Seen from the air, the five streets that make up Oakwood Beach, New York look out of place—they are nothing more than a few spindly fingers of soil surrounded by flat estuarine wetlands. Three miles inland is Todt Hill, which, at 410 feet above sea level, is the highest point on the eastern seaboard south of Maine. Twenty-two thousand years ago, when the massive Wisconsin Ice Sheet—that covered much of New England and all New York City in mile-thick ice—retreated, it left behind certain identifiable characteristics: a long ridge of high land, known as a terminal moraine, that stretches from the southern end of Staten Island, through Brooklyn and Queens, and out the length of Long Island.

But just as glaciers can build mountains so too can they level them. As the ice sheet pulled back, much of the land close to the water subsided, creating hundreds of miles of marshes and swamps like those that surround Oakwood Beach. In other words: The slow withdrawal of the most recent ice age left much of the United States’ eastern seaboard vulnerable to sea level rise.

The United States is eleventh on the list of the countries most at risk to sea level rise, finishing just behind the canal-riddled Netherlands, deltaic Bangladesh, and the island nation of the Philippines. We are going to have to figure out what to do with our densely populated coasts, and soon, because by century’s end many of our low-lying communities will be underwater. While New York City’s response to coastal disasters has long been to build it back, after Sandy a handful of neighborhoods—like the laissez-faire, climate change denying, right-wing neighborhood of Oakwood Beach—began to experiment with larger scale solutions that most post-disaster plans scrupulously avoid. Like retreat.

There has been a tenfold increase in natural disasters since 1970 thanks, in no small part, to an increase in global temperatures. With more water sloshing around in the ocean, the devastation that coastal storms inflict has also increased. And the numbers are only expected to rise. Last summer, 40,000 square miles of ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet melted ice each day, which means that more water is being dumped into the ocean than ever before. NASA recently released a study declaring the loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet “unstoppable.” It alone contains enough water to raise global sea levels four feet. Coastal communities situated near or in wetlands, like those that line Staten Island’s eastern shore, are already feeling the crunch.

I heard about the end of Oakwood Beach in the spring of 2013, after a student of mine at the College of Staten Island told me that her family was trying to sell their Sandy-ruined property to the state. The storm had struck over six months earlier and many New Yorkers were still living in motels or, worse, in drafty, moldy, half demolished homes. My student’s family and her neighbors came together and launched a public campaign, begging the state to use federal money to purchase and bulldoze their low-lying neighborhoods. In February 2013, the governor agreed.