Road to ruin
America produces a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, the population has risen by 100 million since 1970 and when an area three times the size of Britain was recently opened up for mining, drilling, logging and road building, no one took much notice. What does the Bush administration do? It ignores all attempts to curb environmental damage. In a major investigation that took him from the Salton Sea in California to Crooked Creek in Florida, Matthew Engel reports on how America is ravaging the planet

This is what local agents call "a very nice market", and last month their area had a week of free worldwide publicity. Hurricane Isabel swept in, washing out much of the islands' only road and picking up motels from their foundations and tossing them, according to one report, "like cigarette butts". One island was turned into several islets, with a whole town, Hatteras Village, being cut off from the rest of the US - for ever, if nature has its way.

Residents, journalists reported, were in shock. Many scientists were not. Speaking well before Isabel, Dr Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of geology at Duke University in North Carolina, described the Outer Banks property boom to me as "a form of societal madness". "I wouldn't buy a house on the front row of the Outer Banks. Or the second," agreed Dr Stephen Leatherman, who is such a connoisseur of American coastlines that he is known as Dr Beach.

For the market is not the only thing that has been rising round here. Like other experts, Pilkey expects the Atlantic to inundate the existing beaches "within two to four generations". Normally, that would be no problem for the sands, which would simply regroup and re-form further back. Unfortunately, that is no longer possible: the $2m houses are in the way. According to Pilkey, the government will either have to build millions of dollars worth of seawall, which will destroy the beach anyway, or demolish the houses. "Coastal scientists from abroad come here and just shake their heads in disbelief," he says.

The madness of the Outer Banks seems like a symptom of, and a metaphor for, something far broader: the US is in denial about what is, beyond any question, potentially its most dangerous enemy. While millions of words have been written every day for the past two years about the threat from vengeful Islamic terrorists, the threat from a vengeful Nature has been almost wholly ignored. Yet the likelihood of multiple attacks in the future is far more certain.
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