A common theme of environmental fear-mongering is an insistence that the ordinary functions of nature are somehow a marker of the end of the world thanks to human activity.
Granted, humans have done damage to God's creation, especially at the zenith of the Industrial Revolution, but nothing close to the apocalyptic predictions of rabid environmentalists.
If the environment is going along its natural course, there's not much we humans can do about it, as the residents of one Massachusetts beach town have quickly learned.
After the residents of Salisbury Beach pooled their resources and spent about $600,000 and an entire month creating artificial dunes out of 14,000 tons of sand, those dunes were washed away in three days, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.
The purpose of the effort was to protect houses from erosion, which has been a persistent problem on that stretch of beach.
Unfortunately, a storm came in Sunday, right after they finished, and undid all their work.
"What we built this past month, sure, we thought would last longer," Tom Saab, president of the nonprofit Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change, told The Weather Channel in an interview Monday. "But this king high tide hit with a storm out at sea and it was devastating."
Still, the group -- which facilitated the sand project and helped raise money for it -- tried to put a brave face on what happened, claiming in social media posts that "the sacrificial dunes did their job," preventing houses from getting "eaten up" by the storm, the AP reported.
Others were more skeptical regarding the efficacy of the project and the general thinking behind it.
"Throw all the sand down you want. Mother nature decides how long it will protect your homes," resident Peter Lodi wrote in a Facebook post.
The Boston Globe reported that Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change, while successful at raising money thus far, can't afford to ask residents to pay out of pocket each time there's a storm.
Despite repeated pleas for help or funding from Massachusetts, the state has told them to fend for themselves.
Most of the reports about the erosion in Salisbury Beach contend that a solution must be found. Otherwise, they say, with climate change worsening and sea levels rising, residents' homes might be washed away.
But is this really a matter of manmade climate change?
Or is it just a symptom of the natural ebb and flow of the coast?
Anyone familiar with history or possessing even a passing interest in the prehistory of a world knows coastlines don't remain exactly the same forever, even without manmade influence.
Beaches are typically made of sand and are constantly buffeted by the wind and the waves.
They're not going to stay in the same place forever. Eventually, the constant forces acting on them will change the shape of the coast, whether subtly or more dramatically.
Beaches grow and recede; that's just the nature of the coast.
By all means, the residents of Salisbury Beach should protect their houses the best they can, but they aren't going to change the essential nature of the coast.
We don't need to fret that the sky is falling when nature does what it always does.
