He spent decades protecting NC’s coast, but new threats are rising with the sea | Opinion

Forty one years ago, Todd Miller, accompanied only by his Labrador retriever Kwawk – named for the call of a coastal bird – set out from his native Carteret County community of Ocean on a mission to protect the coast’s delicate web of freshwater, sea and wetlands.

That led to his founding the North Carolina Coastal Federation in 1982, with a $20,000 grant from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. Miller’s environmental group, now supported by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, other private donations and government grants, has grown to more than 40 employees serving in three coastal offices. It has played major roles – in the field and in the courtroom – in protecting the coast from environmental degradation and preparing it for the onslaught of climate change.

Miller, 66, announced this week that he’s stepping down as the Coastal Federation’s leader. Braxton Davis, director of the North Carolina Division of Coastal Management, will take over as executive director in 2024, although Miller will stay on as an adviser.

Miller told me he thinks now is a good point to spend more hours in the environment he helped to protect. “I love to go fishing and I want to be able to enjoy it while I can,” he said.

For all that he and other advocates have done, the challenges keep coming as climate change speeds the rise of sea levels and North Carolina’s coastal population grows. The strongest response, Miller said, is to buy land to protect it from development, but conservation dollars can only go so far.

“There will never be enough money to buy all that’s needed,” he said.

The next best response is to encourage housing developments that let water move freely over the land and through sounds and marshes.

With sea levels projected to rise by 1.5 feet by 2050, Miller said coastal development must acknowledge rather than fight the advance. “We are not going to be able to barricade ourselves behind walls,” he said. “We need to adapt to these changes.”

When properly managed, Miller said coastal land can help slow the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere that is driving climate change. For instance, as saltwater intrusion from rising sea levels renders farmland infertile, those lands can be restored to the marshland they were before being ditched and drained.

“Habitats sequester huge amounts of carbon. Just protecting them is a way to avoid that release, and restored lands can begin to sequester carbon again,” he said. “For mitigating climate change, that’s one of the tools that we have.”

Miller’s Coastal Federation has also promoted the expansion of “living shorelines” instead of bulkheads. The living shorelines made of plants, sand and rocks provide more resilience during storms and prevent marshes from being cut off by hard shoreline barriers.

Miller also thinks encouraging the growth of North Carolina’s oyster farms is a way to get a commercial industry on the side of the environment. “Once people are invested in clean water, people will be a lot more serious about protecting the waters because you’ve got thousands of jobs depending on it,” he said.

Showing the connection between a clean environment and a healthy coastal economy reflects Miller’s approach to environmental protection: Don’t confront people, recruit them.

Derb Carter, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said of Miller “powerful idea was to engage people who love the North Carolina coast as the best hope of saving what is so special about it – its wetlands, sounds, waterways, beaches, and way of life.

“No one has been a more effective and steady advocate for our coastal resources than Todd Miller and the Coastal Federation.”

Miller thinks the key to saving the coast for tomorrow is letting it change naturally today.

“Some of these forces we are not going to control. We have to adapt and learn to live with them,” he said.

Miller, likewise, is adapting to the tide of time. He’s protected the coast for four decades. Now he plans to take more days to be “gone fishing.”

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com