As Detroit settles into Fall, predictions are for a wet, warm season. For many of us, this shifting weather means an increased chance of flooding. Roads quickly become impassable, sewerage backs up, and our drinking water suffers from toxic run offs of all sorts. We are still recovering from spring and summer downpours that cost us at least $140 million.  

Recently, the First Street Foundation published “The Third National Flood Risk Assessment: Infrastructure on the Brink,” to highlight the human, social, and physical dangers we face as waters rise. It is a sobering study, beginning with the statement that one-fourth of the United States critical infrastructure is at risk of flooding. The report emphasizes that homes, utilities, hospitals, airports, emergency systems, streets, schools and government buildings are all at increasing levels of risk. Flooding is simply the most expensive natural disaster we face, costing the country $1 trillion since 1980.

The report notes, "The impact of Hurricane Ida stretched across the country, crippling the electrical grid in southern Louisiana, flooding the transportation infrastructure in the NYC metro area, and killing nearly 100 people. It is clear, now more than ever, that the ways and places in which we live are likely to continue to be impacted by our changing environment."

Cities are at special risk of flooding. Detroit is increasingly so, both by our own actions and in actions, and by those of our neighbors. While there is a growing awareness of the need to upgrade and repair basic infrastructure, including pipelines and water delivery systems, these efforts evade the larger question of the scale of urbanization and suburbanization that we are creating. Key to the development of urban/suburban living in the destruction of water ecosystem. We bury rivers, streams and lakes to make way for homes and industry. We fill in wet lands,  to hold our garbage. We shape and reshape the landscape disrupting the delicate balances that would protect and nurture us if we learned to live in greater harmony with the life around us.

From 1800 to 2005 much of Southeast Michigan was urbanized by destroying wetlands. Wayne County lost at least 90% of its wetlands, Macomb 86% and Oakland more than 41%. The loss of these lands, to hold water, purify it, and slowly release it, contributes to our current problem. State policies encourage the destruction of wetlands. In the last 20 years nearly 3000 permits for wetland development have been issued by the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) in the tri county area. Only 90 have been denied. 

In 2020 EGLE approve the permit for Waste Management to expand their land fill in Van Buren Township into one of the most critical wetlands in the ecosystem.

Along with the destruction of wetlands, urbanization has meant the burial of living streams and rivers. Detroit is considered the most extreme example of this practice, having lost 86% of its river network and covered nearly 60% of its land surface with impervious materials.

These trends can be reversed. We can restore wetlands, uncover streams and remove concrete. We can live in ways that are both sustainable and regenerative. But to pretend that simply changing some pipes and fixing a few lines will stop rising waters of destruction, is foolish. We need to think much more radically about how we can live. Our survival depends on it.