The Future’s a Mystery…Or Is It?

I spent Sunday afternoon at a wedding in West Orange, New Jersey, from which I had a wonderful broad panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline. It looked particularly resplendent glowing in the late afternoon sun, and I was overwhelmed by its beauty, which seems particularly poignant and fragile after the events of the past week. Was it really possible that, beneath the surface of this soaring hymn to modernity, the discordant notes of hunger, cold, lack of access to care, homelessness and vulnerability to crime continued to sound so widely in the wake of the disaster of Sandy? And what are we, as citizens of this unique metropolis which is so much a part of our lives and our souls, to do to protect it and its residents from a future likely to include more such occurrences?

Moving backwards doesn’t seem realistic. We can’t depopulate Williamsburg, or Dumbo, or the Lower East Side, or Tribeca, or the Financial District; nor should we. These neighborhoods have been active parts of our city for hundreds of years. And in every case, the residents have developed the sort of passionate neighborhood attachment which will make them rally to revive their homes and the surrounding areas, working extra hard to bring the environs back to their pre-flood vitality. So how do we most appropriately respond? I see a couple of possibilities:

First, we have to make sure that all our neighbors are OK, which they are emphatically not at the moment. This is a moment when we should all be reaching out to help the residents of Breezy Point, or Staten Island, or the Rockaways. I am partial to the Mayor’s Fund, which can be accessed at http://www.nyc.gov/html/fund/html/home/home.shtml  as a venue for donations, but many of the churches and temples around the city have been very active as well. We all need to do our part, with donations, volunteer time, or both.

Second, we all need to look to a level of disaster preparedness which we have not heretofore envisioned. Generators should become standard for residential buildings lying in the flood zones, and they cannot be located in the basement! Elderly residents of high rises need security plans which do not leave them without light, water, and communication for extended periods of time. The most vulnerable  neighborhoods need evacuation strategies AND security plans which prevent them from descending, within days, to the sort of war zone where residents feel they need firearms to protect their possessions! And the list goes on…

Finally, the largest and most complicated issue is how to mitigate the disastrous effects of these events going forward. And there are any number of ideas about that – sea walls, oyster beds, tidal marshes – no one really knows what will be most effective and clearly a more in depth study is necessary before any conclusions are drawn. But two things do seem clear: as the climate changes and waters both rise and warm, larger, more unpredictable events are almost certain to be part of our evolving weather picture.  And we need to do something about it. The financial impact and personal devastation caused by these storms is such that there can be no real argument against a broad, multi-faceted plan of action to minimize the chaos they cause. We cannot afford to forget and wait for things to go back to normal. Normal is changing, and we, and the city we love, need to change with it.

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