On a recent bright, cold November morning, Julie Erb drove a shovel into the soft sand at one of the remaining dunes at Popham Beach State Park. Then Erb gently lifted a strand of beach grass into the hole and covered its roots.
Erb is among a few dozen volunteers transplanting grass from Popham's eroding sandbanks into its imperiled dunes. The hope is the grass can help reinforce the beaches' dune system against further erosion.
"It's just to help preserve the dunes, and bring the beach back," Erb said. She lives in nearby Phippsburg and has witnessed the dramatic changes to the beach in the last several years.
"It's a totally different beach," Erb said. "The river's changed its course dramatically, and it's eroded a lot of the beach people are used to enjoying."
Popham Beach is one of Maine's most popular state parks, attracting about 200,000 visitors a year.
It's also eroding faster than other beaches in the state according to the most recent beach mapping data from the Maine Geological Survey: Popham has been losing more than 91 feet of beach a year since 2017.
The high water mark now reaches nearly up to the main path visitors take to get to the popular east beach. On its website the park warns about walking out to explore rock Fox Island — visitors can't get there without crossing the Morse River, and two hours after low tide the sandbanks are covered with fast-moving cold water.
Park Manager Sean Vaillancourt said that Popham Beach is very dynamic — it gains and loses sand and changes shape.
"But the changes we’ve seen in the last few years have been increasingly dramatic and in a frequency we’ve not seen in the past," Vaillancourt said.
Vaillancourt said people planning a beach day should time it around low tide. Otherwise there's not much room to lay out a beach towel or sun umbrella.
"Every day at least two or three people say, 'What happened?'" he said. "'What happened here? Tell me why this is happening, I didn’t realize it was this bad, I didn’t expect this much dune to be gone or these paths to be closed.'"
Peter Slovinsky, a marine geologist at the Maine Geological Survey, said the shift in the Morse River is mostly to blame for severe erosion.
The river's typical course is to the west of Popham Beach and allows sand to build up and grow the beach and sand dunes, Slovinsky said. But sometimes the river changes course and cuts east along the shoreline.
"When it does that it kind of eats away and erodes all of the dunes that have accreted over 5-10 years and this process happens about every 10-15 years," Slovinsky said.
Heavy damage from back-to-back winter storms almost two years ago added to Popham's stress. And higher tides linked to sea level rise could have an effect too, Slovinsky said.
After the storms, officials asked people to donate used Christmas trees that were arranged in a way to capture sand and rebuild Popham's dunes.
More than 500 trees were eventually used in that project, arranged in rows between the surf and the park's bath house and parking lot.
And at first, it seemed successful — dunegrass began to grow on the new dunes made by the buried Christmas trees.
But even that project has mostly succumbed to erosion from the river, Slovinsky said.
“The dunes we gained back have, for the most part, been lost, except for maybe one or two rows of Christmas trees [out of 5-6 original rows],” he said. “That's not to say that project wasn't successful, because it definitely built the dunes back. It would have been eroded out faster if we had not conducted that project.”
"Until the Morse River relocates itself back to where it traditionally is, we're going to continue to see erosion problems," Slovinsky said.
Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands Director Andy Cutko said the agency intends to hire a consultant to develop a range of options for the long-term future of the park. Meanwhile, it is trying projects like the dune grass replanting to shore up the dunes in the near-term.
That could mean relocating, replacing or removing infrastructure, including the bathroom and shower house and its septic tank, which are currently sitting steps from the eroding banks.
"I think what we've learned in the past several years is that nature is increasingly unpredictable," Cutko said. "It is hard to have 100% confidence in any coastal infrastructure like Popham holding up for the future."
~ Story by Peter McGuire
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With the holidays quickly approaching, gift giving season is in full swing, and online advertisers certainly know it. We’re constantly bombarded with discounts and deals, to the point where we may be impulse-buying items for ourselves, too (I know I have) along with gifts for everyone else on our list.
The frenzy of end-of-year shopping, especially online shopping, however, takes a climate and environmental toll. Some studies show 15-25% of purchases made during the holiday period (from Black Friday through the end of the year) end up getting returned. Last year, the week after Black Friday saw an 80% increase in returns. All told, consumers returned roughly $890 billion worth of products in 2024, according to a report from the National Retail Federation.
And because it’s often cheaper for companies to throw away a returned item than to try to resell it, some 9.5 million pounds of returns end up in American landfills each year. A 2021 analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity found that Americans generate 23% more household waste during the month of December than in other months of the year.
And then there are the carbon emissions from the massive transport of goods that happens over the holiday period. A 2023 report found that transporting returns in the U.S. generated roughly the same carbon emissions that would be produced by 3.5 million gas-powered cars in a year. And studies show that online purchases delivered directly to homes have a higher greenhouse gas footprint than in-store shopping.
Here are some ideas to avoid the online shopping/return trap:
- Gift experiences, rather than items: spa days, cooking or art or language classes, tours, memberships to museums or sports clubs, restaurant gift cards
- Gift consumables: chocolate, fancy coffee or cheese, pestos, jams, baking mixes, wine, liquor, homemade salt and spice mixes
- Gift local (with a gift receipt): If something needs to be returned or exchanged, it’s possible to go to the actual store and pick out something else they’ll love — and small businesses are much less likely to throw away returned items
- Gift time or skills: Why not use your talents for gifts?
- Thrifted gifts: A little bit of effort and searching can result in some extraordinary finds: merino wool or cashmere blend hats, scarves or sweaters, antique glassware or porcelain, nearly new hardcover books… There are already so many goods out there in the world. Why not give one a new home?
Till next time,
Molly
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