Robert E. Lee and Climate Change

Before Robert E. Lee was one of our nations greatest tactical generals, he was one of our greatest engineers.  From 1831 to 1846, Lee was an engineer working in places as apart as Virginia, Saint Louis, Missouri, and New York City.  As for almost every officer in the Engineer Corps, water was his chief opponent.  His work as an engineer taught him many things that would make him a great general.  Michael Korda, in the excellent Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee, points out a key lesson:

"Anybody who has ever lived near the sea, a river, or a large body of water knows its latent power.  If there was one thing the experience taught Lee it was a determined, patient, almost serene state of mind in facing impossible odds - an attitude that never failed to amaze and impress his subordinates.  He had learned it in a hard school - the corps did not accept failure or excuses, however big the task.

With the potential of rising sea levels, stronger storms, and more extreme climate changes, water is again shaping up to be a strong opponent for engineers this century.  From too little water in Texas, to too much water in places like Miami and San Francisco, engineering associated with how we manage water resources will be critical.  The language will sound much like a war - what will be the best engineering solution to economically defend certain coastlines and communities?  In other communities, an orderly retreat will be the only alternative.  Many engineers will need the tactical skills of a Lee as they battle water on local and regional fronts.  Others will need the strategic vision of a Grant as we combine and coordinate resources on a national level.  Both types of engineers must be comfortable with the odds and uncertainties associated with our coming water wars.

From Clouds of Glory:

"If family history, a West Point education, an intense and personal admiration for George Washington, and a happy marriage formed a significant part of Robert E. Lee's character hydraulics supplied another.

The science of hydraulics was of course part of the curriculum at West Point, and it was the heart and soul of the Corps of Engineers in peacetime, indeed the engineers' very raison d'etre.  Their enemy was water: the storms and tides of the sea, the currents and flooding of the great rivers, the navigability of lakes, all these were their responsibility.  They deepened and maintained harbors, often where nature had never intended a harbor to be placed; they built canals and locks; they drained marshland; they removed sandbanks and dredged channels to make great rivers navigable for steamboats where not so very long ago the occasional Indian birch bark canoe had been the only vessel; they built levees to prevent rivers form flooding cities and farmland, drew up maps, and constructed massive fortresses to protect the American coastline in places so close to the sea that no sane man would have dared to build a house there.  What is more, they did all this with nothing much more than picks, shovels, sledgehammers, and crowbars as tools, a task bigger than the building of the Pyramids, which were at least on solid ground - the creation of a modern infrastructure for a virgin continent.  They had been at it since 1779 in war and in peace, and no project was too ambitious or difficult for them; the engineers proceeded at their own slow, steady pace, although underfunded, poorly paid, and grudgingly promoted, challenging nature and transforming the American landscape."