| THE WATER WILL COME Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World Jeff Goodell Boston: Little, Brown & Company, November 2017 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-316-26024-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-316-26024-X | 340pp. | HC/BWI | $28.00 | |
In his sixth book, Jeff Goodell examines the vulnerability of coastal cites to sea-level rise, with special emphasis on the city of Miami, Florida, which faces especial risk because it is built on porous limestone. After giving us a grim scenario of the drowning of Miami in the year 2037, Jeff Goodell reports:
"That is, of course, merely one possible vision of the future. There are brighter ways to imagine it—and darker ways. But I am a journalist, not a Hollywood screenwriter. In this book, I want to tell a true story about the future we are creating for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren. It begins with this: the climate is warming, the world's great ice sheets are melting, and the water is rising. This is not a speculative idea, or the hypothesis of a few wacky scientists, or a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Sea-level rise is one of the central facts of our time, as real as gravity. It will reshape our world in ways most of us can only dimly imagine." – Page 8 |
Florida's queen city, so beloved of those looking to make a quick buck or hand over a bunch of bucks to bask in luxury, so differently described by writers from Philip Wylie (See review of A Generation of Vipers to Dave Barry, can fairly be described as America's queen of denial.
"More than any place in America, South Florida has been an expression of the technological dominance of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life: it is a world created by dredgers, cooled by air-conditioning, powered by nuclear energy, dominated by cars, sanitized by insecticides, glamorized by TV and the Internet. It is a place that has been habitable only if you believe the premise that nature—the heat, the bugs, the alligators, and most of all, the water—can be tamed." – Page 48 |
A surprising but encouraging takeaway is that Miami, for all its handicaps,2 may throw off its blinders more quickly than I would have expected.
The globe keeps warming, Greenland ice keeps melting, and the sea levels keep rising. Sea-level rise is a tremendous risk for the future — but also a very significant risk here and now. Coastal facilities worldwide experience flooding at every high tide, and every increment of rise extends the reach of storm surges. All this is old news by now, after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Superstorm Sandy in Manhattan, Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. But storms are just the headline events in a creeping trend. And that trend is what Jeff Goodell documents so well.
Miami may be the centerpiece of his account, but the periodic inundations it suffers are far from unique, nor even the most severe. The problem is worldwide, running up the eastern seaboard to Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia and then to New York City, across the Atlantic to London and the Netherlands, to Venice, Queen City of the Adriatic, and round past Bangladesh to seaside villages in Alaska and low-lying islands in the remote Pacific. All these locations, and more, suffer from regular flooding. In some cases the sea contaminates freshwater supplies; in others it erodes the shoreline. And always there is the looming threat of storm surge. The big cities are working on expensive movable barriers against the tides to come; other places petition for funding and do the best they can.
Along the way we meet the people who are mustering scarce funding and community support in efforts to improve their local circumstances — and some who only pretend to improve things. Denial still plays a major part in the battle; but it is gradually washing away in rising tides of understanding. Goodell's account is a grim one, but yet a hopeful one. It is done with his usual thoroughness and attention to human details. The result is, as Elizabeth Kolbert notes, "Deeply persuasive and deeply unsettling." There are extensive endnotes, a Selected Bibliography of 65 entries, and a good index. Errors of grammar are few; I detected no errors of fact. I give it top marks and rate it a definite keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.