| inbluevt | Date: Sunday, 2013/05/05, 10:19 AM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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The bulk of this article is about the growth of an adaptation movement and first ever conference related to it. The government hook for looking at this issue goes back to Pappy Bush, gathering unfunded dust in some bureaucratic corner, but Obama dusted it off and has begun setting it in motion. The subject of the article's title is sort of discussed at end.
Quote “We’ll need to figure out what parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon,” writes McKibbon, “so that we can protect the core of our
societies and civilizations.”
On the opening morning of the inaugural National Adaptation Forum, I was eating breakfast at a stand-up table in the exhibition hall when a mustachioed man of middle age plopped his cherry Danish next to my pile of conference literature, a mess of pamphlets and reports with titles
like Getting Climate Smart: A Water Preparedness Guide for State Action, and Successful Adaptation: Linking Science and Policy in a Rapidly Changing World. The nametag dangling above the Danish identified the man as Michael Hughes, director of public works for the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst.
Like many attendees, Hughes was part of a new national emergency-response team without being fully aware of it. He had arrived in Denver knowing little about “adaptation,” the anemic catchall for
attempts to fortify our natural and built environments against theepochal temperature spike in progress.
“I hadn’t even heard the term ‘adaptation’ a month ago,” he told me, taking a bite
He didn’t know anything about the 20 federal agencies that just released adaptation planning studies, or the dozen coastal states negotiating the early stages of “managed retreat” and “coastal abandonment,”buzzwords for the work, underway from Puget Sound to Brighton Beach, of
accommodating rising seas by contracting the contours of the U.S. map. Hughes didn’t know about any of this. He just knew that the Elmhurst sewage and water systems were buckling under the strains of the new normal, and that his job was figuring out what to do about it. “The
floods keep coming, they keep getting worse, and every time there’s damage, everyone blames me,” he said. “I’m here to learn more about
what’s happening, and talk to people dealing with the same problems.”
Read on
Message edited by inbluevt - Sunday, 2013/05/05, 10:20 AM |
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