“The water likes to reclaim territory where it was previously.”

— Christina Gerhardt


High Water Line: New Jersey — a public-facing project for spring 2022 — was organized by Christina Gerhardt, the 2021-22 Barron Visiting Professor in the Environmental Humanities in the High Meadows Environmental Institute, to walk and chalk New Jersey’s future shoreline as projected by science. Three expert panels also engaged the public in understanding the impacts of sea-level rise on the New Jersey shoreline.

The short film below by Princeton-based Orangebox Pictures captures the core of the project, a series of walking tours of Sayreville, New Jersey, that outlined the city’s future shoreline to demonstrate the threat of sea-level rise facing the state’s low-lying coastal and riverside communities — and show how people are responding to the effects of climate change they face already.