Enclosed Thinking

It has been difficult to make light-hearted blog talk these days while taking a beating from a rogue storm and then watching the citizenry beat each other senseless in the recent election.  One of the things I have learned in this endless year of blogs is that writing takes focus.  It has been hard to focus with all the Facebook chatter, the endless satire (yes, elections inspire good comedy shows), and the constant worrying about family and friends who are still living in the very real aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy.

Today on NPR I heard an interesting interview with a Dutch engineer who assisted in the design and construction of a storm surge barrier in New Orleans.  After the ravages of hurricane Sandy left New York City broken and battered, it seems that officials there are now considering physical barriers as a response to last week’s devastation.  Areas such as Staten Island, Rockaway and Wall Street were particularly hard hit.  Local officials speculate that they could survive the anticipated “next storm” by barricading themselves again ocean surges.

Well, the good news is that politicians are finally talking out loud about global warming.  Climate change is a reality, and the sooner we stop kidding ourselves, the sooner we will start taking countermeasures seriously.  At this point, there is not much we can do to roll back the climate clock, but as a society there is so much we can do to stem the tide (no pun intended).  And yet, I could not believe my ears.  Building a wall may protect against a specific point of surge, but it is far from a solution to the ever- rising sea level.   

I remember playing in the bathtub as a child.  One of my favorite things to do was to conjure a wave by slowing moving a toy or sponge back and forth under the surface of the water.  A wave would travel the length of the tub and bounce back on itself.  After a while, waves would join together to create an even larger one.  Then a larger one.  I could mobilize the water so dramatically that the water around me at one end of the tub would dip a few inches below the starting “sea level” while the water at the other end would splash over the surface, making a mess. 

Once this rhythm started it would sustain itself back and forth.  Suddenly, I would push my feet perpendicularly through the surface of the pulsing wave, trying to disrupt its rhythm.  But my tiny feet were no match for the surging waves; the water simply flowed around them doing little to disrupt the force of the wave.  How can no one see that if you build a wall to protect Wall Street, the storm surge will simply find the path of least resistance, dispersing widely around the fixed barrier?

To be fair, the 32 ft storm surge barrier helped to protect New Orleans from its last major storm.  But what happens when sea level rises a few inches higher?  It is inevitable that the waves will get higher or broader (finding a path around the barrier), or both.  Are we to react by constructing a wall at each location only after it becomes a proven target of climate change?  Or are we to wall up the entire eastern seaboard against the known possibility of ever-more-unpredictable storms?  Does anyone else see the folly in this kind of thinking?

A couple of years ago I visited the Farnsworth House, a classic mid-century glass house built by Mies van der Rohe.  This house, situated just outside of Plano, Illinois, was constructed in 1951 for a woman physician, Dr. Farnsworth.  At the time of its construction, the architect—concerned about a nearby river—did a 100 year floodplain study in order to determine an advantageous height for the structure.  It was built on stilts five feet above the flood plain, just to give it an added margin of protection.  In its 60+ year life, it has been flooded out by no less than seven “hundred-year-floods.”  These floods—the last one in 2008—are coming with greater and greater frequency, bringing as much as a foot of water crashing into the home.  Contributing factors are not only the changing storm patterns (this last one was the remnants of an errant Hurricane Ike) but also the growing sprawl of the concrete jungle, robbing the area of its natural run-off.

Yes, New York, by all means move your boilers and electrical systems from the basements, but do not think you can fool Mother Nature by building a wall of a certain breadth and a certain height and be done with it.  This is not a sustainable solution.  What’s worse, I fear it will render citizens complacent, believing that they are taken care of and need do no more.  We all must take steps to slow global warming, but putting up walls is just another way of hiding from the real problem.