My family waits far too long after Christmas to take our tree down, and I usually regret it a little bit when all the needles fall off as we squeeze it out the front door and ingloriously toss it down the front steps. But this year, I was glad that we waited. Following Christmas, I read about the call for people to bring their trees to Popham Beach to help rebuild the eroding shoreline. We have often put our tree in the backyard for animals or sometimes along our own shoreline. But this seemed like a good excuse to get out to Popham Beach on a winter day. We had planned to take the tree down a bit earlier this year, having gotten it earlier than we usually do. But somehow it didn’t happen right after Christmas. And then two back-to-back storms hit the Maine coast.

The Popham shoreline, along with many other shorelines in Maine, was already eroding. The one-two punch of the storms accelerated that process as if someone had taken a time-lapse over many months rather than weeks. So, when I finally jammed our skeletal tree into the back of the car and took the long but lovely drive to Popham, what I arrived to see, aside from a giant pile of Christmas trees, was a fence that had been broken apart in many places and dunes that looked like the ocean had taken a giant bite out of them, their once-sloped faces now turned into sheer cliffs.

The Popham effort, which is being coordinated by the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry along with the Maine Geological Survey, was initiated in response to storms last winter, which similarly pummeled the dunes. These dunes separate the sandy beach from the area above, which includes park pavilions and pitch pines. The plan was to put the collected Christmas trees in the upper part of the beach up against the existing dunes in an effort to form a new, natural habitat where sand and soil could settle and grow new beach grasses that would help to hold the dunes together.

Now, the need is greater than ever, as the recent storm apparently took about 10 feet off the already impacted dunes. It’s a good thing that the placement of the trees wasn’t planned until February, as all of the good efforts may very well have been washed away. This project might serve as a model for others along the coast, both as a way to respond to storms and to prepare for future impacts to shorelines.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the ways to shore up shorelines naturally and referenced the state’s Living Shorelines Program, of which this effort is a part, as a resource for coastal landowners looking for ways to respond positively and proactively to the recent storms. There is a good video about this program on Brunswick’s cable TV network at tv3hd.brunswickme.org/CablecastPublicSite/show/5624?site=1. The Popham Beach project is a dramatic and easy-to-see example of how the creation of a living shoreline might help to slow down coastal erosion. I will be interested to follow as they plan their next steps — and it will give me an excuse to get back out to the beach this winter.

Susan Olcott is the director of operations at Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.

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