The Attacking Ocean (36 page)

In New York’s case, the only solution may be to wall off the city with a levee-like barrier that would halt a nine-meter surge, twice the height of Sandy’s. Movable gates would shut the city off from the Atlantic when necessary, but would allow ships, river water, and tides to flow freely most of the time. An attractive proposition, perhaps, given the enormous cost of Sandy’s destruction, but it bristles with environmental difficulties. How would the barrier affect tidal flows and currents? What about sediment buildup and other environmental problems? Then there are thorny social issues. Would the protection be socially equitable? To put it bluntly, who would be behind the barrier and who would not? All this is quite apart from a longer-term question. Would the barrier work given the uncertainties of climatic change and the growing magnitude of extreme weather events? In any case, for many areas like Rockaways and Coney Island on the Long Island shore, the only feasible solutions would be seawalls or moving everything to higher ground.

Figure 15.1
Hurricane Sandy comes ashore in Southampton, New York. Lucas Jackson/Reuters.

Figure 15.2
Destruction and fire damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in Breezy Point, Queens, New York. Peter Foley/EPA/Newscom.

Whatever the proposals for New York are adopted, they will be a long time in being implemented, even if the politicians support them. These are long-term projects that extend far beyond our generations and those of our children, which is a hard concept for politicians obsessed with election cycles to grasp. Permits and environmental studies alone will
also take years. However, Sandy gives us notice that the federal and state governments involved would be wise to start specific, long-term planning immediately, even if the payoff is beyond our lifetime. Expensive they may be, but they can be cost effective. One can only cite the example of Providence, Rhode Island, which protected its low-lying areas with a nine-hundred-meter gated barrier as long ago as 1966, after two destructive hurricanes in 1938 and 1954. The barrier prevented flooding during Sandy and on earlier occasions. Most of the engineering for this and other such projects is relatively straightforward. It is a matter of looking far into the future and having the initiative and courage to protect us now.

Some of the country’s most urgent needs are fairly immediate—we need to improve satellite coverage for weather forecasting; we need to make massive long-term investments in smart grid technology, especially important for a nation with an outdated infrastructure that is heavily dependent on electrical power; and we need to maintain a strong federal presence in emergency response, a lesson that came through strongly after Sandy, an enormous storm whose effects extended far beyond the boundaries of a single state. Above all, governments have to assume that warmer oceans will breed stronger storms and plan accordingly. While we cut carbon emissions as the only long-term palliative strategy, we will have to use both resilience strategies and massive infrastructure improvements to live in what is becoming an increasingly hot and more crowded world.

WHATEVER WE DO is going to be expensive. Armoring the shore anywhere is hideously costly and requires a combination of long-term political will, strong public support, and very deep pockets indeed. There are no guarantees seawalls will work in the very long term. Costly sea defenses on the scale of the Netherlands are impracticable for poor countries like Bangladesh, where, in any case, the geology and local opposition militate against such construction. The problem is left to local improvisation and ingenuity, which is probably insufficient when millions of people are involved. Tidal barriers such as those that protect
London, New Orleans, and those proposed for other floodplain cities such as Shanghai are another expensive palliative. Again, cost is a deciding factor, just as with dikes and levees.

Low-lying coastal areas are favorites for developers, who cater to people’s desire to live by the ocean, to see the breakers. Many of the world’s most important ports also lie in low estuaries, where thousands of hectares of mangrove swamps and wetlands once thrived. Bulldozers have swept away about the most effective natural protection against the rising sea available to us. Only recently have we realized just how effective such seemingly useless marshlands are in protecting us from sea surges and rising seas, especially from the full effects of hurricanes, where mangroves can protect entire communities from destruction, a lesson learned from Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992. We’ve stripped away most of nature’s natural armor against the sea in a promiscuous quest for prosperity, perhaps the wrong kind of prosperity. Restoring wetlands is an attractive palliative, but it is probably too late, given the intense development of many coastal areas. We face a future that we are not prepared to handle, and it’s questionable just how much most of us think about it.

There are those who choose to ignore the attacking sea by pushing the challenge onto future generations. In China, despite chronic problems with rising sea levels, storm surges, and subsidence caused by human activity, the Shanghai authorities persist in filling in low-lying coastline to allow further residential and industrial development. They are choosing to invest in seawalls and flood control gates. In Florida, high rise construction along threatened beachfronts continues apace, with the state spending billions of dollars on coastal protection such as seawalls and breakwaters that are, in the long term, but temporary palliatives. One can only describe the construction of artificial islands by the government of Dubai in the Gulf region for thousands of new houses at or near sea level as what two respected geoscientists have called “a stunning act of delusional hubris.”
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If armor is too expensive and wetlands are gone, what options remain? They are a matter of adaptation and ingenuity, almost all of them at the local level: Require developers to elevate buildings, then protect
their foundations with seawalls; more radically, create floating neighborhoods, where entire tracts float on pontoons in sheltered waters that rise and fall with tides, surges, and changing sea levels. Experiments with floating houses (not to be confused with houseboats) are under way in the Low Countries and may offer a viable, reasonably affordable solution. Given that many Bangladeshi farmers spend weeks a year effectively afloat in partially waterlogged dwellings or in boats, this may offer one low-cost solution, provided there is enough farming land or other economic activity above sea level—and protection against cyclone-driven sea surges.

Finally, there’s the option of managed retreat. As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, this has been the strategy of choice for hundreds of thousands of years, an option easily exercised when hundreds or thousands, rather than millions, of people are involved. This is no longer possible, for we live in a hemmed-in world of coastal megacities, policed national frontiers and densely packed rural populations. We can no longer move freely to higher ground. The rules of managed retreat have changed beyond recognition. We’re approaching a time, perhaps within half a century, when climate change and sea level rise will force millions of people to move to higher ground, to become climatic refugees. We can no longer kick the problem downstream for our grandchildren. We’re looking at a future of accelerating humanitarian crises that may involve resettling millions of people in completely different rural and urban environments.
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Obviously, some of the migrants will have the resources to cope on their own, but most will be people with no means of moving in planned, safe ways, creating daunting challenges for the global community. Just developing employment opportunities and infrastructure as well as housing and water supplies and integrating thousands of migrants into entirely different cultural traditions will become pressing international problems.

In coming decades, we’ll have to face daunting questions. Are there ways in which one can help people adapt to the loss of agricultural land, other than by forced movement of thousands, even millions, of people to higher ground? How can governments and nongovernmental organizations handle massive population shifts from one overburdened city to
an unwilling neighbor or from one crowded rural area to where land is already in short supply? Such movements, triggered by loss of sustainability, water shortages, and so on, are a traditional response for rural farmers, especially if they have relatives dwelling in landscapes elsewhere. We would do well to remember the lesson of history—that people move in search of food when confronted with hunger. Random movements of thousands of starving victims marked the great Chinese and Indian famines of the late nineteenth century, and an ancient Egypt threatened by drought as early as 2180 B.C.E.
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We would do well to remember that land losses from sea level rise are permanent, unlike those from storm surges or tsunamis. The land loss is enduring, the damage to groundwater usually irreversible.

How does one build long-term resilience to environmental changes like rising sea levels? The answer lies in levels of international cooperation and funding to handle migration unheard of in today’s world. Our descendants will have to address migration in a much broader context than just that of environmental threats, recognizing the complexity of all human movements. Above all, they’d have to accommodate a future where significant numbers of people living in low-lying environments could be trapped unless mechanisms exist for them to adapt—and if necessary, move elsewhere. With tens of millions of people involved and a timescale of a half century, at the most two centuries, the problem of climatic migration demands international attention now, not in our great-grandchildren’s time. To bury our heads in the proverbial sand in denial is not an option. Ten millennia ago, the fisherfolk of Doggerland could adjust effortlessly to their changing world. Many of us, and certainly not our descendants, will never have the option of free movement in the face of the attacking sea. There are too many of us on earth. We face a frightening, long-term crisis that will challenge all our deep reservoirs of ingenuity and opportunism. The sooner we confront our predicament head-on, the better, for our challenge is to master the earth.

Acknowledgments

The Attacking Ocean
began in the middle of a lecture on the sea level challenges faced by Bangladesh delivered by Major General A. N. M. Muniruzzaman (retired) at an Aspen Environment Forum some years ago. His presentation not only shook me, but compelled me to write this book. I am grateful to him for his inspiration. In the end, the book turned into something very different from what I had originally imagined, particularly with its emphasis on extreme events of all kinds, which have affected human societies since the Ice Age—and with even greater force today. From the beginning, I chose to write a global book, which describes ancient (and often modern) societies from all corners of the world. In the final analysis, I am convinced this was the right approach, given the remarkable levels of ignorance about rising sea levels on the part of a public nurtured on sensationalist headlines about global warming, melting ice sheets, and scenarios that conjure images of the impending inundation of London, New York, and places east and west, if not by rising sea levels, then by hurricanes and other extreme unpleasantnesses. I hope this book offers a more sober assessment.

This is a book about environmental vulnerability, about rising populations and various ways of ameliorating the effects of rising sea levels. Above all, however, it’s a story not about potential technological solutions, but about people and the ways in which they live with the ocean and will live with it in the future. I’ve attempted to write a story that is very much my take on a confusing jigsaw puzzle of archaeology, geology, history, and paleoclimatology, with excursions into subjects as diverse, and sometimes esoteric, as barrier islands, mangrove swamps, and nineteenth-century accounts of tropical cyclones. I am, of course, responsible for the
conclusions and accuracy of this book, and, no doubt, will hear in short order from those kind, often anonymous, individuals, who delight in pointing out errors large and small. Let me thank them in advance.