Indonesia builds a resilient “living shoreline”

The Demak District on Indonesia’s most populous island of Java is four years into a five-year plan to restore its disappearing and degraded shoreline. In a collaborative and holistic approach to nature restoration and sustainable development, local and international partners successfully completed many integrated components to build back the shoreline. This “Living Shoreline” vision creates natural defenses against further erosion while increasing economic opportunities for coastal residents….

California’s Wildfires Burn Through America’s Climate Illusions

The Golden State is actually a pretty inhospitable place: arid or semi-arid in large parts, prone to occasional floods (maybe even mega-floods) and, lest we forget, a giant quake-zone. There’s even a clutch of volcanoes. As a prosperous home for almost 40 million people, it is a place made, not begotten. Roughly a decade after Didion’s essay, Marc Reisner characterized California as “a beautiful fraud” in his much longer polemic “Cadillac Desert,” chronicling in exquisite detail the epic water projects, bottomless budgets and Chinatown politics that went into making a place like Los Angeles not merely viable but desirable….