"PERCE, Quebec — Against the ravaging seas, Quebec’s coastal communities have learned through bitter experience that the way to advance against climate change is to retreat.
Over the past decade, civilization has been pulled back from the water’s edge where possible along the eastern stretch of the Gaspe Peninsula where coastline is particularly vulnerable to erosion. Defenses erected against the sea ages ago have been dismantled, rock by rock, concrete chunk by chunk.
Forillon National Park, nearly 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Perce, removed a road that the ocean turned into heaving chunks of asphalt and scattered with boulders year after year as winters warmed and the shore’s protective sea ice vanished.
In Perce, a town of several thousand that swells with summer visitors drawn to the majestic seascape, a manmade beach was “nourished” with pebbles and given to nature to sculpt. After extreme storms wrecked the town’s old seaside boardwalk, a new one was built farther from the water and without the concrete wall that had only added to storm wave fury. "
