Torchlight Till Human Voices Wake Us

By: Nancy E. Anderson, Ph.D., Executive Director, The Sallan Foundation

Issue: Torchlight #30
Date: June, 2010
Torchlight #30

I am a lifelong New Yorker and I work in lower

Manhattan.
Till Human Perhaps that’s
Voices why Rising
Wake Us Currents:
Projects for New York's Waterfront, an exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art haunts me.i Rising
Currents imaginatively grapples today with a not-
too-distant future of sea-level rise resulting from
global weirding, more delicately called global
warming. It offers “new ways to occupy the harbor
itself with adaptive ‘soft’ infrastructures that are
sympathetic to the needs of a sound ecology…to
dramatically change our relationship to one of the
city's great open spaces.”ii

While lower Manhattan is just one of five “zones of intervention” in the exhibit, it’s the area I
can explore just by walking out of my office. Lower Manhattan, “Zone O”, contains some of
the densest building development in the world and has recently morphed from a strictly-for-
business area into a mixed-use neighborhood. People are living in new apartment buildings,
clustered in Battery Park City, as well as in early 20th century office buildings converted to
residential use. Most of this development is very high priced, even by New York standards.
While the Sallan Foundation is an advocate of making high performance, energy efficient
buildings New York’s new normal, we have long way to go, and even the concentration of
LEED-rated buildings in Lower Manhattan stands as little more than a poster child for
what’s possible. And just to be clear, the benefits of making high performance building the
new normal extend well beyond cutting our carbon footprint by reducing energy
consumption. Those benefits include a reduced burden on a strained electric power system
whose substantial expansion would cost billions, reduced reliance on the tricky politics and
economics of fossil fuels, local economic development stimulated by new products and skills
and markets for greener real estate and higher market and rental values for such properties.

But real estate is not the only part of this zone’s chiaroscuro portrait. Inviting parks ring
Lower Manhattan, even though they’ve got more pavement than grass or turf and it’s a part
of the city where ferries and terminals cluster. Downtown is home to the Stock Exchange

© 2010 The Sallan Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.sallan.org 1

Torchlight #30

and nearly all of the City’s subway lines come here. If severe rain or storm surges start to
regularly
Till Humanflood the subways
Voices and disrupt
Wake Us the telecommunications systems that lie just
underground, New York along with much of the global financial system would be brought to
its knees. None of the elaborate post-9.11 security measures would do a thing to stop the
inundation that is surely coming in the next few decades.

Since there is little reason to be optimistic that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will be cut
to 350 ppm during this century, we can only become a sustainable and resilient city by
focusing our vision and mobilizing our imagination, energies and resources, starting now.
Rising Currents, which appeared to be a hit at MoMA, is one of those starting points. It
foresees:

“Adaptive design strategies deployed here would include increasing the height of
the existing sea wall to prevent inundation. Peripheral land may also be
reconsidered a wetland zone, and sloped fill may be built up against the seaward
side of the seawall. Channels and slips may be extracted from streets that were
formerly inlets to allow water to move inland in a controlled way. The shallow areas
just south of Lower Manhattan are a potential site for a protective offshore
archipelago of artificial islands.”

This vision assembles resources from new and old sources alike, ranging from the
installation of up-to-the-minute geotubes to create sloping shorelines that would slow
the landward rush of stormwater to using decommissioned subway cars to construct

© 2010 The Sallan Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.sallan.org 2

Torchlight #30

artificial reef habitats in the harbor. These subway reefs would create 800 to 1,000
times more biomass
Till Human than Wake
Voices the openUs
ocean while deflecting “strong sea turbulence”. On
high Rising Currents recommends lightweight soils that could be used for green roofs
to absorb rainwater that otherwise would overwhelm the sewage treatment system.
Beneath our feet, porous pavements could also
soak up storm water and reduce the need for
large and costly, engineered water retention
devices now deployed to protect New York
Harbor from pollution.

In more bureaucratic prose, the PlaNYC Progress

Report 2010ii sketches a three-stage approach to
bolster the City’s resilience to the future impacts of
climate change. It places special emphasis on
creating up-to-date floodplain maps, working with
vulnerable communities and rethinking zoning
regulations while also devising a broad approach to minimizing the vulnerability of
infrastructure systems to storm surges, flooding and higher sea levels. This is a daunting
task in light of projected sea level rise ranging from 12 to 55” above current levels. The 2010
report of Green Building Codes Task Force also weighs in on planning for climate change by
incorporating flood risks into new building standards. For example, the report recommends
s study of how to make buildings better able to withstand the loss of electricity or
interruptions to water and sewer services.iii

Obviously, any and all planning for a resilient New York will require sustained diligence and
significant investments over the span of decades. Easy? Of course not, especially now.
Consider America’s inability to pass comprehensive climate legislation, its economic
insecurity and the rise of the Tea Party with its flagrant anti-government fulminations.
Taken alone or together, these events point to rough times for adapting to a hotter, wetter
world because success will require large-scale government actions, rule making and
expenditures.iii

© 2010 The Sallan Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.sallan.org 3

Torchlight #30

As Mark Lilla notes in “The Tea Party Jacobins”iv, the American public, across the political
spectrum,
Till Humanis “inspired
Voices by the
WakesameUs
political principle: radical individualism.” To this add the
Tea Party as it rages “against just about anyone thought to be above, Democrats and
Republicans alike.” While this version of us-against-them is a staple of American populism,
Lilla sees something different in today’s populism. “It fires up emotions by appealing to
individual opinion, individual autonomy and individual choice all in the service of
neutralizing, not using political power. It gives voice to those who feel they are being bullied,
but this voice has only one, Garbo-like thing to say: I want to be left alone.” If he’s right,
what this will mean in the face of global weirding, we are surely fated to discover.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
— T.S. Eliot

Nancy Anderson is the Executive Director of The Sallan Foundation.

i Guy Nordenson, Catherine Seavitt, Adam Yarinksy, On the Water | Palisade Bay, Hatje Cantz &
MoMA, 2010

ii PlaNYC 2010 Progress Report, NYC Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability
http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/downloads/download.shtml

iii Gary Yohe argues that resilience should be examined in terms of “adaptive capacity”, which entails
the availability of “social and political capital, the ability to manage risk, the ability to separate signal
from noise in support of response decisions.”
http://www.rff.org/Publications/WPC/Pages/Issues_of_the_Day.aspx pp. 38-39

iv Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/

© 2010 The Sallan Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.sallan.org 4