We can have our beachfront properties our Miami high-rises, our Hamptons mansions, our Jersey boardwalks or we can have our beaches. But as geologist and Duke University emeritus professor Orrin Pilkey has been arguing for decades now, we cant have both.

As the oceans warm and sea levels rise, coastal living is becoming an increasingly risky proposition. Any climate scientist would tell you not to invest in a beach house, and yet large-scale migration inland is something weve yet to see. The beaches themselves can withstand extreme weather, of course. But its our attempts to hold them in place,through techno-fixes like seawalls and beach replenishment, that ironically enough will end up destroying them. Sooner or later, Pilkey argues, were going to be forced to retreat. The question is whether therell be any beach left by then.

The Last Beach, which Pilkey co-wrote with J. Andrew G. Cooper, a professor of coastal studies at the University of Ulster, is but his latest attempt to drive home just how wrong-headed our push to build on and preserve shorelines is. Its been an uphill battle; for Pilkey, what counts as progress was that people acknowledged his plea not to rebuild after Superstorm Sandy instead of just attacking him for suggesting it even if they didnt really end up following his advice.

Bring pollution, oil spills and the destructive business of sand mining into the picture, and its not so extreme, Pilkey told Salon, to imagine a future where beaches as we know them as places to live and even as places to visit will no longer exist.

We dont typically think of beaches as something that can go extinct, but it seems like thats basically what youre arguing here.

Thats exactly what we argue: that beaches in developed areas will not be there, that they will be replaced by seawalls large and small. There will be beaches left in remote places and on national seashores and things like that, perhaps although theyll be suffering too, because theyll be eroding and retreating back separately from the developed areas, which will be standing still for a while.

By the time we really begin to see whats happening, like we are right now in Florida, well be worrying about Manhattan and Queens and Boston and Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Miami, Charleston, all those cities. We fully expect that the great expense required to hold back the shoreline which is a losing proposition in any event will be overwhelming for them.

It seems to us to be pretty obvious and I think most geologists would agree with this that in a 50- to 100-year timeframe were in trouble. The best example of that, the proof in the pudding, is Florida, where they have hundreds of miles of highrise-lined shoreline. What can they do? You could move the buildings back, but thats very costly and theres no place to move them to. So what we see right now, especially with the current governor of Florida, is the building of seawalls right and left. All you have to do is declare an emergency and you can build a seawall.

In the book, you also discuss how beaches have become dangerous places. So would you say theres also a loss of beaches, not physically, but as we are able to enjoy them?

Yeah, that was the point of that. We, by the way, were really shocked the one chapter that was really out of our range was pollution, and we were rather shocked at the numbers. We saw repeated statements about how to use a beach, if youre going to go to a beach what should you do and how should you use it, in the technical literature, but it hasnt been getting out to the public. Maybe thats a little bit of irresponsibility on the part of some of the biochemists in not getting that out to the public. On the other hand, I know what would happen. They would get heavily criticized, probably, as being alarmists.

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The end of beaches? Why the worlds shorelines are in serious trouble