Burying the Survivors

Photo: Geoffrey Scott Baker, resident of nearby Oella who calls Ellicott City his muse

I remember this riddle from middle school days -- "If a plane crashes on the U.S.-Canada border, where would they bury the survivors?" The punchline, of course, is that you don't bury survivors.

I was reminded of this when reading Ambitious Ellicott City flood prevention plan would tear down 19 buildings in historic downtown, by Baltimore Sun journalists Sarah Meehan and Jess Nocera. The headline is an accurate summary of what Howard County officials have proposed in response to the devastating floods of July 2016 (see my Flood Flash and and Flood Peak articles) and May 2018 (Flooding: It's Not in the Cards).

The headline hints at some of the problems with the response of county officials. The plan is indeed ambitious, in the way that Al Capone was ambitious at banks: it contemplates obliterating the victims. The financial cost to be paid by the county would be high, but the businesses that have rebuilt in the "flood zone" would not survive in new locations. They thrive because of the "sense of place" to which they have contributed for years or decades.

The plan announcement seeks to downplay the impact of the demolition by pointing out that 5 percent of the historic district would be affected, and this map with much less than 1 percent in red reinforces (and exaggerates) that message. Everyone who cares about the place, however, knows that this is the most important road segment on the map, or indeed in the entire county.



Moreover, the removal of buildings in the path of the flood waters will not "prevent" flooding. As detailed in the Preservation Maryland Statement on Ellicott City Demolition Proposal, the county's plan merely moves victims out of the way but does not even include study of the radically altered upstream hydrology that has driven the floods.

Main Street Ellicott City -- A walkable downtown with arts, history, architecture, cuisine, and coffee

The story is a reminder that climate change is leaving less room for error in many of our decisions about the environment. In this case, decisions about land use that would normally have made flooding quantitatively worse are now making it qualitatively worse -- a threshold has been crossed into an entirely new type of flood risk.

Lagniappe

I have to admit that -- like many people from this part of Maryland -- I take the woes of Ellicott City personally. I have been a customer in most of the buildings slated for demolition, and my favorite librarian and I bought wedding gifts for each other in Discoveries.

Discoveries, around the anniversary of the 2016 flood. We tried to go again in May 2018, but downtown was thriving and we could not find a parking space. We were actually glad to see that. The next day, it was destroyed by a disaster resulting from climate change and poor land-use planning upstream.

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Humans Should Act Our Age

Our geologic age, that is.

Geologists who define ages and epochs according to the rise and fall of organisms have come to realize that one particular species has dramatically altered the earth in ways that will be detectable well into the future. That species is us: Homo sapiens sapiens. As the name implies, higher-order thinking distinguishes us from the rest of our genus, and indeed from the rest of all life. It may be both our doing and our undoing.

A lot of that thinking has been directed at the extraction of resources that could be used both for energy and for useful products. Those resources, especially coal, petroleum, and natural gas, provided both concentrated energy and material -- plastic -- that could be used to manufacture almost literally anything.

The Anthropocene (human age) is so called because that process of extraction has fundamentally changed the Earth in ways that some humans have difficulty believing. The earth is indeed so vast -- comprising billions of cubic miles of material -- that it seems unlikely that a "mere" humans could affect it in any significant way.

The first step in understanding how this is possible is to think about the spatial scale of Earth's environments. I help to run an educational project called EarthView, in which we take a giant, inflatable globe to school gyms. We point out that on a 20-foot globe, almost everything that counts in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere -- indeed, the entire biosphere -- is within 1/5 of an inch of the surface. At the scale of an ordinary classroom, all of our resources are within the thickness of the paper covering it.

The second step in understanding how humans can significantly alter the planet is to think about the temporal (time) scale of human activity. Over a few millennia of civilization, humans have changed land-use patterns through hunting, fire, and agriculture. And in just a couple of centuries, we have extracted fossil fuels that have formed over a period of about 300,000,000 years. We use energy for our homes, factories, planes, trains and automobiles that was derived by photosynthesis when India was still attached to Antarctica.

About half of the oil, coal, and natural gas are formed from decayed layers of plants and animals that were growing during the carboniferous period and developed under heat and pressure ever since have been released into the atmosphere and oceans in just two centuries. In half a century, much of that has been turned into plastics that -- whether dutifully recycled or not -- have accumulated into Texas-sized sludge islands in the oceans.

Anthropocene imagined. Image: Shutterstock by way of NPR.
Note vertical exaggeration of the near-surface features.
The Earth has a diameter of 8,000 miles; almost all of our experience is
within a layer that is far less that 1 percent of that thickness.

Thus have geologists recognized our new age. The ability of our children and their children's children to thrive -- or even to survive -- the changes will depend upon our taking much greater interest in what we have wrought, and much greater responsibility for ameliorating the damage.

To this end, the most recent edition of the Ted Radio Hour is dedicated to understanding the Anthropocene and considering our responsibilities. The discussion begins with a paleontologist's perspective on the evidence we are leaving future geologists, and then turns to several discussions of our impact on biodiversity, including the potential of landscape ecology to reduce further harm.


Lagniappe

For more on the basics that drive the climate part of our epochal impact, see my earlier posts Frosty Denial and Early Warning. For beautifully written, nuanced discussion of the localized impacts of climate change throughout the world, please see my various blog posts referencing the works of Carl Safina and read his book The View from Lazy Point.

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