{"id":4950,"date":"2013-11-13T16:57:57","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T21:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=4950"},"modified":"2015-06-01T15:24:56","modified_gmt":"2015-06-01T19:24:56","slug":"the-catch-22-of-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2013\/11\/13\/the-catch-22-of-resilience\/","title":{"rendered":"The Catch-22 of Resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ecologists who study how ecosystems change over time know there is a balance between resilience and adaptation.\u00a0 Resilience<\/a> is a measure of how long it takes for an ecosystem to return to a previous state. \u00a0For example, how many decades will it take for a forest to regrow after a fire?\u00a0 Adaptation<\/a> is the transformation to an alternative stable state, better suited to the prevailing conditions.\u00a0 If the forest burns again, and then again, a meadow may replace the forest.<\/p>\n

Ecologically speaking we need both forests and meadows.\u00a0 As a scientific matter we don\u2019t prefer one over the other. \u00a0With cool precision we measure which species gain and which species lose when a fire burns the forest down.<\/p>\n

It is difficult to bring the same level of equanimity to the damage wrought by natural disasters on built ecosystems, that is, the communities where people live and work.\u00a0 Although of a different kind, cities also have dynamics of disturbance, resilience, and adaption.\u00a0 Part of what makes cities like New York so fascinating is the on-going changes within and among the city\u2019s neighborhoods, unrolling across decades, even centuries.\u00a0 At the same time when sudden, catastrophic changes come, no one likes to see the human toll of suffering and loss associated with events like Hurricane Sandy<\/a>, just over year ago.<\/p>\n

\"Storm
Storm damage along the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, New York, as a result of Hurricane Sandy. Photo by Terah L. Mollise\/U.S. Navy from Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thus we have the Catch-22<\/a> of Resilience.\u00a0 As a larger community, we know that the city must adapt over time to changes in the environment, whether that environment is defined ecologically, economically, or socially.\u00a0 But when it comes specifying those potential alternative stable states, the loudest voices are the people who lost the most, and what they want is exactly what they had before. \u00a0Who came blame them?<\/p>\n

The catch is after natural disasters there is a rush to \u201crebuild the familiar,\u201d as some scholars<\/a> described the process in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina<\/a>.\u00a0 We can see it in many places up and down the coasts of New Jersey and Long Island today, and in parts of New York City, where largely the decisions about what to do have been left to individual property owners, some of whom had support from private insurance (if covered) and government intervention (if not).\u00a0 Most people, quite naturally, don\u2019t want to move.\u00a0 Most wish that Sandy had never happened and that future storms won\u2019t ever come back. \u00a0Few anywhere want to tell them different, even though the scientific writing is on the wall.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn, on the south side of New York City, as shown on an 1844 U.S. Coast Survey chart. The shoreline is highlighted with a dotted blue line. The Rockaway Peninsula and Pelican Beach, shown here, are both barrier islands and once hosted dunes. Behind them, salt marshes develop in the protected the water. The combination of beach-dunes-marsh is nature\u2019s solution to coastal protection on the mid-Atlantic coast. Chart courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The
One principal quality of barrier islands is that they move, often in response to storm events, but also because of the daily action of long-shore currents. This chart shows the Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn in 1861, based on a U.S. Coast Survey chart. The blue line is the shoreline from seventeen years before. Chart courtesy of the NOAA Historical Map & Chart Collection<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The
The Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn in 1882, based on a U.S. Coast Survey chart. The blue line is the shoreline from 41 years before. Chart courtesy of the NOAA Historical Map & Chart Collection<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The
The Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn in 1924, based on a photograph from the Fairfield Aerial Company. The blue line is the shoreline from 80 years before. Photograph courtesy of Fred Mushacke at New York State Department of Environmental Conservation \/ georeferencing by Eymund Diegel.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The
The Rockaway Inlet between Queens and Brooklyn in 2012, based on a satellite imagery. Note the significant amount of development and coastal reinforcements placed during the twentieth century to hold the Rockaways in place. Engineering and civilization is trying to keep the barrier island from moving. How long can we keep it up? For reference purposes, the blue line is the shoreline from 166 years before. Note that Pelican Beach, as such, no longer exists. Imagery courtesy of Digital Globe, served by ESRI<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unfortunately the realities of climate change mean living on a barrier island or atop filled coastal wetlands is becoming less tenable than it once was.\u00a0 Sandy was not the first, nor the last severe storm, to threaten New York.\u00a0 At least four hurricanes<\/a> have made on direct hits on New York City over the last 400 years<\/a>, while marsh sediments record numerous large overwash events extending back to at least the 1200s.\u00a0 Severe nor\u2019easters<\/a> are more common than hurricanes and can have storm surges of 6 \u2013 8 feet<\/a>.\u00a0 Climate change predictions<\/a> for New York City suggest the future will see warmer temperatures, increased precipitation, and rising sea levels, not to mention, fiercer weather.\u00a0 There is every reason to believe that conditions will continue to change.<\/p>\n

To break out of the Catch-22 of resilience, we need new ways to reconcile the democratic process with the reality of climate change, not only in areas vulnerable to hurricanes, but also in areas where fires, floods, and tornadoes occur.<\/p>\n

There have been some interesting starts after Sandy.\u00a0 The public sector responded robustly, with major reports delivered at Federal<\/a>, state<\/a>, and city<\/a> levels all within a year of the event, full of language promoting resilience.\u00a0 The very first recommendation of the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force<\/a> (2013) is: \u201cPromoting resilient rebuilding through innovative ideas and a thorough understanding of current and future risk.\u201d\u00a0 To develop those ideas, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Rockefeller Foundation launched \u201cRebuild by Design<\/a>\u201d, commissioning ten \u201cworld-class, interdisciplinary teams\u201d to develop \u201ctransformative planning and design approaches\u201d after Sandy.\u00a0 Teams presented<\/a> their first set of ideas around the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy in late October 2013.\u00a0 The US Army Corps of Engineers<\/a> launched its own studies to promote resiliency of the North Atlantic coast, taking advantage of the large amounts of sand they dredge and move every year around New York Harbor.\u00a0 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration created \u201cDigital Coast<\/a>\u201d a website designed help people \u201cturn data into information they can use,\u201d including county-level reports, a sea level rise and coastal flood impacts viewer, videos and a blog.<\/p>\n

While important, these efforts focus on traditional models of public engagement, where experts create knowledge (like flood maps) or ideas (like novel architectural designs) that are subsequently communicated to the public.\u00a0 The public is conceived of as recipient, not a participant, in the process of understanding what resilience and adaptation means.\u00a0 That\u2019s a problem.\u00a0 Researchers who study how the public understands science question whether the \u201cBig Expert Speaks to Passive Public for Their Own Good\u201d mode of knowledge creation really works, especially when changes in public behavior are necessary<\/a>.\u00a0 More effective, they find, are shared, interactive modes of knowledge production<\/a>,\u00a0 especially when dealing with complex, interdependent environmental problems, on the interface between science, society, and policy, like \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 \u201cBig Storm Strikes the Shining City by the Shore (Again)\u201d.<\/p>\n

What does this mean for those of who care about nature in the city?\u00a0 It means that we need to take nature seriously in all its aspects.\u00a0 Yes, seeing redtail hawks in love<\/a>, nesting on the ledges of apartment buildings along Fifth Avenue, is wonderful.\u00a0 But nature has its darker sides too.\u00a0 No matter how much we treasure our deeds of property, the fact remains that the wind and the waves do not care one iota for scratches on paper.\u00a0 Nature\u2019s first and last lesson is no part of the universe is meant to last forever.\u00a0 We can see transience as a tragedy, or we can embrace it as part of the Earth\u2019s dynamism, but in either case the place where adaption really needs to occur is in our hearts and our minds.\u00a0 Our social response after natural disasters like Sandy measures not only our toughness and resilience, but also our capacity for wisdom and growth.<\/p>\n

In New York and elsewhere, restoring nature\u2019s defenses (beaches, sand dunes, salt marshes, riparian corridors, bioswales, green roofs, etc.) will help us be more resilient to the next storm.\u00a0 Sandy has opened huge opportunities for nature restoration along the Atlantic shoreline.\u00a0 Nature can protect us through systems of its own making and ones we help nature make.\u00a0 The natural world overflows with advice<\/a> about the strategies we can take to avoid and survive the next disaster.\u00a0 Even how not to have disasters.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Jamaica Bay landscape on the south shore of Long Island in the southeastern corner of New York City, as shown on this 1844 U.S. Coast Survey chart, highlights nature\u2019s plan for coastal storms. Broad beaches with dunes on barrier islands protect lagoons fringed with tidal salt marshes. Marsh islands, and possibly eelgrass meadows (not shown) grow in the interior. Chart courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection \/ digitizing by the Welikia Project<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But being resilient is not the only, or even the main, reason why nature in the city is important.\u00a0 Nature in the city is important because it enables us to see alternative ways of being, in our place, in our environment, in our cities, in our lives.<\/p>\n

Eric W. Sanderson<\/strong>
\nNew York City<\/p>\n

On The Nature of Cities\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ecologists who study how ecosystems change over time know there is a balance between resilience and adaptation.\u00a0 Resilience is a measure of how long it takes for an ecosystem to return to a previous state. \u00a0For example, how many decades will it take for a forest to regrow after a fire?\u00a0 Adaptation is the transformation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":4951,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[273,297],"tags":[104,402,448,33],"coauthors":[127],"class_list":["post-4950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-essay-science-and-tools","tag-climate-change","tag-coasts","tag-disastersred-zone","tag-resilience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4950"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}