pool caved in, its far end dropping like a fallen lower jaw onto the beach.

From the hotel we walked down the sand to the south, where a row of houses stood directly on the low tide beach, hundreds of sandbags humped in front of them. To even call them “bags” is to not get the point across. They were enormous, 10 feet long and terrifically ugly, great lumpish loaves that transformed the beach into a seeming war zone. It looked as if hundreds of drab-colored whales had decided to beach themselves all at once. The problem with sandbags, Orrin explained, was the same as with concrete walls and groins and other attempts to stop the sea. While they might temporarily protect a particular building, they caused down-drift erosion. This meant that the next house down, the house to the south, bore the brunt of the erosion. While piling up sandbags might understandably be viewed as self-protective—I can’t let my house topple into the sea—it was also, at the very least, an unknowing assault on one’s southern neighbor.

“This is just the beginning, of course,” Orrin said. “Coastal storms and erosion have caused this. But the real problem is coming with sea level rise. If the ice of Antarctica and Greenland continue to melt, we’ll see the most radically changing shoreline in thousands of years. Many of the predictions are too conservative. They don’t factor in what is happening in Antarctica and Greenland, and all indications are that the ice melt is increasing in both of these places. A more realistic assessment comes from the state of Rhode Island, a state that obviously has a lot invested in getting the estimate right. They’re assuming that the rise is going to be between three and six feet.”

He paused dramatically.

“If it does get to six feet, we aren’t just going to be worrying about a few beach houses on the Outer Banks,” he said. “We are going to be worrying about Manhattan and Boston.”

I stayed by the sandbags while Orrin walked down to where a small sandbar jutted out into the surf. He turned and stared back at the building. He looked quite dramatic standing out there. What would happen if the sandbags were removed? The buildings would go, at least some of them, during the next big storm. As I watched him, I indulged in a little daydream. I pictured Orrin standing down there on the beach at night, staring up as the Comfort Inn buckled to its stilted knees and fell forward into the ocean. In my vision I armed him with a boom box on which he cranked up Beethoven’s 9th. A slight smile formed below his beard, and a glint of moonlight lit his eyes as the concrete crashed into the surf.

Orrin’s estimate of future sea level rise has changed since that trip. Of course there is a cacophony of numbers, ranging from the preposterously low of a couple of inches—put forth by certain coastal developers—to the , a number that at first seems alarmist but can’t be entirely discounted, because melting naturally leads to more melting, and once the ice caps start lubricating and sliding, all bets are off.

“Seven feet,” Orrin told me a year or so after that first trip “That’s not a prediction, mind you, but a working figure. Maybe not likely, but a good number for prudent development. If I were in charge of things, that is the figure I would use. I would act as if the seas will rise seven feet by 2100.”

He looked at me to make sure I got the point.

“If the water rises seven feet, you can kiss our barrier islands goodbye,” he said.

I understood that this fact should have been troubling to me, since at the time I lived on one of those islands. But like a lot of us, and like our legislators, I had a hard time really believing the current rash of predictions. Would this really happen? I wanted some confirmation of Orrin’s number, so I decided to go directly to the top and sent an email to Jim Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. I didn’t really expect a reply, but the wired world sometimes holds surprises. About two hours later Hansen wrote back:

“That’s a good figure, in my opinion. If we stick to business-as-usual it will likely result in a sea level rise of about two meters, which is about seven feet. The catch is that if we hit two meters in the order of a century, it means we would be on the way—sea level rise would not stabilize at two meters.”

Of course, there are a lot of numbers floating around. They change, and for good reason. Not long after my walk with Orrin, a chunk of Antarctic ice , and the predictions have grown more dire.

My brain, like most of ours, tends to focus on the short term. But for a moment I try to stretch my mind. Seven feet. Let’s say we take this figure seriously. Let’s say we accept the fact that Pilkey and Hansen, who spend their lives studying this sort of thing, know more than we do, that their observations and calculations trump our gut feelings that it couldn’t happen, not here, not really. Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that they are serious when they say seven feet. What would that actually mean?

For one thing, it would mean that when I walked down the stairs of my stilted treehouse-style home in North Carolina, I would step directly into the Atlantic. For another, it would mean that islands like the one I lived on would be frequently washed over by storm surges, a process that is already well under way. Of course, as Orrin pointed out back in Nags Head, if the seas really rise seven feet, barrier islands and beach homes will be the least of our national concerns.

The truth is that, despite ever-more sophisticated computer models, no one really knows how much the sea will rise. Even Orrin, while using seven feet as his “working figure,” is skeptical of anyone who speaks with too much certainty on the issue. But in today’s twisted political climate, where mainstream scientists, once revered, are now routinely doubted by non-scientists, it does not pay to voice too much uncertainty. And when Orrin Pilkey speaks emphatically, it is often to combat the bozos who emphatically state that there is no way the sea can possibly rise, with no evidence to support them.

“There are real uncertainties and valid criticisms of global climate change, but these guys are way off base,” Orrin said to me the other day. “We know the sea is rising, and whatever the exact numbers, life does not end in 2100. What we are experiencing, along with the rising sea, is a tsunami of anti-intellectualism. Science is at a new low in the public’s view. Scientists are not respected as we once were, and we are out of our league when we compete with the sharpies, the good talkers and salesmen types. We’d rather be out in our labs or out on our research vessels. I think the coal and oil companies, aided by politicians, have done fundamental damage to science in this country. It’s true we are not always right. But we deserve to be listened to.”

It is no coincidence that these same denying legislators have made it their mission to that North Carolina spent many decades creating. Because, make no mistake, it is education, knowledge, and science that are the true enemies here. The developers and legislators are against observation, thought, deduction. And so they deny not just the fact that the sea is rising, but Enlightenment values themselves. They tell us not to believe what we see. They tell us not to trust our scientists, or to trust only the fringe scientists who happily support what is profitable.

What chance do these higher values have when pitted against personal profit? The developers, and the legislators they have bought, stand to lose 2,000 square miles of developable land if they admit the sea will rise. So like the mayor in Jaws as the Independence Day crowds approach, they tell everyone that the water is fine, that there’s no shark, and that we should keep building on the beach. And we will keep building, and denying, swearing the sun revolves around the earth, you can be sure of it. Right up until the time our houses sink under the rising water.

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