“That in itself is a retreat scenario,” says Truitt. “What we’ve done on Longboat Key is a form of retreat, too.” What happened there is FEMA finally got tired of paying for the rebuilding of two houses that were getting ripped apart with every major storm surge. So it bought them from the owners and turned the property over to the town for beach access. Similar deals are in the works elsewhere in the county.

“My philosophy,” says Truitt, “is that a good beach renourishment project should not be viewed as a way to avoid retreat but as an opportunity for economists, politicians, lawyers and other decision makers to improve, say over 10 years, their policies and laws so there can be a planned, orderly retreat.”

To some extent, the damage done by a seawall can be mitigated by design and siting, Truitt explains. But he stresses that there’s no way to build one without major negative impacts. One of those negative impacts, of course, is that you lose most of what’s between the sea and the hard place—i.e., sand. Floridians have a legal right to “laterally traverse the sandy beaches of the state.” But by removing beaches, seawalls usurp that right. When state and county bureaucrats allow a community to build a seawall, they are sacrificing a public beach for the express benefit of private property owners and developers.

The National Wildlife Federation's David Conrad suggests this: "Communities could levy a small recreation sales tax, develop a trust fund, and pass a rule that for 20 years Front Street can have buildings, but that when the ocean reaches a certain level, they'd buy out Front Street, demolish the buildings, and let the beach rebuild its dunes. Then Second Street would be Front Street. That sounds radical. But there are places right now where Fifth Street has become Front Street. It's just that no one will acknowledge it; instead they fight and fight and spend taxpayer money."

Last July David Godfrey, Gary Appelson, and Renée Zenaida, all of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, the world's oldest sea turtle research and protection outfit, showed me the results of the latest shoreline armoring technology on the habitat of sea turtles and human beings. In the east-coast town of Wabasso, Fla., which is adjacent to the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge (the world’s second most important sea-turtle nesting beach), 17 oceanfront cottages had supposedly been protected from the Atlantic by an 1,800-foot seawall of metal and cement.  In 2004, hurricanes Frances and Jeanne crumpled it like a sand castle. Eight of the 17 cottages were lost, the others rendered uninhabitable. The seawall had destroyed most of the beach in front of the cottages and severely damaged 200 yards of beach to the south.

 “Over there was Wabasso Park,” said Godfrey, pointing to a gravel-lined gully on our right. “That's where the public bathrooms used to be. Gone. And the people who buy these lots are going to come back and build something bigger and feel like they're safe because of the [repaired] wall.” Godfrey related a confrontation he'd had with one of the homeowners when the wall was going up: “The guy came out on the beach and started grilling me: ‘Who are you? What do you want?' I told him we were concerned about sea-turtle nesting and had differing opinions about how to deal with beach erosion. ‘Well, this is my house, and I'm gonna do what I need to protect it, and blah, blah, blah.' Well, that's how he ‘protected' his house.” Godfrey pointed to a gray floor—all that was left.