Issue #14: A Song of Retreating Ice and Rising Water
How humans respond to existential threats
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Reef Restoration
The alarm bells have been ringing for coral reefs for a couple of decades. Bleaching of coral reefs at global scales have been documented in the late 1990s, up until 2010, after which mass-bleaching and deaths of entire reefs have become an annual occurrence. Chasing Coral (after Chasing Ice, a documentary that allowed us to visualize decadal degradation of the world’s glaciers), was among the first documentaries to film the death of entire coral reefs over several years - from the initial bleaching, to the growth of algae, to the final disintegration of the reef - and portray it in a way that it can be absorbed by human beings.
Reef restoration has grown as a phenomenon on the back of mass bleaching events globally. Coral restoration efforts include building coral nurseries, seeding sunken objects (such as shipwrecks) with coral fragments, sinking objects as underwater surfaces for corals to colonize, and many iterations thereof. While coral restoration does not have the “pressure” of global policy behind it yet (at the scale that forest conservation and restoration efforts take place), “coral gardening” is taken up by small NGOs and community-driven organizations that experiment with reef restoration with a nearly DIY methodology. These organizations are present at various scales all over the world, including India. To understand, learn, participate or donate to these organizations and support their reef restoration programs, I’ve added some links below.
For organizations and projects working to restore corals in India:
Article: A Deep Dive into the Coral Regeneration Projects of India on The Outdoor Journal
Website: Reefwatch India - Restoration and Rehabilitation (Karnataka, Andaman Islands, Maharashtra, Pan-India)
Website: Mithapur Coral Reef Recovery Project - Wildlife Trust of India (Gujarat)
Website: Coastal Impact - Projects (Goa)
Global Organizations:
Website: SECORE - Projects (Latin America)
Website: Coral Gardeners - About Coral Reefs (Oceania, Global)
Article: Coral Gardeners: What it takes to protect a reef on Oceanographic
Website: Coral Restoration Foundation - Restoration Work (United States of America)
While the Climate Catalogue Reader generally keeps the readers away from content that peddles destruction and doom, today we look at a book by journalist Jeff Goodell. The intent of presenting this work is not to understand the content, but to understand the form that a lot of the dialogues surrounding climate change take.
Issue #1 introduced us to Climate: A New Story by Charles Eisenstein, who presented his case for a re-framing of the narrative of climate change, away from a mere numeric or technical understanding of climate change, and towards an understanding of our environment as an extension of ourself, or vice-versa. The reduction of other-than-human lives to numbers is often more detrimental to their safety; when an ecologist states that numbers of a particular species of species of bird in the wild are “near-critical”, it means that the numbers are not “critical” yet. While, yes, it is important to understand the hard data to track events that occur through unimaginable time-scales and at unimaginable system-scales, the numerical reductions may not be the best way to snap humanity into action.
Eisenstein’s philosophy is one part of the solution to ecological destruction at a global scale; the other part is work that’s presented by the ilk of Bill McKibben and Jeff Goodell. Investigative journalism that can interpret and propagate the learnings from the highly esoteric climate models that the scientists at various institutions have concocted is important. Investigative journalism that studies the effects of the climate change (as predicted in the esoteric climate models) on the ground is considerably more important; it connects readers to the anthropological effects of extreme weather events and large-scale negative feedback loops.
[A book]
The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
by Jeff Goodell, published by Little, Brown and Company in 2017
A review of the ideas discussed in this book.
This book is a 7 HOUR read.
Goodell, a veteran journalist who has published books covering a variety of roughly climate-change-related topics, such as the dependence of the North American energy sector on coal and fossil fuels, or an examination of geoengineering as a possible solution to reverse climate change, now covers the reality of one of the most-talked-about phenomenon’s associated with climate change - the rising sea level.
Rather than just spout facts and data that corroborate the existence of climate change and the onset of extreme weather events, Goodell examines how a variety of coastal conditions would be affected (or, are being affected) by rising sea levels.
Increasing reports show that sea levels are not going to rise gradually in a way that is nearly imperceptible: rising sea levels mean that there are higher storm surges and more violent ingresses during high tides accompanied by storms or cyclones. While storm surges may not be a permanent advance in the line that divides land from sea, they are a dark foreshadowing of what is to come.
In the United States of America, a country which boasts a large naval presence, rising seas threaten to cut off low-lying naval bases from basic amenities and submerge billions of dollars worth of development that is crucial for “national safety”.
This also applies to India, a country comprised of a rather large triangular peninsula - our navy should be (and is) one of the best in the world; however, we are at a similar risk of losing naval bases; particularly those in low-lying atolls such as the ones in the Andamans. How should a country like India, with a far smaller defense spending compared to the United States of America, build it’s resilience against rising sea levels?
Goodell also talks about the almost cloak-and-dagger manner with which the Naval Generals must navigate requesting funding to build up a naval base’s resilience to rising sea levels. It’s not as simple as stating “We need more money because the sea is rising due to climate change” - this will almost never have political backing, since the words such as climate and change and sea and level and rise have been blacklisted by certain echelons of the governing bodies. Therefore, while being fully aware of the extreme threat of rising sea levels, and the need to fortify their positions, Generals must ask for funding for a very specific reason in a particularly roundabout manner.
Another economic force that seems to not heed the warning from storm surges and coastal inundation is the real-estate market. Visiting Miami and Lagos, Goodell ridicules the real estate tycoons that do their business between the shifting coastlines. In Miami, for example, sea-front properties are selling at an alarming rate, almost as though there is no risk posed by higher storm surges. Developers balk at the idea of “resilience”. On the other hand, lower income neighborhoods such that occupy low-lying areas of the city are exposed to risks such as inundation, the literal rotting away of their homes, and several water-borne diseases. This disparity between the urban elite of Miami and the working class is exacerbated because the government of Miami pays several million dollars each year for the fixing or upkeep of infrastructure that is damaged in the storm surges - and this money only comes from and for infrastructure in the “upper class” districts of the city - the low-income neighborhoods are forced to make do with substandard infrastructure systems.
Lagos, taking coastal development a step further, is building an entire township of middle-income, high-rise apartment buildings on entirely reclaimed land - with nearly no consideration for rising sea levels. Goodell compares this mode of development - with a feeble “sea wall” to hold back the rising sea, and another, seemingly more resilient development paradigm - the floating slums of Lagos. Here, the houses are built to float, sink, be pulled apart, and rebuilt. Based on this model, an architect from Lagos has constructed a school that floats on the water - known as the Makoko Floating School. While a larger financial investment may have gone into the high-rise townships, the informal floating slums seem to be far more resilience than concrete towers protected by a wall.
On the topic of walls, Goodell also talks about the various “Sea Wall” projects throughout the world - what their success rates are (not very high). Most such infrastructure in built to withstand 1/100 year events every decade or so; however, we are currently witnessing 1/100 year events about three times a year. Most infrastructure fails within a few years of it’s completion, despite the massive capital that may have been pumped into constructing it. He considers how shiny, financially supersized infrastructure projects often garner more political and economic backing than subtle, perhaps more sensible projects such as Living Breakwaters Project, or the Billion Oyster Project. The latter examples provide multiple layers of resilience against storm surges, helping to reduce tidal forces by breaking up the waves along the sea bed, rather than building a wall that can only block the tide when it meets the land.
Goodell’s book demonstrates a plethora of human reactions to an existential threat such as sea-level rise, from the Miami Developers’ denial, to the Naval General’s Climate-Change-subterfuge, to New York and Venice’s throw-money-at-Big-Infrastructure approach. These reactions are calibrated, for the most part, by the political and general demographic views towards climate change and their approach to resilience. On one end of the spectrum, there are those whose everyday life is affected deeply by sea level rise, and they are powerless to do anything about it; at the other end of the spectrum, there are the uber-rich who can afford to rebuild and stave off something like the actual force of the sea for as long as their interests are returning a profit, and when that stops being the case, they can cash in and move to higher ground.
How do we explain, discuss, visualize and propagate the idea that the effects of sea level rise are only going to be evident after several generations?
Ancient Aboriginal stories preserve history of a rise in sea levels
[Tap on the title to access the link]
A short article on The Conversation’s website talks about how aboriginal “folklore” and “mythology” tell the tale of a coastal inundation event some 13,000 years ago. Translated to English during colonial settling, this may refer to sea level rise during the last interglacial melt (referred to in the introduction of Issue #1). The evidence from ice cores and a better understanding of deep geological time has helped scientists to corroborate the aboriginal oral traditions.
In Goodell’s book, he also refers to this and asks whether the culturally pervasive idea of The Great Flood, present in Hindu, Jewish, and Christian stories may actually refer to an event so catastrophic that it has made it’s way into legends that are told thousands of years in the future.
However, with the technology at hand today, with the amount of data we can record, it may be possible to tell stories of ecosystems changing over decadal timescales very clearly - which is something that Chasing Ice has managed to achieve.
[A Documentary]
Chasing Ice
by Jeff Orlowski featuring time-lapse photography by James Balog on Vimeo
This is a 75 MINUTE video.
[Tap on the title to access the video]
Chasing Ice is a documentary that follows National Geographic photographer James Balog and his team as they develop a time-lapse camera system to capture the retreating glaciers of the Arctic.
Glacial retreat is, by definition, a geological event that occurs at a… glacial pace. It is not apparent to those of us who do not spend year after year in the same icy location. Unlike calving of ice sheets, glaciers tend to recede and advance the year round, depending on the temperature. Scientists can present studies and data, showing stages of glacial retreat and pointing out discrepancies between the ice levels this summer, versus the ice levels at the same time last year, and it would not look much different even to a trained eye.
However, Balog and a team of scientists were able to develop a series of cameras and monitoring equipment that created a single, stark time-lapse of glacial ice, retreating rather obviously over a period of ten years or so. It was this vision, of ice literally disappearing before the viewer’s eyes, that stirred up a flurry of global action towards preserving glaciers and studying the effects of their melting on temperatures, sea levels, and ecological systems.
Chasing Ice (followed closely by Chasing Coral) are both documentaries that demonstrate the challenges that scientists and photographers face when trying to capture events that may take decades or even centuries to manifest a tangible result.
A large part of our move towards understanding the scale of events that take place as an effect of climate change comes from being able to capture and present slow-onset events, such as sea level rise, reef death, and retreating glacial ice.
Thank you for reading through this issue of the Climate Catalogue Reader.
If you want to read more about the topics we’ve discussed in this issue, or you want research material to help with an endeavor you have undertaken, feel free to reach out to climate.research.catalogue@gmail.com.