Sink or Swim?

If you live in Carteret Islands in the South Pacific (Papua New Guinea), the idea of global climate change means that your homeland will soon be entirely underwater. Wikipedia: “It was widely reported in November 2005 that the islands have progressively become uninhabitable, with an estimate of their total submersion by 2015. The islanders have fought a more than twenty years battle, building a seawall and planting mangroves. However, storm surges and high tides continue to wash away homes , destroy vegetable gardens and contaminate fresh water supplies. The natural tree cover on the island is also being impacted by the incursion of saltwater contamination of the fresh water table… Paul Tobasi, t he atolls' district manager with Papua New Guinea's Bougainville province, and many other environmental groups have suggested that the flooding is the result of sea-level rise associated with global warming. He also stated that small tidal waves were becoming more frequent.”

They’re used to wading through ankle-deep water even during average, non-storm times… and they know it’s time to leave. “In October 2007 it was announced that the Papua New Guinea government would provide two million kina (USD $736,000) to begin the relocation, to be organized by Tulele Peisa of Buka, Bougainville. Five men from the island moved to Bougainville in early 2009 to build houses and plant crops. It is planned to bring another 1700 people over the next five years.” Wikipedia.

In the U.S., the higher rate and greater intensity of hurricanes has obviously taken its toll, and the loss of mangrove swamps – the vegetation that acts as a barrier to flooding waters – has made inundation a particularly nasty growing problems, especially in the Gulf Coast region. Hurricane Katrina was an extreme example, where storm surges took out entire communities. But the “little signs” are everywhere. And one community where Americans might not think such risks abound is wrapped around Norfolk, Virginia and the surrounding towns and farms. Local rivers and the Bay all are experiencing the back-up linked to their ocean proximity. Located just west of the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, Norfolk and neighboring Larchmont (built in marshy areas), have seen the beginning of a continuous pattern of flooding that is slowing contracting the land mass and beginning to interfere with simple tasks like driving down main roads.

Strange that this challenge would hit Virginia, where there is a strong movement which, for religious and other reasons, challenges the very notion that global climate change is even real: “Climate change is a subject of friction in Virginia. The state’s attorney general, Ken T. Cuccinelli II, is trying to prove that a prominent climate scientist engaged in fraud when he was a researcher at the University of Virginia. But the residents of coastal neighborhoods here are less interested in the debate than in the real-time consequences of a rise in sea level…

“If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides… When Ms. Peck, now 75 and a caretaker to her husband, moved here 40 years ago, tidal flooding was an occasional hazard… ‘Last month,’ she said recently, ‘there were eight or nine days the tide was so doggone high it was difficult to drive.’” New York Times, November 26^th.

Indeed, local officials are dealing with an entirely new kind of infrastructure project, one that is going to be an increasing cost factor for coastal communities: “Larchmont residents have relentlessly lobbied the city to address the problem, and last summer it broke ground on a project to raise the street around the ‘u’ [where land is surrounded on three sides by water] by 18 inches and to readjust the angle of the storm drains so that when the river rises, the water does not back up into the street. The city will also turn a park at the edge of the river back into wetlands — it is now too saline for lawn grass to grow anyway. The cost for the work on this one short stretch is $1.25 million.

“The expensive reclamation project is popular in Larchmont, but it is already drawing critics who argue that cities just cannot handle flooding in such a one-off fashion. To William Stiles, executive director of Wetlands Watch, a local conservation group, the project is well meaning but absurd. Mr. Stiles points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has already spent $144,000 in recent years to raise each of six houses on the block… At this pace of spending, he argues, there is no way taxpayers will recoup thei r investment. ‘If sea level is a constant, your coastal infrastructure is your most valuable real estate, and it makes sense to invest in it,’ Mr. Stiles said, ‘but with sea level rising, it becomes a money pit.’” NY Times. It seems these “little signs” are global warnings about global warming.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it does seem as if the 21^st century is going to be the time that humans are going to pay nature’s piper.