By Robert E.L. Walters
Image: 1942 Vintage Postcard
Like the little pup in this week's image (who I've named Climey) it seems drought, rain, snow, hurricanes, blizzards, cold fronts and warm fronts, desserts in Mexico and the greening of the Sahara, are all the ominous effects of climate change and its effect on modern society. Whether this is caused by burning fossil fuels, paving billions of acres of arable land with billions of acres of heat absorbing asphalt, record cow flatulence, or even an ever swelling population, the causes are rapidly becoming less of a concern than the effects. In other words, if the planet is indeed warming, what are we doing to adapt to it?
Naturally we hear the majority of this warming is caused by the use of carbon based fossil fuels, as well as the other causes catalogued above, the so called "anthropogenic climate change." But this should be no surprise since we humans have a long history of working hand-in-hand with nature to reek havoc on the climate through an alliance of limited knowledge of local conditions and plain old human hubris.
A good modern example of this is the Dust Bowl period in American History. Eager western pioneers from the U.S. East Coast and Europe made a massive agricultural migration into the U.S. Middle West between 1803 and 1861, an expansion briefly halted by the U.S. Civil War. Within three generations of 1861, the drought conditions which were periodically normal for this region returned, and when coupled with agricultural practices poorly suited to both the region and the climate, resulted in a horrific humanitarian crises in the 1930s. Yes, the drought was an act of God, but the resultant disaster was an act of man.
I bring this up because as we hear of "super storms" and see the horrible effects of coastal and riverine flooding, we often hear about what we need to do to affect the climate by curtailing the use of fossil fuels, but we rarely hear what we need to do as a society to mitigate our exposure to disaster by not living in coastal or riverine areas.
Humans are resilient and foolhardy. Even though Pompeii and Herculaneum were utterly destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Naples, a city of nearly one-million people and the third largest city in Italy, sits right in its eruption zone. Per the local provincial plan of Campania (of which Naples is the capital) [links and notes are retained] an evacuation in advance of an imminent eruption with between two-weeks and twenty-days advance notice of such an eruption, foresees the emergency evacuation of 600,000 people, almost entirely comprising all those living in the zona rossa ("red zone"), i.e. at (the) greatest risk from pyroclastic flows.[7][77] The evacuation, by train, ferry, car, and bus, is planned to take about seven days, and the evacuees would mostly be sent to other parts of the country, rather than to safe areas in the local Campania region. Imagine if you will, moving six-hundred-thousand people in a week. It's mind boggling. But then so is the legal and economic ramifications. When these people are moved to "other parts of the country" what becomes of their property in Naples? How does this plan encourage people to actually evacuate beyond just saving their lives? For many, saving their livelihoods is just as important (if not more important) that saving their lives.
It's easy to dismiss concerns of property and livelihood as "greedy" or "self-centered," but the reality is very different. For older people especially, their home is their greatest asset. Our consumer credit system and long reliance on home equity have only reinforced these concerns. If I abandon my house, how do I start over? How can I retire without the equity I banked in my home of many years? As a society, questions like these put us in the crosshairs of prudence and property, crosshairs even more confused by the nature of how some of these properties came into being in the first place.
Let's start with coastal properties. Up until the late nineteenth century people did not build on barrier islands for good reason. As described in an excellent 30 August 2011 article by Sarah Zielinski in Smithsonian Magazine entitled: Building On A Barrier Island, They were viewed as ethereal, unreliable real estate. But starting with various Methodist camps in the late nineteenth century and roaring through the middle of the twentieth century, all that changed. Post war jubilation, human hubris and plain old-fashioned greed made barrier islands and seaside living a tangible part of the American Dream. In South Florida it hit an extreme of preposterous proportions. Once the barrier islands were developed (and redeveloped and redeveloped again, ever higher) swamps and everglades were drained, neat lots carved behind bulkheads to receive the fill from the dredging and what resulted was a sub-tropical megalopolis sloping from a few feet to a few hundred feet above sea level, all with highly priced (and taxed) real estate.
The greed in this scenario is not restricted to the stereotypical real estate speculator selling swampland in Florida, those individuals (though shady) had nothing on the federal, state and local governments who conspired to augment this mess, from the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers who created the land in the first place, to the state and local authorities parceling it, assessing it and taxing it. The insatiable desire for high-value taxable real estate trumped any responsible regard for safety or prudence, as Hurricane Andrew monstrously demonstrated in 1992, when ostensibly inspected and approved hurricane-proof houses blew away like stacked cards.
The "South Floridafication" of the Gulf coast of the state was no better, just slower, and Florida's coastal cancer has metastasized everywhere in that state except the so-called "Nature Coast" where development was only slowed because the dense coral ledge of that region makes blasting out yacht basins cost-prohibitive.
I know I'm picking on Florida a lot here, so let's look at California, which has an entirely different problem. Fire.
California, who vociferously wants the world to end global warming should be concerned, and with good reason. California's state and urban planning has utterly disregarded both its climate and its region, packing tens of millions of people into deserts and on mountainsides and in canyons utterly ill-suited for mass development. On top of this debacle, we have insane property valuations and taxes, and all this before we consider that the whole state straddles a series of fault-lines which make even building the houses that shouldn't be built there in the first place, more expensive and less secure to build.
And then there's New York, a city where land is so valuable that for centuries they have literally kept making more of it via landfill, much of it inches if not feet above sea-level.
Humans are great engineers and I have great respect for the profession. I often say, if I had chosen any other profession, it would have been as an engineer. But for all their brilliance (and they are brilliant) even the best engineering is based on hypothesis. An engineer can look at geology reports, historic water levels, tributary flow, climatic conditions, fault-lines etc. and apply the concepts of stress, and volume and worse case scenarios to a project such as a dam or a sea wall, or a cantilevered house, but it is still only an hypothesis. As a society we have chosen to bet the farm on a series of hypotheses. Sometimes these bets pay-off, other times they do not. But climate and region, regardless of global warming, are the house, and when you bet against the house, you have an excellent chance of loosing.
Although we have hitherto been examining the two coasts, our most recent storm of note, Hurricane Helene, has brought the vulnerability of riverine systems into the public eye. Valleys are, by their nature, flood zones. I say this because valley's are most often created by the steady erosion of land by a river over the course of centuries if not millennia, and unpredictably eroded at that. In theory at least, even the highest wall of a valley could potentially be in a flood zone. As an extreme example, many geologists believe the entire Chesapeake Bay system is the flooded Susquehanna River Valley that got inundated by rising sea levels from glacier melt at the end of the last ice age, which explains why Maryland's Eastern Shore is so flat and sandy. (It's basically a humongous sand bar.) Even today, three millennia later, the Susquehanna River still flows through the center of the bay as a prevailing current that one can plainly see.
In the 1930s, the United States became very interested in rivers, valleys and dams for a number of reasons. They provided public works for the unemployed of the depression, they offered cheap electricity for rural electrification projects, and they aided in riverine flood mitigation. Flooding with American rivers had long been considered a problem. Merely two generations before, the Johnstown Flood of 1889 had horrified the American public, and even though that catastrophe had been caused by a failed dam (the dam failure most likely being caused by a questionable real estate scheme) projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the construction of the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams had wide and optimistic public appeal for depression weary Americans.
In this vein, the proliferation of dams, towns and infrastructure in Appalachia is and was admirable, as presidents such as John F. Kennedy directed attention and resources into the region. But this still didn't address the underlying reality that Appalachia is and was under-populated and under-developed for a reason, namely its terrain is both difficult and unforgiving and the landscape pocked with hundreds of micro valleys or "hollers"that thwart development and infrastructure. This is a problem not unlike rural Puerto Rico where there are countless valleys where delivering basic services such as electricity and WiFi are made more difficult by the mountainous terrain.
In each of these cases, coastal islands (natural or man-made), urban landfill, semi-irrigated deserts, cantilevered mountainside houses, or building along riverbanks artificially widened by dammed and abbreviated river flows, we have to ask ourselves this valid question, once these properties are destroyed, does it make any sense to rebuild them?
From a private citizen standpoint it does. As we discussed earlier when we examined the Naples conundrum, for many, rebuilding is the only option. Besides the human desire (or hubris) to conquer nature via engineering at all costs, there is the very real human financial impact of not rebuilding your single greatest asset. For those who have heavily invested in real estate (presumably in good faith) and who have paid a premium for that investment by way of elevated property taxes and insurance premiums, this becomes a non-question. But as a society is this our best option?
Personally, I don't believe it is. I think as a society we need to collectively buy ourselves out of a situation where our elected officials (and by extension ourselves) were complicit in the first place. Local, state and federal assistance in reclaiming land lost in catastrophic circumstances would be much better spent buying it back at fair market value and assisting coastal and riverine folks to safer ground. Will this be expensive? Extraordinarily so, but consider the alternative, which is repeating this extremely expensive aid every time another catastrophic storm barrels through overly populated and questionably inhabitable areas.
For those of you who do wish to rebuild at any cost, I'm afraid that as a society, we are going to have to insist you do so on your own nickle to include self-insurance. Constantly raising general insurance rates to off-set losses due to high-valued and ultimately over leveraged and over-exposed coastal properties is not only unfair, its absurd.
We as a society can keep blaming the dog of climate change for every little puddle we encounter, but if we don't housebreak the dog, aren't we the one's really in the wrong?
NOTE: If any of our readers have an interest in helping those affected by Hurricane Helene, please see our link The Socratic Review Hurricane Helene Relief page. If there is a charity you are aware of and would like to see added to this page, please let us know at TheSocraticReviewComment@gmail.com and we will be more than happy to include it. Thank you,
Robert E.L. Walters
Editor-in-Chief
The Socratic Review
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