Let's "draw" you a picture

Are you following the devastation in and around south Texas? Do you think climate change / global warming might have had something to do with making it worse? If we could take actions we knew would lessen the likelihood of "another Harvey" should we build on those foundations now?

Sunrise River, some of Minnesota's floodplains and wetlands

Photo by J. Harrington

If your answer to those questions is Yes, Yes, and Yes!, we have a place to begin. (If your answers aren't all Yes, how did you end up on this blog?) Paul Hawken, the same author who's brought us Natural Capitalism, The Ecology of Commerce, Blessed Unrest and other pillars of using business to build a better world, has recently produced Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Produced to Reverse Global Warming. The book has its own website, which contains thumbnail sketches of the "100 most substantive, existing solutions to address climate change."

Coastal wetlands are rated #52. "Coastal wetlands can store five times as much carbon as tropical forests over the long term, mostly in deep wetland soils." They also can help reduce storm surge from storms like Harvey, as well as provide a variety of other ecological services.

"Texas has lost 52 percent of its original wetland base (Mitsch and Gosselink, 1993). The Texas coastal plain experienced a loss of approximately 200,000 acres of wetlands between the mid-1950s and the early 1990s (from 4.1 million acres to 3.9 million acres)."

St. Louis River, downstream of a proposed mine, upstream of Lake Superior

Photo by J. Harrington

What, you may ask, does any or all of this have to do with our Minnesota? For one thing, we're also experiencing climate change. The thunderstorms that wash our topsoil into the Minnesota River contribute to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico near Louisiana. For another, we're continuing to treat our wetlands and water resources as if they are easily replaceable and/or not particularly valuable. Proposed mines in and near the Boundary Waters or tributary to Lake Superior put our common water resources at risk for the benefit very few local people and the profit of many foreign owners. Industrial scale agriculture has fewer environmental restrictions that protect water quality than most (all?) other industries. We Minnesotans continue to spend our tax dollars in part to preserve valuable resources and in too big another part to clean up environmental messes and mistakes prior generations left us as they pursued their own short term profits.

There's an old saying to the effect that "when you find yourself in a deep hole, the first thing to do is stop digging." These days we're suffering the consequences of dumb decisions made yesterday and months and years before. The first thing we have to do is to stop being so dumb. As a recovering planner, I know that "more of the same never solved a problem." That's especially true of dumb decisions.

Providence

Natasha Trethewey, 1966

What’s left is footage: the hours before
       Camille, 1969—hurricane
              parties, palm trees leaning
in the wind,
       fronds blown back,

a woman’s hair. Then after:
       the vacant lots,
       boats washed ashore, a swamp

where graves had been. I recall

how we huddled all night in our small house,
       moving between rooms,
              emptying pots filled with rain.

The next day, our house—
       on its cinderblocks—seemed to float

       in the flooded yard: no foundation

beneath us, nothing I could see
       tying us  to the land.
       In the water, our reflection
                                trembled,
disappeared
when I bent to touch it.

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