Resilience over sustainability

We should "roll with the waves" instead of trying to "stop the ocean," writes innovation guru Andrew Solli, in response to, what I believe is the proposition to erect a multibillion dollar "sea wall" around New York, to protect it against future Sandies:  

Unfortunately, the sustainability movement’s politics, not to mention its marketing, have led to a popular misunderstanding: that a perfect, stasis-under-glass equilibrium is achievable. But the world doesn’t work that way: it exists in a constant disequilibrium — trying, failing, adapting, learning and evolving in endless cycles. Indeed, it’s the failures, when properly understood, that create the context for learning and growth. That’s why some of the most resilient places are, paradoxically, also the places that regularly experience modest disruptions: they carry the shared memory that things can go wrong.

“Resilience” takes this as a given and is commensurately humble. It doesn’t propose a single, fixed future. It assumes we don’t know exactly how things will unfold, that we’ll be surprised, that we’ll make mistakes along the way. It’s also open to learning from the extraordinary and widespread resilience of the natural world, including its human inhabitants, something that, counterintuitively, many proponents of sustainability have ignored.

The World's Mine Oyster

This was the rascally Piston's quip to Falstaff in Shakespeare's early comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor:

Falstaff:I will not lend thee a penny.
Pistol:
Why then the world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.
Falstaff:
Not a penny.

Pistol's comic threat--that he's going to steal if falstaff doesn't loan him money--has over time become a merely conceited proclamation of opportunity.

But Oysters are not to be trifled with anymore. They can't simply be seen as passive repositories of the mythical pearl.

Oysters, as Paul Greenberg, who writes about environmental issues reminds us, play a vital role in protecting the Tri-State shorelines from the violent incursions like the one we saw from Hurricane Sandy.

Yet the "oyster kingdom" has been depleted over years.

Sans the depletion, the Hudson and the East river would not have made such deep and devastating inroads into the low-lying areas of Manhattan and New Jersey:

Until European colonists arrived, oysters took advantage of the spectacular estuarine algae blooms that resulted from all these nutrients and built themselves a kingdom. Generation after generation of oyster larvae rooted themselves on layers of mature oyster shells for more than 7,000 years until enormous underwater reefs were built up around nearly every shore of greater New York.

 Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there is much talk about re-designing the infrastructure in New York City to handle the city's identity as an emergent "Gulf Coast".

But humans have already dismantled the natural infrastructure. Isn't it time for the environment  to become a part of the conversation?

Sandy and Frankenstein

As Time Magazine recently reported, the name given to Hurricane Sandy--Frankenstorm--is an effort to be funny, and to chime in with the spirit of Halloween. 

However, given that Sandy has also been described as a "freakish" storm, a hybrid of two disparate storm systems, I don't think the reverberations of the word "Frankenstorm" are all that funny.

It has literary resonance: I am reminded of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's memorable monster. He shares many of the qualities attributed to Sandy: he is a "freakish" "hybrid" of man and beast. Shelley's misshapen monster bears physical resemblance to humans yet he has no soul; in Shelley's time, the soul was the seat of humanity.

Sandy has no soul--the monstrous terms in which it is being discussed makes its monstrosity evident. 

Finally, Frankenstein, the monster was a creation of a scientist, who was hubristic enough to engineer a creature into being. In this, Victor Frankenstein, the brilliant scientist of Mary Shelley's novel, offended nature. 

Sandy, as Naomi Klein, has indicated, could be a product of geoengineering. Geoengineers 

advocate high-risk, large-scale technical interventions that would fundamentally change the oceans and skies in order to reduce the effects of global warming

In other words, they could be the 21st century's rough equivalents of Victor Frankenstein.

Is hurricane Sandy a hideous progeny of our era's Victor Frankensteins?