and a poorly tie-dyed Audubon T-shirt clearly abandoned by a summer camper. He will spend the rest of the day cutting down invasive head-high grasses called phragmites. Cameron has a degree in ecology and has been managing Jacob’s Point for the past five years. It’s a process that has become increasingly difficult as the system inputs—temperature, saltwater levels, tidal highs and lows—all shift. He makes a plan, the salt water inundates a new portion of the marsh, and the entire ecosystem changes.
Together we make a beeline for the shore, where Cameron delivers a plastic box full of fishing nets to a group of excited eight-year-olds who are about to catch fiddler crabs. Next we walk toward the stand of tupelos. At first we stick to the high ground. Then, abandoning the idea of keeping our feet dry, we leave the path behind and sink into the soaked land.
Jacob’s Point, like all tidal marshes, contains three distinct zones: low marsh, high marsh, and an upland area at its farthest inland edge. Every day the low marsh is covered in salt water twice, and also uncovered twice; the high marsh slips beneath the salt only in storms. Which is to say, along the point’s seaward edge, plants and animals have adapted to live with the tides, while upland the opposite is true. Think of a tidal marsh as—like all wetlands—a transitional region where distinctions blur and the entirely wet world morphs into the almost entirely dry one. It is a liminal ribbon. An in-between. A spit of land at the edge of things, where the governing laws change four times a day. Tidal marshes are frontiers, and as Gary Snyder says, “A frontier is a burning edge, a frazzle, a strange market zone between two utterly different worlds.” To pass from one to the other is to cross an almost imperceptible but important boundary, the place where freshwater meets the brine of the sea.
As we walk toward the tupelos we are slowly grading downward, crossing the threshold between sweet water and salt. Cameron tells me what he sees and also what he does not see. “These weren’t here five years ago,” he says, clomping through a bunch of coarse-toothed marsh elders that have taken over a section of the point that has become suddenly rich in saline. “I expect more are on their way, but it’s hard to keep up with.” The knee-high shrubs have pushed out a stand of phragmites, their arrival making Cameron’s job easier in this small acre. But the equilibrium they have brought is not destined to last.
“In the past, when sea levels dropped, the marsh dropped down too, and when they rose the marsh rose with them,” Cameron says as we work our way past the tupelos toward the rugosa-studded bank. If you were to take an aerial time-lapse photo of the process he is describing, it would look as if Jacob’s Point and the ocean were moving in and out together, the way desire follows the desired.
This swirling, migratory dance is primarily the result of two different physical and ecological processes. The first is called accretion. “As salt water flows in and out of the marsh, vegetation traps some of the sediments suspended in it, and as those sediments settle the marsh gradually gains elevation,” Cameron tells me. Accretion results in the building up of low-lying land; it is nature’s nimble backhoe. If accretion makes marsh migration possible, then rhizomes power the retreat. Dense, arterial, and interconnected, these specialized root systems run belowground, giving wetlands their shape. In the past, as sea levels rose and the marsh gained sediment, rhizomes would pull away from the increased salinity while simultaneously sending out new shoots, often uphill, in search of the kind of water that suited them best. As these plant communities moved up and in, the fauna that depended on them moved too. While the physical location of the salt marsh might change, its defining features would not.
But now that sea levels are rising faster than they have in the last twenty-eight centuries, the ocean and the tidal marsh are falling out of sequence. In the Ocean State, and along the rest of the Atlantic coast of North America, the rate of the rise is significantly higher than the global average. Here accretion is already being outpaced, which means that land that once was built up slowly is starting to slip beneath the sea’s surface. On top of that, if the marsh’s upland slope abuts some piece of human infrastructure—a road, or, as is the case at Jacob’s Point, an old railway line—as the rhizomes pull away there is nowhere less salty for them to thrust their spindly roots. The marsh is squeezed between the sea and the hard stop we built along its upland edge and, like the tupelo, it begins to drown in place.
“Maybe if the old Bristol line weren’t there, Jacob’s Point would stand a chance. But then again maybe not. It’s so hard to tell with accretion rates being what they are,” Cameron says. Then he adds, “It’s a terrifying and wonderful time to do the work that I do.”
Together we walk over the farthest bank, toward the shade of a bushy beach grape. Out in the Narragansett Bay, a flotilla of sailboats tacks back and forth, working its way south. The boats are from the nearby Barrington Yacht Club, which runs a summer program for locals. From where I stand it looks as though the campers can’t be much older than ten or twelve. “Capsize!” their instructor suddenly bellows, and all the little white sails dip beneath the surface of the bay. All, that is, but one. Then I hear another voice, whimpering, “I’m scared of being in over my head.” You and me both, kid.
That fall I attend the Rising Seas Summit at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston. I am there on a Metcalf Institute Fellowship, designed to deepen the relationship between environmental writers like me and the scientists on whom our work depends. Over the past twenty years, sea level rise modeling has gotten increasingly sophisticated. Today many modelers rely on a mixture of observational data (such as tidal gauge records), theorems that take into account the earth sciences (for example, factoring in the gravitational pull an ice sheet will have on a nearby body of water), and the geologic record (which provides insight into how quickly sea levels rose in the past). What nearly everyone agrees on is that sea level rise is accelerating at a rate far faster than modern man has ever witnessed. But precisely how high the waters will get, especially at any particular location and time in the future, remains somewhat difficult to predict. Among other things, sea level rise is not uniform. As ice sheets melt, their gravitational pull lessens and the ground beneath them rebounds, lowering sea levels nearby while simultaneously intensifying the phenomenon elsewhere. In other words, the places farthest from the largest chunks of melting ice, including the East Coast of the United States, are likely to experience higher rates of relative rise.
The ceiling of the Sheraton is covered in strings of crystal globes like dewdrops and ten-foot-wide linen lanterns likely dyed far away, in the cadmium-ripe fabric factories I’ve seen polluting the rivers around Dhaka. Beneath those looming lanterns and ridiculous lights I listen to all the different and conflicting predictions being made about the future of sea level rise. I hear about the two and a half feet of rise predicted by 2100—and the ten feet of rise predicted by 2100. The eighteen feet of rise if the planet heats another two degrees—and the thirty feet of rise if the planet heats by the same two degrees. I hear that, counterintuitively, the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will affect sea levels in Rhode Island more than the melting in Greenland—and I hear about the president of Kiribati buying land in Fiji because his island nation will soon be underwater.
“It is not a question of if but when,” says Ben Strauss, sea level rise expert and vice president of the nonprofit news organization Climate Central. Then he shows us a series of photorealistic mock-ups of the world’s major coastal cities, starting with Boston. “This image illustrates what four degrees of warming would look like, and corresponds roughly to business as usual,” he continues. “Business as usual” assumes that we will emit slightly more CO2 in the next eighty years than we have since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
On the screen above Ben’s head, light-blue water washes over just about everything in the city except Beacon Hill and the northernmost corner of Boston Common. MIT is underwater. So are Northeastern University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Fenway Park, Copley Square, and Newbury Street. That was the street where I bought my first Ani DiFranco album. The street my father revitalized in the late eighties by leasing
