I think this was the first chapter that the author didn’t directly criticize European presence in the Americas — instead she talked about the entire human race. However, that’s not my main point of this post. When I was reading this chapter, I kept thinking back to Hurricane Sandy and all the damages it has done. Thus, it was no surprise to read about the winter storms that New York gets from time to time. When she was describing the damages by the storms in the 1980s and 1990s, I thought back to the time when my parents and I were driving around Staten Island, witnessing all the chaos Hurricane Sandy brought about.
The author writes how people look for solutions to these storms, but if you really think about it, the only viable solution is to move to an area that is not as affected by the storm. This, however, causes problems because how can you get all the people living by the shores to move out? People propose building giant walls and other construction as such, but that’s not effective. It isn’t because when you build a wall to block out the water, that water still has to go somewhere, and where will it go? Around the wall, it’ll be pushed out and hit other areas of the mainland. I recall that after Hurricane Sandy people proposed creating such walls to protect the city, but then that storm water will just drown other boroughs and New Jersey. It may be argued that if the Dutch could do it for hundreds of years, then we should be able to as well. But, the Dutch lowlands aren’t in the same environment and location as us. We don’t have the problem of being below sea level, but have the problem of being hit by great volumes of water in a short period of time. Thus, using that argument is not valid – because as previously mentioned, the walls and canals only protect certain areas of New York City.
What I found most powerful in the reading was when the author brought up the idea that people always wait until last minute to find solutions. On page 148, she writes how people are indifferent to the environment around them and take a “so what?” type of attitude towards climate change. I think this was very accurate because, as sad as this is, it’s true. People are selfish and focus on themselves: “so what there are less species? So what that the ice caps are melting? By the time they all melt and raise the sea level to the point where my house will be underwater, I’ll be dead.” I think this also relates directly to all the previous discussions that we’ve had in class, about how people don’t care about change and focus on what’s most beneficial to themselves; they use the excuse that humans have been doing these kinds of things since the beginning of humanity, but fail to realize that population size is so much greater than it was during the hunter-gatherer period, that technology is destroying the environment, and that we’re more likely to ruin the planet than get hit by a meteorite that’ll wipe out all life.
