This commentary is by Nicholas Boke, a freelance writer and international education consultant who lives in Chester.
Like many Vermonters, ever since the July floods I’ve felt mildly anxious much of the time.
Those of us who live in Chester were mostly lucky: The flooding of the Williams River was minimal and, although Lover’s Lane Brook rose significantly, crossing the 80 feet up the gradual grade toward the foundation of our house, when the rain stopped the waters began, immediately, to recede.
But, since then, every time it starts raining I wonder what’s next. I often walk down the little slope to see how high the brook has risen. So far, so good.
Add to our personal experiences the videos of the eastern Libyan dam breaks that swept sleeping families into the Mediterranean, the fires that turned Lahaina into an ash heap, and the floods that drowned a number of Chinese cities, and it’s pretty hard to rest easy these days.
Then there are things like insurance companies that are withdrawing from California and Florida, citing the overwhelming numbers — and costs — of the various disasters that have hit these states in recent years, to say nothing of FEMA having to ask Congress for more funds just to honor the promises it has recently made to several regions.
So I’m wondering how long all this can go on.
Not, of course, how long the climate-based disasters can go on. We know the answer to that: for a long, long time.
But how long people can try to behave as though these climate-based disasters were an aberration? You know, people who want to build back where the flood or the fire took out their house or business, or where yet another tornado hit, or where — for one reason or another — building back just doesn’t make sense.
And, once all those people have realized the virtual idiocy of rebuilding in the same spot, what they’ll decide to do.
Montpelier is among the Vermont municipalities in which the citizenry is trying to face what needs to be faced, to decide what needs to be decided, and then — somehow — to begin to respond to the realities that the facts tell us must be responded to.
What unimaginable tasks face Vermont’s capital, as well as towns like Johnson and Londonderry, which, like Montpelier and Barre, must accept the fact that lying alongside a flood-prone river means that there’s no simple solution. Anything that would make a difference would totally change the nature of each municipality.
Simply put, anything that might actually protect the town might mean that the town literally could not exist where it now exists.
Whether it’s the coastal plains of Bangladesh, or downtown Juba, South Sudan, or lower Manhattan, the fact of the matter is that, in the world that’s coming our way, human beings just won’t be able to inhabit some of the places they’ve inhabited for a long, long time. Period.
Whether it’s the sea-level rise that will hit the Indian Ocean, or the Caribbean Sea or the South Pacific, or the drought and extreme heat events that will cripple America’s desert Southwest and the countries surrounding the Persian Gulf, some forces are just too powerful to restrain.
These realities, of course, raise a number of other questions. Where will the people who currently live or work in those places go? How will the places they go to find a way to house and hire them? Who will make the decisions about what needs to happen in order to save the lives and property that will be lost if these changes aren’t made? To say nothing of what will become of what we think of as places where people can live on the planet?
What will we do? What will you do? What will I do when this possibility becomes an unforgiving reality?
