The Tides of History

The phrase “tides of history” is often used as a metaphor to suggest the sweeping geopolitical drifts that come to shape human destiny. 

But after reading an alarming article in The Washington Post, I couldn't help but think of these “tides” literally. 

How will historians of the future characterize our era when they look back over the centuries? Will the stories that currently grab our headlines be the ones that eventually come to mark our moment? 

“The Drowning South: Where Seas Are Rising At Alarming Speed” was the headline that grabbed my attention. This is the type of in-depth, comprehensive reporting that we need a lot more of. At its core, of course, this is a climate crisis story. There has been no shortage of grave reports about rising sea levels. 

But the strong geographic angle struck me as well as the myriad emotional anecdotes about how much the effects are already being felt. As the article notes:

The number of high-tide floods is rapidly increasing in the region, with incidents happening five times as often as they did in 1990, said William Sweet, an oceanographer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“We’re seeing flooding in a way that we haven’t seen before,” said Sweet, who leads the agency’s high-tide flooding assessments. “That is just the statistics doing the talking.”

Just the statistics doing the talking. Will that be enough to wake up the Republican politicians who control the state governments along the Gulf Coast and Southeast? For decades they have denigrated the data and scapegoated the scientists. Now I think of a phrase I first heard from former Secretary of State George Shultz to describe what would happen to those who ignore the climate crisis: They are being “mugged by reality.”

Unfortunately, they’re not the only victims of the crime. 

As much as schadenfreude might seem to be in order, the more appropriate emotions are anger and ultimately sadness. The damage we have done as a nation in not facing up to the mounting climate crisis is a catastrophe that will resound across the centuries to come. You can make a convincing argument that when you try to calculate the harm going forward, the Republicans in our government who refuse to act might end up being one of the most destructive forces in human history. I wish that was hyperbole. 

As the article makes clear, it is the poorest and most marginalized that will suffer the most. Racist housing practices like redlining have confined the most vulnerable in the region to many of the low-lying areas that will be most damaged by the rising waters. These areas are also frequently polluted. 

You can extrapolate these forces of inequity to the world as a whole. The imbalances of wealth and power will compound the global environmental tragedy. 

When it comes to the climate, we seem unable, as a nation or maybe as a species, to grapple effectively with persistent threats. A lot of the focus is on the most immediate and dramatic dangers. But as the article makes clear, we should be thinking differently:

While much planning and money have gone toward blunting the impact of catastrophic hurricanes, experts say it is the accumulation of myriad smaller-scale impacts from rising water levels that is the newer, more insidious challenge — and the one that ultimately will become the most difficult to cope with.

“To me, here’s the story: We are preparing for the wrong disaster almost everywhere,” said Rob Young, a Western Carolina University professor and director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.

Many who work in the climate space have identified climate despair as now posing a greater threat than climate denial. A sizable segment of our population seems to have gone from “it’s not real” to “there’s nothing we can do about it.” That is a very dangerous mindset because the more we do now, the more we can prevent future harm. It could, and likely will, get worse. 

On a positive note, there are many examples of how human ingenuity and resolve have led to unpredictable successes. We need to unleash all the creativity and energy we can to stem the tide, so to speak, of our warming planet.

But we will also have to recognize the immediate and growing threat and prepare accordingly. 

Here in San Francisco, there is a plan with a price tag of more than $13 billion to prepare the shoreline for the new reality. The city’s website lays out the stakes: “Sea level rise may be a slow-moving threat, but San Francisco recognizes that it demands action now.”

That is also the message from the South as well. The tides of history are real and they are rising. What will we do about it?