3 minute read
Your Ecological House™—Denial and the Price of Real Estate
— Kristina Trotta, Florida Department of Environmental Protection employee, 2015
This column is part of an ongoing series on rebuilding America’s infrastructure. To read previous articles in the series, visit www. gazzettetimes.com, keyword “Wenz.”
Albert Einstein is credited with saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Those words came to mind when I read that the Army Corps of Engineers has unveiled a preliminary proposal to build a 15- to 20-foothigh, six-mile-long sea wall right through the heart of Miami—at an estimated cost of $6 billion.
The purpose of said barrier? Mostly to protect Miami from increasingly frequent storm surges exacerbated by sea-level rise caused by global heating.
Alas and alas: the project will cost far more than it would have if built a decade ago, when sea-level rise had already manifested in the form of catastrophic storms and floods; and the project ultimately will fail to protect Miami which, like most of south Florida, ultimately will be overwhelmed by the rising Atlantic.
Both of these sad facts are directly connected to the past and current denial of the predictable effects of climate change. In 2015, when then-Florida Governor (now U.S. Senator) Rick Scott was in charge, the state’s semi-official policy was simply to pretend that climate change wasn’t happening. He was backed by the state’s legislature, which for decades refused to pass any climate-related adaptation measures.
The thinking, it seems, was that talk of sea-level rise, persistent and often dangerous flooding and so on would hurt real estate values. Whether those governing Florida really believed that climate change wasn’t a problem, or just said so in order to attract certain types of supporters or campaign donors, remains unclear.
In a way, Florida’s policy of climate-change denial was successful. People kept moving into the state, especially its crowded metropolitan areas; investors backed more and more waterfront highrises; property values skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, the laws of physics continued to operate, and in 2017 Miami narrowly dodged a bullet in the form of category-five Hurricane Irma, which bypassed Miami but devastated the Florida Keys and caused considerable damage around the state. One result of that event was the mandate for the Army Corps of Engineers to propose solutions to Miami’s vulnerability to floods. They came up with their massive sea wall.
Interestingly, the Corps’ proposal has been criticized by both development boosters and environmentalists. The real estate industry sees the wall as an ugly intrusion into Miami’s waterfront that will devalue property.
Environmentalists view it as an expensive, “one-size-fits-all” solution for a series of complex, interrelated problems that need multi-faceted responses. While the wall might repel a massive storm surge in midtown Miami, partially protecting the most expensive properties, it will do nothing to prevent flooding from warming-intensified rainstorms and rising tides. Exacerbating these growing threats is South Florida’s geology: the peninsula sits on a base of porous limestone which the expanding seas are flooding, repelling rain runoff while frequently lifting groundwater and sewage to the surface. Miami area septic systems are beginning to fail, and will cost billions replace. These conditions affect the whole of South Florida, which sits, at its highest point, just 10 feet above the current sea level.
But while the local environmentalists propose relatively inexpensive, more diversified, and likely more effective solutions such as replanting natural storm barriers and creating municipal water catchments, they, too, are engaging in a form of denial. Numerous science-based maps show most of Florida’s peninsula completely underwater in the coming decades.
Alas, we are likely throwing huge amounts of good money after bad unless we simply abandon certain regions of our ecological house.
© Philip S. Wenz, 2021 Philip S. (Skip) Wenz is the author of the E-book Your Ecological House, available at all major electronic book distributors.
