In a season of climate change, we’re plagued by more than high winds and rising waters, massive blizzards and hail storms, damaging surges and colossal floods. Though more and more of us live through these frequent disasters, we can’t seem to find ways to focus on the key question they raise about everything from protecting our coast lines and river banks, to where to develop real estate and where to find next the tax base. Distracted from these very real but hard to solve problems roiling around us, our ecological strategies remain unfocused, kept under our radar by a general lack of clear communication and public discourse. Here Kevin Shanley, FASLA, is CEO of SWA Group and a long-time resident of Houston, provokes us to think deeper than the next tweet. –SSS

Kevin Shanley, FASLA / SWA Group

Jared Green: You were recently in Washington, D.C. speaking at the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation on improving the resiliency of our coasts in an effort to protect them from increasingly damaging storms and sea-level rise brought on by climate change. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, this is an issue on the minds of just about everybody who lives on the coast. What were the lessons of this disaster?

Kevin Shanley: There are several lessons. There are real-world lessons and then “should-be” lessons. The real-world lesson is that everybody is at risk. These storms don’t just happen to Florida or Bangladesh. They can hit New York City. The storm could have hit Washington, D.C., with disastrous results. We’re not ready.

The other lesson we need to learn is quite important: we forget really quickly. Katrina happened, now eight years ago. Some structural changes were made to the levee system, but all of the really great plans to re-build New Orleans as a more sustainable community, a better community, a more integrated community came to nothing. In Houston in 2008, Hurricane Ike was a near miss. The SSPEED Center at Rice University is involved with this and has been working to make sure we don’t forget what happened with Ike. If Ike had come in, it would have been a disaster ten-fold Katrina. It didn’t, so we were lucky. It swerved about sixty miles to the east and it literally wiped the Bolivar Peninsula clean, virtually every structure on the peninsula was gone. It went up Chambers County, an agricultural community, and created huge damage, but relatively light because there’s nobody there, which is a lesson to learn.

Hurricane Ike damage at the Bolivar Peninsula / Bryan Carlile, Beck Geodetix

The challenge after Sandy is to ask ourselves what’s the next thing that’s going to distract everybody? In 2001, Houston was hit not with a hurricane but with a really amazing tropical storm called Allison. It dumped thirty inches of rain in twenty-four hours. It flooded seventy-five thousand homes and ninety five thousand cars. It was an amazing flood. It actually tracked all the way up to Canada. Post-Allison, many good things started to happen and a number actually did happen. There were bigger policy changes and changes that many of us were working on, but then in September 2001, guess what happened? The national attention, the local attention, everybody’s attention totally changed and a lot of policy-changing momentum was lost. Read more…

Storms and hurricanes are nothing new for New York City. Some four decades after the European founding of the municipality in 1625, a severe storm was chronicled in Manhattan. Subsequently, the Great Storm of 1693 rearranged the coastline, likely creating the Fire Island Cut. Many more significant storms followed over the centuries. To underscore the lessons of super storm Sandy, there are people alive today who can remember the great hurricane of 1938.

What’s new in recent decades is the relentless development of the coastline, haphazardly accelerated with apparent disregard for protective natural buffers, such as wetlands and dunes. As recently as the 1980s, development exploded in today’s storm ravaged Staten Island, even filling and building on marshland.

Also new to many people is the realization of the human contributions to climate change through our modification of atmospheric gases, a warming climate, and the attendant increases in sea levels, storm frequency and severity, droughts, heat waves, and more. These meteorological changes are real and measurable.

Hurricane Sandy, aside from its tragic aftermath, has done us a huge favor, providing a loud and unequivocal “I told you so!” in the nation’s densest population areas and most developed coastline. The visible devastation of New York City and the Jersey Shore brings tangible urgency to our efforts to take all possible measures to alter the lifestyle and behaviors that have brought us to this critical juncture. We need a paradigm shift in our land-use patterns and energy consumption. Most fundamentally, we must change the ways we interact with the natural systems of the earth.  Massive sea gates and walls might protect against some storm surges, but what will they do to fisheries, sediment transport, water quality—to mention but a few potential repercussions? We need an integrated approach to climate adaptation and mitigation that uses natural systems as ongoing guides.

Wetland Restoration and Mitigation, image courtesy of appliedeco.com

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Hurricane Sandy has invoked a lot of change. Whether it’s coast lines or politics, we have experienced first-hand what scientists, planners, and architects have been warning about for years, that a storm like Sandy was going to happen.

“Sometime between now and 2100, a storm will dump 18 feet of seawater into lower Manhattan, flooding much of the financial district, Battery Park, and most of the subway stations south of Rector Street. Six hundred oil tanks in Bayonne, New Jersey, will be inundated. And all but a nub of Liberty State Park, the landfill opposite Ellis Island, will disappear into the harbor. That’s the grim forecast for New York.”

The above quote comes from Suzanne LaBarre in her 2010 blog post, Hope Floats, where she describes MoMA’s Rising Currents exhibition “as an optimistic rebuke to the government’s stopgap approach to public infrastructure. Whereas the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erects concrete dams and levees, these architects favor broad solutions that reconfigure the social, economic, political, and natural landscape.”

An image from the MoMA Rising Currents exhibition,
Courtesy of Scape Landscape Architecture

LaBarre rightly calls out how the Rising Currents exhibition took sustainable and creative approaches to dealing with cataclysmic storms like Sandy. The ideas in the exhibition illustrated concepts that would help create resilient communities; communities that are not only physically safe from the water’s wrath, but stronger socially, economically, and environmentally

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