Somebody with some more knowledge about beach dynamics please step in here.
 What follows is a little bit of knowledge and a lot of speculation and
interpolation (and of course some emotional stuff of my own!):
 
Don't beaches in nature come and go, move from here to there, form, erode
and reform?  If there was a lovely sandy slope on Beach X in historic
memory, it was there for a reason, it would seem, because of winds and
currents depositing sand on Beach X. If this sand washes away, it is going
to be redeposited somewhere, on Beach X again, because of the same
prevailing winds and currents, or on Beach W or Beach Y, depending on the
prevailing currents and winds, and the current contours of the coastline.
If Beach Y has developed a lovely white sandy beach in the recent past, its
position may be blocking redeposition of the sand back on its historic
Beach X.
 
Thus we might have to eradicate lovely Beach Y, (!!) or keep renourishing
the geologically passe Beach X on and on, to the detriment of other
worthwhile projects and, more important to us as enthusiasts of marine
life,  the said marine life offshore of Beach X.   Neither seems to me to
be a sane course of action.
 
So what about tourism? This is the same cry one hears in the Pacific
northwest about the lumber industry and the spotted owls.  These people
have been lumbermen for several generations.  But they are 1) destroying
the environment and 2) eradicating the much-demeaned and cursed-at little
bird, which is somewhat of a symbol as well as a vanishing species.
 
The best response I ever heard to the question you asked was delivered in
response to the lumbermen who were asking the same question:  How do we
feed our families?  How do we survive?  The answer was to get retrained to
do something else. This same dilemma is facing everyone else in the land,
with expectations for all of us of having to change careers several times
in our lives.  Why should the timber [tourist] industry be exempt?  At the
end of a long and eloquent and moving and to-the-point speech, the speaker
revealed that he had practiced exactly what he was preaching...his
ex-industry and that of his forefathers was..guess what?  Whaling!
Everything changes.
 
We can't keep on privately owning our beaches and we can't keep on fighting
Mother Nature. She doesn't like a fixed beach and will do her worst to
destroy it. Beaches belong to the sea and the earth, and call me a romantic
if you want,  (or whatever other names are occurring to you at the moment)
but I believe trying to mold them and own them and insisting upon deriving
an insured and continuous profit from them is like trying to cage the wind!
 And pumping sand onto the beach from the live waters offshore seems to me
a bit like governmental price supports on tobacco! Spend a lot of feel-good
money to destroy us.
 
Also, Carol, they've shown in the movies that if you build it, they will
come. Stick a skee ball cum cotton candy stand in the middle of a desert
and the tourists will go there. Build a country music town in absolutely
nowhere and they will arrive by busloads.  Plunk enough rides and cute
stuff in the midst of a hot, steamy central Florida swamp and you get
Disney World.  Beaches are getting a bit raw and natural for the average
world tourist, and besides, they don't have coin slots or admission fees.
Where's the fun in that? Other attractions can replace the vanished beach,
but they will take work and imagination. And the transition will be tough.
 
Lynn, also ducking the unfriendly fire