Crossposted from https://piefed.social/c/barefoot@piefed.social/p/2201987/our-beach-is-now-barefoot-friendly
When we bought our house last year, this was the state of the lakefront:
It was completely overgrown with pine trees, aspen trees and bushes. The previous owner of the house just plain stopped caring years ago, and it was so overgrown the lake could barely be seen from the house.
So I had a lumberjack fell the trees and clear the bushes. When winter subsided, it looked like this:
Much nicer! But it was pretty much impossible to walk on without shoes on because of all the roots sticking up. A beach you can’t walk on barefoot isn’t much of a beach, is it?
So last month, I got a guy with an excavator to remove all the tree stumps and the roots underground. It took all day and he removed almost 10 tons of roots! That was the beach after the excavator left:
And finally, yesterday and today, with a shovel and a rake, I manually dug up another 800 lbs of roots and decaying organic material - this whole area is peatland, leveled the beach and coarsely sifted the sand to make sure nothing nasty was left in it so that I could enjoy our beach barefoot, as beaches should. Good thing I did that too, because I unearthed a lot of broken glass: apparently, people have been enjoying the summer holidays, drinking beer and throwing the bottles on the beach for decades here.
And now the beach finally looks like a beach 🙂
Now I’m trying to rent a beach cleaning machine to lift up the sand and remove all the small bits of organic material left in it. That’s just too much to sift through manually. But I can’t seem to find any such machine anywhere in the area…
Reminds me of those people who like their houses on the edge of a cliff or on stilts in the water. Like, sure man, that looks cool, but how safe is it 10 years down the line? And who’s gonna clean up the mess after?
Just seems like irresponsible decision making in pursuit of prettiness…
Why wouldn’t this be safe? If left unmaintained nature will reclaim this in few years.
Nature can be quite violent in these trying times.
Encouraging/facilitating erosion and damaging the root systems of nearby trees.
Nice job! Now watch your cottage slowly slide into the lake over a period of time.
This is just basic beach/shoreline cleanup… it looks good. What’s the problem here?
It is aesthetics vs ecology.
An “overgrown shoreline” protects the water body like lakes and ponds from too much nutrients running into it. As well as helps protect against soil erosion.
I can see that they mainly just cleared out the area, and didn’t simply build the shoreline there. But I would disagree with decision that was made here.
And if it really is peatland, then a lot of damage has already been done to the local ecosystem.
It mildly infuriates someone who has no connection to it.
there’s nothing even wrong here.
I wish my problems were so insignificant that I had to go look for shit like this to get mad about. What a privilege it must be to be OP. They’re harassing him in his original post too.
Today I learned that calmly pointing out a negative aspect that somebody might not have thought of is “harassing”.
Rather than do any sort of harassing, I decided it would be better to express my frustration by sharing it here where I thought some others might sympathize.
And as for your comment on me having no relation to it: we all have a relation to it. Habitat destruction is a worldwide problem with worldwide consequences. And even if it didn’t, maybe it’s okay to care about non-human creatures.
I think the problem is that this is NOT the natural state of this specific shoreline. If being left alone resulted in trees and grass growing then a sandy “beach” shoreline is not in balance with the local ecosystem. Trimming the grass and clearing a small path for access would have been okay but nuking that span of shoreline has now introduced significant erosion risk. Grasses, shurbs, and roots play an important role in preventing erosion. Maybe the 50-100m stretch won’t be a big deal in the long run but if all the homes in the area follow suit then long term large scale problems will arise. Even still at a small scale, I can already see how close this shoreline is to their home. They have eliminated a decent bit of erosion preventing vegetation that served as a buffer from the back yard of their homes. A few seasons of high and low tide cycles will, at best wash away their “pretty walking area”, and at worst undermine the stability of the soil near the building foundation. There is no easy “undo” for the damage they have done, the closest thing is artificial erosion preventative measures which will be concrete, metal, or some other manufactured system that will be much more of an eye soar then the original condition they apparently hated so much.
If you read the original post, OP explains that the lake is managed, it used to be an overgrown swamp full of mosquitos, the government cleaned it up, raised the water level and created the lake.
Is it isn’t some ancient natural habitat that got ruined.
You know nothing of this area.
There is no tide here. There is no current. The water level is constant. Because it’s not a real lake: it’s a swamp that has been dredged out to prevent mosquito infestation. There’s a 10-acre buffer zone upstream that prevents silt from the catchment area from filling the lake back up, and there’s a dam downstream to control the lake level. That’s so the entire goddamn area isn’t filled with mosquitoes.
It’s not a real lake! All the lakefronts around it are artificial.
Thanks for the clarification. I originally tried to access the piefed post but it wouldn’t load so I worked off the assumption this was a natural lake.
I’ll edit my original post with a note to clarify my misunderstanding.
it seems piefed has put upma login wall in recent weeks. I’m not sure what does that prevent other than regular users visiting links…
How do we know the state it was in before was natural? Invasive species grow and invade natural climes all the time.
Would you suggest all that broken glass was natural too?
That’s a ridiculous strawman.
But, supposing that you were being sincere and not intentionally strawmanning: you can clean up glass and other waste without excavating and literally trying to remove any trace of biological presence. I would encourage everyone to do so.
it’s not even a natural lake, so the “natural state” of things is sort of a moot argument, no?
OP is just naive af and badjacketing this whole thing about a guy who cleaned up the shorelline at his lakehouse. Probably because they’re jealous, probably because they don’t know wtf they’re talking about and think human = bad.
An artificial lake with native wildlife that’s colonized it is better than an artificial lake with a barren artificial beach.
The best was not to create an artificial lake at all, but that’s out of the home owners control
It’s the Buffer zone between trees, grass and water that is home to many species and a cradle of life. Modifying this habitat to create a beach tend to destroy the fauna.
that buffer zone still exists… the guy didn’t remove the boundary between the beach and sea… it’s still there.
You realize that shorelines shift in change in nature all the time, right? Like, changing tide levels, water levels in lakes, shifiting sands, trees… nothing the original person did is in any way significantly different than normal nature… this “habitat” zone has probably shifted several times in just the course of the year…
It went from marsh to nearly dead sand….
Am I crazy for thinking he’s in for some serious erosion problems without the roots holding the area by the water together?
I think it’s a work in progress, but I agree, I think he should plant some bushes along that ridge line before the sand to prevent that soil from eroding and weaking the tree roots.
Don’t worry, they’ve removed all the roots because they hurt their feet. Nothing bad could happen from doing that when their house is nearby!
These people ignorance hurts every other living being on earth, they should pay for the damage they provoke and for the (hopefully possible) restoration of it.
Erosion might steal his beach
Fucker
where i am, this type of work would require planning and submission to the state dept of natural resources (DNR) for approval.
they would not have given it.
For good reason
Buddy is going to learn the hard way what happens when you remove tree roots and all of the things holding shorelines together… natural lake or not. All of that stuff was holding his property from sliding into the lake slowly each rainfall and keeping trees from falling over in the wind. My brother does this kind of stuff and then wonders why he needs to maintain things so much after.
What a fucking dickhead. Hope you removed enough roots for your stupid home to get undermined and slide into the lake.
Whats mildly infuriating is that I get threatening letters from the landlord if I let nature take over my patch, but also get to watch people get annoyed at other people not letting nature take over their patch.
Apparently everyone is angry at you all the time no matter what you do.
Once the Internet gained enough people, I found that any area of it with a lot of people generally had other humans that would be angry with your life choices.
I wish my brain was awake enough to word that better.
can’t be a dickhead anymore cuz of woke
As a fellow lake-user, I’m appalled.
You’re the sort of person who gets into HOAs and makes all sorts of ridiculous regulations, aren’t you?
Boo-fucking-hoo. There’s tens of thousands of kilometers of overgrown shoreline like that in Finland.
Recreational outrage.
