|
Purchase at: |
Reviews of |
|
By FRANCIS X. ROCCA Venice is sinking and always has been. When refugees from barbarian invasions first abandoned the Italian mainland for the Venetian lagoon in the fifth century, the sedimentary mud they stepped on had been compacting for thousands of years. And the rising Adriatic, fed for some 20 millennia by melting Alpine glaciers, was already encroaching. Thus the builders of the Most Serene Republic, in the words of the historian John Julius Norwich, sank "their foundations into shifting sands." The city's slow descent has become part of its poetic myth, lending poignancy to the tourist fairyland of canals and gondoliers. Anticipating its disappearance, Lord Byron foretold: "A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls./ A loud lament along the sweeping seas." The art critic John Ruskin called Venice "a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak -- so quiet -- so bereft of all but her loveliness." In art and literature, this sense of inexorable decline has blended naturally with the air of exquisite decadence that clings to the city of Casanova. Thomas Mann famously saw in Venice a setting for disordering passion amid waters bringing pestilence and death. Floating Barriers Sinking has almost come to seem an eternal characteristic of the place, yet over the past century this ancient tendency has turned critical. As journalist John Keahey reports in "Venice Against the Sea" (St. Martin's/Thomas Dunne, 296 pages, $25.95), St. Mark's Square was inundated seven times in 1900 and 99 times in 1996. The worst flood in the city's history occurred on Nov. 4, 1966, when water more than 6 feet above sea level made 5,000 people homeless. Carcasses of cats, dogs and rats floated in the canals; electricity went out for a week; and the water turned black with spilled diesel fuel. This disaster inspired the founding of more than 30 organizations around the world, including Save Venice in the U.S., dedicated to preserving the city's art and architecture. After all, it could happen again, as bad or worse. Italy, too, is taking steps. In December, the government finally approved plans for a set of 79 floating barriers that will keep dangerously high tides out of Venice's lagoon. These hollow walls, 65 feet wide and up to 100 feet high, will ordinarily lie flat and filled with water on the floors of the channels connecting the lagoon and the sea. When necessary, the barriers will fill up with compressed air and rise on their hinges, far enough in just half an hour to keep out tides 10 feet above sea level. The barriers will sway back and forth, absorbing the waves' impact, until the danger is past, when they will refill with water and return to their usual hidden positions. The barrier idea was first proposed in 1970. Bureaucratic sclerosis partly explains the delay but so does the opposition of environmentalists, who believe that the barriers will upset the ecology of the lagoon and thereby poison it. One critic has denounced the so-called MOSE project (a technical acronym as well as the Italian name for the prophet who split the Red Sea) as an instance of "technology-driven artificialization." Yet, as Mr. Keahey recounts, the lagoon no less than the city owes its survival to artifice and technology. From the 14th through the 18th centuries, Venetians manipulated nature on a vast scale, diverting major rivers to keep the lagoon from silting up and building walls to stem erosion of the barrier islands between the lagoon and the sea. Industrial Threats The point was to preserve the city's strategic position, which was shielded from land and maritime attack; but independence ended with Napoleon's conquest in 1797, and the industrial age that followed did not respect the fragility of Venice and its lagoon. More channels for shipping, and deeper ones, boosted the influx of sea water, leading to higher tides. Tapping ground water under the lagoon accelerated the sinking of the land. But the industrial development most threatening to Venice, in Mr. Keahey's view, is one of world-wide scope: carbon-dioxide emissions that heat up the planet. According to a United Nations panel on climate change, to which the author repeatedly refers, sea levels could easily rise far enough in the coming century to keep St. Mark's Square under water year-round. Of course there are those who argue that the U.N. panel has overstated the effects of global warming. Bjorn Lomborg, the self-described "skeptical environmentalist," is only the most recent. Others have predicted far smaller sea rises and even cast doubt on the link between sea level and climate change. Mr. Keahey might have acknowledged their dissent. For whatever reason, the Adriatic is rising. But what to do about it? Mr. Keahey, after going over the problem and various proposed solutions in often redundant detail, comes to no conclusion of his own. He tells us that today's maintenance efforts -- dredging and repairing canals, raising the city's pavements, shoring up the edges of barrier islands -- are insufficient to keep St. Mark's Square dry without MOSE's floating barriers. But he also notes that the flooding he witnessed on a visit in November 2000, when unusual wind conditions raised the waters of the lagoon higher than those of the Adriatic, would have been even worse had the barriers been in place. So is Mr. Keahey for MOSE or against it? He doesn't say. Based on the evidence in "Venice Against the Sea," one can easily believe that the barriers, although very costly, would at least be better than nothing. The strongest objection to them -- that ever-higher tides would require so many closings as to prevent the natural ebb and flow that cleanses the lagoon of contaminants -- seems a defect that could be mitigated through trial and error. An even more fundamental question that Mr. Keahey raises without even trying to answer is: Why bother? Why spend billions of dollars saving an anachronism while, as Mr. Keahey puts it, "thousands die in raging floods in Mozambique and Bangladesh"? The best reply is to note the millions of people, many humble day-trippers, who visit Venice each year to glimpse the relics of civilization in a sublime state. And a precarious one. Mr. Rocca is a writer in Vicenza, Italy. -- The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2002 |