Santa Cruz Island – Will Adler

"I have been lucky enough to be going out to the Channel Islands since I was a teenager. The islands are one of my favorite places to be. They are the closest you can get to seeing what Southern California would be like with out development" - Will Adler

Santa Barbara-based photographer Will Adler has an eye for creating beautiful sharp, yet disorienting images. The photographs confuse and crop reality that asks the viewer to question the truth of the photograph and consider the manipulation of lighting and perspective that photography involves. Some are absurdly deadpan, straight photographs, while others are noticeably more intricate in their staging. Adler’s collections of photos push us back and forth, in and out of reality, all with a sly wink of humor that keeps you grinning.

-Juxapoz Magazine

Vanishing Sands: How Sand Mining is Stripping Away Earth’s Beaches by Orrin Pilkey, et al – Duke | Nicholas School of the Environment

Cover art: Forest City, Johor, Malaysia, 2017. (Photograph by Sim Chi Yin, courtesy of Duke University Press)

A new book from Duke University Press, “Vanishing Sands: Losing Beaches to Mining,” casts light on the shadowy world of sand mining through case studies that illuminate its disastrous impacts and a concluding chapter that proposes common-sense solutions.

Because of the tradition of viewing beaches as public land, people have historically thought of beach sand as a free and limitless resource, Pilkey and his co-authors explain in their preface to “Vanishing Sands…”

As global demand outstripped the supply that could be economically sourced from conventional inland sand pits, beach sand was deemed a suitable substitute, partly because it has angular grains that adhere to each other and, theoretically at least, improve the durability of any material or matrix they’re mixed into, and partly because it could be sourced from nearby dunes and beaches at practically no cost.

Excavators, bulldozers and dump trucks soon replaced buckets and wheelbarrows.

By 2020, entire beaches and dune systems in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, South America and the eastern United States had been stripped bare… 

In addition to documenting large-scale sand mining’s adverse impacts in nine vividly written chapters, “Vanishing Sands” provides a list of science-based recommendations—Pilkey and his co-authors call them “truths and solutions”—for ending the damage.

“Coastal sand exploitation is rapidly spreading in this time of sea-level rise and intensifying storms. Such mining is slowly destroying the protective nature and touristic value of beaches on a global scale,” they write. “Ultimately, the solutions must (include)an inexpensive substitute for sand to be used in concrete…an end to coastal sand mining, and a systematic move landward as the sea rises. Here’s hoping that some wisdom will prevail…”

Co-authors of the new book are Norma Longo, a geologist, photographer and longtime colleague of Pilkey’s at the Nicholas School; William Neal, emeritus professor of geology at Grand Valley State University; Nelson Rangel-Buitrago, professor of geology, geophysics and marine research at the Universidad del Atlantico in Colombia; Keith Pilkey, an attorney concerned with issues of coastal development; and Hannah Hayes, a scholar of land rights, disaster capitalism and risk management.

The New World Order Series – Coca Cola; By ©1011

The New World Order Series – Coca Cola, March 2020; By ©1011Plastic fragments collected on the beach, Terrigal (New South Wales, Australia) By © 1011 In the spirit of Maria Sibylla Merian’s 18th century naturalistic plates, The New World Order Series is composed of drawings of fish stamped with the logos of the most polluting […]

Surfing is biomechanically perfect

Nowadays, among all the activities available to modern humans, surfing is among the best for body and soul. Here are some reasons why.