In a time of accelerating sea level rise and increasingly intensifying storms, the world’s sandy beaches and dunes have never been more crucial to protecting coastal environments. Yet, in order to meet the demands of large-scale construction projects, sand mining is stripping beaches and dunes, destroying environments, and exploiting labor in the process. The authors of Vanishing Sands track the devastating impact of legal and illegal sand mining over the past twenty years, ranging from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to South America and the eastern United States. They show how sand mining has reached crisis levels: beach, dune, and river ecosystems are in danger of being lost forever, while organized crime groups use deadly force to protect their illegal mining operations. Calling for immediate and widespread resistance to sand mining, the authors demonstrate that its cessation is paramount for saving not only beaches, dunes, and associated environments but also lives and tourism economies everywhere.

Orrin H. Pilkey is Emeritus James B. Duke Professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences at Duke University and the author and coauthor of many books.

Norma J. Longo, a geologist and photographer, is coauthor with Pilkey of several books on coastal issues.

William J. Neal, Emeritus Professor of Geology at Grand Valley State University, is an expert on ocean and Great Lakes shoreline evolution and coauthor of many books with Pilkey.

Nelson G. Rangel-Buitrago is Professor in the Geology, Geophysics, and Marine-Research Group at the Universidad del Atlántico, Barranquilla, Colombia, and a prolific author of coastal science studies.

Keith C. Pilkey, an attorney concerned with legal issues of coastal development, is coauthor of two books about sea level rise.

Hannah L. Hayes is a scholar of changing land rights, disaster capitalism, and risk management in Barbuda and Fiji.

Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xv
1. Who’s Mining the Shore?  1
2. Sand: Earth’s Most Remarkable Mineral Resource  21
3. Singapore Sand Bandits: Sitting on Asia’s Sandpile  43
4. The Sands of Crime: Mafia, Sand Robbers, and Law Benders  56
5. Sand Rivers to the Beach: Choked Flow  77
6. Barbuda and Other Islands: Lessons from the Caribbean  97
7. A Summoner’s Thirteen Tales: South America’s Coastal Sand Mining  118
8. A Different Kind of Sand Mining: Legal but Destructive  143
9. Africa Sands: Desert Abundance—Coastal Dearth  167
10. Beach Mining: Truths and Solutions  185
Appendix A. Sand Mining Violent Events  195
Appendix B. Sand Rights: Bringing Back Reason  197
References  201
Contributors  233
Index  235