The extraordinary hubris of the Army Corps of Engineers

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Posted on December 13, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

If we are to pull ourselves back from the brink of ecological destruction, this society simply must alter its relationship to the natural world of which we are a part.  Unfortunately, we ‘tamers of the wilderness’ have claimed the biblical charge to dominate and subdue nature to the point that we are dominating and subduing it into complete dysfunction.  We have taken the charge of the Age of Enlightenment, of Man’s [sic] supposed superiority over Nature, as if we were separate and over and above, in order to rationalize our way to ecological insanity.

Okay, where does the day’s diatribe come from?  It comes from this Op-Ed in the NY Times, about the Army Corps of Engineers’  plans to redevelop the Mississippi Gulf Coast, that coast that was devastated by Hurricane Katrina last year.  The plan was presented to some 200 scientists at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.  According to this article, they were stunned.

“…stunned by the scope, expense and sheer wastefulness of the projects the corps is considering.”

Seawalls to keep out rising waters, to protect redevelopment along the coast, reconfiguration of islands to raise them 20 feet, the dumping of 50 million cubic yards of sand — all at enormous coast to US taxpayers — so that people who can afford it can live there, and for the tourist industry that benefits from coastal development.

All this, while knowing that sea levels are rising, that hurricanes are growing stronger, that destruction of all these grandiose, even egomaniacal, schemes are doomed even before the projects begin.

But that is our western way.  Nothing, not even the forces of Nature, seems able to bring us to this most essential of human virtues — humility.

“The clear consensus among coastal scientists at the Geological Society meeting was that the corps’ amibitious plans for Mississippi will fail — either all at once in a major hurricane or gradually through shoreline erosion and other long-term changes.  It is an effort in futility.”

As the authors point out — and they are both experts in earth sciences and shorelines — the nation’s shorelines will only become more vulnerable as global warming takes hold and sea levels rise.  Inundation of the coasts is inevitable now, and the only question is by how much, depending on how soon we begin to cut back the production of  greenhouse gases that are bringing this warming about.

And so they call for something we have been saying on this blog — that it is time to step back from the development of our shorelines.  That is certainly what sane people would do.

“We should not rebuild on the shoreline of vulnerable areas like the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  We certainly shouldn’t be doing it with federal dollars or destroying a National Seashore in order to provide a false sense of security for development.”

By the way, such projects already exist all along the eastern seaboard, protecting tourist meccas like Ocean city, MD, the Outer Banks in NC, South Bethany and Rehoboth, DE, and the Jersey coast. 

“They are at war with the sea,” says a Rutgers University geology professor of the Army Corps’ efforts at Ocean City. 

Wow — at war with the sea?  What is wrong with us?

These are beautiful places, and profoundly inappropiate places to be building homes and hotels,  protected by state and federal government projects at enormous expense to the US taxpayer.

The Corps helped prepare the way for the destruction of New Orleans many years before Katrina struck the coast by what it did to the Mississippi River.  To read (or listen to) this stunning, little-reported story, go here.  It is one of the best examples I can think of about what is wrong with our relationship with Nature.  Keep in mind, it was reported 3 years BEFORE Katrina.

The coastlines are going to be claimed by the sea.  What will be our attitude towards this phenomenon, brought about in part by our industrial, consumption-oriented society? 

Instead of seeing the seas as summer playgrounds, can we stand at the shore and once again feel awe — and the humility that can save us?

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