Reddit reviews The Battle for North Carolina's Coast: Evolutionary History, Present Crisis, and Vision for the Future

https://www.amazon.com/Battle-North-Carolinas-Coast-Evolutionary/dp/0807834866

I'm going off the top of my mind so I might be wrong on this but I think I remember something about NC coastal economy kicking off after New Deal infrastructure but now people are debating how to respond to growing beach erosion

The kinda sad thing is that the barrier islands of the Outer Banks would naturally migrate and actually stay above water, for the most part, if we didn't obsess over trying to protect the existing settlements. They go through cycles of contraction/broadening out as they slowly move westward. The problem comes when you start trying to fight that with beach nourishment (which is a temporary fix that leads to MASSIVE erosion the second you stop it... or a good storm comes along).

The artificial grass dunes that line the entire OBX are probably the island chain's worst enemy. Do they protect people's front yards? Yeah. But at the expense of preventing the overwash that would naturally be building up the back end of the island (and additionally increasing it's height so that it actually wouldn't be completely submerged with sea level rise). Unfortunately, overwash doesn't play nice with massive vacation houses and people's homes, and highway 12, nor does the fact that inlet formation/filling in is a completely natural occurrence and that trying to alter it is probably shooting yourself in the foot elsewhere--the sand tries to find equilibrium one way or another.

I lived out there a couple summers and it was immensely frustrating watching the way the state politicians handled the OBX. The only long-term way for people to successfully live on a barrier island is to admit its dynamic and build with a light and easily movable footprint, and let the island migration process occur (to be fair, barrier island geology is "relatively" young, so a lot of stuff has only come to light since the 70's). Stuff like this is part of why I couldn't bring myself to come back for another summer of work--it's just too damn depressing that such a gorgeous area is going to be almost completely lost because of folks putting their heads in the sand. Well, that, and as someone who's position was all about pointing out this kinda stuff to the public, we weren't always the most popular with the some of the locals.

If you're interested in the barrier island dynamics at all, I strongly recommend checking out Stan Rigg's book on the subject, "The Battle for North Carolina's Coast" (Amazon had the cheapest copy I saw): http://www.amazon.com/The-Battle-North-Carolinas-Coast/dp/0807834866

A quick google seach also pulled up this fieldtrip document from Eastern Carolina University, which also gives a glimpse at a lot of the stuff discussed in the book (not sure of it's date, so don't know if it takes into account the most recent inlet on Pea Island... NEW New Inlet):

http://core.ecu.edu/geology/mallinsond/IGCP_NC_Field_Trip_Guide_rev1.pdf