The phrase bothers anyone who espouses a "never retreat, never surrender" mentality. However, it's time to face reality. Climate change isn't in our future -- it's happening now. Coastal cities the world over can deny reality or they can plan for a managed retreat from rising seas.
A pair of stories this weekend highlight the brave new world we're shaping.
In Ventura, up the coast from Malibu on the Pacific Ocean, California begins its retreat from a rising sea, reports the Los Angeles Times:
Construction crews are removing a crumbling bike path, ripping out a 120-space parking lot and laying down sand and cobblestones. By pushing the asphalt 65 feet inland, the project is expected to give the wave-ravaged point 50 more years of life.
The "managed retreat" marks a reversal with profound implications for a state that has for more than a century crammed its most valuable homes and businesses on the edge of the ocean.
"There's the old-school mentality that when nature threatens you, you fight back," said Paul Jenkin, Ventura campaign manager for the Surfrider Foundation and a longtime advocate for the project. "So this idea of retreating and moving back was really quite a radical proposition."
Although the City of Ventura is planning and paying for this first instance of a managed retreat, the county of Ventura doesn't even have a climate change plan.
On the Atlantic Ocean, rising waters threaten the North Carolina coast, reports the Charlotte Observer:
Rising sea level is the clearest signal of climate change in North Carolina. Few places in the United States stand to be more transformed.
About 2,000 square miles of our low, flat coast, an area nearly four times the size of Mecklenburg County, is 1 meter (about 39 inches) or less above water.
While polls show growing public skepticism of global warming, the people paid to worry about the future - engineers, planners, insurance companies - are already bracing for a wetter world.
Unlike Ventura, North Carolina isn't retreating. The town of Nags Head will dump millions of dollars and sand onto the shore. The average cost of doing so is about $1 million per mile, to lather, rinse, and repeat every five years as storms wash the sand away. Other towns plan dikes and sea walls. But state planners are preparing detailed maps of future high-water marks, anticipating the eventual retreat of people and property. "At some tipping point - state officials calculate sea-level rise will cause significant problems by about 2042 - decisions will have to be made. Infrastructure such as water and sewer lines, and industries, will have to be moved inland."
Predicting responses to sea level rise is an interesting, albeit depressing, parlor game for those of us comfortably inland. Some general trends can be seen.
* Planning for sea level rise will begin with refusal to retreat, with sea walls and truckloads of sand. It'll be ad hoc, at a local level, until the money runs out.
* The National Flood Insurance Program will become a political football: premiums will skyrocket, dire reports warning of receivership (bankruptcy equivalent) will be written, conservatives will demand it be shut down, and the like. Meanwhile, private insurers will rewrite policies to exclude climate-change-caused damage, and litigation will ensue.
* Money talks: the great cities of the Northeast (New York, Boston, Washington) will get more federal money than the North Carolina coast. Coastal residents outside those cities will have "self reliance" preached at them until they either move or drown. A few hardy souls will remain.
* It's easier to armor a somewhat elevated coastal city from once-a-decade storms than it is to protect a flat coastal city from creeping groundwater. Coastal cities of Texas and Florida (I'm looking at you, Miami) will eventually be left to the seas. New York won't be abandoned.
A well planned, centralized managed retreat from rising seas now may save some lives and money in the long run. However, in a time during which politicians' reckless attacks on science succeed remarkably well, we're more likely to waste money on refusing to retreat...until we must.