Book Review: The Sea Around Us In 'The Ravaging Tide,' award-winning environmental journalist Mike Tidwell demonstrates the risk to all Americans from global warming Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
By: SUSAN LARSON
August 6, 2006 In 2003, journalist Mike Tidwell sounded the alarm for Louisiana's environmental crisis in "Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast." As he proudly recounts in his new book, "The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America's Coastal Cities," then-Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster bought a copy of that book for every member of the Louisiana Legislature and the U.S. Congress.
Perhaps we would have been better served if they had taken the time to read it. For, as Tidwell makes clear -- yet again -- in "Ravaging Tide" is that global warming and rising sea levels are not just a Louisiana problem. The calamity that was Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath could befall New York, Baltimore, Miami -- and probably will. It's just a matter of time, time that Tidwell says is rapidly running out.
The great strength of "The Ravaging Tide" is the passionate, informed way Tidwell makes the case for such environmental catastrophe elsewhere. As he lays out the facts, it simply seems a matter of common sense, though many will find it startling when he says that what created our sinking city was the fact that the levees held for so long, not that they failed. Land subsidence and rising seas combine to make bowls of coastal cities protected by levees. It's inevitable.
And what will happen as the coastal population of the United States withdraws inward? It will change the face of the country. Tidwell draws heavily on two sources to make his case: NASA scientist James Hansen, who has worked on global warming, and writer Jared Diamond, author of "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." He states the facts of environmental loss, the cost of political indifference, particularly of the current administration. (The $14 billion price tag for Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana is "the exact cost of the 'Big Dig' tunnel-building project in downtown Boston or, later, the cost of just six weeks of spending in Iraq.")
In recounting his first visit to New Orleans after the storm, Tidwell conjures the harsh reality of the post-Katrina landscape: "But what you can't even begin to appreciate until you go there -- what I, myself, was unprepared to take in -- is the enormous scale of it all. The vastness of the annihilation and loss -- from the empty skyscrapers to the children's toys hanging from trees or the ocean of uninterrupted darkness that still washes over much of the city at night -- this cannot be captured secondhand. To wear out a pair of shoes or burn up a tank of gas and still not see one wholly functioning neighborhood or one square block of intact businesses is to experience something no one now alive has ever known before, much less witnessed firsthand, on American soil. It is another world entirely, New Orleans, and to go there is to experience grieving beyond words."
But as Tidwell makes his case for the melting ice and warmer rising seas -- imagine drowning polar bears, drowning native peoples in Alaska, bigger storms, more cities like Atlantis -- he brings it all back home to the reader: "That glad-it's-not-me feeling you've had toward post-Katrina New Orleans should be fading by now. If you live anywhere from lower Manhattan to inner city Baltimore to the southern suburbs of Houston you now know what it was like to be a resident of New Orleans prior to August 29, 2005. Major, major change is coming your way and it won't be pretty."
This brief, compelling book has only a few flaws. Readers, especially local readers, will no doubt be appalled by Tidwell's statement that "The demise of New Orleans and much of south Louisiana can only be described, in the end, as a form of group suicide." As a metaphor, this seems both ill-conceived and over-dramatic, and dismissive of the efforts of those who have struggled valiantly to save the Louisiana environment. We haven't quite gone the way of the Easter Islanders yet. And in setting the stage for future global warming, referring to Africa as the world's 9th Ward is a bit much.
But Tidwell practices the environmentalism he preaches. And when he writes at length about his personal efforts in energy conservation, the result can be a bit tedious, but efforts like Tidwell's are exactly what it will take to make a difference. If, after reading this book, you find yourself installing solar power, buying a hybrid car (watch for Tidwell to become a spokesman for the Toyota Prius), turning off the lights, wondering about a corn-powered stove in your living room, it will be a start. Next step: writing your congressional representatives and senators or joining Tidwell's proposed "grassroots rebellion." As he writes -- and many others have said -- "There is no substitute for ironclad political will," especially as we see the result of failures of such determination.
"The Ravaging Tide" fulfills the crucial function of informing and inspiring readers because, despite its catalog of losses and failures, it is not a pessimistic book. Each reader can make a difference, with just a bit of thought and effort. This problem isn't going away, and neither is Mike Tidwell. Louisianians are lucky to have his passion and intelligence working on our behalf; residents of other coastal cities, Americans everywhere, listen up.
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