The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities

This book has helped me realize the connections between respect for our planet, personal responsibility, peace, and human dignity. All of them are intertwined, and Tidwell clearly shows their relationships in examining the effects of the Katrina hurricane on New Orleans and then connecting the magnitude of the detestation to human actions. If Tidwell was not such an inspiring, and hopeful person/writer I would be quite freightened by all of the new knoweldge I have gained. BUT, he puts it all into perspective and ultimately the world can be OK if we all take personal responsibility and as a planet reduce the C02 in our atmosphere.

Mike Tidwell predicted that a Katrina-like storm would destroy New Orleans in his 2003 book "Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast." He said in truth he knew the disaster was coming when he saw how much land had vanished while doing a story on Louisiana's coastal region for the Washington Post in the late 90s. There were also thousands of reports about the need for better levees and the restoration of the barrier islands. He said there was nothing "natural" about this disaster. Tidwell's 2006 book "The Ravaging Tide" explains why Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, shows how similar calamities will become more frequent and how we can prevent them. Using the research of Jared Diamond and Conrad Totman, Tidwell illustrates how history is repeating itself. Thankfully history also shows there are viable ways to prevent future disasters. Jared Diamond in his book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" shows how history is littered with people who allowed their society to participate in a form of group suicide. Sifting through the challenges and the reactions of the ancient Mayans of Central America, Greenland's Vikings and the Polynesian society of Easter Island Diamond found common "interacting" factors that brought them down. These included hostile enemies, climate change, self inflicted environment degradation and adverse changes in trading partners. For example the Easter Islanders cut down their giant palm trees although the fruit provided food and the trunks supplied wood for the canoes needed to harpoon fish. The catastrophic soil erosion that resulted from the deforestation made agriculture impossible. By 1722 the island was a lunar landscape. Diamond says the Easter Islanders decision to pursue short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival led to their downfall. The leaders had wrapped themselves in the illusion of permanent prosperity. Conrad Totman in his book "The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Prehistoric Japan" says that Japan teetered on the brink of ruin in the 1600s when soil erosion, floods, mudslides and barren farmland resulted after logging most of their old growth forests. But Japan's collapse did not happen. They launched one of the most successful reforestation program in the world's history. Today an astounding 70 percent of Japan is under forest cover¾ the most of any industrialized country in spite of having the highest population density in the developed world. Tidwell shows how the Katrina catastrophe could have been prevented. In the early 90s the Army Corps built modest dam-like structures in the Mississippi's flood levees to control water flow through a series of pipes and canals. Satellite photos later showed that the "diversion" project south of New Orleans created hundreds of acres of new marshland. With rising public and scientific support a coalition of south Louisiana leaders pulled together a master plan called "Coast 2050: Toward a su

The flooding of New Orleans resulted from a combination of effects: subsiding land, sea level increase, destruction of protecting wetlands, and of course a violent storm. Tidwell's thesis is that sea level will continue to rise and tropical storms and hurricanes will increase in intensity, all as a result of climate change. The entire East Coast of the United States will be as vulnerable as was New Orleans. Most of Miami and the rest of Florida average just a few feet above sea level. While New York City is mostly on higher ground, the author observes that the infrastructure, the subways system for example, is well below ground. As world temperatures rise, melting or collapsing glaciers will add water to the ocean. Higher world temperatures will also mean that the water already in the ocean will expand and cause an additional rise in the sea level. Thus, land that is today at or slightly above sea level will become land that is below sea level. Certainly, whether or not storms grow more intense (this is still being debated in the scientific community), global warming will increase the level of the ocean. All of our coastal cities may go the way of New Orleans. Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report in which it stated that the Earth is warming and that most of the warming is a result of human activity. This is also the overwhelming view of the scientific community. My first encounter with the effects of global warming was a hike in the 1980s to the foot of the Paradise Glacier on Mt. Ranier to visit the ice caves. I was disappointed to find that the famous caves were mostly gone. The caves had disappeared because the glacier itself was retreating. We now know that glaciers all over the world are melting. A recent headline caught my eye; "Iceberg off New Zealand becomes tourist mecca," AP, November 21, 2006. The residents of New Zealand could look out their windows to see pieces of Antarctica floating by. It is not clear what it will take to get our US government to take steps to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. We have already lost one major city. Will we have to see a few more go before we take action? Tidwell does a good job of presenting the need for individual and governmental action. I also recommend "With Speed and Violence" by Fred Pearce. a book about recent scientific investigations and their implications for global warming.

I loved this book so much that I've read the first chapter aloud to three appreciative people on the phone, and I'm also planning to buy a copy for every Maryland state legislator. (Let me know if you do the same in your state.) Mike Tidwell writes beautifully. Even though I've seen An Inconvenient Truth, and heard Bill McKibbon speak, I learned plenty from The Ravaging Tide that I hadn't already heard before. Tidwell shares history, science, policy, despair (when we don't act on clean energy policy), and promise (when we do). Yes, it may be odd, but I was walking (not driving!) down sidewalks while reading this book. I couldn't put it down, until the very last page. Mike Tidwell is a former journalist and travel writer for the Washington Post and the National Geographic Traveler.

No question about it: Mike Tidwell has an axe to grind. And after you read "The Ravaging Tide," you may have a few axes to grind as well. The book is partly about Hurricane Katrina, partly about global warming, and partly about what patriotic American citizens can do to fight global warming. The first three chapters explain why Hurrican Katrina was a man-made disaster. New Orleans suffered an indirect hit from a high Category 3 storm--Mississippi bore the brunt of the storm's onslaught. But because of man-made canals and the wholesale destruction of barrier islands and marshes south of the city, there was little natural barrier left to absorb the impact of the hurricane's storm surge. The more powerful Camille (a huge Category 5 hurricane) struck in nearly the same spot in 1969 but did not flood New Orleans--the difference in 37 years is not the power of the storm, but the ongoing subsidence of New Orleans and the destruction of the surrounding landscape. The tragedy is that scientists and public officials knew that this day would come and were unable to do anything to stop it. The government was not willing to spend the $14 billion required to implement the 2050 plan, which would eventually restore the barrier islands and marshes in the Mississippi Delta. Instead, we'll spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding New Orleans--and it won't be a bit safer than it was before Katrina hit. By being penny wise and pound foolish, we've insured that our government will be a big, wasteful spender for decades to come. So much for the polemic. The parable is that Katrina is a warning about what will happen throughout the United States and the world in the next few decades because of global warming. Scientists know what's coming and they have some good ideas of what to do about it, but few policy makers are willing to listen. That doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist: the insurance companies, who are not known for their sympathies with environmentalists, can read the writing on the wall. That's why they are withdrawing from insurance markets along the Gulf Coast and other extremely vulnerable places like New York state. Tidwell's book isn't total doom and gloom, however. He spends the last several chapters of the book explaining how he changed his home and his life so that his family darstically reduced green house gas emissions. The result was a win-win arrangement for a lot of people and for the economy as well as for the environment. Tidwell hopes that his example will lead others to act before it is too late. Still, if Tidwell and others are right, there's not much time to turn things around before global warming really starts to have a devastating impact. There's a lot of hope at the grass-roots level and at the local level--Portland, Oregon, for example, has reduced its green house gas emissions by 12.5% since 1993, while the rest of the United States has increased emissions by 15.8%. Business is also rallying--wind energy