Daniel Botkin:
“Whatever is happening to Earth’s climate does not seem to be our fault”
For those of us who love our national parks and are confronted daily with media, politicians, and pundits warning us of a coming global-warming disaster, it’s only natural to ask what that warming will mean for our national parks. This is exactly what the well-known Union of Concerned Scientists discuss in their recent report, National Landmarks at Risk: How Rising Seas, Floods, and Wildfires Are Threatening the United States’ Most Cherished Historic Sites.
I’ve done research since 1968 on the possibility of human-caused global warming and its possible ecological effects, and have published widely on this topic, discussing possible effects on biodiversity and on specific endangered species as well as on forests, cities, and historical evidence of Arctic sea ice change. I’ve also been involved in the development of some aspects of some climate models, and having developed a computer model of forests that is one of the principal methods used to forecast global warming effects on vegetation, I sought out the UCS report with great interest.
The approach the Union has taken is to have the report written by four staff members: Debra Holtz, a journalist; Kate Cell, a fund-raiser for the organization; Adam Markham, with a B.S. in zoology, who was the founder of Clean Air-Cool Planet, a nonprofit organization “to promote innovative community-based solutions to climate change in the Northeast”; and Brenda Ekwurzel, the Union’s Senior Climate Scientist. She is the only author with research experience on the subject, has a Ph.D. in isotope geochemistry from the Department of Earth Sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and has been on the faculty of the University of Arizona Department of Hydrology and Water Resources.
These four authors took the standard reports from such organizations as the United National Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, treating them as accurate and true, and then discussed the implications for 16 American historic sites. As shown in the accompanying table, they write that 11 of the sites are threatened by rising sea levels and their consequences (coastal erosion and flooding); two by inland flooding; two by wildfires; and one by “extreme heat and drought” (table 1).
The report opens with a bold assertion: “Many of the United States’ iconic landmarks and heritage sites are at risk as never before. Sea level rise, coastal erosion, increased flooding, heavy rains, and more frequent large wildfires are damaging archaeological resources, historic buildings, and cultural landscapes across the nation.” The report later goes on to add, “All of the case studies in this report draw on observations of impacts that are either consistent with, or attributable to, human-induced climate change based on multiple lines of scientific evidence.” To which the authors add, “This report sounds a wake-up call: as the impacts of climate change continue, we must protect these sites and reduce the risks.”
The point of the report, its opening theme and its major conclusion, is that these historic places are in trouble and it’s our fault, we have been the bad guys interfering with nature and therefore damaging places we value. This is consistent with the IPCC 2014 report and the 2014 White House Climate Change Assessment, for both of which I acted as an expert reviewer and testified before the House and Senate about.
TABLE 1. HISTORIC SITES AND CLAIMED THREATS TO THEM
Threatened by Sea Level Rise and Accompanying Flooding
- Boston’s Faneuil Hall and surroundings
- Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island
- Harriet Tubman National Monument Monument
- Historic Jamestown, VA
- NASA’s coastal facilities
- Annapolis, MD
- Fort Monroe National Monument
- Cape Hatteras Lighthouse
- Bering Land Bridge National Monument & Shishmaref; Cape Krusenstern National Monument, including Kivalina Native Villages and Ancestral Lands
- Pu’uhonua O Honaunau & Kaloko-Honokhau National Historical Parks
- Prehistoric Florida shell structures
Threatened by Future Floods
- Charleston, SC; Historic St. Augustine, Fl and Castillo De San Marcos
Threatened by Wildfires (and perhaps also flooding)
- Mesa Verde National Park and Bandelier National Monument & Santa Clara Pueblo
- Groveland, CA and other California Gold Rush era towns
Threatened by Extreme Heat and Drought
- Cesar Chavez National Monument, California
Back Bay Fens Park and Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge
Reading the dire forecasts of the UCS report, I thought immediately about two seaside places familiar to me: Back Bay Fens Park in Boston and Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge in New York City. Back Bay Fens park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape architect known especially for designing New York City’s Central Park. Back Bay was a problem because it was a landfill on Boston’s shore that flooded frequently, which caused various problems.
To understand what Olmsted did in designing Back Bay, one has to step back and consider Boston’s original site, which had certain advantages for a major city: a narrow peninsula with several hills that could be easily defended, a good harbor, and a good water supply. But as the city grew, demand increased for more land for buildings, a larger area for docking ships, and a better water supply. The need to control ocean floods and to dispose of solid and liquid wastes grew as well. Much of the original tidal flats area, which had been too wet to build on and too shallow to navigate, had been converted, before Olmsted got involved, to flat land — hills cut away and the marshes filled with their soil. The filling of Back Bay began in 1858 and continued for decades.
Olmsted’s solution to the flooding and sewage pollution was a water-control project he called the “fens.” His goal was to “abate existing nuisances” by keeping sewage out of the streams and ponds and building artificial banks for the streams to prevent flooding—and to do this in a natural-looking way. His solution included creating artificial watercourses by digging shallow depressions in the tidal flats, following meandering patterns like natural streams; setting aside other artificial depressions as holding ponds for tidal flooding; restoring a natural salt marsh planted with vegetation tolerant of brackish water; and planting the entire area to serve as a recreational park when not in flood. He put a tidal gate on the Charles River—Boston’s major river—and had two major streams diverted directly through culverts into the Charles so that they flooded the fens only during flood periods. He reconstructed the Muddy River primarily to create new, accessible landscape.
The result of Olmsted’s vision was that control of water became an aesthetic addition to the city. The blending of several goals made the development of the fens a landmark in city planning. Although to the casual stroller it appears to be simply a park for recreation, the area serves an important environmental function in flood and sewage control. Confronted with the combined problems of ocean surges and flooding from river runoff inland, Olmsted did not waste his time complaining about whether or not people have caused the problem. He just set out and solved it.
Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge, although not directly planned to solve flooding problems, does so in much the same way that the Boston Back Bay Fens does. The Refuge has become one of my favorite places in New York City. It is the largest migratory bird sanctuary in the northeastern United States. It is the only wildlife sanctuary that is part of the National Park System, and it lies within the city of New York, in view of the Empire State Building, as my accompanying photograph shows. New York City residents wanting contact with nature can get there by public transportation.