Climate-Proofing Our Cities
The 20-teens have seen the onset of a trend that will be with the developed world for a very long time to come: building infrastructure that protects our cities from the escalating ravages of climate change, as discussed in this wonderful article in the New Yorker. There are dozens, possibly hundreds of things encompassed here, and new ones are militated with each new disaster: building sea walls and water drainage systems to prevent floods, as those resulting from Hurricane Harvey, and ensure resilient power systems to ensure that old people don’t bake to death in the heat of abandoned care facilities that lost air conditioning as they did in the wake of Hurricane Irma a few weeks later. It’s much harder to imagine, however, how we could be capable of protecting an entire 3500 square-mile island (like Puerto Rico) in the Caribbean, where more than two-thirds of its people are still without power 38 days after Hurricane Maria.
It’s hard to read an article like this one without one’s mind ranging to the old adage: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s probably even more applicable here today than when it was coined by Ben Franklin almost 300 years ago, given that there are elements of damage being inflicted on our environment that we, as a civilization, are totally powerless to protect against with technology.
Let’s say we can build walls around New York, thus protecting the Big Apple and its surrounds against the next Superstorm Sandy. Yet, regardless of our capacity for supersizing our seawalls and building redundancy into our electric grid:
• High concentrations of greenhouse gases will continue to cause droughts, wildfires, and floods in areas that we simply don’t have the resources to defend.
• Desertification will keep shrinking the amount of arable land on which to grow food.
• CO2 levels will still acidify our oceans, slowing rendering them incapable of supporting fish and all other types of aquatic animals (except jellyfish).
• Pollution from power plants will continue to cause increased rates of cancer and respiratory disease, and increasing the rate at which species of plants and animals go extinct.
Building walls seems to be the watchword for the early 21st Century. But wouldn’t it be better to deal with the underlying problem?
