S T C E P S PRO
How to De-Develop in an Age of Fire and Flood Much is riding on how Americans approach new development and managed retreat as the climate crisis worsens over the next decade. By Gabrielle Gurley The optimism that greeted the pandemic’s temporary decrease in global emissions has now all but evaporated. Planet Earth is on a trajectory to breach the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius warming frontier at some time in the next five years. Beyond that marker, human and animal life will be in greater peril. The historic rains now flooding the northern reaches of Yellowstone National Park, an early wildfire season, and a projected above-average hurricane season all point to the urgent need to drop climate incrementalism for strategies that recast urban and rural built environments in an overheating world. Radical new perspectives on the climate crisis promise to realign expectations about where humans can live and how they can confront a dizzying array of increasingly severe events: sunny-day f looding, hurricanes, bizarre rain- and snowstorms, and wildfires. Managed retreat—that is, responding to such cataclysms by entire neighborhoods or small towns picking up and moving, by downshifting development in once-desirable areas, by letting other areas return to nature—is clearly a controversial idea today. But within the next decade, state and local governments will have pointed residents and developers in the direction of survival. Far from the cacophony of international climate conclaves, some cities and towns are gingerly adapting to the extremes of heat and cold, fire and water. These places are adopting strategies to manage development and recast collective mindsets about what it means to abandon places and lifestyles developed and inculcated over decades. Ceding neighborhoods (or more) to nature— a course still largely viewed as extreme— will become a regular feature of planning regimes within a decade. 28 PROSPECT.ORG AUGUST 2022
Managed retreat has simple, if hard-toaccept, goals. One of them is ending haphazard development in areas repeatedly hit by storms. Removing one million homes from the nation’s floodplains could save the country $1 trillion (even though the estimated cost of compensating the homeowners is nearly $200 billion). Residential areas and business districts on gorgeous coastlines or in the middle of forests are often some of the most dangerous and expensive places to build. Such beauty spots provide property tax
revenues and tourism dollars, which is one reason why municipalities are unwilling to summon the political willpower to say no to well-connected developers, or to settled, inflexible residents who also vote. No one in harm’s way wants to move, since tragedies happen to other people—until their own home floods. For decades, developers have called the shots in built environments, rebuilding in floodplains or in the seam between inhabited areas and forests because they can. But constant rebuilding in threatened places is
