Times Argus Opinion Piece August 31, 2011
Don’t Rebuild. Re-Design
I walked down to the Winooski this morning to watch the last of our most recent biblical flood. In the clearing skies I started to sense a message from the heavens. They seem to be sending Vermont a clear and repeated warning. Perhaps we couldn’t hear it whispered beneath one of the highest snow-packs ever last winter, or in the statement of this spring’s catastrophic floods. However, Irene shouted it much louder. And that message is? “Vermont’s future is going to be very wet.”
Now, I am not a climate scientist but, like the old Dylan song goes, “you don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.” It seems obvious that Vermont now has a giant bulls eye painted on it, along with a sign saying: “Dump all the water here!” Evaporating Gulf of Mexico water, which once provided fairly even rainfall from Texas to New England, is now pouring it down on us. Meanwhile, drought-ravaged Dixie is praying for a hurricane. Is there a pattern here?
Returning home I found the national television, I was treated to full picture of our harvest-ready, now-submerged landscape and the cars floating down the streets of our towns. Predictably the politicians. from the President on down promised to help us independent Vermonters to repair and rebuild.
And why not? When disaster strikes, we humans, like ants, automatically rebuild. Our natural instinct is to quickly repair our ravaged homes and towns and get back to normal. But there’s one problem. (Just in case you missed the messy debates in Washington last month.) Given the red ink in our stretched national state and town budgets, there may not be the money for rebuilding over and over.
In certain circles, one talks about so-called “climate change mitigation.” Translation: How can we protect ourselves from the approaching damages to our infrastructure? While the rich New Yorkers talk of building a sea wall to protect Manhattan, Can we imagine building a Dutch-style dike in downtown Barre to keep back the yearly floods? While we will probably replace the scenic covered bridge in Woodstock to appeal to the wealthy tourists, How many old culvert bridges should be fixed only to wash out again in our next deluge? Who is going to help the flooded-out homeowners and businesses all over the state with repeated floods? Who will help farmers whose crops were put in late because of the spring floods and were wiped out again by Irene? How are small towns going to pay for rebuilding 2,000 washed-out roads throughout the state?
These are all critical questions.
While catastrophic climate change may be creating a new desert in the southern third of the country, it may be creating a temperate rain forest here in the northeast. In that case, rebuilding our towns and roads on the old routes might be considered a triumph of optimism over experience. We cannot live in yesterday if the new normal is wet. Put it all together and the scope of the problem becomes starkly evident. Remember the story of the little Dutch boy and the dike? The dikes started leaking and the little boy put his thumb in the dike, saving the town. But how many thumbs does one little Vermont boy have? Is it better to put his thumb, and all his limited fingers, in the leaking dike, or to redesign the dike altogether? (The Dutch, by the way, build their wet infrastructure on a thousand-year basis. In the U.S., we build it for 100 year events. Now, what was once a 100-year flood, is 70 years and dropping.)
Given that the climate is fast changing, it would be foolish to rebuild for yesterday. Rather, Vermont needs to redesign of all of its systems to face tomorrow. We need to reset our rebuilding mindset, and sooner rather than later. Given the message from the heavens, there is a good chance that more of our quaint historic towns and villages will continue to be washed away by repeating deluges. Roads along river banks and stream beds are about to become irreparable and obsolete. Riverbank farms will be too wet for planting. And we don’t have endless resources. So how should we use them?
As hard and expensive as it may be, Vermont must seize this moment to reset its systems in order to deal with a long term response to climate based emergencies. This means that any monies for emergency rebuilding must be channeled through a review that doesn’t allow for constant repetition of the same mistakes of old. Washed out roads and flooded main streets? Maybe they should not be there in the first place. They may have to relocate uphill.
Vermont is full of smart, inventive people who have the imagination and design skills to help re-imagine our master system. I know several people who are successfully growing rice on terraced central Vermont hillsides. They are learning to live with climate change, rather than pretend that it doesn’t exist. With some imagination and work, we can lift our livelihoods out of the river-bottom land and up a bit into the hillsides. Re-imagining the layout of our roads and farms, we can take advantage of all that water the heavens are dumping on us. We could generate more hydropower – a huge, sustainable energy blessing. We preserve keep more of the water in the land for agriculture.
Vermonters cannot stop catastrophic climate change. But we can mitigate its effects. We need to take this moment, in the shadow of Irene’s flooding disaster, to consider what kind of state we wish to design if our future is truly going to be very wet.
Dan Jones
Montpelier VT
