Seaside afterglow

"I hate the beach. My skin burns and blisters as soon as the sun touches it, I dislike sweating without exercising, and sand makes no sense at all to me—it's just hot and gritty dirt that other people apparently enjoy rolling around in... Plus, the ocean itself, while aesthetically pleasing, is terrifyingly untrustworthy, with its riptides and hurricanes and tsunamis and sharks and microplastics and slithering monsters of the deep. It has just too many sneaky ways to kill you."

Good points all, Lauren Groff, and the larger environmental message of your essay/review of Sarah Stodola's The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach is of profound ethical/existential import for our progeny and our species. 

But I still love the beach and haven't yet lost the afterglow of our week at Tybee. I've already (almost) forgotten the unpleasantness of being stung by a ray on first setting foot in the water last Monday, and the peeling skin on my right shoulder doesn't bother me. The elemental experience of walking and pedaling up and down an uncluttered early-morning seashore always restores my spirit and awakens a palpable perception of deep time. Mother Ocean nurtures my naturalist sensibility and reinforces my concern for the fate of the earth as a hospitable human abode.

And oh how I love the palate-memory of those wonderful grouper sandwiches and shrimp tacos, and the visual memory of those gorgeous island sunrises and sunsets.

If we're to conserve and preserve the places we love we must allow ourselves to delight in the small experiences that bring us into vital connection with the only home we've ever known. If sun, surf, and sand are not your thing, that's cool. I like mountain hikes too, and country rambles, and occasional urban immersions in the Whitmanesque crowd. All the varieties of human experience are potentially to the good, if they remind us of our obligation to sustain the possibility, for ourselves and our successors, of continuing to indulge them. 

In other words: find your springs and tap them. Don't tap them out. Embrace "conscientious stewardship" at the seashore and everywhere else.