On the Beach at the End of the World

The end of beaches? Why the world's shorelines are in serious trouble

Contents:

  • Navigation menu
  • The beach at the end of the world: Aussie science fiction's new wave
  • Not the end of The World: the return of Dubai's ultimate folly
  • The haves and have-nots: four cities in crisis
  • more on this story

    • That was then, of course. In May, two of the three Australian features at Cannes were science fiction. Like those films, The Rover is set in a dystopian future, a lawless society 10 years after the Collapse an event that is never explained. Like the collapse of The Rover, the apocalypse is unexplained, simply providing an excuse for writer-director Zak Hilditch to explore a few scenarios. These Final Hours revolves around James Nathan Phillips , who plans to spend his final moments attending an orgy with most of his friends, but instead devotes his last day to a young girl talented newcomer Angourie Rice.

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    In contrast, the Puget Sound area, from which the strange radio signals come, is found to have avoided destruction because of missile defences. The film ends with a quote from a Walt Whitman poem entitled "On the Beach at Night", describing how frightening an approaching cloud bank seemed at night to the poet's child, blotting the stars out one by one, as the father and child stood on the beach on Massachusetts' North Shore. To say any more would be to risk spoilers. Max Galleon's future is monitored by Pow-Pow the environmental enforcement panda mascot, and his past by an AI archive that stands in for his memories, most of which are missing. It should be made mandatory reading for all professional diplomats and politicians.

    Thanks to moments of heroism and dry humour, it is less downbeat than you might expect. Again, Australian films have often visited the apocalypse, going back to the Hollywood production On the Beach How did beaches, the quintessence of Aussie fun and freedom, become equated with the end of the world? Moreover, why does a nation known for its sunny outlook manage to make such gloomy SF films?

    Hilditch previously made the short film Transmission , about a pandemic that has wiped out most of humanity. It was filmed in the dusty Western Australian town of Kellerberrin.

    The beach at the end of the world: Aussie science fiction's new wave

    This time, however, it was neither apocalyptic nor post-apocalyptic. Is the East Coast going to be just as vulnerable the next time a storm comes? Almost every house, if there was a house left, had an American flag in front of it. It brought out patriotism, for some reason or another. I really believe that we will give up on the beach, for the most part. The beaches will disappear much faster than they are now. In North Carolina a typical beach lasts about three years. It all depends on where you are. For the most part, if someone is going to go through the cost of moving they ought to get off the island.

    We have a photograph in the book of the so-called "Outlaw House" in North Carolina Outlaw was the family name. All the houses near the Outlaw House now are all McMansions. The McMansion that was in the movie "Nights in Rodanthe" was just moved down the highway a bit to a safer place -- I say safer , but not safe.

    In a recent interview , you said you've stopped defining yourself as a scientist and have instead become a scientific advocate. When and how did that change come about? I started out as a deep-sea sedimentologist.

    Not the end of The World: the return of Dubai's ultimate folly

    I worked on the continental margin of North Carolina and the abyssal plains -- I sampled 13 abyssal plains around the world -- but I got tired of going to sea. People were asking to quote us and so forth, and I realized there was a real vacuum here and I began to move to the beach. When I first came to Duke it was not possible, before you get tenured, to get involved with controversial things with the general public.

    One had to wait until one had tenure before one could start pounding on the table about these things, and by the time I got my foot skiff I was already tenured. I had also been a journal editor and a couple other things, and that gave me credibility in the scientific community. Nonetheless, I remember a number of times being criticized by scientists, basically saying "you're off-base for doing this kind of thing.

    I think at least geologists, and probably a lot of others now, are recognizing the value of being able to converse with the public.

    The haves and have-nots: four cities in crisis

    I know that most universities, Duke included, appreciate work that has an impact on the general public. We are rewarded for doing such work, although there are local problems in individual states, probably in every state, where public schools still have problems.

    Here in North Carolina, I know at least two, maybe three geologists who have been asked to turn in their emails, or to furnish all emails that have to do with sea-level rise. It's something that people come up against with a lot of these environmental and climate problems. Do you have any insights into how to get that message through to people? The reason you go to beaches is because you went down there with your mother and father during the summer and had the most wonderful time in your whole life, and what could be better than to live there year-round?

    It all began with the Palm Jumeirah , an idea credited to Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have sketched out the form of the trunk and fronds as the most efficient shape to maximise the amount of beachfront. Each frond would be like a street, with a row of properties on either side, backing on to their own stretch of private beach. The novelty shape and the promise of beachfront homes was a winning formula: Walking up the hard shoulder of the roaring highway of the Palm today there is no pavement; everyone drives , the feeling is less one of an exclusive private enclave than that of a generic slice of American suburbia.

    The houses have been packed in cheek by jowl, at three times the original planned density, leaving rows of McMansions looking across at each other between thin strips of stagnant water. In the sales brochures and news reports, this new form of Google Earth urbanism was intoxicating, especially given that much of the intended audience would never see it in reality. The media frenzy generated by the Palm was enough to convince Nakheel to plan a further two palm-shaped islands of even greater size: Together, they would add more than miles of coastline to the shores of Dubai, and provide an additional 6, hectares of land — an area larger than the whole of Manhattan.

    In a move that now seems like tempting fate, the Palm Jebel Ali was to feature a halo of calligraphically shaped islands , spelling out the lines of a poem written by Sheikh Mohammed: In this case, the challenge proved too great.

    The shape of Jebel Ali was formed, but the project has been on hold ever since. Caught up in a frenzy of shape-making, before the palms hit the buffers, The World was the obvious next step.

    Dodge Walks Home/The Beach - Rob Simonsen & Jonathan Sadoff

    On the corridor outside his office hangs a satellite view that shows not only The World and the three palms, but a cacophony of other swirly shapes that fill the entire area of sea between the mainland and the existing islands. There are moon-shaped crescents, cosmic starbursts and wiggling worms, arranged in an indiscriminate muddle, as if someone had spilt a bowl of spaghetti shapes across the map.

    This is The Universe , an aborted plan for an additional 3, hectares of fantasy islands shaped like the Milky Way and the solar system. It was announced in January , just as The World was completed, but was swiftly sucked into the great black hole of the financial crisis, never to be seen again. It even had its own airport, and would have needed 1 or 2 million people to make it successful. Ajamil did manage to bring a little bit of market sense to the madness. Before he got involved, The World had been planned solely with private owners in mind.

    Imagine Venice on steroids. His team developed a zoning plan, locating the more public, resort-style islands closer to the mainland, while the more exclusive areas for private estates were sited further back towards the Gulf. Antarctica was imagined as a big commercial hub, with rows of seven-storey hotels and a mile-long beach facing Dubai , creating a wall of development that would have essentially blocked the sought-after view of the mainland from the private islands behind. Ajamil says sales really took off when they demonstrated how owners could re-shape their islands, carving coves, inlets and marinas to create more saleable area.

    The smart folks figured out that the game was to work with the water, given that the plots of land were so small. You could put buildings on stilts and bring boat slips in underneath them. It was a lot of fun.

    We did some kick-ass projects. His practice worked on a number of the early schemes, including a plan to divide Moscow into two linear islands, connected by a five-storey glass box called Red Square, which would have glowed red by night. At one point I counted seven Eiffel Towers. The whole premise behind The World was fundamentally transformed from being a community of exclusive desert islands, with a villa on each, to thin strips of sand carved, stretched and squeezed to ensure the maximum commercial return.

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    On the Beach is a post-apocalyptic novel written by British-Australian author Nevil Shute World War III has devastated most of the populated world, polluting the atmosphere with nuclear fallout and to Osborne named Moira Davidson, who tries to cope with the impending end of human life through heavy drinking. Sometimes, you want to leave the world behind and escape into a book — but if you're in the mood for a good disaster story, we've got a.