Years of poor land-use decisions and neglect of emergency preparedness probably made the losses of life and property from superstorm Sandy significantly worse. Similar situations exist in other U.S. coastal areas.
Freelance writer and photographer Roger Archibald tells the tale of the 2012 Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition, which sought to reclaim a tenuous natural migratory route that the state’s surviving endemic wildlife might once again follow.
"For more than a century, for good or ill, New Jersey has led the nation in coastal development. Many of the barrier islands along its coast have long been lined by rock jetties, concrete sea walls or other protective armor. Most of its coastal communities have beaches only because engineers periodically replenish them with sand pumped from offshore. Now much of that sand is gone."
"Every time a storm brings flooding to a large metropolitan area, there are calls to improve the levee systems that are designed to prevent flooding."
"Superstorm Sandy delivered only a glancing blow to Delaware, but it brought new focus on man’s attempts to manage nature, to hold back the sea."
"PARIS — The hammer blow dealt to New York by superstorm Sandy should raise the alarm for coastal mega-cities in Asia which are more exposed but less equipped to deal with such threats, experts said on Tuesday."
"More than 20,000 high-temperature records have been broken so far this year in the United States. And the heat is especially bad in cities, which are heating up about twice as fast as the rest of the planet."
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