Americans aren’t supposed to run away. The very word “retreat” is anathema to them. So why is Sarasota County commissioner Jon Thaxton telling us we should no longer try to hold our ground against the Gulf of Mexico, that wherever practical we should back off, taking our buildings with us or even abandoning them?

The answer is that he is one of an increasing number of officials who understand how the sea and shore interact, and that the most modern of beach-retaining paraphernalia implemented by the most learned engineers can’t hold back the sea any better than did King Canute. Retreat is very expensive, but lots cheaper than refusing to retreat. “When I came onto the board six years ago I was very much opposed by developers; they thought I was going to be a tree hugger,” says Thaxton, who had made a reputation for himself as an Audubon activist and a champion of endangered species, in particular the Florida scrub jay.

It wasn’t long before he reinforced the image, appalling beachfront owners and his fellow commissioners by calling for a vote to abolish the ordinance permitting shoreline armoring with seawalls. As an environmentalist, Thaxton had long understood that seawalls do little to protect human dwellings (which shouldn't be built on the beachfront any more than they should be built on a river's floodplain), and that seawalls reflect waves so that sand is carried away. Instead of a beach, birds and sea turtles find gravel and bedrock that's inundated at high tide. Seawalls encourage development, which, in turn, brings more seawalls.

And seawalls give home buyers a false sense of security. Florida's beachfront dwellings, allegedly protected by seawalls, are forever being destroyed by storms. In many cases owners are able to collect taxpayer-provided state and federal insurance, then rebuild. Sarasota County provides a vignette of what's happening statewide. On Casey Key, where houses in the path of the advancing sea are being washed away, just six homeowners were allowed to build an 804-foot-long seawall in 2004. About a third of the county's 35-mile oceanfront has been armored with seawalls, and more are going up.

“The intent of the seawall ordinance,” Thaxton says, “was to allow people to protect their property only under severe and extraordinary circumstances. I don’t mean to criticize this current board, but what has happened through several boards is that the temptation to help the individual has resulted in a degradation of a public resource. When a person comes to you in tears, it’s hard to say no. I thought the best way to handle the situation was simply to not have the ordinance as an option. That would force another option, rarely used: the strategy of retreat. Recognize the building is in a precarious location and move or rebuild the structure landward. I was able to get a second, but not a majority vote.” And that’s especially frustrating, says Thaxton, because Sarasota is considered a national model for smart growth policies.

 “And for us to have hardened such a significant portion of our Gulf beach shore—and to have an ordinance in place that could armor virtually all of it—goes against what we are preaching,” he emphasizes. “What makes Sarasota County so distinctive with regard to shoreline armoring is: One, we’ve done so much of it; and two, we have the highest density of sea-turtle nests anywhere on the west coast, and there’s no close second.”

Florida has by far the most prolific and diverse fish fauna of any state in the union. Florida is a birder’s paradise. Ninety percent of all sea turtles in U.S. waters nest in Florida. Because the state’s beaches, bays, estuaries and near-shore reefs provide nursery and breeding habitat for all these creatures, you’d think that Florida’s policies for beach management and coastal development would be especially enlightened. Instead, they’re the most backward in the nation.

“Florida uses a lot of seawalls," declares Professor Orrin Pilkey, director of Duke University's Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines. “It’s probably easier to build one there than anywhere else." In Florida you can even build seawalls for land speculation—that is, you may lawfully use them in an attempt to protect undeveloped land.

After the recent hurricanes, Thaxton’s prescribed alternative to seawalls—retreat—isn’t sounding quite so radical. In fact, there’s not an authority on beach erosion who doesn’t agree with it, and this includes ethical sea-wall developers themselves. “People hear ‘retreat,’ and what they envision is closing down the buildings and moving off the barrier island,” remarks Cliff Truitt of the highly respected Coastal Technology Corporation, a Sarasota-based company that designs and builds seawalls as well as “beach renourishment” projects—a euphemism for making fake beaches. “Well, that’s one method of retreat. But other methods are going on right now.”