Product Description

The question on every American's mind: Can Katrina happen to me where I live?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes, yes, and again yes. If you are one of the

150 million Americans who live within 100 miles of a coastline -- and even

if you live much farther inland -- you could be inhabiting the next New

Orleans. The bad news for you is that there are even more studies full of

even more scientific data confirming this fact than the studies predicting

Katrina prior to 2005.

The issue this time is global warming. We are literally altering the sky

above us. And be assured: This is not some "junk theory" peddled by Greenpeace

extremists. No less an authority than the Bush Administration itself has

officially confirmed, on multiple occasions, that global warming is real and

is driven by our use of fossil fuels -- oil, coal, and natural gas.

Worldwide, thanks to climate change, sea level is expected to rise up to

three feet within the coming decades and extreme weather events will

significantly increase, according to the Bush Administration.

These two factors -- more intense storms and rising ocean levels -- mean we

are rapidly turning every coastal city in America into another New Orleans.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #342142 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Award-winning travel journalist Tidwell (who predicted a Katrina-like catastrophe in his 2004 book, Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast) ramps up the rhetoric to a category 5 intensity in this assessment of how global warming is swelling the volume of water lapping against the world's coasts. Because of society's insistence on re-engineering natural waterways and shorelines, we are committing a form of "group suicide." And, Tidwell goes on, President Bush, by refusing to fund a $14-billion plan to bring back wetlands and barrier reefs to protect the Louisiana coast, is committing "federal mass murder." His central thesis is that two conditions threaten to inundate nations like Bangladesh and cities like Calcutta, London and New York: land-based glaciers are vanishing, their meltwater seeping into the seas at the equivalent of a Lake Erie every year,; the slowly warming water temperatures causes sea levels to rise even more dramatically. Drastically slashing greenhouse gases is the only way to save the planet, writes Tidwell, who proves—his dire prognostications notwithstanding—to be an optimist, pointing to Japan's success in reforesting its islands as a model for other nations to emulate. (Aug. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"The ignoble American response to the unprecedented peril of climate change has produced few heroes, but Mike Tidwell is one. Here he shows why -- this book is a perfect mix of reporting, motivation, and specific advice for the huge work ahead of us. A truly crucial book, one that will make a difference!"

-- Bill McKibben, author, The End of Nature

"The Ravaging Tide makes brutally clear that Katrina was but a curtain-raiser, that big oil and big coal have taken our government hostage, and that America's historical legacy may well be as the chief exporter of climate chaos to the rest of the world. The time for action, Mike Tidwell insists, is now. And the most critical actor is you."

-- Ross Gelbspan, author, The Heat Is On (1998) and Boiling Point (2004)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

It was a short phone call, lasting only a few minutes, but it formally launched the largest displacement of American citizens since the Civil War. On Saturday, August 27, 2005, Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, told New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin that Hurricane Katrina was the "worst case" storm everyone had feared for decades. It was headed right for New Orleans with the energy of a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes.

Within hours, Nagin had ordered the first mandatory evacuation in the city's three-hundred-year history. Over the next two days a staggering 1.3 million people would abandon the city and much of south Louisiana. So many cars headed north, full of people and pets and valuables, that satellite cameras captured the bumper-to-bumper interstate crawl from outer space.

In New Orleans, every rental car, every U-Haul van and truck, was gone. People walked, hitchhiked, hot-wired postal vehicles. They took flatboats up the Mississippi River. Amtrak and Greyhound sent their last cars and buses rolling north, east, and west -- anywhere away from the storm. Prisoners were hustled off in chains. Hospital patients who could be moved were evacuated -- babies in incubators, psychiatric patients strapped to gurneys. Drivers out of gas on clogged highways drilled holes in the gas tanks of abandoned cars for fuel to keep moving.

The human tidal wave crashed first into Louisiana towns just to the north. Baton Rouge, the somewhat somnolent state capital, doubled in size almost overnight, taking on 200,000 newcomers and becoming the largest city in the state just as New Orleans shrank to nothing. Hotels everywhere were booked solid. Extended families of up to forty people crammed into three-bedroom homes, with sleeping bags spread across hallways and kitchens, and water running nonstop from showers, washing machines, and flushing toilets.

And still they came, hundreds of thousands more refugees, arriving just ahead or after Katrina's harrowing landfall. Makeshift shelters sprang up across Louisiana and neighboring states and as far away as Nevada and Washington, D.C. Within days, Baton Rouge's modest airport was the second busiest in America, with passengers accepting any flight anywhere away from the storm and its aftermath, scattering themselves across America. By Sunday, September 4, the last fleeing inhabitants of New Orleans -- the poorest and most desperate people, abandoned on overpasses and littered sidewalks -- were finally bused by the thousands to Houston's Astrodome and convention center.

A week after it started, the retreat was at last complete. It had occurred on a scale no one could have imagined. Over one million people displaced in Louisiana alone. A vast section of American real estate lay broken and eerily, impossibly, empty. The return date for evacuees was wholly uncertain. Many would never return.

Yet as difficult and chaotic and disruptive as the Katrina evacuation was -- broadcast nightly in horrifying detail to the world -- there's one crucial element I'm sure most Americans have failed to appreciate, and it is this: At least those 1.3 million people had somewhere to run to. At least there was a safe and secure mainland to receive them.

Imagine a different scenario. Imagine if all those men, women, and children had not been able to flee at all. Imagine if all the roads out of town had been blocked for some reason and all escape vehicles sabotaged to boot. What if, instead of the few thousand who couldn't or wouldn't flee Katrina, all the people of New Orleans and surrounding parishes were left behind. Picture every last schoolteacher and grandmother and checkout girl and auto mechanic and kindergartner and musician and corporate lawyer all huddled behind those faulty levees as a nuclear-scale storm rapidly approached.

Why imagine this? Because, like the long-ignored warnings about insufficient levees in New Orleans, there are extremely serious warnings out there that Katrina-like disasters could become commonplace along vast stretches of U.S. coastlines in the not-so-distant future. And evacuating inland might not be an option, no matter how bad the storm, because extreme weather events in the heartland (droughts, heat waves, forest fires) will remove the welcome mat. There simply won't be the infrastructure and surplus resources needed to absorb the overflowing humanity.

Ever since Katrina hit, Americans have been asking two fundamental questions: How in the world did this disaster happen? And, could a similar calamity happen where I live? This book will answer both questions in detail.

For starters, Katrina devastated New Orleans because, over the decades, we, as a nation, profoundly altered the basic hydrology of the Mississippi River. The river's massive flood levees directly triggered a geologic chain reaction that obliterated the vast wetlands and coastal barrier islands that once protected the city from hurricanes. By 2005, so much land had disappeared that we had essentially created a watery flight path for Katrina to slam into New Orleans like a plane into the World Trade Center. There was nothing "natural" about this natural disaster. We did this.

In March 2003, my book Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast was published. It predicted in great detail that a Katrina-like storm would soon destroy New Orleans, leaving thousands of people dead and the national economy bruised. When the hurricane did hit, precisely as foreseen, journalists from around the world began calling me, asking how it felt to be a prophet. How amazing, they said, that I was able to see this disaster coming when so many others didn't.

In truth, I deserve no credit whatsoever for my prediction. Katrina's arrival was as certain as tomorrow's sunrise. There were thousands of pages of reports before the storm, from advocacy groups and government agencies, spelling out the need for better levees and bigger barrier islands to prevent the looming catastrophe. Hindsight is 20/20, and Americans are now outraged by the lack of prior action. Yet the predisaster paper trail was so long, stretching to the moon and back, that a journalist like me was just stating the obvious prior to August 2005. Katrina was coming. The facts were as clear as day.

And now something else is coming, something just as obvious but much bigger and even more dangerous. Which leads us to the second question on every American's mind: Can Katrina happen where I live? The answer, unfortunately, is yes, yes, and again yes. If you are one of the 150 million Americans who live within a hundred miles of a coastline -- and even if you live much farther inland -- you could be inhabiting the next New Orleans. The bad news for you is that there are even more studies full of even more scientific data confirming this fact than there were predicting Katrina prior to 2005.

The issue this time is global warming. We are literally altering the sky above us. And be assured, this is not some "junk theory" peddled by Greenpeace extremists. No less a voice than the Bush administration has officially confirmed, on multiple occasions, that global warming is real and is driven by our use of fossil fuels -- oil, coal, and natural gas. Worldwide, thanks to climate change, sea level is expected to rise up to three feet during this century and extreme weather events are expected to increase -- according to the Bush administration.

These two factors -- more intense storms and rising ocean levels -- mean we are rapidly turning the majority of America's coastal cities into places greatly resembling New Orleans. Thanks to global warming, mountain glaciers worldwide are vanishing, sending meltwater into oceans that are themselves warming and growing in volume. The resulting sea-level rise -- again, up to three feet by 2100 -- means that vast areas of many U.S. coastal cities will soon fall below sea level just like New Orleans, and they will require levees to survive, just like New Orleans.

On top of this, along America's Atlantic and Gulf coasts, hurricanes are becoming much more ferocious. Three major scientific studies in the past year alone reveal that rising sea-surface temperatures linked to global warming are driving an observed trend toward much stronger hurricanes. One study by a noted scientist at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology shows that hurricane wind speeds have doubled in the last fifty years. This may account for the following astonishing fact: Among the six most powerful hurricanes to strike America in the last 150 years, three of them -- a full half -- happened in just fifty-two days in 2005: Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

In 2003, I declared with complete confidence that Katrina was coming. I argued that below-sea-level New Orleans would soon fall prey to a major hurricane because of human actions. Now I beseech readers to trust me when I say Houston and Tampa and New York City and Baltimore and Miami are in equally deep trouble. If you want to know what disasters these cities will be frantically fighting against fifty to seventy-five years from now, just turn on your television. Look at New Orleans today. That's the future.

Yet a full year after Katrina hit, we are still ignoring that storm's biggest lesson. We continue to turn a blind eye to global warming the same way we once ignored the dire pleas for stronger levees in Louisiana. History is repeating itself on the largest scale imaginable. The pages that follow will make clear that all of America -- and indeed the whole planet -- is now like a low-lying land behind broken and insufficient levees, and the water is coming up fast.

But, thankfully, there is a plan to get us out of this mess just as there was once a viable plan to prevent Katrina's worst impacts. It involves the seemingly unlikely aid of hybrid cars and modern windmills and solarized homes. Clean energy is the solution to global warming, and clean energy is as widely available to us today as the dirt belo...

Customer Reviews

Insightful
Mike Tidwell predicted that a Katrina-like storm would destroy New Orleans in his 2003 book "Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana's Cajun Coast." He said in truth he knew the disaster was coming when he saw how much land had vanished while doing a story on Louisiana's coastal region for the Washington Post in the late 90s.

There were also thousands of reports about the need for better levees and the restoration of the barrier islands. He said there was nothing "natural" about this disaster.

Tidwell's 2006 book "The Ravaging Tide" explains why Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, shows how similar calamities will become more frequent and how we can prevent them.

Using the research of Jared Diamond and Conrad Totman, Tidwell illustrates how history is repeating itself. Thankfully history also shows there are viable ways to prevent future disasters.

Jared Diamond in his book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" shows how history is littered with people who allowed their society to participate in a form of group suicide. Sifting through the challenges and the reactions of the ancient Mayans of Central America, Greenland's Vikings and the Polynesian society of Easter Island Diamond found common "interacting" factors that brought them down. These included hostile enemies, climate change, self inflicted environment degradation and adverse changes in trading partners.

For example the Easter Islanders cut down their giant palm trees although the fruit provided food and the trunks supplied wood for the canoes needed to harpoon fish. The catastrophic soil erosion that resulted from the deforestation made agriculture impossible. By 1722 the island was a lunar landscape.

Diamond says the Easter Islanders decision to pursue short-term gains at the expense of long-term survival led to their downfall. The leaders had wrapped themselves in the illusion of permanent prosperity.

Conrad Totman in his book "The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Prehistoric Japan" says that Japan teetered on the brink of ruin in the 1600s when soil erosion, floods, mudslides and barren farmland resulted after logging most of their old growth forests. But Japan's collapse did not happen. They launched one of the most successful reforestation program in the world's history. Today an astounding 70 percent of Japan is under forest cover¾ the most of any industrialized country in spite of having the highest population density in the developed world.

Tidwell shows how the Katrina catastrophe could have been prevented. In the early 90s the Army Corps built modest dam-like structures in the Mississippi's flood levees to control water flow through a series of pipes and canals. Satellite photos later showed that the "diversion" project south of New Orleans created hundreds of acres of new marshland.

With rising public and scientific support a coalition of south Louisiana leaders pulled together a master plan called "Coast 2050: Toward a sustainable Coastal Louisiana" to enlarge the project. Federal officials under both Presidents Clinton and Bush denied the project due to its $14 billion price tag.

Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of thousands of climate scientists and scholars, said that one of the biggest global warming issues will be coastal flooding the 2005 post-Katrina emergency money was a dismal $250 million to fix broken levees, collapsed bridges and flawed evacuation plans.

Tidwell says sea levels are expected to rise three feet within the coming decades. Even the Bush administration, the biggest supporter of the oil and coal industry, admits that global warming is real and is driven by our use of fossil fuels¾ oil, coal and natural gas.

To prove that it's possible to repair and protect our life-giving climate Tidwell and his family switched to energy sources that don't generate carbon dioxide. He bought a Toyota Prius gas-electric car and cut his home's carbon emissions by 90% in six months by using a combination of compact fluorescent light bulbs, greater appliance efficiency, a corn-burning stove for heating, a solar hot water system and rooftop solar panels for electricity. Without sacrificing comfort or convenience he now saves around a $1,000 per year. The changes only cost him around $7,500 thanks to state and federal grants and tax credits (learn more at www.dsireusa.org). Tidwell says that over 100,000 American homeowners enjoy the cost effective rooftop photovoltaic (PV) solar panels and hot water systems. Also a million village homes in the developing world enjoy modest electrical power from small solar panels.

Tidwell believes America can cut its consumption of oil, coal and natural gas in a matter of months without sacrificing an ounce of comfort.

Because of conservation, hybrid engines, commercial wind farms, biofuels, and lighter vehicle frames Europe is twice as efficient and clean. Although they use half the energy per capita as the United States they are pushing for more cuts while continuing to grow Europe's biggest national economy.

Tidwell says most of our nations problems¾ health, national security, the economy and the environment flow from our national energy choices. Are we in America going to stubbornly stick to the use of fossil fuels even if it kills us?

ripping good read
Tidwell's argument is simple: we created the damage Katrina caused, and we are going to create more destruction to coastal cities, by bulldozing, filling, removing the natural protections against storm surges. The book rips right along in making this argument--I would call it an "enjoyable" read except that he is so dead serious about the issue. As a part-time resident of Long Island, I have to hope he is wrong, and he certainly presents no counter-evidence (this is NOT a scientific book), but I fear he probably is right. The high tides out where I live have risen a good foot in the past forty years...

Climate Change is Real
The flooding of New Orleans resulted from a combination of effects: subsiding land, sea level increase, destruction of protecting wetlands, and of course a violent storm. Tidwell's thesis is that sea level will continue to rise and tropical storms and hurricanes will increase in intensity, all as a result of climate change. The entire East Coast of the United States will be as vulnerable as was New Orleans. Most of Miami and the rest of Florida average just a few feet above sea level. While New York City is mostly on higher ground, the author observes that the infrastructure, the subways system for example, is well below ground.

As world temperatures rise, melting or collapsing glaciers will add water to the ocean. Higher world temperatures will also mean that the water already in the ocean will expand and cause an additional rise in the sea level. Thus, land that is today at or slightly above sea level will become land that is below sea level. Certainly, whether or not storms grow more intense (this is still being debated in the scientific community), global warming will increase the level of the ocean. All of our coastal cities may go the way of New Orleans.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report in which it stated that the Earth is warming and that most of the warming is a result of human activity. This is also the overwhelming view of the scientific community. My first encounter with the effects of global warming was a hike in the 1980s to the foot of the Paradise Glacier on Mt. Ranier to visit the ice caves. I was disappointed to find that the famous caves were mostly gone. The caves had disappeared because the glacier itself was retreating. We now know that glaciers all over the world are melting. A recent headline caught my eye; "Iceberg off New Zealand becomes tourist mecca," AP, November 21, 2006. The residents of New Zealand could look out their windows to see pieces of Antarctica floating by.

It is not clear what it will take to get our US government to take steps to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. We have already lost one major city. Will we have to see a few more go before we take action? Tidwell does a good job of presenting the need for individual and governmental action.

I also recommend "With Speed and Violence" by Fred Pearce. a book about recent scientific investigations and their implications for global warming.