Freshly back from what is fast becoming my family's annual summer visit to New Jersey's Long Beach Island, I am struck by the memories it evokes in me, in my mother, and makes me wonder what memories of these trips will stay with my son.

My father's parents had a summer house there (Brant Beach, all misspellings aside, the obvious choice) and when I was growing up, we usually spent two weeks in August at the house on Farragut Avenue.

Now in her 70s, my mother seems to have more memories of her time there as a teenager with my dad than of the family vacations that loom so large in my memory. Perhaps their strict schedule blends them together into one long summer.

Significant among her memories is a time when the northern portions of the island, places like Harvey Cedars and Loveladies, remained largely devoid of development.

This is, not surprisingly, no longer the case.

In fact because these areas were built up later in the timeline, they are not filled with the modest capes and bungalows that inhabit wider portions of the island like Ship Bottom and Surf City.

Instead, they are populated with extremes of modern architecture, each trying to make a structural statement on its own individual postage stamp, with little regard for the equally unique masterpiece next door.

The crowding together of so many attempts at individuality on what was once bracken, marsh and beach grass makes for an interesting metaphor for what we're doing to our seashores.

In short, we're building them into oblivion, erecting mansions on the shifting sands of barrier islands, what geologists call high-speed real estate.

But first, a disclaimer.

Yes, we rent what my wife charmingly calls "an upside down house."

With the kitchen, living room and perhaps a master bedroom on the top floor, along with elaborate decking arrangements that reach to the roof, the extra flight of stairs up which groceries must be hauled is offset by a near-constant breeze and, if you're willing to add a zero or two to the already outrageous rent, a glimpse of watery blue on a clear day.

Add central air conditioning, a requirement for those of us who carry an extra year-round layer of insulating seal blubber, and it's a veritable paradise on earth.

Who wouldn't want one, if only for a week?

And therein lies the problem.

Everyone wants one and, frankly, there are a lot more everyones.

More than half the country's population lives along the nation's coasts, the northeast alone averaging 767 people per square mile. In Florida, a 600 percent population increase in the last 50 years has seen the population grow from 1.9 million to 15 million, all in some of the most ecologically fragile habitat in the country.

In fact, 46 percent of the entire U.S. population lives in coastal regions where the eco-system is the most fragile and taking a drive down Long Beach Boulevard, it's easy to see the evidence.

So this year, we pried the two cousins' fingers from their beloved boogie boards and spent an afternoon at a place called the Long Beach Island Federation of the Arts and Sciences.

There, a "Barnegat Bay Day" event promised a presentation using live diamondback terrapins, something Eli, my science-loving nephew, was bound to enjoy.

And he did.

As did we all. The turtles were as charming as amphibians can be, and we learned about their dwindling population and the dangers they face which are, of course, man-made.

At such events, it is not uncommon for a variety of like-minded organizations to hand out literature, and this was no different.

I must admit though, that I was impressed with a large pamphlet the federation handed out called "The Island Blue Pages."

It was filled with useful information about human impact on this fragile barrier island and suggestions about how to mitigate that impact.

But no amount of substituting native plants for wimpy, water hungry lawns can keep the non-stop development from doing things like destroying the habitat of the diamondback terrapin to make room for more breezy upside down houses. The math is against them.

For probably the most startling image amid the graphics on crab eating habits and eel grass habitat was the population chart.

Charted for all of Ocean County, which includes the towns on the other side of the bay as well as those on the 18-mile island, which is less than two city blocks wide at some points, was a graph that showed population largely constant and well below 100,000 souls from 1850 to 1950.

Then, in the next 50 years America added another 500,000 residents. As such, 30 percent of Barnegat Bay's watershed has been developed, a critical tipping point at which the eco-system passes a point of no return and can no longer support the life that has lived there for millennia.

Used for its shock value, the figure is meant to spur efforts to act now to save the bay and certainly we should try, but it makes me wonder if it isn't already too late, if we haven't already turned the place upside down.

With little room left on that sliver of sand, I don't wonder if we haven't already doomed the diamondback and his neighbors in exchange for more places for more people to enjoy a week standing on top of a house built on top of what they came to admire.

For as more and more people strive to provide their children with summer memories like mine, myself guiltily among them, we are perhaps ensuring that those memories will be alarmingly different, and contain little appearance of the island's natural state at all.