I was quite interested to read this article as I myself am a constant victim of flooding during storms. I live very close to the great south bay so when there is a heavy storm, there is a high chance that there will be 1. inches of water in my basement that just continuously replenishes for days and 2. flooding in the streets up to a few feet.
Something mentioned in this article that was interesting was how humans do things to solve problems that are happening now to protect themselves in the near future rather than seek long term safety. They mentioned how sea walls are built, dams are constructed and dunes are built on beaches, only to be destroyed by another storm and cause even more disaster in the near future. This is a great overview of the way things work near where I live. Each and every year, there are tropical storms and if we are unlucky enough, hurricanes. There are homes that are destroyed and rebuilt a little higher up than before to protect against ground flooding in the future. However, another storm comes and destroys the same house. When i drive by these houses and see them being rebuilt AGAIN, I wonder to myself, “why don’t then invest in something that will protect the house from any storm or disaster rather than just rebuilding every time?”. It seems like such a waste of time, money, and aggravation. The reality is that people don’t think that it is ever going to happen again so they think about the NOW rather than the far future because lets face it, we all think that “this cant happen again, right?” or that we can just deal with it when it happens. But why not create something that will protect us forever, forgetting aesthetics?
I would love to say that in the near future we will all ban together and fix the environmental degradation we have caused, slowing down the catastrophic fate of our ecosystem, but that will just be a lie. Human nature is to live in the NOW and to be happy for their current wellbeing. To bring light to this, I think that the small steps that activists and other people take are in the right direction, it will just be very hard to convince everyone to change the lifestyle they are used to to protect people hundreds of years from now that they wont be alive to meet.
