GASPÉSIE PENINSULA
Québec, Canada
The case of the Gaspésie Peninsula materializes through erosion—the continual wearing away and transport of material. As an earthly process, erosion is so universal that it evades the norms of environmental policy that depicts the exchange as a negative attribute within conservation and restoration models. When land is lost, blame is laid on erosion. That is why today, human societies that live along highly erosive shores are allied with retreat. Retreat is not caused by environmental limits, rather, crossing environmental limits necessitates retreat. The shores of the Gaspésie Peninsula are wild places, and erosion reminds us that domestication of the edge is a miscalculation that tends to distress landowners and homeowners because it upends the desire for possession and ownership. It is hard to own a mobile property, yet residents are keenly aware of the authority of erosion and the ignorance of governance, which engenders civic advocacy within communities unwilling to waste years calculating erosion rates and disinclined to wait for a political breakthrough on climate change. As high tides push landward, homeowners adjust to change on their own terms.
The Maule River estuary outfalls at Constitución, one of the hardest hit communities following the tsunami in 2010. Extreme pulses of inundation are common to estuarine environments where marine sand meets river silt. At present, many estuaries along the Chilean coast are infilled by coastal concretization that intervenes between marine and terrestrial realms.
The wave action following an earthquake brought silty inundation, erosion, and deposition to the estuarine coast, a disturbance that is neither unprecedented nor particularly unique. The lineage of estuary formation across time is described by paleo-geological
analysis which confirms that the southwest coast of
Chile is a remarkably active area on t
A rupture twenty-five kilometers deep beneath the Nazca plate, produced the earthquake, triggering a tsunami that traveled along the
fault at tectonic junctions. The magnitudinous waves spread beneath the coast until making landfall along the shores between Constitución and Concepción. Magnitude is relative power, and its measurement takes into account the energy released at the source. By comparison, intensity is the strength of the shaking produced by the magnitude.
Along a Tidal River
The tidal shore of the Gaspésie Peninsula is a landscape of risk. Risk arises from the dynamic interaction between inundation and erosion, processes of shoreline evolution that create vulnerability. Residents recognize and understand the change, even if they are not equipped to evaluate, chart, or publish feasibility studies. Risk is understood between neighbors as sea-levels rise more progressively, intensifying tides and susceptibility. The common future of all residential shoreline communities is more precarious, as millions of global residents will move or be forced to relocate in the coming decades.
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See Mathew E. Hauer, “Migration induced by sea-level rise could reshape the US population landscape,” Nature Climate Change 7.5 (2017): 321–325, and Scott A. Kulp and Benjamin H. Strauss, “New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding,” Nature Communications 10.1 (2019): 4844.
Delaying the move is a deeply ingrained form of climate-denial that is hard to appreciate on the surface. Because of this, I am interested in excavating the denial by highlighting a community in Gaspésie that is so sensitive to the changes in their environment that they are finding creative ways to honor the landscape. The communities along the Gaspésie are familiar with the shore because its liveliness is shared through multi-generational attention that builds a rapport, moving the dial from inhabiting a landscape of risk to appreciating a landscape of retreat.The St. Lawrence River, “or Big Waterway,” is projected to be free of winter sea ice by the end of this century. The Big Waterway conveys a huge volume of water to the ocean. But water is not the only thing being shed. The capacity of the river suspends dissolved salts, rock fragments, sand, pebbles, and other washes dissolved from land to water. From this perspective, the river is an agent of discharge that uses water to flush aquifers of their discharge. Reduced sea ice cover will result in longer open water fetches and increased wave heights and storm surges during winter. More prolonged open water seasons will also result in increased exposure of shorelines to wave action and extreme water levels, increasing erosive forces notwithstanding the lack of ice cover.
A rupture twenty-five kilometers deep beneath the Nazca plate, produced the earthquake, triggering a tsunami that traveled along the
fault at tectonic junctions. The magnitudinous waves spread beneath the coast until making landfall along the shores between Constitución and Concepción. Magnitude is relative power, and its measurement takes into account the energy released at the source. By comparison, intensity is the strength of the shaking produced by the magnitude.
We spoke with Dr. Ladd Johnson, a benthic scientist living in the area, who reminded us: “Every snail is important, which is why I work in the intertidal and subtidal. Everything below the tide: rocky shores, kelp forests, seaweeds, bottom ecology; remember benthos means bottom, the depth of the sea.” Johnson explained that he was drawn to Gaspésie because it is a simplified version of an intertidal zone, a reduced description by comparison to a coral reef, for instance: “I can do great things in this region with only a couple of rocks. No one else is doing it.” While he told us all about three kinds of snail, urchin bearing grounds, and subtidal kelp we exchanged thoughts on ocean poisoning, mercury, and microplastics. Johnson dives every morning in the region around Sainte Flavie, he says he’s a field person, not a lab person. I explained our fieldwork and in return, he offered one of the most profound observations of our shared interest: “The landscape of retreat is the future intertidal.”