climate change

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Climate adaptation education for all

Three Boston programs provide youths of color with thoughtful training for green jobs.

Extreme heat, jaw-dropping storms, devastating floods and other dangers growing in the climate crisis: “If you are 15 to 20 years old, this is normal for you,” says Mark Borrelli of University of Massachusetts/Boston.

That new normal comes alongside an old normal: Young people from disadvantaged communities that are at the greatest environmental risks typically get no say about those risks. And although the U.S. is now starting to generate a wealth of green jobs in the race for climate resilience, youth of color generally are among the last to see employment opportunities.

But three Boston programs are rising to the challenge. Their leaders outlined their efforts for preparing diverse groups of young people for green jobs at an Environmental Business Council of New England/Sustainable Solutions Lab session on April 14.

Starting green in middle school

“The opportunities that exist in Boston always bypass our kids and our communities unless we deliberately build bridges,” said Matt Holzer, principal of Boston Green Academy (BGA). That’s been the mission of the academy since its founding in 2011. Based in Brighton, BGA enrolls more than 500 middle school and high school students. “We represent the mosaic of Boston,” Holzer said, with more than half the students coming from low-income neighborhoods in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan.

Some incoming students have never heard of environmental sustainability. “Our job is to widen their worldview and empower them to take advantage of those opportunities,” he said. “We help them have the language and the skills and the experience to talk about it and to be in the room where it happens.” The goal is not just to deliver a set of skills but to enable students to work with a purpose that makes sense to them.

BGA students quickly get out into the wild at the Blue Hills Reservation, Mattapan’s Boston Nature Center, Thompson Island in Boston Harbor and other places. “We give them mentors, we give them opportunities, we have guest speakers, their classes are focused on ecology and urban ecology–things that are germane to their experience,” said Holzer.

Beginning in ninth grade, about a quarter of BGA students enter an environmental career technology program, “a deep dive with credentials,” Holzer said. As seniors, students do paid internships. “We have to provide stipends, because they work, and we’re competing with McDonald’s,” he said.

“We are addressing economic inequality,” he said. “There’s a deliberate commitment to equity everywhere. All we are doing is trying to give our students everything that they would have if they went to high resource places without racism or economic oppression. That’s what we want. And so we’re trying to create those spaces.”

Training the unemployed and underemployed

Often when attending green workforce development meetings, “I’m the only one that looks like me,” said Davo Jefferson. “So we’re trying to expand on that.”

Jefferson is executive director of PowerCorpsBOS, a green jobs program for young adults that the city launched last year. “It’s a six-month program targeted towards opportunity for folks in Boston age 18 to 30, who are generally not on a higher educational career track, typically unemployed or underemployed,” Jefferson said.

Based on a successful Philadelphia program, PowerCorpsBOS graduated its first class of 21 in December. Participants are paid each week and given a monthly T pass. PowerBOS offers two professional tracks, urban forestry and energy-efficient building operations.

Urban forestry might not seem the most obvious job entry point. “For many young folks from the communities that we’re recruiting from, trees are not on your radar,” Jefferson said. He noted that one street in the Dorchester neighborhood where he grew up lacks a single tree.

But the need for trees grows ever more obvious with climate change, and PowerCorpsBOS training supports the expansion of Boston’s urban tree canopy, particularly urban wilds like Buena Vista in Roxbury, above.

The program builds toward certifications in OSHA safety measures, first aid, pesticide application, energy efficient building operations, and other relevant skills. Training takes a village: inhouse experts, project partners from other city agencies, contract trainers and especially potential employers.

“Students receive professional skills training, which consists of things like time management, workplace etiquette, conflict resolution, working independently and on teams,” Jefferson said. They also get help finding and keeping jobs: resume building, job search techniques, networking, interview preparation, keeping the job and moving up in their careers.

Crucially, Jefferson said, PowerCorpsBOS also offers support mechanisms to help trainees navigate life obstacles they may be encountering, including assistance with housing, childcare, legal issues, obtaining vital documents and other stumbling blocks.

Creating climate ambassadors

Last summer a month-long program led by the University of Massachusetts/Boston turned 15 high school students into climate ambassadors, doing field research on extreme heat in Roxbury.

The program is a cooperative effort with the Boston Planning & Development Agency, Boston public schools and Roxbury Community College.

“The intent here was to encourage youth of color to consider public sector careers,” said Alan Wiig, associate professor of urban planning and community development at UMass. “And then through that, to do a project that would reinforce resident-led and city-supported efforts to address extreme heat in lower Roxbury.”

“We wanted a real-world project that would pull us out of the classroom and into the city,” said Wiig, “and would focus on a critical issue that’s confronting the community that these youth live in… Perhaps most importantly, in my opinion, it was a paid work experience that they could put on a resume.”

In addition to classroom studies, the group took weekly field trips at places ranging from Boston Harbor to City Hall. In the field at Roxbury’s Nubian’s Square, they managed to perform 109 interviews in 75 minutes. Residents generally were happy to talk with the teenagers, and agreed that extreme heat is a serious problem in the neighborhood.

A week after those interviews, the students measured air temperature at 26 locations in Roxbury on what turned out to the hottest day of the year around the world. Boston’s official high point, measured at Logan Airport, was 89 degrees. “However, in lower Roxbury, the findings were 10 degrees hotter and in some cases 20 degrees hotter,” Wiig said. “That speaks to the effect of urban heat islands, and how uneven [heat] is across neighborhoods like lower Roxbury that lack shade trees.”

Surprisingly, parks and playgrounds were particularly hot. This summer, the program expects to enroll about 40 students and work with Boston Parks & Recreation to redesign two parks in the neighborhood.

Another surprise was the high student interest in getting jobs as climate ambassadors. “This isn’t something that myself and other professors thought of; this is something that the teenagers thought of themselves,” Wigg said. These young people could conduct outreach to connect residents with the resources to adapt to extreme heat and other climate stressors, and they could act as advocates to City Hall and the State House, he said.

Like other speakers at the session, Wiig emphasized the critical need for programs and people to stay engaged with their students over the long run. “We need to commit to 10 years of mentoring with the same group of youths,” he said.

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Winding up the gigawatts

Offshore wind is blowing past the barriers for renewable energy–the technical barriers, anyway.

The U.S. aims to gather 30 gigawatts of power from offshore wind fields by 2030, one enormously ambitious goal. On the technology side, the biggest challenge is bringing the power ashore and integrating it into our not terribly robust existing power grids, while our demands for electricity soar.

But for the wind turbine technology itself, the U.S. can tap into the rapid advances in largescale wind farms globally. That’s what we heard from Danielle Merfeld, chief technology officer for GE Renewable Energy, at a forum on offshore wind sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering’s Gulf Research Program.

Largescale, yes. In fact, today’s turbines are “the largest moving machines humanity has ever built,” Merfeld remarked. “A 15-megawatt offshore wind turbine is on the scale of the Eiffel Tower.”

Manufacturing these monsters is obviously more than tricky. GE’s latest turbines have 107-meter blades, as long as a football field with endzones. “We have to think in a completely different way to be able to efficiently manufacture these blades,” she said. The nacelles, which draw energy off those spinning blades, are correspondingly huge (top right).

Installing the gargantuan machines at sea will be no easy task. There are very few of the required jackup boats (below left) and none under the U.S. flag. Offshore field developers will need many jackups to get anywhere close to the 30GW goal. “And by the end of the decade, some of those vessels will be obsolete because we’ll move to even bigger systems,” Merfeld commented.

Additionally, offshore wind fields more than 30 miles from shore shore will want to run DC power cables. That calls for an AC-to-DC conversion platforms, perhaps as tall as a 15-story building and as wide as a football field, built onshore and towed out to sea. “These are, again, big engineering challenges,” Merfeld said.

Turbines also typically require five or more maintenance visits a year, she said. GE’s new Jules Verne (below right) is a high-tech “service operation vehicle” designed to hang out on a wind farm for days to handle everything from lubricating moving parts to replacing blades.

These giant structures bring significant environmental worries above and below the sea. Early experience with the five GE turbines installed off Block Island suggest that turbines do act as artificial reefs. “There was a tremendous amount of increase in sea life activity, so the fishermen were happier than they thought they were going to be,” Merfeld claimed.

The humongous blades remain big threats to migrating birds, but operators are learning ways to reduce the killing. “Some of it is in the siting,” she said. “You don’t put a wind farm in the middle of a migratory lane for birds, or you turn [the turbines] off during certain migratory periods where you need a week, or even days or hours of the night or day when you expect [birds] to go through.” New mitigation approaches may help. A study last year found that painting one blade black can reduce bird strikes by more than 70%, she added.

All these engineering and environmental demands will be topped by offshore wind’s tough economic, regulatory and political barriers. But in the U.S., as Barbara Kates-Garnick of Tufts University remarked at the forum, “offshore wind is critical to a successful energy transition.”

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Storm season

What we’re learning about hurricanes. And how societies handle them.

I’ve lived through impressive tropical storms, twice on sailboats safe in harbor, but I can’t really imagine a hurricane with 150 mph winds like Ida. That’s the business of coastal scientists, engineers and other experts. Here’s what they’re telling me:

  • It might not always seem this way, but in the past few years the National Hurricane Center has notably upped its game for predicting storm tracks.
  • Structural engineers can now simulate hurricane risks for each individual building in a region, by combining advanced storm simulations with machine learning tricks to predict each building’s shape and strength. Coastal Louisiana, appropriately enough, is one testbed for this NSF-funded open collaboration.
  • The lamentable history of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina is beautifully described in Andy Horowitz’s Katrina. Once again Hurricane Ida is highlighting society’s lack of interest in guarding the vulnerable, while maintaining systemic foulups like police focused on protecting property rather than people.
  • The rebuilt New Orleans levee system “is less ambitious than the one Louisianans lobbied for after Katrina, and the protection it offers grows weaker every day, as the wetlands that buffer the city from the Gulf of Mexico get wetter,” as Horowitz wrote in the New York Times. “But it kept the Gulf of Mexico out of the city, which was its job.”
  • That was a straightforward goal for the Army Corps of Engineer’s $15-billion New Orleans levee project. Achievable goals may be far less clear for megaprojects under consideration for other U.S. cities. Case in point, Miami just turned thumbs down on a Corps plan built on a massive seawall.
  • Miami is among the urban areas hoping to adopt “nature-based systems” (oyster reefs, salt marshes, sea grass meadows, mangroves… ) as part of their resiliency efforts. NBS is a big theme in the Texas coastal spine proposal, centered not just on enormous sea gates but on miles of sand dunes. As with traditional gray engineering, NBS measures have strengths and weaknesses; salt marshes retain no magic if they’re buried under a surge of seawater.
  • There remains the little problem of paying for coastal adaptation measures–ideally, before disasters hit. Boston, which is doing a commendable job of planning for climate change, is among the cities puzzling to find the vastly greater sums needed for actual construction.
  • Traditional benefit/cost analyses for such projects that consider only financial factors “might lead a government to protect only the parts of a city that contain high-value properties while dismissing parts of a community where less advantaged people live,” notes a National Academies report on localized climate action.
  • There’s much talk about “managed retreat” from endangered coastal sites but so far this radical step is taken only when there is no choice at all. “There are reasons people live where they live,” as one prominent engineer pointed out to me.
  • Hurricanes can rip away the accoutrements of civilization over surprisingly huge areas–for instance, Ida killed more people in the Big Apple than the Big Easy. But with the huge exception of rainfall, the worst structural damage is usually highly localized. Properly designed and constructed buildings often survive hurricanes surprisingly well, and the big problem for their occupants becomes waiting for restored power, water, roads and other lifelines.

See also What survives the storm

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Opening the sea gates

As Boston plans for resilient waterfronts, there’s still a case for a barrier in the outer harbor.

Along Boston Harbor, the big worries from climate change are sea-level rise and storms—but not in that order, William Golden remarked in a Environmental Business Council (EBC) of New England session on December 10.

Currently in Boston, sea-level rise is “a nuisance issue that can be addressed for another 30 or 40 years with a couple of feet of seawall,” said Golden, an attorney and environmental activist best known for filing the lawsuit that led to the cleanup of Boston Harbor. “The real issue is storm surge.”

That is, when the sea climbs to scary heights—say, the 14-foot-above-high-tide wall of water that swamped lower Manhattan in Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Much of the Boston waterfront was originally tidal flats and its edges remain highly vulnerable to ocean storms, which are growing more numerous and often more terrifying. In this record-breaking year, 12 named Atlantic storms hit the U.S., one clobbering Louisiana with winds over 150 mph and a storm surge of 17 feet.

Now leading the Boston Harbor Regional Storm Surge Working Group, Golden renewed his call for a harbor barrier stretching from Hull to Deer Island in outer Boston Harbor, guarding against storms for 15 cities and towns with 175 miles of coastline. (Such a barrier wouldn’t do anything about sea-level rise, which instead would be addressed by relatively modest structures onshore.)

Boston turned down this concept in 2018 after a preliminary feasibility study argued that the sea-gate system would be less cost-effective than onshore measures, take decades to build and pose uncertain technical risks. Golden and his allies, however, remained unconvinced.

Sanjay Seth, Boston’s climate resilience program manager, didn’t comment on the harbor barrier proposal at the EDC meeting but did outline the city’s active program to defend itself onshore.

“There are several areas of Boston that can serve as entry points for significantly damaging floods,” Seth noted. “We do have a real but very narrow window to achieve a unified network of protection in the city. .. Climate change really isn’t waiting.”

The downtown Boston waterfront, with its almost completely private ownership and messy underpinnings, may be the hardest neighborhood to handle. “There’s no silver bullet here,” Seth said. Instead, the plan calls for a mix of four options: raising the main roads closest to the waterfront, reconfiguring parks and other open spaces, beefing up the Harborwalk, and placing structures directly in the sea.

The preferred strategy for the downtown is a line of defense along the outside edge of the waterfront. “It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be doable,” said Seth. He acknowledged that success will require “entirely new levels of public/private coordination, as well as new, more robust coordination among private property owners themselves.”

Golden applauded Boston’s resilience planning but pointed out the limitations of any land-based measures. “Flood walls, particularly when they’re meant to address storm surge and sea level rise, can separate the public from the water,” he noted. The walls also can leave marine uses such as cargo shipping and ferry traffic unprotected. Moreover, the structures can act as bathtubs that need pumps to clear themselves after heavy rainstorms.

Harbor barriers can minimize those problems. Truly massive barriers are quietly guarding London, Rotterdam, Saint Petersburg and other cities. Smaller ones have worked well in New Bedford and other New England cities, Golden pointed out.

The leading U.S. contender for a giant gate system is the one proposed for Galveston Bay and Houston, part of a grand scheme for the Texas coast that seems headed to Congress this spring.

William Merrell of Texas A&M in Galveston came up with the concept back in 2008 while he was trapped in an apartment building by high water of Hurricane Ike. Once known as the Ike Dike, now as the Texas coastal spine, the idea is “extremely simple,” Merrell said during the EDC meeting. “Stop the water at the coast.”

The central barrier would cross Bolivar Roads, the main entrance to Galveston Bay and the Houston Ship Channel. It would combine a set of 300-foot-wide vertical-lift gates with massive horizontal swinging gates on the navigation channel, like those in Rotterdam. Left open in normal conditions, these entry points would allow almost-normal tidal flow. In addition to the gates, the project would bundle in defensive local measures for the city of Galveston and other sites inside the Bay, along with 43 miles of beach and dune restoration on barrier islands plus a wealth of ecosystem restoration efforts.

A far more colossal harbor barrier has been proposed for metropolitan New York, where Sandy killed more than 100 people. This humongo structure could close the Ambrose shipping channel with a five-mile barrier stretching from the Rockaways to Sandy Hook. Additionally, a one-mile barrier could close the East River.

This regional system would work together with lower onshore barriers designed to deal with sea level rise and most storms, said Robert Yaro, professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, at the EBC session.

However, New York City chose instead to pursue a number of very large onshore projects, with very little to show to date. “Nothing’s operational after eight years, and none of them are fully funded,” Yaro said.

“Every one of these onshore barriers is a lot more complicated, a lot more expensive and a lot more time-consuming than anybody anticipated at the outset,” he added. Many protective measures depend on deployable flood barriers, an operational nightmare. And it’s still not at all clear that there’s even a working concept to protect Wall Street, whose waterfront is particularly constrained.

“When you add up the cost of the various onshore barrier systems that have been proposed for the New York metropolitan area, they exceed the cost of an offshore barrier system,” Yaro said. He also declared that even projects on this enormous scale can be constructed in a few years if the will is there—for instance, the Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt the New Orleans barrier system in less than five years after Hurricane Katrina.

“We believe that the surge barriers that we’re proposing will give us a hundred years or more to adapt our region to climate change,” Yaro said. “We need to have some time to plan to reinvent our cities and our civilization around the even more destructive changes that may be coming.”

“We’ve got to be more resilient, but we’ve got to be smarter about how we do it,” he summed up.

For Golden, that means a deeper study of the potential for a Boston harbor barrier, leading toward a shovel-ready coastal defense plan that could tap into the federal funding that he sees on the horizon. When and if such big bucks arrive, “we need to know what we’re going to do with that money,” he said.

Near Bolivar Roads, after Hurricane Ike.

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Cartography blanche

Guerrilla Cartography highlights the power of maps to inform, persuade and inspire.

“Everyone believes a map. No other narrative device—not story or song or historical treatise—is so readily accepted as true. We have come to accept the map as fact.”

So writes Darin Jensen in Water: An Atlas, a remarkable collection of maps with many ways to view water that was released in 2017.

The maps for this crowd-funded publication were contributed by cartographers and other researchers around the world via Guerrilla Cartography, an open collaboration Jensen founded to “widely promote the cartographic arts.” The group’s first project was Food: An Atlas, a milestone accomplishment in 2012.

Its latest production is Atlas in a Day: Migration, a stunning response to a challenge to research and design an atlas about migration in one day last October. No fewer than 43 maps “interpret the theme of migration in diverse ways, considering the movements of people, animals, climates, physical materials and cultural artifacts over time and space. Some of them represent the culmination of years of research on a critical topic; others are quick sketches inspired by current events and concerns.”

All three atlases can be downloaded free, and Food and Water can be bought as books.

Maps retain plenty of power in print, Jensen points out.

“Guerrilla Cartography is about letting story emerge from data and illustrating the story through the art of cartographic design,” he says. “We give voice to the talents of mapmakers who may have no other platform for a wide and printed distribution of their work and ideas.”

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Surge protectors

Will the Boston Harbor ocean barrier rise again?

Built on four centuries of filled land, Boston is wildly vulnerable to the next major hurricanes or winter northeasters. These risks only accelerate as storms get worse and sea levels rise. To their credit, the city and state understood this exposure years ago and have been steadily working away on climate resilience initiatives. One project was to consider a grand Boston Harbor barrier that would close off much or all of the harbor against big ocean storms. A study led by the University of Massachusetts found, however, that such a barrier would be thoroughly impractical.

But maybe not. William Golden, famous here for kicking off the legal struggles that triggered the harbor cleanup a few decades ago, today launched an open meeting of a Boston Harbor storm surge working group. The group’s premise is straightforward: the best defense against the sea is a layered defense that combines a re-thought harbor barrier (to fend off the storms) and relatively modest local measures such as berms (to handle sea level rise).

Among points by Golden and his allies:

  1. There are many alternative barrier routes and designs, some sketched out above by Duncan Mellor of Tighe & Bond. These might mostly follow shallow water, use dual gates for the shipping channels rather than the never-built-anywhere single gate structure examined by UMass researchers, and be considerably less massive. That might make them dramatically less expensive than the $7-12 billion pricetag UMass experts suggested.
  2. Depending on your assumptions about how long construction takes and what you pay for money (discount rates), costs again might drop significantly. And unlike smaller projects, federal funding just might be available.
  3. A barrier that guards the entire harbor, not just Boston, could provide benefits that no one has counted yet. Most dramatically, the savings in regional flood insurance payments might be many times the investment.
  4. The default alternative of building high local berms/seawalls everywhere brings up seriously worrying questions. For one, what about the places that can’t afford them? For another, how will all these patchwork walls connect? And do we really know how to efficiently build a watertight 20-foot seawall all along, say, the North End waterfront, with its crazy web of buried infrastructure and weak geological underpinnings?

Our safeguards against the sea will have domino effects far beyond Boston. “This is going to affect the economy of the whole region,” Golden said. “It’s an existential threat.”

Pre-filled Boston, courtesy Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library

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Hot water for fisheries management

As climate change deepens, we’ll need to understand entirely new marine ecosystems.

Here’s the good news: Since 1990, the catch of Maine lobsters has quintupled.

Okay, the rest of the news, as in other stories about climate change, is not so good.

The bumper crops of lobsters apparently have been driven by warming in the Gulf of Maine. Sea surface temperatures have climbed about four times as much in recent decades in the Gulf as in the global ocean average, according to Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

Lobster populations have moved northeast from southern New England waters,  Pershing said, speaking at a Metcalf Institute seminar on climate change held in Cambridge last Saturday. The shift has been a boon for Maine but a bust for fisheries south of Cape Cod.

Warmer water in the Gulf also has knocked down populations of other marine life, including some we eat (or once ate) such as northern shrimp and cod.

For hundreds of years, cod in the northwest Atlantic was one of the world’s richest fisheries. Back in the 1970s, my older brother took a trip to Georges Bank as a whale watcher on a giant Russian factory ship. At night, the sea looked like a city, dotted with the lights of dozens of fishing vessels busily sucking up cod and everything else on the seafloor.

Cod never recovered. The U.S. soon took control of our waters out 200 miles and managed the seafood take as well as it could. But most of the cod we eat now comes from China or Iceland.

Today climate change is delivering not just disruptions in ocean temperature and circulation patterns but acidification, extreme storms, loss of mangroves and marshes… As fisheries are disrupted around the world, the familiar difficulties of managing them get worse.

We don’t really know how to model newly emerging marine ecosystems, Tatiana Rynearson of the University of Rhode Island remarked at the Metcalf session. We lack the years of data needed to understand the fluctuations in conditions and populations, as Jorge García Molinos and colleagues pointed out in a 2015 paper.

Our need for long-term ocean monitoring and related research couldn’t be clearer, but climate change research is under heavy attack in the U.S.

Fortunately, compared to most of the waters of the world, we do have good historical information on Gulf of Maine waters and seafood. And while lobsters are a luxury food, they offer a positive example for management.

Unlike the case in some other states, Maine fishers must toss back lobsters that are too big as well as too small. Simulations have shown that saving the big ones has helped the shellfish survive the fishing onslaught in the Gulf, where 90% of legal-size lobsters are caught each year, Pershing said.

The saga of Maine lobsters, of course, rolls on. The catch dropped significantly in the last two years, and the highest landings keep moving north.

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Watching the river flow

The Thames Barrier is still prepped for decades defending London against high water.

On Tuesday, the warmest winter day ever recorded in Britain, there was not a cloud in the sky over the Thames Barrier. A tug calmly pulled its barge through one of the channels in the Barrier, which shuts off the Thames when the incoming tide will rise over sixteen feet. This offbeat superdam doesn’t look like anything else: a necklace of giant steampunk silver mussel shells stretched a third of a mile across the river. London began seriously contemplating means of protection after a major dousing in the great North Sea storm of 1953. The Barrier went into operation three decades later. It has decades of usefulness ahead; although climate change was not considered in its design, sea levels along the southern English coast aren’t inching up from geologic causes as fast as originally expected. The Barrier has been shut about 200 times, 50 of them in the 2013/2014 season, when the culprit was not super surges from the ocean but super rain surges that incoming tides would have pumped up further. “It is designed to be bomb-proof and failure-proof,” the Londonist once noted. “When a 3,000-tonne dredger hit the Barrier in 1997, the ship sank. The Barrier lost a ladder.” One of these decades, the enormous wall may be supplemented by a much more enormous dike downstream. In the meantime, “the structure is fundamental to the lives of millions of Londoners,” the London Review of Books commented, “which may be the reason very few of them want to look at it.”

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Canaries in a coal-mined world

Environmental writers tell great stories about life across our fast-changing globe.

We’re seeing a remarkable series of stories about climate change and other manmade or partly manmade threats—some even complete with hints of solutions. Here’s a fairly random baker’s dozen from this striking crop (hmm, only two of these pieces come from for-profit publications).

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High water marks

What does the Venice Architecture Biennale say about resilience to climate change? Not so much yet.

Now is the start of acqua alta season in Venice, when high tides occasionally flood low-lying areas like Saint Mark’s Square and sometimes sweep across neighborhoods around the city.* As we jumped on a vaporetto waterbus one warm sunny day, platforms of temporary pedestrian walkways were stacked nearby.

We were off to the Venice Architecture Biennale, the remarkable collection of exhibits from many countries. I was particularly curious about how the huge show would reflect the call for resilience to rising sea levels, scarier storms, droughts, heat waves and the other deadly baggage now arriving courtesy climate change.

Venice has been sinking into its lagoon by about a millimeter a year for hundreds of years. Three decades ago Italy launched the MOSE megaproject, building gates to close three entries to the lagoon against high tides. When and how well the gates will operate still seems uncertain. Perhaps it was unsurprising that Venice’s own pavilion said little about climate change, although it did emphasize advances in predicting tides.

Among the national pavilions, mentions of climate change were rare. This didn’t reflect any lack of brilliant conceptions and designs. Strikingly, many of the most intriguing pavilions didn’t focus on new construction. The French exhibit presents 10 abandoned buildings adopted for cultural use or aiding the homeless, for example. The Egyptian pavilion dives into how street vendors capitalize on public spaces in Cairo.  Other exhibits, such as the Argentinian, do highlight natural landscapes and what’s left of them.

You could profitably spend hours in many of these intriguing spaces. I didn’t, and I probably missed a lot of serious thinking about climate resilience. I definitely although accidentally skipped the Antigua and Barbuda pavilion, which was not at the main Biennale sites but in a monastery near the center of Venice. Last year, Hurricane Irma hit Barbuda with winds over 150 miles per hour and destroyed most of the island’s buildings. All 1,800 residents were evacuated. Unsurprisingly, the pavilion’s theme centers on climate change: Environmental Justice as a Civil Right.

Giant dikes and other grand engineering projects will help us deal with climate change, but most of the heavy lifting will come from rethinking local architecture and design. The Biennale was awash in young architects from around the world, our hope for resilience.

*  Two days after I wrote this, Venice was hit by a storm bringing the worst acqua alta event in years, flooding most of the city.

In good weather, Venice is all about eye candy, not just in architecture and art.

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Towers of power

Wind turbines go to work 16 miles off the Rhode Island coast.

Offshore wind turbines seemed a bit, well, gimmicky to me until a few years ago when I saw a farm calmly spinning its blades as I flew home from Europe. Anything that keeps working in the North Sea is entirely real. Now they have arrived in 600-foot-form off the New England coast, as I saw last month in a trip to Deepwater Wind’s installation off Block Island (thanks, Noelle Swan and the New England Association of Science Writers!). These giant beasts won’t always be easy to maintain, as we saw watching a crew struggling to jump onto one tower from a support vessel in gentle six-foot swells from Hurricane Maria. The 240-foot blades are no favor to offshore birds. But Deepwater Wind seems to have made every reasonable effort to minimize and monitor the overall environmental impact of the turbines, as attested by the National Wildlife Federation scientist onboard our fast ferry. Ocean wind turbine technology is advancing rapidly, one example being the replacement of the traditional gearbox with a GE direct-drive permanent magnet generator, noted Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware’s ocean wind power program. Wind turbines can tap steady winds at sea, where they can be built much larger than on land, and a wealth of projects are planned along the U.S. east coast. Yes, they’re designed to survive hurricanes, although maybe not a problem like Maria. And although offshore wind still can’t produce power here as cheaply as fossil-fuel plants, European wind costs are already below that mark.

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Public Spectacle

A beacon of hope in a changing climate.

kid Spectacle

On a clear hot August day you can take a ferry to Spectacle Island and walk a winding path up to its northern summit, admiring wildflowers and eating blackberries. The summit is the highest point of land on Boston Harbor, with low wooded islands scattered around.

Off to the east you can spot a windmill near the huge sludge-digesting eggs of Deer Island, and a second windmill a few miles south at the tip of the Hull peninsula. These two points of land bracket the entrance from Massachusetts Bay to the harbor’s inner archipelago.

One distant day, Deer Island and Hull also may anchor a massive sea barrier, holding off an ocean that’s now projected to climb as much as eight feet by 2100.

Today it’s hard to imagine how we might start to build such a Big Dike, given our current politics.

But you can also see hopeful signs on this Spectacle for our ability to clean up our own messes.

The first time I sailed past the island it was a garbage dump, with the remnants of a horse-rendering plant buried under many feet of still-smoldering refuse.

Now that’s all taken away and replaced by fill from the Big Dig. The island was reengineered and replanted. Rich ecosystems began to reappear. On summer days like this, children swim a stone’s throw away from the site of the old factories.

In wildness is the preservation of the world, as Thoreau said. But not just in wildness.