When is Enough, Enough?
Hurricane Harvey, Climate Change, and Owning our Inaction
The sentiment of Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived around 500 B.C., still rings true today. As quoted by Plato in his work, Cratylus:
Everything flows and nothing stays.
Everything flows and nothing abides.
Everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.
Everything flows; nothing remains.
All is flux, nothing is stationary.
All is flux, nothing stays still.
All flows, nothing stays.
Basically, the only constant is change.
When your environment is always changing, it is admittedly tough to know at which point you begin to change, or should begin to consciously change along with it. Some changes are so minute and gradual, you continuously adapt to them until they no longer feel like changes. Take for example, my bicycling habit during pregnancy. By never stopping my daily bicycle commute or city jaunts, even as my belly continued to grow, my body adapted — I never felt unstable or unbalanced.
At some point, however, it became obvious that I would need more than my balance to continue riding. During the course of the past week, the almost 6-lb baby in my belly has not taken kindly to being jostled by my pedaling legs and has rebelled by lodging himself/herself in my ribs, making it quite painful to breathe. I’m normally one to push through discomfort, but not at the expense of my health or my baby’s health — that’s my personal tipping point. This is the first time in almost 3 years at my current job that I haven’t biked at least once during the week. I’ve accepted that I need to sacrifice a bit of my flexibility to catch the bus in the morning and afternoon, but the change has altogether gone smoothly — Plus, it’s great practice for my future routine after the baby arrives but before he/she can ride on a bike or in a bike trailer.
Though this commute mode change looms large for me personally, it’s pretty small in the grand scheme of changes — This past week saw some much larger shifts, specifically in the form of natural disasters ravaging cities from North America to Africa to Asia. Death tolls in Sierra Leone surpassed 1,000 while severe monsoon rains in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh contributed to at least 1,200 deaths in those areas. The United Nations estimates that 41 million people in those three countries were affected in one way or another by the ensuing floods. Not to mention the news closer to home, of course, coming out of Texas. Hurricane Harvey has made landfall twice now, unleashing over 50 inches of rain in the Houston area and displacing over 35,000 people. Much of Port Arthur, a city of 55,000 people, is underwater. Flood waters continue to rise, obscuring the true extent of death and devastation in the area.
Obviously, no one can control a natural disaster — They are just that, natural, and beyond the control (or power) of any human. But after being bombarded with the heartbreaking images and stories from Texas and beyond, it baffles me that the White House continues to deflect questions about climate change and its role in such storms. Could Hurricane Harvey still have unleashed such destruction without the aid of climate change? Maybe. Did climate change contribute to the strength of this storm, and will it increase the frequency of storms like it? Possibly.
I’m not a climate scientist myself, but I am an environmental professional, and I agree with the more than 97% of scientists who assert that “global warming is real and largely caused by humans.” Say you don’t agree, but you do recognize that there is even the slightest possibility that climate change contributes to the strength and frequency of storms like Harvey and their potential for destruction of communities. At what point does it become worth it to address it, on the off chance that possibility is true? What is the tipping point? How many more events like this and their outcomes — deaths, billions of dollars in damages, personal losses, productivity losses — does it take to finally incite action?
While our current federal government continues to turn a blind eye to environmental issues, they don’t disappear. Some cities, including Atlanta, have pledged to uphold the tenets of the Paris Agreement and strive to combat climate change, which is admirable, but talking about it and putting in the hard work to do it are two different things. Reducing the environmental impacts of government buildings is nice, but making sweeping changes to zoning codes and permitting regulations to encourage density, invest in the expansion of public transit and bicycle infrastructure, require tree plantings, and reduce parking will ultimately have greater impacts than the efforts that look most attractive on a website.
Our climate is changing, and though day-to-day the shifts seem incremental, the overall scope is beginning to show. The decision we need to make, both collectively and as individuals, is when the time has arrived to make that leap and change ourselves. We need to be real about our tipping point, and if the death and destruction unleashed by this latest chain of natural disasters aren’t enough, we need to own that the next time a storm wreaks havoc and we have done little or nothing to mitigate it.
We can’t avoid natural disasters, true. But, even if climate change had only the slightest chance of enhancing the scale or scope of Harvey, or any other of the disasters across the globe this past week— Is it worth it, for the future, to ignore that?
