By on Rhode Island’s Future
On January 9, I attended a
State House presentation coordinated by the RI Bays, Rivers, and Watersheds
Coordination Team reviewing the shoreline special area management plan, the
Beach SAMP. The speakers, primarily from government agencies, spoke on climate
change induced sea level rise and what it means for Rhode Island.
All well and good, but it
was infused with a great deal of magical thinking about keeping
intact our shoreline communities with private control of access to the shore
while expecting public subsidy in order to safely keep them there. There was a
stunned silence after I finished my question about magical thinking, though eventually the speaker representing the
real estate industry mouthed some platitudes.
In this age of austerity, in an age of shrinking livelihoods for many Americans, in an age where the rich demand that we cut their taxes and kowtow to their every whim, while they suck up all the money and insist that free enterprise is the way to the future, we need to call out the hypocrisy of the owners of the shore line when they demand that we either publicly fund the infrastructure they need to maintain their houses and lifestyles and allow them to violate environmental rules and common sense, while they fund climate deniers and demand that the poor be abandoned.
The sea is coming. The issue
is not how long can we hold it back for the benefit of home owners, it is how
do we adapt to rising sea levels and the slow disintegration of our economy as
the climate creates disaster after disaster.
We cannot allow rebuilding
along the coast. We need to engineer a retreat while we create much larger
coastal ecological buffers that will reduce our carbon footprint, and improve
our food security.
Recycling the materials in
coastal properties, especially the copper, before it falls into the sea is much
better for all of us than waiting for the next storm.
If the rich insist on waiting
it out until the sea comes for them, they should pay the cost of their own
stupidity and not expect the rest of us to rescue them and bail them out.
