The Drowning of Money Island (A Forgotten Community's Fight Against the Rising Seas Threatening Coastal America)

The story of the Bayshore, a community ravaged by Superstorm Sandy, where lack of recovery, sea level rise, and a state effort to buy out and demolish neighborhoods has fractured the community and foreshadowed coastal America's sinking future.

Andrew Lewis grew up the Bayshore, a 40-mile stretch of desolate Delaware Bay beaches, marshland, and fishing hamlets at the southern end of New Jersey. In The Drowning of Money Island he reveals its rich history while amplifying its working-class community's fight to retain their place in a country that has left them behind. The Bayshore, like so many rural places in this country, is under immense pressure from a combination of severe economic decline, industry loss, and regulation. But it is also, uniquely, contending with one of the fastest rates of sea level rise on the planet and the after effects of one of the most destructive storms in American history.

Cumberland, the poor, rural county where the Bayshore is located, had been left out of the bulk of the initial federal disaster relief package post-Sandy. Instead of money to rebuild, the Bayshore got the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's Superstorm Sandy Blue Acres Program, which identified and purchased flood-prone neighborhoods, then demolished them to be converted to open space.

In truth, the Bayshore began disappearing long before Sandy. As soon as the first European settlers arrived in the early 1600s, they wrote of the bay's ravaging storms and relentless tides. In the two centuries after the Revolution, the bay's plentiful oyster beds made local watermen some of the richest people in America, but overfishing, pollution, and, ultimately, globalization have left the Bayshore in severe decline. And now, there is this: the Bayshore is sinking beneath the bay, thanks to a confluence of subsiding land and rising seas.

The Drowning of Money Island is an intimate yet unbiased, lyrical yet investigative rediscovery of a rural hometown ravaged by sea level rise and economic hardship, and the increasingly divisive politics those factors have helped spawn. In the end, the book offers a glimpse of the future of coastal retreat in America--a future in which the wealthy will be able to remain while the poor will be forced to leave.