Inventing the Beach: The unnatural history of a natural place (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Inventing the Beach: The unnatural history of a natural place (2016)

smithsonianmag.com

57 pointssoftwaredoug24 comments

Only related tangentially: Los Angeles’ famous beaches, some 31 miles worth, are all man-made.

“In 1947, for example, nearly 14 million cubic yards of sand were removed to make way for El Segundo's Hyperion power plant. They were deposited onto Santa Monica's beaches. Another million cubic yards came a couple years later, the sand this time recovered from dredging operations along a nearby breakwater. In all, some thirty million cubic yards of sand have been dumped onto the beaches of Santa Monica and Venice. That's almost as much, by volume, as all the concrete used to build the Three Gorges Dam in China.“

https://www.kcet.org/shows/earth-focus/rewilding-santa-monic...

I live on the beach. Like actually I wake up and there it is staring at me in bed, my porch is covered in corrosion and salt air persists everywhere.

It may be an invention but a few years into living here damned if it isn't one of the few things that resists hedonic adaptation. I feel way more relaxed here, granted I was coming from a major metro but I sometimes things that get hyped up actually are great!

Do you mind sharing where you live? One day I think I'd like to live on the beach.

Puerto Rico! If you are a US citizen you can just get up and move here. Lots of videos on YouTube to describe what it’s like and what it’s like to move here.

Before anyone gets too excited, keep in mind that the homicide rate for the US is 5 per 100,000, El Salvador (the highest) is 52 per 100,000, and Puerto Rico is 30... closer to El Salvador than to the US which isn't even that low.

An incomplete list of contiguous US city homicide rates PR is closer to than El Salvador as of 2018:

X 60.94 - St. Louis

X 58.64 - Baltimore

38.88 - Detroit

37.09 - New Orleans

28.52 - Memphis

22.78 - Washington DC

22.12 - Philadelphia

22.07 - Buffalo

20.70 - Chicago

18.88 - Cincinnati

18.84 - Pittsburgh

18.46 - Indianapolis

17.74 - Atlanta

16.62 - Milwaukee

16.27 - Oakland

14.95 - Fort Wayne

14.88 - Tulsa

13.60 - Orlando

13.45 - Toledo

13.26 - Nashville

12.62 - Greensboro

12.32 - Albuquerque

12.18 - Jacksonville

11.77 - Houston

11.38 - Dallas

11.09 - Columbus

10.54 - Stockton

09.72 - Miami

Does the 'X' mean that those cities have clinched the division title?

In short: In the 18th and 19th century the British Elite, the most powerful back then, started to use beaches as a place to restore and rejuvenate. Then extended this to the Mediterranean and Baltic seas.

The article fails to mention that the main reason for the elite to seek solace in coastal shores was health-related: iodized fresh air on the beach helped (or at least was considered of help) with several diseases that were common back then.

It's kind of striking how much faith they used to put in the power of climate to affect health. Histories of the period very frequently include people moving specifically because they are told the climate will improve their health. I wonder if there was anything to it or if it was the equivalent of a fad diet.

Probably a mix; for respiratory conditions, the _abysmal_ air quality in London (look up the "Great Stink" of 1858) and other industrial(izing) cities meant a move to somewhere the air was cleaner would have a rapid, measurable effect on health. (The Victorian understanding of the word "climate" would have included "air quality" as a factor.)

Other medical conditions (Cholera) that were exacerbated by poor sanitation would also show lower prevalence in the countryside, but the "climate" would be correlation, instead of causation.

And some of it was undoubtedly just a way of showing off in an "I spend 4 months a year on the French Riviera for the climate, on advice of my Doctor. PS I am wealthy enough to summer in France and have a personal Doctor." sort of way.

> but the "climate" would be correlation, instead of causation.

Two I've heard in the modern era are asthma and allergies. I'm not sure if it helps with asthma but different climates definitely affect allergies, particular the prevalence of more evergreen trees in warmer climates means there's a reduced/missing allergy season.

People like Keats were told Mediterranean climates were good for his tuberculosis. Quite a few people would take that sort of advice when that was a prevailing ailment.

Moving would also mean a change of diet or at least a change of food suppliers, and given how horribly adulterated things like bread could be especially in the big cities, that might have been a (probably mostly unnoticed) contributing factor to some people's recoveries too.

Allergies are certainly one factor that changes with climate.

There's probably a conflation of "mindfulness" in there. Since it wasn't a word at the time (I would presume), the meaning of it was probably mixed into other concepts, like climate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory

My wife and I are moving for climate. She has some rare diseases, and does very poorly where we currently live. Any time we travel to somewhere without high dust and mold levels, many of her problems clear up. What's surprising to me is really how little modern physicians pay attention to climate.

I don't think that is very surprising. A lot of people have rather strong bonds to the places they live in, and telling them "my medicine for you is move somewhere else" probably does not go over well in the general case.

Well if you consider that back then there was a ton of soot and disease in the air in cities and their wallpaper was likely to literally contain arsenic I can’t see why it couldn’t actually help.

Ahem, 5th paragraph: "The notion of the “restorative sea” was born. Physicians prescribed a plunge into chilly waters to invigorate and enliven. The first seaside resort opened on England’s eastern shore in the tiny town of Scarborough near York. Other coastal communities followed, catering to a growing clientele of sea bathers seeking treatment for a number of conditions: melancholy, rickets, leprosy, gout, impotence, tubercular infections, menstrual problems and “hysteria.” In an earlier version of today’s wellness culture, the practice of sea bathing went mainstream."

> From antiquity up through the 18th century, the beach stirred fear and anxiety in the popular imagination. The coastal landscape was synonymous with dangerous wilderness; it was where shipwrecks and natural disasters occurred.

It's still actually a very dangerous place [1]. Keep in mind that very few people knew how to swim back then.

[1] https://glsrp.org/statistics/

Some of the history is surprisingly recent too, still in living memory. My mum has a newspaper front page clipping of her friend being led away in handcuffs for the heinous crime of wearing a bikini. I think Grandma was the first generation of women that was allowed to swim at all and at least in some places they had gender segregated times. To add insult to that on the way back from the weekly beach trip Grandad liked to stop at the pub for a couple, women and children weren't allowed so they had to sit in the car.

Through the 20th century the beach has been a close parallel (usually lagging) of gender equality.

As a local, I was thrilled to see Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast mentioned as one of the first places where the idea of the beach transformed from a nightmarish hellscape into an idyllic retreat.

I also feel entitled to mention how - at this particular location - things have, in a way, come full circle.

What are the historical views and experiences of people outside of Europe?

Sadly this article is written exclusively from a Euro-centric perspective. Even the “Inventing the Beach” part of the title is colonialist.

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