“Loss examines an essential dimension of what human societies have to deal with in a climate changed world. Places are destroyed and disappear. Political and economic privileges attendant on a destabilized status quo are eroded… Environmentally destructive practices must end.”
– Rebecca Elliott
By now, the eye of providence may view the rising seas, and their inexorable encroachment into our homes and communities, with greater certitude than the march of human progress itself. Greenland’s ice sheets, which contain enough ice to raise global sea levels by 7 meters, are melting at an accelerated rate, steadfastly approaching the tipping point for full collapse. A recent report published in Nature found that global glacier loss has outpaced IPCC estimates by more than 18%. As glaciers disintegrate and oceans warm and expand, we can expect to see sea level rise in the range of 1-2 meters by 2100 . By 2060, more than a billion people may live in megacity-sprinkled low elevation coastal zones, of which 315-411 million will be situated in the (now misnomered) 100 year floodplain. These populations will be exposed to threats like storm surge, chronic inundation, and freshwater salinization; stressors that will act in tandem with the supercharged storms and increased rainfall that accompany warming climates. This precarity of coastal living will test our ability, or lack thereof, to preempt and adapt to emerging threats.
No place typifies these tensions and our tortured response better than Miami.
Miami is one of the highest ranked global cities in terms of assets exposed to sea level rise. Built atop the drained Everglades and Miami River delta, urbanization has radically diminished the capacity of natural ecosystems to stabilize coastlines and absorb storm surges. The average elevation in Miami-Dade county stands at just six feet, and the city rests on a bedrock of porous limestone that allows intruding seawater to rise up from underground. With only a few centimeters of sea level rise to date, the city has begun to regularly experience “sunny day” or extreme high tide flooding, trapping residents inside their homes, frustrating movement of goods, inundating properties and pushing raw sewage onto the street.
Cities at risk from sea level rise (Graphic via C40)
In response, the city has opted for hard stabilization – installing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of floodwater pumps and elevated roads. These carbon-intensive adaptation measures will soon be overwhelmed by projected flood volumes. Forward-looking trends are jarring, predicting 250 days of sunny day flooding per year by 2045, a completely brackish aquifer by 2050, and a submerged city by century’s end. In the age of climate-exacerbated hurricane seasons, there are no long-term resilience plans that can meet these challenges. Instead, the governor has banned mentions of climate change in state communications while city government issues bonds for more flood water infrastructure, deludedly named Miami Forever.
Still, Miami is in the midst of a real estate renaissance with more capital flowing to luxury high rises than to addressing sea level rise. This luxury building boom has resulted in an oversupply of luxury rentals, is fueled in part by money laundering and the EB-5 visa program – which allows foreign donors to invest $1 million in a real estate project in exchange for a green card.
Much of new real estate is overexposed to environmental threats like sea level rise and intensified storm surge. For instance, in the neighborhood Edgewater, an entirely new waterfront skyline has been erected over the last three years – a fitting monument to our obstinate maladaptive behaviors. That a cash-flush real estate sector has a moribund Miami within its glitzy grasp can be viewed as a stand-in for larger trends stymieing decisive climate action. Real estate invokes a transnational flow of global wealth to Miami, oftentimes seeking speculative, maximal returns by developing luxury real estate for the super-wealthy. Money talks, and a new construction boom has had an arresting influence on sensible policy development. When Miami Beach’s Mayor Levine defended his preferred adaptation strategy of structural engineering, he emphasized that “we can’t let investor confidence, resident confidence, confidence in our economy start to fall away.” Unremitting construction in Miami is caused by the dominance of short-horizon investment windows and political short-termism, as much as it is our ingrained shortsightedness. As we will see, the prioritization of capital returns over protecting residents has followed the general dynamics of neoliberalization, which has heretofore handicapped our response to climate change.
Miami skyline (Photo: Daniel C, via Flickr
Through decades of neoliberal hegemony, managerial political institutions have largely conceded decision-making power to largely self-regulated and supposedly decentralized markets. Policymakers have used deregulation to promote competition for goods that should be guaranteed to all citizens, all based on the premise that market forces deliver more efficient outcomes. In the context of climate resilience strategies, this approach is manifested in what Hannah Teicher calls the “competitive resilience regime”. Instead of intervening in real estate investing, cities seek to achieve climate protection by partnering with and enabling developers to pursue resilience as a competitive strategy, one that both protects their assets and increases their value of the investment. This phenomenon is evinced in statements like this one from a Miami real estate agent, who gushed that a luxury property had been “built several feet above the zoning requirements” as a major “selling point”.
The limits to this decentralized “autonomous adaptation” include: exclusive resilience that prioritizes high-value buildings and an incrementalism that fails to protect a city at requisite scale and pace, thereby producing an “adaptation capacity gap”. This adaptation style also has implications for residential climate gentrification, a phenomenon that is beginning to price out residents in Miami’s high-elevation low-income neighborhoods. When “ecological security” becomes a value-add in the marketplace, cities with finite housing supply will find lower income residents excluded from secure neighborhoods and resilience investment money. Put together, the looming threats of sea level rise and the competition for ecological security will leave vulnerable populations overexposed to environmental hazard. Take for example displaced low income populations that are relocating to lower elevation neighborhoods and closer to the seaside Turkey Point nuclear plant.
Why is it that despite signs of our looming dispossession, we remain stuck treading Miami’s miasmic floodwater? The answer is multidimensional: economic, social, and highly individual. Many residents are simply stuck: unable to get out from under properties that are plummeting in value – a phenomena that will becoming increasingly pervasive. National flood insurance has created a moral hazard effect, but has also effectively trapped people who, due to severe repetitive loss designation on their properties, cannot sell. Still, the trapped are a subset of the vulnerable, therefore it is imperative for planners to understand how clear signals to migrate become refracted through our emotional landscape and cognitive biases. For instance: researchers in the Peruvian Andes interviewed populations living under environmental hazards, who explicitly expressed dissatisfaction with the worsening environmental conditions. Researchers found 74% of dissatisfied residents chose to remain for reasons of positive attachment to place and people, familial obligations, and fear of the outside world. This is termed place attachment reflecting our ability to tolerate hardship in order to remain in the places we love, as creatures of habitat and habituation. Or, in the words of a Miami local: we will do what it takes “ to keep the party going”.
Nonetheless, as current trends persist, this defensive sacrifice cannot be sustained. Even as reality creeps in, studies have found that fatalism can act as a psychological deadweight as those who feel themselves to be personally helpless to fix a problem are less likely to take action (Lotenzoni et al 2007). Of course, the (very american) capacity for techno-optimism is a decision-making criterion all the less comprehensible and all the more pernicious. Allowing techno-optimists to double down on business as usual, and bet it all on “future generations” and “innovation” is a dangerous indulgence in an unprovable hope. When techno-optimism is routinely and institutionally evinced by decision-makers in Miami, it is worth interrogating its sincerity.
It is time to reckon with the considerable and growing losses placed at the altar of our fossil-fueled consumption. Miami is harbinger of the radical loss and unmooring that society shall come to know intimately. In a way, this loss is a reversion to age-old vicissitudes: death and wreckage at the hands of untamed nature, displacement and migration, losing one home and starting anew. Nevermind that these well-worn paths are gnarled by the fact that we are sprinting, with foresight, towards an uninhabitable planet – living on borrowed time while assuring ourselves that I will never be called for restitution. As illustrated by Rebecca Elliott’s Climate Change as a Sociology of Loss, by facing our incurred loss we “adjust the analytical focus, asking about what does, will, or must disappear rather than what can or should be sustained.”
Art via United Nations Development Programme in Europe and CIS. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 (cropped)
A sustainable Miami will look a lot like loss. The challenge is to embrace this: providing a long term publicly-assisted depopulation, resettling displaced communities, and restoring the coastal ecosystem in a way that protects inland communities. This is preferable to fighting against the tides of inevitability: rebuilding in place, inviting the cycle of forced evacuation, flood insurance payouts, storm damages, and lives lost. As illustrated, recognizing loss can provoke “more deeply transformative visions”. Communal loss can breed solidarities and renew our openness to one another. Shared loss can guide in accepting displaced communities with open arms and reinvigorate a community consciousness in the wake of our atomistic present. As suggested by Elliott, loss from climate change will be both drastic and quotidian, even more so as we embark on transition to a low-carbon society. In this, we can opt to pursue “positive post-carbon futures”- like those most famously proposed by the Green New Deal. This loss can inform the shifting definitions of the “good life”, from overwork and conspicuous consumption to a life of plenitude, complemented by truer solidarity informed by a life-sustaining social project. Worth stating is that this social project, society-wide decarbonization, is ecologically and morally urgent, drawing on our capacity to parlay loss into a reimagined, collective, and meaningful future.