I felt that this chapter really presented some problems of nature that will be out of our hands to solve due to our actions harming the environment. The author mentions the rising sea level and how one big storm could basically destroy an entire coastal city given the right conditions for the sea. Even if we are trying to use technology to prevent these storms, we really can’t stop the strongest storms because mother nature can just overpower whatever we have built. We have basically created this condition for ourselves because of our careless behavior with the environment in the past and even now without thinking of the consequences. These powerful storms are just one of the many consequences that we will have to accept and face in the future and might be a good reminder for us to watch out with what we are doing with the environment right now. I do think that these storms and other immediate consequences might not necessarily be an entirely negative thing because they can show people that if we do not change our ways, then nature will eventually punish us one way or another.
Another interesting point McCully mentions on page 148 is that people believe that nature will change anyways, so what’s the point of us trying to do so much conservation and protective work regarding the environment. This mindset is probably true and the fact that nature will change is also true, so we can’t really blame people for thinking like this because realistically many people living on Earth right now probably won’t die from a huge natural disaster and as we can see throughout the readings, nature is a volatile force that is hard to predict and hard to protect against. McCully’s view on this mindset seems to be that compared to our ancestors, we are speeding up all of these bad natural disasters or processes, but people won’t really consider that point because even though we are speeding things up, the fact remains that it will still take at least decades or centuries before these impacts will directly cause huge troubles for us. The global warming example on page 148 says that global temperature measurements have changed from being measured over thousands of years to centuries now, but to the human species right now, centuries is still way past their lifetime and will not spark them to take action to instantly save the environment.
McCully seems to disagree with a lot of the preventive measures of storms taken by the coastal cities, implying that one big disastrous storm will wipe out any of these preventive measurements. However, I feel that these preventive measures aren’t necessarily as bad as she views them because at least the government or the locals are trying to slow down the storms instead of leaving themselves completely vulnerable to a direct storm, which will result in more casualties. There should be adjustments for these preventive measures to better adapt to the storms, but not having anything to reduce the impacts of these storms will not pose well for people living near the sea.
