The Golden Bay Dune Debate

Life exhibits strange ironies. Sometimes they are so perfectly arranged that I have to step back and laugh.

Residents at Golden Bay, Western Australia, have spent years objecting to development that could alter or remove the area’s natural sand dunes. Their concern is easy to understand. The dunes are part of the coastline’s character. They support wildlife, soften the landscape and remind us that not every available patch of ground needs a roof, road or retaining wall placed on it.

I like nature too. I’d rather see dunes, trees, swamps, grasslands, frogs and birds than another regiment of roofs advancing towards the water. We have an extraordinary talent for pulling the natural world apart, then congratulating ourselves when we preserve one attractive piece of it. It is one of those ethical dilemmas of humanity we rarely examine for long.

But look beyond the photograph of protesters sitting on an untouched dune.

Look behind them, if you can. (You can’t. The dune hides the truth.)

Many live in homes built on land that was once natural too. Their houses, streets, driveways, drains and powerlines did not float down from heaven and settle without disturbing anything. Dunes were flattened. Vegetation was cleared. Wildlife moved—or failed to. The destruction being opposed today is a continuation of the process that made yesterday’s homes possible.

That does not make the protesters evil or their concerns worthless. It makes the story uncomfortable.

It gives the issue the kind of moral ambiguity I usually explore in fiction. Everyone wants to be on the right side, but the right side becomes harder to locate once the camera pulls back.

The difference appears to be timing.

Development was tolerable when it supplied our block of land. It became environmental vandalism when it threatened the remaining view. Our lower-density suburb was acceptable; someone else’s higher-density suburb is a plague. We want room, comfort, roads, shops, services and sea breezes, then question whether those things are necessities or entitlements of a selfish lifestyle.

To be fair, a newer development may be denser, uglier and more damaging than the suburb beside it. Those differences matter, and objections can improve what is eventually built. But they do not erase the earlier bargain. A larger block created decades ago did not preserve the environment; it simply destroyed more of it for fewer people and had time to grow gardens over the evidence.

Human beings are excellent at drawing a line immediately after crossing it.

That is the strange irony.

We demand progress but object to its machinery. We welcome population growth until newcomers need somewhere nearby to live. We want affordable homes, but not those homes. We want nature protected, provided the protection does not require us to surrender the patch we already claimed.

Perhaps this is informed awareness or blind ignorance. Perhaps it is both. Awareness is easy once the concrete beneath our own feet has dried.

The honest argument is not that one particular development represents the moment destruction began. It began long before that. Every suburb along this coast sits on something displaced. Every road sliced through habitat. Every shopping centre, school and car park replaced a landscape that did not volunteer to leave.

We behave as though humanity has earned a God complex: this part may live, that part may be cleared, and this last attractive ridge must remain because we have finally noticed it.

If we genuinely want to protect undeveloped land, the discussion must include limits. Smaller footprints. Denser living in places already disturbed. Less expansion. Fewer demands. Perhaps even the deeply unpopular idea that endless population growth and endless coastal development cannot coexist with endless untouched nature.

That is a harder protest sign to carry.

It is also the whole truth nobody really wants. The trimmed version says developers are destroying the dunes. The complete version says all of us participate in the same system. We consume, multiply, expand and then become sentimental about whatever remains beyond the back fence.

In another hundred years, today’s proposed development may be considered old, spacious and worth protecting from the next wave. Concrete may stretch farther. People may look at photographs of Golden Bay’s remaining dunes and wonder why anyone allowed them to disappear.

Or perhaps they will be sitting on the final one, holding signs.

Best of luck, Golden Bay. I mean that sincerely.

But until the protest is about us—not merely the people arriving after us—I don’t expect success in this lifetime.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)