A Cautionary Tale - Live In Harmony With Your Environment or You're Out.

Of course we're Masters of the Universe or so we like to imagine. It's just that once what was a fanciful conceit is now a dangerous, potentially lethal indulgence.

Today we're trying to support roughly twice as many humans as the world can sustain. The unfortunate evidence of what we've done is everywhere.

The Indonesian capital of Jakarta is one example. It may be the first capital city to fall to climate change.

Indonesia just found itself a new capital. The country’s president, Joko Widodo, announced last Monday that the new seat of government will be on the island of Borneo, hundreds of miles to the northeast of the current capital, Jakarta. The crowded city’s aquifers have been drained and the ground is caving in, making it one of the fastest sinking cities in the world. The Java Sea threatens to swallow 95 percent of the city over the next 30 years.

And we're just getting started in the global 'retreat from the sea.'

An overheating planet and unchecked development along the coasts have let the sea expand into new territory, leaving many people who live along the shores unsettled (in both senses of the word). According to the United Nations, up to 1 billion people could be displaced by storms, droughts, and floods in 30 years. In the United States, the cost for protecting people and property from rising seas and intense downpours is expected to climb into the hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming decades—and that’s a conservative estimate. 

There’s “an ongoing mass migration” away from our coasts, said Elizabeth Rush, author of the Pulitzer-prize nominated book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. “These changes will happen whether we like it or not,” Rush said. “How profoundly and how detrimentally they reshape our coastal communities is up to us.”

It's hard to muster much sympathy for the rich slobs who monopolized our shorelines for generations. However they're often a thin line of hyper-affluence. A block or two inshore you're apt to find middle class homeowners. A few blocks further in it may be working class neighbourhoods.

Where sea level rise is compounded by surface subsidence, flooding can inflict great damage on a highly vulnerable segment of the population who don't have the options available to the rich.

The Americans are now formulating policies aggregated under the title, "managed retreat." That can include everything from elevating existing homes on stilts, higher and stronger sea walls, costly new water and sewer systems, on and on and on.

There's a snag. Waterfront homeowners, the rich folks, expect local and state governments to take them off the hook with buyouts and, so far, they've done quite well. Socialism for the rich, I suppose. Only what happens when governments confront the outstretched hands of the less affluent, less powerful, less visible middle and working class property owners who, in their turn, are inundated? How will they find the revenues in this, the era of "Everyday Low Taxes" and deficit-budgeting governments?