Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Louis Porter, the Lake Champlain lakekeeper for Conservation Law Foundation and the former chief of the Vermont Press Bureau. The piece was first published by the Times Argus.
As I walked around Montpelier last week after its most recent flood, I experienced two powerful and conflicting feelings. First, I felt intense pride in my neighbors’ tireless toiling to help others deal with the devastation.
Many residents and business owners lamented the environmental havoc wrought by massive runoff, spilled fuel and the partial overwhelming of the Montpelier wastewater plant. One building owner went to significant lengths to remove the oil in his basement to prevent it from ending up in the Winooski River, even as his store’s inventory remained at risk.
Such individual efforts buoyed my spirits. Yet I also felt intense shame at what we collectively have helped bring about.
For years, scientists have been predicting more extreme weather as a result of human-caused climate change. When we talk about the issue, we prudently disclaim that individual weather events or seasons cannot be definitively connected to climate change. But the pattern emerging of record-shattering weather around the world in recent months is difficult to ignore.
Bill McKibben said it best in his recent Washington Post op-ed: “Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years.”
We Vermonters love where we live. We are no strangers to extreme weather. Generations of Vermonters have endured five months of it each year — we call it winter. But now we are witnessing unprecedented extreme weather for which we are not well prepared.
The Nature Conservancy’s report, Climate Change in the Lake Champlain Basin, predicted, “The basin could receive as much as 10–15 percent … more precipitation in an average year, with heavy storm events becoming more frequent.” Does that sound familiar?
We compound the problem by developing our land without planning adequately for the pollution-controlling, flood-mitigating infrastructure required in a wetter world. An immediately apparent – and painful – example is the development along the Richelieu River in Quebec. Development pressure and seawalls around homes have eliminated flood plains and restricted the flow of the now-swollen Richelieu, backing up floodwaters all along Champlain’s shores.
Here in Vermont, where 56 percent of the Lake Champlain basin’s land area is located, we have over-paved the landscape and erected buildings without adequate stormwater infrastructure. This causes more runoff — faster and dirtier — to reach Champlain and its tributaries. Sewage plants throughout Vermont have had more than 150 untreated or inadequately treated sewage discharges since 2007, many of them related to infrastructure failures caused by heavy storm flows.
So what do we do if this kind of extreme weather becomes ever more common?
We can marshal the same spirit of collective action demonstrated by our neighbors in communities throughout central Vermont. We can improve our infrastructure and enforce the laws designed to prevent the worst impacts of pollution and flooding. We can build greener stormwater systems to soak up floodwaters, slow runoff and safely infiltrate it into the ground. We can construct better wastewater plants and use their capacity more conservatively. Meanwhile, we can reduce our contribution to climate change through efficiency measures and appropriate alternative energy projects.
Or we can take McKibben’s mock advice:
“It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies.”
