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Orrin Pilkey Teams with Batik Artist for Book about Barrier Islands

Duke University geologist Orrin Pilkey has fought for years against excessive human development of U.S. barrier islands such as North Carolina’s Outer Banks, producing many books and articles about the pitfalls of living on these restless spits of land that gradually migrate and are sometimes overwashed by waves.

Now Pilkey—a retired professor emeritus at the Nicholas School, but still actively crusading—has teamed up with batik artist Mary Edna Fraser in a book, strikingly illustrated with more than 150 color plates, that takes readers on a guided tour of barriers along the coastlines of six continents.

A Celebration of the World’s Barrier Islands, published June 1 by Columbia University Press, is both a coffee-table book and an expert primer on the striking dynamism and diversity of the archipelagoes that nature has created by the actions of sea-level change, weather and geological forces.

“I’ve grown over the years to envision the barrier islands to be almost like living things,” Pilkey said in an interview. “They’re so dynamic and at the same time they are very fragile. You stop them from moving and, after a few decades or maybe a century, they become lifeless piles of sand.”

With about 2,200 of them worldwide, including 405 within United States waters, barrier islands encompass about 12 percent of the planet’s open ocean shorelines. Yet “each island is different, tremendously different,” Pilkey said.

For example, barrier islands off Colombia are subject to geologic “tectonic” processes that cause earthquakes and tsunamis. The behaviors of those in the arctic are affected by winter ocean freezeups lasting nine to 10 months each year. The largest numbers in a single chain (50) dot the coast of northern Brazil.

Besides discussing natural forces that create barrier islands, the book describes how humans have, or haven’t, modified them.

The Dutch, being what Pilkey calls “vintage coastal engineers,” allow neither development nor seawalls on their barriers.

In contrast, the book describes how islands located from Taiwan and Italy to Florida and New Jersey have already lost their original roles as barriers due to overwhelming amounts of construction.

Pilkey and the Charleston, S.C.-based Fraser first discussed the collaboration between artist and scientist in 1993 while meeting on Cape Lookout National Seashore, the most pristine and protected of North Carolina barrier islands.

In the book’s prologue, Fraser noted that her batik works are derived from aerial photographs of coastlands made over the past 23 years, often from the open cockpit of her grandfather’s 1946 415C Ercoupe flying at about 85 miles an hour.

“What I have observed is both breathtakingly beautiful and disturbing,” she wrote. “Some trips of up to eight hours have not yielded a single photo I can use for a design; jetties, seawalls, landfills and false harbors have altered nature beyond recognition.”

—For the complete article by Monte Basgall of Duke News and Communications, go to http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2003/05/geology520.html

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