lagoon's edge and ordered two cups of cappuccino. It was a glorious day, warm, sparkling, and timeless. Other than the mammoth vacation cruise liner that momentarily blocked our view as it glided stately by, it could have been 1850. Or 1750. Or older.
Venice has been in business for 1500 years, we noted, surviving all sorts of travails - war, oppression, occupation, disease, tourists. It flourished too for a quite a while, before entering an inevitable decline (despite its legendary status today, Venice is still shedding residents). It is a resilient city, in other words - which is more than one can say about any number of other cities around the globe that had their roots in the 9th century AD.
That's rather impressive, we thought, sipping our coffee - and probably instructive too. Why did Venice survive when other cities collapsed? What makes a city resilient?
This raised another question: how long can Venice maintain its resilience in the Age of Consequences? Ten feet from our chairs, the Adriatic Sea lapped gently against the quay. Much trouble lurks in those gentle waves, we thought. For many years, the main concern of Venetians was that their beloved city might sink into the sea. Venice was built atop millions of logs driven into a muddy lagoon centuries ago. The threat of sinking, as a result of this novel architectural strategy, became part of Venice's existence from the get-go. So did flooding (a month-and-a-half after our visit, Venice was hit by the fourth-worst flood since 1872; water rose 61 inches above normal, inundating St. Mark's Square in thigh-deep seawater for days).
But the worry these days is of rising, not sinking. If the predictions of climatologists are even partially correct, rising sea
levels resulting from melting glaciers will claim Venice as one of the first victims of global warming.
Although the threat was tangible to us, sitting there in chairs a few feet from the water's edge, it was hard to imagine such a fate on such a day as we were enjoying. Everything seemed perfect. The steady ebb and flow of people on the esplanade behind us, which appeared to include as many Italians as foreigners, was as timeless and unconcerned as the sea. The bells in the square rang out as they always had and the sun shone as contentedly on this day as it would a century from now. The wheel of time added one more quiet click to its endless progression. We finished our cappuccinos and surveyed our world in silence.
All was well.
That's humanity's conundrum, of course. Our mind tells us one thing - that we're doing insane things to the planet - while a peaceful breeze caresses our faces. As Gen often notes, one could argue that all of the history of western civilization has aimed for this precise moment: comfort, security, freedom, and really good coffee (for many of us, anyway). Humanity worked hard to get here, doing many wonderful, and terrible, things along the way. And here we are, enjoying the hard-earned fruits of our forbearers' labors.
We won't let go of them without a fight.
Does that mean Venice's fate is sealed? I don't know. What I can say with confidence, however, is that reconciling what we know with what we feel may well be the greatest challenge we face in the Age of Consequences.
