A Global Environmental History of Coastal Dunes

Abstract

This book provides a holistic perspective on coastal dunes, highlighting new insights into present-day challenges to show that narratives, along with numbers, graphics, and computer models, have a role to play in climate change science, policymaking, and citizenship awareness. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, this book combines fiction, history, and science, to discuss past, present, and future ways of living in coastal areas. Dunes are hybrid environments, a combination of natural elements and human agency; they tell stories of values, traditional wisdom, institutions, empires, technology, vulnerabilities, coastal management, adaptation, and sustainability. Drawing on the past, Joana Gaspar de Freitas unpacks a diverse and fascinating history of dunes, linking knowledge, methods, and approaches from several case studies across the world, including France, Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, New Zealand, USA, and the UK. The book connects the bio geophysics of global change with the main driver of transformation— human agency—to integrate and address nature-society issues, taking human and nonhuman agents into account. In following the choices, paths, and strategies that created today’s coastal landscapes, the book generates greater awareness and understanding of how to shape coastal futures. This is an engaging, original, and, fundamentally, important book that fills a gap in our knowledge of cities, infrastructure, economies, and cultures built on shorelines. A key read for scholars, researchers, and students in environmental history, environmental science, sustainability, coastal land management, and climate change.