After yesterday’s post on the beauty of our beaches, it was distressing to read a long, detailed and complex article in today’s New York Times on climate and rising sea levels: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/science/earth/14ice.html?_r=1&hp. It is of course a threat to major cities around the world and even whole countries, but my thoughts were more narrowly focused on the place I know and love, the Hamptons. Projecting from what scientists predict globally, life as we know it here could be radically different by the end of the 21st century. Wetlands and low-lying areas—vast parts of Eastern Long Island —might be inundated, and the kind of storm that appears once a century or so, like the hurricane of 1938, might become a regular occurrence.
It is dreadful to think that our villages and hamlets, which have been evolving since their settlement in the mid seventeenth century, could be altered beyond our imagination. I remember how thrilling it was in 1998 when East Hampton celebrated its 350th anniversary (technically, our sesquarcentennial or semiseptcentennial) and Main Street was entirely closed to cars for a day while we strolled around, greeting one another, happily celebrating our past and our present, taking the future for granted. Now, I wonder, what will it be like 2098?