Discussion
Down the southern end of our road is the sea, the Solent, the English Channel – or La Manche if you’re waving from a Normandy beach.
It’s a little over 200m from our house.
Until earlier this year, you could walk to the top of the road and see the sea from where you stood.
Across the Esplanade, the crumbling promenade, the shingle poured onto the beach to stop the sand longshore drifting into the Channel, and there it would be, doing its thing.
But now, a wall of concrete…
…You can stand at the top of our road and look at rising accessible walkways of concrete leading up to the now raised and repaved promenade. About 1.5 metres higher than before.
And somewhere behind that is the predicament, the sea.
I’m grateful. Living in a ‘strategically important’ naval city means we get to have money thrown at our locale to stop inundation. For a bit.
But £150 million later, much more is obscured than just the sea, still sucking shingle from the beach…
…Obscured are the carbon emissions that have gone into mixing and pouring the concrete, hauled into place with machinery that runs on that most valuable of deep-time derivatives that’s running out: diesel.
Obscured only because we have no evolutionarily-selected senses with which to ‘see’ the vast quantities of CO2 we are shitting into the air with our valiant ‘tech’…
…Obscured is the masterplan designed over a decade ago, when a 1m to 1.5m uplift would protect Portsmouth for “the next 100 years”.
Before we ‘bounced back’ from COVID.
Obscured is the clustering of years since then in which we can now raise the average surface temperature of our entire planet annually by more than 1/10th of a degree, while telling ourselves that “every 1/10th of a degree matters”.
But not this year, eh? Cos there’s a need for “growth [of carbon emissions] in every postcode”…
…Obscured is the mid-Century future when Portsmouth will probably have succeeded in not being inundated – Huzzah! – but we will have collapsed the oh so precious economy, and those who survive will be asking “What did we do this for”?
But they’ll be able to walk along the still robust promenade and not know that when people moved here at the turn of the millennium they could just stand at the top of the road with their young children and see the sea without having to ascend concrete…
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