This commentary is by Jim Stiles of St. Albans, a member of the Vermont Healthy Soil Coalition.
I find some aspects of Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” campaign to be appealing, while others are less so. Building better is generally a good thing. Building back is sometimes the right thing, but if we focus too narrowly on building back, we risk not paying enough attention to building better.
To cope with change that is coming hard and fast, simply building back — even building back better — could be a bad idea. The issue is that it needs to be enough better, given the challenges we face and the changes that are happening now and in the future.
Instead of thinking about building back, we could try thinking in terms of building forward. The impacts of climate change mean we should look hard at the future — what it’s going to be like — and make some changes.
These thoughts were inspired by VTDigger’s recent flood coverage, which included a piece about how Montpelier’s public library suffered serious damage. Although the flood damage was no surprise, it was painful to see.
When I lived in Montpelier, the Hubbard Public Library was a favorite place. Libraries tend to be nice places, and Montpelier’s certainly was, and hopefully will be again.
No one who pays attention to climate change believes that this flood was the last one that Montpelier is going to suffer. Floods like this one are going to increase in frequency and severity for many years before we have any real hope of relief. Therefore, it would be a mistake to just simply rebuild the library like it was. It will be a very long time before nature returns to a condition where that approach would be wise.
The most interesting example of building forward I have encountered is a project in Wilmington, Vt., following Tropical Storm Irene. There is an apartment there that had flooded, as it had several times before. A local architect took on the job of rebuilding it. His solution to repeated flooding was to create a comfortable, livable space that could be abandoned when the next flood came and then quickly and easily reoccupied without serious repair or rebuilding. The specific techniques he used would not apply to Montpelier’s library or to many other spaces that were flooded (and will be again, and again, and again).
Every Vermont community should take a hard look at how it should build forward as climate change alters the conditions in which we live. In many places, retreating from flood-prone places (or other problem locations) and simply not rebuilding will be the right answer.
Places like downtown Montpelier face severe challenges and should not build back to something that is simply more of the same. Building forward, with creativity and determination — actively embracing changes for buildings that are worth preserving but require some changes — is better than just building back. In downtown Montpelier, this could mean that many cellars should be mostly abandoned, and a great many first-floor spaces should be made highly flood-tolerant.
There is no longer any reasonable hope of preventing serious climate change. Within the next few years, we should expect one or more years where global temperature rise exceeds 1.5 °C. Chances are good that after this El Nino cycle, global temperatures will temporarily retreat below that point.
No one knows the future for certain, but we should prepare for the world to quickly blow past 1.5 for the long haul, and soon thereafter blow past 2.0 °C. A conservative view suggests that we should be prepared for a global temperature increase of 4 °C when today’s children are growing old (hopefully after living long and mostly comfortable lives).
With hard work and our fair share of good luck, I do believe we can prevent 4 °C global temperature rise. However, as we plan for a good future for today’s children, luck should not be part of that plan’s foundation. Luck is not a plan.
I hope that 100 years from now Montpelier will still be a vibrant, vital place. I love the idea that there will still be a wonderful library in that city, and that it will still be housed in the same building where it now resides. That building may well look somewhat different. Likewise for the other buildings that will see many floods over the lifetimes of the children who live there now.
And finally, a sobering thought. CNBC just published its analysis of the best and worst states in which to live and work in 2023. It was no surprise that Texas was rated the worst. However, it worried me that Vermont was rated the best. Depending on how many people facing climate challenges agree with their conclusion, Vermont may be in for very big changes.
