The Human Age (7 page)

When the residents of Newtok do move to their new town of Mertarvik on Nelson Island, a mere nine miles away, most will return to their familiar ice-coast life of subsistence fishing, but they’ll be exemplars of a different epoch.

Tuvalu, another palm-frond island country in the South Pacific,
has begun evacuating its people to New Zealand. And the president of Kiribati, an island nation of thirty-two atolls sprinkled across 3.5 million kilometers of ocean between Australia and Hawaii, is negotiating with Fiji to buy five thousand acres of land so that his population of over 102,000 can relocate. One Kiribati native, Ioane Teitiota, appealed for refugee status to Auckland, New Zealand, arguing that none of Kiribati’s atolls is more than two meters above sea level, and therefore his life was endangered by the rising seas of global warming. The judge who heard his case found the claim novel, but not persuasive.

BRAINSTORMING
FROM EQUATOR TO ICE

S
uch claims may soon become less novel, but fortunately humans are gifted with a taste for the novel that’s leading us to some innovative responses—not only old-style mechanical solutions like fossil-fuel-powered Industrial Age steel floodgates, but promising new ways of addressing root causes and harnessing solar power.

Some countries have been stalwartly battling tides for years. Maeslantkering, one of the largest moving structures on Earth, is part of a network of sluices, dams, dykes, levees, and storm surge barriers protecting the Netherlands from the blustery North Sea. Galveston, Texas, is designing what will be the United States’s longest sea wall, affectionately known as the “Ike Dike,” to protect the low-lying city from impending floods. In Venice, the $5.5 billion MOSE Project—seventy-eight mobile, underwater steel gates—will isolate the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic Sea and shield the city from floods.

In London, gated crusaders are already at their posts. Like a row of giant knights standing up to their necks in water, armor gleaming, weapons hidden, the Thames Barrier spans the river near Woolwich,
downstream of central London. Behind each helmet looms an antique vision of the brain, all levers and hydraulics. Trapped in futuristic folded steel, the fixtures appear lighter than water, though in reality each gate weighs about 3,300 tons. Altogether they can close ranks beneath the waves to protect the city from storm surges.

Like so many other rivers, the Thames is not as wide as it used to be. We encrust the banks of our rivers with shops and houses, nosing out into the water, as if we long to be osmotically part of the current, in the process narrowing channels and putting our lives and property at risk. London has flooded famously in the past—307 people died in the 1953 flood—and with the world’s sea levels rising, and the city steadily sinking at a foot a century, it needs not so much Knights Templar as Knights Temperature.

In mild days and years, the gates lie open, and you can sail between the five-story-high helmets, admiring their sleek beauty and wondering what London’s son John Milton would have made of them in the 1600s. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” he wrote in a sonnet about his blindness. He meant himself, serving God, but the Knights of the Order of the Barrier also stand and wait, reminding Londoners of climate change’s reality, and how it will play out in their backyards, streets, and wharves if they don’t take steps. Meanwhile gleaming guards defend the shores. Peer into their faces and darkness greets you. They will serve a few years more before their metal weakens and they’re replaced by newer and abler paladins.

There is something ironic and fitting about using the very process that has led to trouble—the burning of fossil fuels—to forge the protectors to combat the ongoing sequelae of that very climate change, technological lords of deliverance we hope will protect us from ourselves. Better to harness the sun.

One of the most heartening solar stories comes from northwestern Bangladesh, home to the world’s largest floodplain. Even though it’s not raining at the moment, the humidity is nearly 100 percent, and the air feels thick as rubber. The monsoon season is ending, and though the sky can still rip with fierce downpours, children wearing
colorful tunics and trousers hurry to the riverbank to board their solar-powered school boat. Older villagers wait for the health boat or library boat or agricultural extension boat. Thanks to one man’s ingenuity and generosity of spirit, hope floats whenever it floods.

Mohammed Rezwan, an architect and climate-change activist who grew up here, ached to see his country being ravaged by ever-worsening floods. He’s noticed that as temperatures rise and more snow melts in the Himalayas, more water surges across the Bangladeshi floodplain. Every year one-third of Bangladesh lies underwater, as if a giant eraser annually scrubs away the hand-drawn pictures of family life.

Rezwan decided that he didn’t want to design buildings only to see them and whole communities washed away before his eyes. So, in 2008, he founded Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha (which means “self-reliance”), a nonprofit that deploys a fleet of one hundred boats with shallow drafts that can skim across the lowlands, serving as libraries, schools, health clinics, and three-tiered floating gardens. He persuaded local boat builders to outfit these traditional bamboo boats with solar panels, computers, video conferencing, and Internet access. The fleet also provides volunteer doctors, solar-powered hurricane lanterns, and bicycle-powered pumps. Solar batteries on each boat can power cell phones and computers, and people may recharge lamps to take home—provided their children keep attending school. Thus far, the project reaches 90,000 families, and it expects to reach another 81,500 families by 2015.

Because people become stranded and can’t feed themselves in flood season, Rezwan invented a technique for them he calls “solar water farming.” As he explains: “The system includes floating beds made of water hyacinth (to grow vegetables), a portable circular enclosure created by fishing net and bamboo strips (to raise fish), and a floating duck coop powered by solar lamps. It has a recycling system—duck manure is used as fish food, cold-water hyacinth beds are sold as organic fertilizer, and the sun energy lights up the duck coop to maintain the egg production.”

So giggling children attend school, even during flood months, and their families can produce food and clean water despite the deluges. In this way, if monsoons or conflicts push people from their homes, the flotilla creates lifesavers of education, medicine, food, lighting, and communication.

Rezwan can’t single-handedly fight climate change, but his brilliantly simple solution is helping people adapt. The words “adaptation” and “mitigation” are appearing more and more often in the lexicon of climate scientists, who use them to cover practical (and impractical) responses to climate change.

Remember blue-green algae, to whom we owe our oxygen-besotted lives? One controversial idea is seeding the Antarctic Ocean with iron to trigger the growth of such algae. Algae thrive by absorbing sunlight and carbon dioxide, which they use to forge chlorophyll, but for that they need iron. As algae soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they sink down to the ocean floor and die. Scientists aren’t sure yet if widespread “iron fertilization” is safe for ocean animals, so they recently tried a small test, dumping iron powder into an Antarctic whirlpool (so that it wouldn’t spread). Sure enough, a giant bloom of algae diatoms arose, sucking carbon dioxide from the air, and after a few weeks many diatoms carried pearls of CO
₂
to the bottom and died. Would it work safely on a large scale? That’s the big unknown. Geoengineering is a highly controversial plaything. We won’t know except by trying, and a bad outcome could be deadly. We’ve already been geoengineering the planet for decades, unintentionally, by saturating the air with CO
₂
and the oceans with fertilizer—not with good results.

Geoengineering and adaptation ideas run the gamut from shucks-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that to plain nutty. The monochrome Earth method includes painting cities and roads white, covering the deserts in white plastic, and genetically engineering crops to be a paler color—all to reflect sunlight back into space. Or installing roof tiles that turn white in hot weather, black in cold. More bizarre tech fixes include firing trillions of tiny mirrors into space to form a hundred-
thousand-mile sunshade for Earth, or building artificial mini-volcanoes that spew sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere to block sunlight. There’s even been a “modest proposal” that we genetically engineer future humans to be tiny so that they’ll need fewer resources.

At the other end of the globe, on the Norwegian coast, a colossal Carbon Capture Storage facility, owned jointly by Norway and three oil companies, is bagging carbon emissions before they’re released into the atmosphere and storing them in underground vaults. Carbon prisons are still too expensive to be practical everywhere, and not worry-free, but many countries are following suit. In a quest for the first technology that can efficiently,
economically
pull CO
₂
out of the air, Richard Branson is offering a tempting prize of $25 million.

Research by the cell biologist Len Ornstein shows that if the Australian Outback and the Sahara were forested, they’d absorb all of the CO
₂
we’re pumping into the atmosphere every year. Obviously not an easy venture, it’s technologically possible. Grassroots indigenous, nongovernmental groups have already planted over fifty-one million trees in Africa. In time the forests, absorbing water from the soil and releasing it back into the atmosphere through their leaves, will generate their own clouds, rain, and shade, cooling things down, and providing the bonus of sustainably grown wood for their host countries.

Meanwhile, the eastern coast of the United States, from Boston to Florida, needs widespread sea barriers, preferably of sand, and also artificial barriers and gates wherever they’re workable. They needn’t be poetic knights of deliverance like London’s. They might even be a version of the natural reefs and oyster beds that once flanked the American coast.

Trillions of oysters lined the eastern shores, building up knuckle-shelled beds that blunted the storm surges, capturing waves on the reefs, where they collapsed before they could blast down the estuaries. The Hudson River estuary was famed for the quality of its oysters.
Oysters closest to shore also filtered the water, which made the habitat ideal for marsh grasses, whose root systems, clinging to the land, kept it from eroding.

We’ve largely destroyed that long, sweeping natural barricade. Now, as hurricane surges pummel cities and harbors, we’re starting to realize what we’ve lost, not just in small innocent-seeming meals of wild-gathered shellfish but through toxic runoff from cities and farms. And it’s the same the world over—85 percent of the world’s oyster reefs have vanished since the end of the nineteenth century.

To protect New York City, the landscape architect Kate Orff favors an archipelago of artificial reefs built from piles of “rocks, shells, and fuzzy rope,” to attract oysters, because oyster beds naturally act as wave attenuators. In time, the oyster-encrusted barriers would filter the water and also serve as a kind of ecological glue. “Infrastructure isn’t separate from us, or it shouldn’t be,” Orff explains. “It’s among us, it’s next to us, embedded in our cities and public spaces.”

BLUE REVOLUTION

“M
ariculture,” I say, floating the image of a vertical ocean garden in my mind, as I climb into a heavy, buoyant, safety-orange worksuit designed for extended periods on cold water.

“Think of it as 3D farming that uses the entire water column to grow a variety of species,” Bren Smith says, closing his own suit over a black-and-red-checked flannel shirt and jeans, zipping the fish teeth of ankle zippers, and latching the belt. This is just the beginning of his vision for an elaborate network of small, family-owned, organic, and sustainable aquafarms arranged along the East Coast—oysters in beds under curtains of kelp—to help subdue storm surges while also providing food and energy to local communities.

Climate change is especially hard on fishermen and on farmers. The thirty-nine-year-old seaman sitting across from me in a dinghy on a frostbitten morning in Stony Creek, Connecticut, is both. Bren has a slender build with powerful arms and shoulders, a sign of his rope-heaving, cage-hauling trade. Although he now shaves both face and head, his plumage for years was natural red hair and long beard, hints of which remain. With his flame-orange watch cap, cinnamon
five-o’clock shadow, and rusty-blond eyebrows, he is a study in reds, the long wavelengths of visible light.

We’re not anticipating a stumble overboard, but like many a fisherman Bren doesn’t swim, and the suit adds needed warmth through high winds and snow-thunder in the recent cannonade of winter storms.

A perennial mariner, he grew up in Petty Harbour, a five-hundred-year-old Newfoundland town with eleven painted wooden houses filled with fisherfolk and a salt-peeled wharf with jostling boats. On the rocky shore, a boy could find lobster cages, floats, anchors, ropes, seaweed-tangled shells, fish and bird skeletons, and tall tales. So it’s not surprising that, at fifteen, he dropped out of high school and ran away to sea. In Maine he worked on lobster boats, in Massachusetts on cod boats, and in Alaska’s Bering Strait on trawlers, longliners, and crab boats. At one point he factory-fished for McDonald’s.

“Do you think of yourself as a fisherman or a farmer?” I ask.

“A farmer now. It’s more like growing arugula than facing the dangers of the sea—which, believe me, I’ve seen.”

In a sense 3D farming is rotational agriculture. Bren harvests kelp in the winter and early spring; red seaweed in June and September; oysters, scallops, and clams year-round; mussels in the spring and fall. At least that’s the theory. Hurricane Irene tore up his oyster beds, which he promptly reseeded, knowing he’d have to wait two more years for harvest. Hurricane Sandy smothered the oyster beds yet again. Clams have a better chance of surviving a hurricane because they at least have a strong foot and can move a little. But oysters really are trapped. They don’t even move to eat or mate. Without the reefs, storm surges churn them up, and as the silt smothers the oysters they die, beginning the slow process of joining the fossil record. Right along with the Model Ts that sank when the Long Island Sound froze over in 1917–1918 and foolhardy souls tried driving across it.