Present at the Future (12 page)

—WILLIAM D. RUCKELSHAUS

The problem with speculating about the future is that tomorrow will be yesterday by the time you read this. Words fixed on paper cannot keep up with the dynamics of a world that is changing by the minute. The future may change overnight to become the past. Perhaps next time it will be not the Gulf Coast under hurricane attack but the Florida Keys. Or then again, maybe Mississippi, or even, yes, New Orleans once more.

But it really doesn’t matter because sooner or later, just about all coastal towns around the world will be flooded, victims of melting polar ice and rising sea levels, the signature of global warming. The vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting, some of them at twice the rate expected. Just the runoff of the melting ice from Greenland, flowing into the North Atlantic, could raise sea
levels 20 feet in the next few hundred years. And it won’t be just the coastal cities of America sinking beneath the waves.

“If you want to see what Shanghai, Gdansk, Poland, Bombay, India, and New York City are all going to be obsessively dealing with fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years from now, turn on your television and look at New Orleans, says Mike Tidwell, activist and environmental writer (Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast), “because that same sea-level rise from global warming will wipe out barrier islands, destroy buffering wetlands, and cause all kinds of problems to cities that are designed and built along the East Coast.

“Because of global climate change in this century, we will see between one and three feet of sea-level rise worldwide. Whether the land sinks three feet per century, as in New Orleans, or the sea level
rises three feet per century, as in the rest of the world, you have the same problem.”

So what are the low-lying seacoasts and ports around the world going to do about it? How will they survive? It appears that they have a couple of options: They can try to do what the Netherlands has done and build dikes and seawalls and hold the sea back. Or they can retreat inland and allow the sea to capture—or recapture—real estate destined to be underwater in a world of rising sea levels. About one quarter of the Netherlands is below sea level, yet it has engineered a system of levees and seawalls that keep the sea under control. Why can’t we emulate the Dutch?

IMITATING THE DUTCH

“I’m really encouraging everybody to look at the Netherlands,” says Ivor Van Heerden, director of the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes and deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “When you compare our levees to theirs, it’s almost shameful. They’ve got it
right. They’ve got lots of technique. They’ve combined hard structures and earthen levees, compartmentalization. They’ve got some excellent pump technology. We could learn a lot from them.

“But the ‘plus’ that we have in Louisiana that the Netherlands doesn’t have is we have our coastal wetlands—what’s left of them. We have barrier islands, and we have the sediment of the Mississippi River. So combining the levees—looking at the Dutch, learning from them, combining the levees with wetlands, with barrier islands, gives us, in essence, a three-tier level of protection. The barrier islands protect the wetlands. The wetlands protect the levees, and the levees protect the homes and infrastructure. And I really hope that we look at the Netherlands and use some of their technology as we move forward.”

Dr. Robert Bea, a member of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley agrees. “The water is the enemy and we need to find out how to slow it down, number one; and number two, when it starts to get out of hand, we need to be able to control the water levels and the wave action. So gates in some places are things we want to think about, in addition to levees, pumps, and evacuation techniques.

“There’s a wide variety, a wide arsenal, of things that we have at our disposal to help not only areas like New Orleans but also other areas that have important deltas around the United States and, of course, many of the coastal areas that will be stressed by rising sea levels.

“In fact, I gave this problem to my class that works on risk management,” recalls Dr. Bea. “We looked at New Orleans and came to the conclusion that based on economics and standards of practice and historic precedent like the Netherlands—that we would need to go for a ten-thousand-year level of protection in most areas. It could be one thousand in other areas, depending on what we were protecting.”

Bea and other experts agree that the standards set for New Orleans are too low; they need to be raised to withstand the kind of
ferocious storm that comes not once very 100 years but once every 10,000, the same standards—again—that the levees and gates in the Netherlands are held to. He challenged his students to find a way of meeting that standard.

“The next step we took was: How do we do that? And at this point, we started thinking about big levees, levee heights of forty or fifty feet started to show up. And at this point, you say, ‘Hey, this isn’t sustainable.’ If you try and pile up something like this in a permanent works, with subsidence and settlement, you can expect it to go down. So at that point, we had to abandon the traditional—what I call brute-force—approach and start thinking about defenses in depth.”

REVIVING THE WETLANDS

Defense in depth, to scientists, means that you have to bring nature back into the plan. Concrete and steel barriers will just not be enough to hold back rising waters, whipped by hurricane-force winds. Bea says the first line of defense would be strong barrier beaches to first slow down the inward rush of storm surge.

Then, “let’s use those wetlands to help absorb some of the turbulence and energy out of the water. That’s been called horizontal levees. And then, by the time we get to the perimeters we’re trying to defend—this third level—we’ve now got earthen levees, and in some cases, indeed, gates, where we can stop the water from getting into areas around New Orleans like Pontchartrain and Lake Bourne. And at that point, you say, ‘Well, even then I’ve got to have pump stations to get water out of these low-lying areas.’

“What you’re doing is you’re developing a system, and the system is one that starts with nature—and so uses the natural defenses and then complements nature with engineered works, so that we have a system in place that is environmentally friendly and—very, very, importantly—we can afford it and sustain it.”

Not everyone agrees that the Dutch have all the answers. Not Mike Tidwell.

“A lot of people look at Holland and say, ‘Well, they’ve got it going on. They’ve reclaimed the sea and they’ve built these seawalls and they’ve mastered the natural forces of this coastal area.’ And the reality is that that is just as great an environmental calamity and a social infrastructure waiting to implode just like Louisiana, because the land in Holland is sinking just as rapidly as in New Orleans because they’ve done the same thing. They’ve leveed their major rivers along their coasts, and there is no land building going on. And even though they’re behind those seawalls, it’s not a sustainable way to go forward in the future. It’s just not something that you can count on a hundred years from now. Sooner or later, sea-level rise and subsidence of that
land will make that whole living arrangement in Holland unsustainable, believe me.”

PLANNING FOR THE NEXT CENTURY NOW

In fact, not only the Netherlands is sinking but so is New Orleans. So in many cases, nations facing global warming and rising oceans are struggling just to stay in place, to make up for sinking real estate while planning for sea-level rise. It’s a problem that can only get worse by the minute but will take decades to solve, making now a good time for cities to start taking action for the future.

“That is exactly right,” says Bea. “We need to make prevention number one on our list. It’s going to take a long time to get ahead of the problem in a sensible way. I think the other thing that we need to recognize is when to give up. In some cases we need to surrender back to the coastal areas and back to other river areas what it is that we should not be protecting—another way to let nature do its job.

“So some hard decisions have to come forward, and it’s going to take a significant amount of time to mobilize the works, get them into place. But I think the key is first to recognize that we need to get ahead of flooding. It is, to my knowledge, the single most devastating and damaging thing to the people of the United States that we have to suffer within our confines. And with all of the technology that we have, we know how to start thinking about how to approach it.

“The problem is not the way. The problem is the will and the focus on prevention.”

“New Orleans could be the test bed for the rest of the coastal portions of the U.S., and probably elsewhere in the world,” says Van Heerden. “The Dutch have achieved it; sixty percent of their country’s below sea level. Dealing with the soft soils of New Orleans, its unique geomorphology, and the fact that we’ve got these wetlands—that could be a real part of the protection. We could learn a lot as we try and sort this out that could be applicable elsewhere.”

“I would agree with that,” says Daniel, chair of the American Society of Civil Engineers, External Review Panel, and president of the University of Texas at Dallas. “And I think one of the lessons learned is that in critical life-safety issues like this, where infrequent but catastrophic events occur, like a major earthquake, we tend to forget as time passes. And history has also taught us that to make it work, you have to create very systematic, rigorous practices for continually assessing life safety. For example, in large dams—earthen and concrete dams—where failure would be catastrophic, we have federal programs in place to periodically inspect and reevaluate the safety of those structures. We have to be in this for the long run or we won’t succeed.”

CHAPTER TEN

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE

This is a moral issue, and it’s a spiritual issue because how we respond to climate change is going to define what it means to be human.

—THE REVEREND SALLY
BINGHAM

Conservatives like to brand environmentalists as “tree huggers,” a pejorative nickname for people who believe that the environment and the living creatures in it have a value that can’t always be measured in dollars. Being labeled a tree hugger, to some, is a close second to being called a liberal, heaven forbid. But heaven, or those who believe in it, are now weighing in on the issue with a belief that is uniting environmentalists in a common cause.

At churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples around the country, religious leaders are bringing a message to their worshippers that is a decidedly green one: Stop global warming now. And it’s not just a responsible thing to do, they say, but is more—something we’re required to do in our role as stewards of the planet.

“The Buddhists believe that everything is interconnected, and if you harm some part of nature, you’re harming yourself,” says the Reverend Sally Bingham, environmental minister at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. “The Muslims believe in a balance that God set up between nature and humans, and Christians believe that all things came into being through Christ; therefore, everything will be reconciled to God through Christ. And every major religion has a mandate for stewardship of creation.”

As for the phrase in the Old Testament about people having “dominion over the Earth”? Bingham believes it has been misinterpreted. “Dominion does not mean ‘dominate’ or ‘exploit.’ Dominion is the same kind of perhaps dominion that God has over us, in that it’s about care and love and stewardship. It’s a mandate to be caretakers.”

Bingham is founder of the Regeneration Project, which was started in 1993 and focuses on getting individuals to make more Earth-friendly energy choices. Congregations in almost two dozen states are active. “We ask congregations to join the program and then cut their carbon emissions—in other words, practice what they preach.”

For example, in one Catholic church south of Detroit, a windmill, solar panels, and solar water-heating systems have helped the parish cut its energy use, its carbon dioxide (CO
₂
) emissions, and its energy bills. And in an effort to further spread the word, the organization has been holding free screenings of films on global warming, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

“We like to have the priest or the rabbi walk down the aisle and be able to say this congregation is cutting their carbon emissions in response to climate change, but also it has an economic value too, because when you cut your energy use, you also are saving money.”

The Reverend Bingham’s religious fervor is more than just words. “The cathedral has compact fluorescent lightbulbs throughout. They have sensors in the bathroom so that if someone is in but leaves, it doesn’t remain on. After five minutes, the lights go out. We have all
energy-efficient exit lights, the LED [light-emitting diode] exit lights.” And whenever a congregation gets with the program, the Regeneration Project alerts it whenever their local utility offers rebates for energy-efficient bulbs or is giving out free compact fluorescent lights. “We notify all of our members that those perks are available.”

Above all, the Reverend Bingham believes it is important not to let politics get in the way. The environment is neither Republican nor Democrat. It doesn’t matter to Bingham what party Al Gore belongs to. And by the size of the crowds that turn out to see his film, it doesn’t look like they care, either.

“We advertised it not as a film about Al Gore but as a film about the science of global warming. And to see the overwhelming response was extraordinary, and that happened all over the country. That was happening in Georgia, it happened in Arkansas. We showed this film in every single state in the country, four thousand venues. We showed it here at the cathedral, and we had expected fifty, perhaps at the most seventy-five people, but three hundred people showed up to see this film. And I asked the question: ‘How many of you have seen it before?,’ thinking that maybe they were just coming in to see it for a second time. But largely, they were people seeing it for the first time, and that tells me that folks are hungry for the science.”