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Paper short abstract:

Case study exploring the social, technological, and environmental history of a barrier island road in the context of coastal change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the surprisingly complex social, technological, and environmental history of a narrow seven-mile road on a shifting barrier island. Seasonal human habitation of Santa Rosa Island began thousands of years ago, and, despite a handful of ill-fated and short-lived efforts to construct permanent structures, the island remained a distant coastal frontier to the nearby city of Pensacola, Florida through the early nineteenth century. Local boosters, ignoring prescient warnings by coastal stakeholders, spearheaded the construction of a narrow road on the island to a new state park in 1949. Over the ensuing decades, the road became a lightning rod for conflict between local, state, and federal stakeholders as storm- and climate-induced coastal changes, social movements, and technological innovations made and remade Fort Pickens Road, offering a vivid case study of the compromises, adaptations, and innovations wrought by coastal change.