Tag: America

A living thing – the Barrier Islands of North Carolina

The only constant is the creed of the Barrier Islands of North Carolina according to marine scientist Orin Pilkey. In his introduction to this PBS documentary from the 1980s, Pilkey provocatively comments the image of beach houses slowly being swallowed by the sea with the following words: “For some this is a tragic and an ugly sight. But I think it’s beautiful. Because surrendering this house to the sea represents a bright promise for our future.” He later says “I’ve really come to think of these islands as living things. They are constantly responding in sensible and even intelligent ways to the forces of nature.”

Video link

The evocative title of the documentary refers to the slow movement of these islands over millennia. But as Pilkey makes clear, islands lie these will continue to move and need to move in order to sustain. So called “hard stabilization”, the effort to stabilize shore lines by sea walls and other massive concrete structures, Pilkey calls “a recipe for disaster”.

In contrast to today’s buildings and infrastructure the early settlements on the islands were much less permanent. Some of the early settler’s houses on these islands were equipped with a trap door in the house, in order to let flood water flow through to limit the damage to the house’s structure. Many houses were even built in ways, so that they could be easily moved away from the shore. Houses but also whole villages, like Diamond city, appeared and disappeared across the islands over the course of it’s history of settlement.

This film and Pilkeys argument are actually pre-climate-discourse at least as public opinion is concerned. This makes it a fascinating document of the development of environmental thought. Basically all the worries, warnings and arguments of today’s coastal climate adaptation discourse are here – but without sea level rise! It’s simply ill guided real estate development and false landscape planning.

Tides (2021)

“Tides” (alternative title “The Colony”) is a sci-fi movie from 2021 about a post-apocalyptic world at the moment the first human communities are about to re-settle again. The only territory suitable is a coastal strip that is covered by tides twice a day. The area is a tidal zone, not quite land and not quite sea, with little to no vegetation and natural shelter for the people to build a more permanent habitat.

The landscape and weather in the story are the same as on the location, the movie was filmed. “Tides” was largely filmed outdoors on the small island Neuwerk in the German Tidelands, situated between the estuaries of the rivers Weser and Elbe.

Neuwerk during low tide

Director Tim Fehlbaum explained in an interview how this landscape inspired the movie plot in the first place:

“For the outdoor scenes we went to the German Tidelands, which was where the idea for the film started. I’m a very visual director and my ideas often have a visual trigger. I had never been to the Tidelands and having grown up in the Swiss mountains being at the low point of Germany was eye-opening. Looking out at this expanse of water was so interesting because in an hour or so, everything you just saw becomes covered in water. The floods in the film are real, and they come in twice a day. Shooting there was exceedingly difficult because we could never shoot much longer than two or three hours, and I always wanted to keep shooting, but it becomes a question of minutes before the water is at your knees and suddenly up to your chest.”

You could say, the movie is really an exploration of this landscape and the living conditions and the atmosphere in tidal zones. That human renewal after the partial retreat and ecological meltdown takes place in such a tidal zone is interesting as it references this landscape as a realm of opportunity, transition and change – a liminal space full of potential rather than decay.

I find this inspirational in regard to our current situation of ecological and social transformation. Author Kim Stanley Robbinson made a similar reference to the “intertidal” as a space of opportunity and renewal when sketching his “Super Venice” in the post-apocalyptic novel “New York 2140” four years earlier. It is striking how both works are set in tidal zones, how both interpret them as spaces of renewal, and yet how radically different they paint this landscape. You can read my post on Robbinson’s book here.

Flood Memorabilia

In Germany as well as in many other countries, images of extreme floods often found their way on postcards. Here is a selection of postcards. (click on the image to find the online source)

1909

1910

1914

1920

1920

1929

2002

undated postcard from Tokyo, Japan

undated postcard from Panama, probably 1924

The “Lost River”

Ryan Goslings 2014 movie “Lost River” is most of all a portrait of urban decay and our fascination with decay in a broader sense. The film juxtaposes the stylized display of bodily mutilation and destruction in a Grand Guignol style cabaret on the one side and the at once slow and dramatic decay of urban environments in the US rust belt on the other.

While buildings on fire – an image particularly indicative of the Detroit situation in the 1980s and 1990s – or urban structures overgrown by vegetation are the two main visual ciphers for urban decay in the movie, a flooded town also plays a central role.

As one protagonist explains, the town is called Lost River, because a section of it was once purposefully submerged when a water reservoir was built. Beneath the river lie the remains of that city and also a prehistoric theme park. Pre-historic monsters are said to live in the deep water. The idea of a prehistoric past lurking underneath the water’s surface is reminiscent of J.G Ballard’s 1962 novel “Drowned World“, where global climate change and flooding causes nature to regress into an early state of evolution.

The movie pays little attention to this submerged town. Instead it effectively uses one rather simple image in several scenes: the street lights that stick out of the water and create an eerie sense of displacement and confusing proportions.

Dive to “Dryland”

In the post-apocalyptic action movie “Waterworld” from 1995, all human settlements have drowned as global warming has melted the ice caps. At the time in 1995, “Waterworld” was the most expensive movie ever made and it was not a huge success. Maybe the prospect of a drowned world was not a hot topic at the time? Or maybe open sea sailing and a virile but lonesome yachtsman boating around in the sunset was a too elitist scenario to appeal to a larger audience. (much of the movie appears like a tourism commercial for a Future-Punk-Cape Cod. It is still today regarded as one of Kevin Costner’s campier acting efforts.)

The plot, set in 2500, revolves around the quest for “Dryland” the mythical last unflooded piece of land. The lead character is a sailor with amphibic abilities, one of the first mutated humans to have adapted to live in waterworld. (He has small gills behind his ears and adnated toes.) Because of his abilities he is able to dive down to the drowned cities and bring back soil and other valuable objects that he trades above water without disclosing their origins. He thus strengthens the common believe in a hidden land above water and becomes a target for adventurers and pirates searching for Dryland.

Eventually he agrees to disclose the secret to his companion and takes her on a dive. At this point in the story, it becomes clear to the character that there is no sacred refuge to go to but that humanity is stranded on boats and floating cities with nowhere else to go. (As the plot continues they do however eventually find dry land, which pretty much turns the story from a drama to a soap opera.)

This is the scene of the dive to the drowned city and it is the only scene in the movie set in the drowned world.

“Waterworld” was clearly an effort in eco-fiction. The original script was written in the 1980’s. In 1989 the oil tank ship Exxon Valdez spilled it’s cargo off the coast of Alaska, causing the second largest oil spill in US history. In the 1995 movie the ship features prominently as the setting of the final fight between the mariner and the pirates. “Waterworld” was clearly informed by climate politics and the knowledge of continuous sea level rise already apparent in the 1980s and ’90s. It’s unfortunate that due to a questionable directing job and unconvincing plot twists the movie is today much less recognized for it’s political message than for it’s costly antics.

Atoll Settlement from Waterworld (1995)

Image of the swimming settlement in the movie “Waterworld” from 1995. The settlement is called “Atoll” in the movie but in fact it is a human made swimming construction. There is no natural land left known to the population of waterworld.

This sequence from the movie clearly shows the allusion to the Dutch cultural heritage with a windmill and a manually operated large weir mechanism featuring prominently.

Looming and Silent Cities

There is an optical phenomenon called looming in which objects at sea appear to be floating in the air above water level. In Spring 2021 such an image photographed went viral online.

(click n the image for article.)

Apparently this phenomenon was well known throughout history among coastal communities as it appears as a sign for bad luck in legends and myths. Along the German North Sea coast it is a common superstition that loomings announce severe floods and houses or cities that are seen that way will be submerged and lost. (see the post on vineta) It’s interesting to note that in the superstition the city is first elevated above and then submerged under the sea level.

This image is also a case of looming:

It shows lake Michigan apparently with the skyline of Chicago in the distance. “Due to the curvature of the earth, the city isn’t visible over the lake from here: the image is a refraction of the real skyline projected above the horizon. Like the boat in David Morris’s image, this is an example of ‘looming.” (National Geographic).

Similar illusions of floating cities also appear on land, particularly in arctic regions due to the extreme temperatures. During the gold rush in the 19. Century, reports of mysterious cityscapes became very popular. agical cities foating Cities floating above ground are also a popular topic in science fiction literature and film. There are numerous reports of travelers seeing city skylines appear out of the fog or above the ground, ofter referred to as “Silent Cities”.

Read the full article here.