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Geologist Teams with Batik Artist for Book about Islands

'A Celebration of the World's Barrier Islands' is both a coffee table book and an expert primer

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University geologist Orrin Pilkey has fought for years against excessive human development of U.S. barrier islands such as North Carolina's Outer Banks, producing many books and articles about the pitfalls of living on these restless spits of land that gradually migrate and are sometimes overwashed by waves.

Now Pilkey -- a retired professor emeritus at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, but still actively crusading -- has teamed up with batik artist Mary Edna Fraser in a book, strikingly illustrated with more than 150 color plates, that takes readers on a guided tour of barriers along the coastlines of six continents.

A Celebration of the World's Barrier Islands, to be published on June 1, 2003 by Columbia University Press, is both a coffee-table book and an expert primer on the striking dynamism and diversity of the archipelagoes that nature has created by the actions of sea-level change, weather and geological forces.

"I've grown over the years to envision the barrier islands to be almost like living things," Pilkey said in an interview. "They're so dynamic and at the same time they are very fragile. You stop them from moving and, after a few decades or maybe a century, they become lifeless piles of sand."

The best way to "kill" a barrier island, he contends, is to tether it in place with human-built "armored" structures such as seawalls and jetties.

After establishing his reputation as a geologist studying unrelated ocean floor processes, Pilkey took on the many issues connected with living on barrier islands after his father's own Gulf Coast home was devastated in 1969 by Hurricane Camille.

His first popular book on barrier islands and development, The Beaches are Moving (Anchor Press, Doubleday 1979), coauthored with Wallace Kaufman, introduced the concept of island migration. He subsequently started Duke's Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, of which he remains director.

While he and research colleagues have previously visited barrier islands in other countries to study their evolution -- actually "discovering" formerly unrecognized barriers in Brazil and Colombia -- the new book is Pilkey's first extensive global odyssey.

With about 2,200 of them worldwide, including 405 within United States waters, barrier islands encompass about 12 percent of the planet's open ocean shorelines. Yet "each island is different, tremendously different," Pilkey said.

For example, barrier islands off Colombia are subject to geologic "tectonic" processes that cause earthquakes and tsunamis. The behaviors of those in the arctic are affected by winter ocean freezeups lasting nine to 10 months each year. The evolution of those around Iceland is influenced by glacial melting. The largest numbers in a single chain (50) dot the coast of northern Brazil.

Besides discussing natural forces that create barrier islands, the book describes how humans have, or haven't, modified them.

The Dutch, being what Pilkey calls "vintage coastal engineers," allow neither development nor seawalls on their barriers. And the subsistence culture occupying Bazaruto Island in Mozambique treats its barrier home in what Pilkey calls "a very gentle manner" by keeping roads unpaved, conserving vegetation, and avoiding construction of structures near beaches, even grass huts.

In contrast, the book describes how islands located from Taiwan and Italy to Florida and New Jersey have already lost their original roles as barriers due to overwhelming amounts of construction.

Pilkey and the Charleston, S.C.-based Fraser first discussed their collaboration between artist and scientist in 1993 while meeting on Cape Lookout National Seashore, the most pristine and protected of North Carolina barrier islands.

In the book's prologue, Fraser noted that her batik works depict images derived from aerial photographs of coastlands made over the past 23 years, often from the open cockpit of her grandfather's 1946 415C Ercoupe flying at about 85 miles an hour.

"What I have observed is both breathtakingly beautiful and disturbing," she wrote. "Some trips of up to eight hours have not yielded a single photo I can use for a design; jetties, seawalls, landfills and false harbors have altered nature beyond recognition.

"Orrin Pilkey's early book, The Beaches Are Moving, verifies that what I see aesthetically in the air is indeed true from a geological standpoint."

Faser also gives readers a primer on batik making, an ancient art form rooted in Asia and Africa. The method involves affixing images onto large silk panels that are then treated with hot wax, colorful dyes and heat.

Her artworks have been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Duke University Museum of Art, the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences.