Don’t let Beantown become a has-been town.

Buckle your seatbelts: it’s going to be a wet ‘n’ wild ride. That’s the prediction — or, rather, the certainty — that today’s global warming carries. Erratic and unpredictable weather is en route, and coastal areas are among the places destined to be hardest hit. So why are Americans paying so little heed?

As scientists and weather pundits survey the winds of change destined to bounce our thermostats and pivot our climate, the political will of the nation seems becalmed. With change now the constant, it is high time and high tide to contemplate the fate of the half of our population who live on the nation’s coasts.

Recently, an EPA-funded study predicted that massive coastal flooding could radically alter the landscape of Boston, my home city, by the end of this century. The Hub, which prides itself on the “if-you-don’t-like-it-wait-a-minute” changeability of its weather, is not alone: the East Coast’s problem is America’s predicament, and the world’s. Alas, few U.S. residents have yet to seriously consider the message.

“We should take serious steps and a multifaceted approach now if we’re going to avoid trouble a century from now,” said Conservation Law Foundation head Philip Warburg in response to the 160-page report, which not only underscored the coming threat, but included graphics showing how surging seas would affect some of the city’s streets and landmarks. “We need an industrial-scale renewal.”

For all the efforts of Warburg and others, the study seemed to galvanize neither city officials nor citizens. I heard not a word on, say, patching the battered Charles River Dam Bridge, nor on combating an overflowing Charles River or Boston Harbor. Not a word about preventing distress to the institutions facing a soggy tomorrow, including Mass General Hospital, the Public Garden, and the Esplanade. Not a nod to a city’s worth of historic structures built on mudflats, nor plans to protect the already-leaky Big Dig tunnel, which houses the city’s major artery, or the vulnerable subway nearby.

Indeed, an opposing attitude toward the shores prevails. Real-estate pages throughout New England and elsewhere continue to feature developer portraits of forthcoming buildings jutting toward the ocean, as if the future were a mirage. To be realistic, these seaside images should portray ground-floor tenants peering through their underwater windows, eyeball to eyeball with passing fish and flapping seaweed.

Though developers are missing the boat, scientists are stepping in. In January, a gathering at the New York Academy of Sciences discussed the toll of climate change on their sea-wrapped metropolis, and the literal barriers that might ward it off. What’s an island “nation” like Manhattan to do in the face of rising waters and storm surges? This was the question posed by Douglas Hill, an engineer who edited The Baked Apple: Metropolitan New York in the Greenhouse almost a decade ago, and is still (and maybe more) anxious today. Hill and Malcolm Bowman, an oceanography professor from the State University of New York-Stony Brook, shared the platform to discuss the chances of protecting the populated urban shore.

Their presentation offered a glimpse of tomorrow’s weather events, when hurricanes, packing the extra wallop of the changed climate, would combine with rising waters. That mounting height and flooding would construct an inescapable situation, Hill observed. “When do you plan for a flood?” the scientist-scholar asked. The answer to this classic question: “Too late.”

When in foam, do as the Venetians do.

Attempts to defend these fragile shores are getting off the ground in places — from New Bedford, Mass., which has long relied upon a rocky hurricane barrier, to New Orleans, which struggles to find ways to protect its precarious perch below sea level. In Europe, Venice introduced adjustable barriers to prevent tidal flooding. The Netherlands, a parent of water protection, has constructed barricades, places for inland flow to run off safely, and even amphibious houses that bob up and down as the seas come and go, Hill pointed out.

But barriers are not enough. We need to be creative about alternatives, endorsing efforts like the New England governors’ and eastern Canadian premiers’ work to implement CO2 reductions, and Portland, Ore.’s success in shrinking emissions to levels of a decade and a half ago. We need fossil-fuel alternatives and conservation, not rich self-protectionists tiffing at offshore wind turbines. We should, as Warburg says, pursue an industrial-scale energy shift, and we must reduce consumption. We must mitigate and guard against rising seas. And though Washington retreats, this nation — which contributes 25 percent of the world’s carbon emissions — should, at the very least, join the rest of the industrial world in following the Kyoto Protocol.

If we protect our shores, we protect ourselves. The need is great, and the only thing weirder than the weather is the fear or myopia that stops us from acting. If our Wordsworthian “getting and spending” chokes our initiative as it has cloaked our world, then we’ll have sunk our planet — and ourselves.

Image: NARA.

Abroad, my Polish cousin, a secret agent, did underground duty in Paris. My uncle, a bombardier, flew the B-17s of “Bloody Hundredth” fame, while his wife worried and wrote and volunteered and his sister sent her sewing machine to the Red Cross. That was the war on the home front.

In the larger nation, Rosie became a riveter and anybody who wanted just a little bit of butter with their bread got white margarine accompanied by a coloring tube. Conservation of rubber, metal, and gas was the order of the day. And this (no need to say) was small potatoes compared to those in the trenches dreaming of a white — or maybe just a safe — Christmas.

So here we are at holiday time on a home front, now called the “homeland,” and today’s commanding general is exhorting us all to consume. Since the World Trade Center collapsed and the economy hit the skids, the call to buy, buy, buy could power enough hot air to send Santa into orbit. In the culminating moment, the president and the ex-president joined hands across the mall over Thanksgiving. George and Bill, Together at Last! Uniting jingos and jingoism, the two plumped for anything but abstinence, seeking salvation far from their ancestor’s axiom –”use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” as they urged patriots to shop, not save, for victory.

Image: NARA.

Not that World War II’s “greatest generation” was all that great. The post-World War II heroes came home to trash the cities and spread houses and concrete over fields and wetlands. Via Veteran Administration mortgages to 10 million vets and mortgage insurance to the entire nation, via highways and more highways, they celebrated victory with profligacy. While that made us fat and happy, it launched the worst human degradation of the continent in history — and with it, the envy and anger of the world, where absolute poverty is the lot of 1 billion, hunger of 3 billion, and death through starvation of 60 million every year.

Now I don’t want to cool the passion to “keep America rolling,” as the GM ad puts it. But I, like many others adrift in the media tales of shattered lives at home and throughout the globe, wonder what this buy-first bromide can bring us. Where exactly are we rolling to in this freedom-through-capitalism (never mind spiritualism) post-Sept.11 era? The great American marketplace has left an immense footprint on the Earth and made us prey to oil-mongers. And still we continue to push for more nuclear plants and filthy fuels to fabricate the artifacts of affluence.

Enough, as the magazine for the Center for the New American Dream puts it.

was fought to make the world safe for democracy; World War II for ourselves and our allies. Is this new breed of war being fought simply to make the world safer for consumption? We have been spending and spending and wheeling and dealing, and whimpering that nobody likes us any more. And now, as we bail out the airlines and bust their workers; as we subsidize the oil imperialists and slice the environmental budget, some of us find that we don’t like ourselves or our government anymore, either.

At home in a state of suspended anxiety, some are beginning to question the voraciousness behind our “buy-first” presidential prayer. Instead of taking our supersized SUVs to our mammoth malls, spinning down our sprawl-breeding superhighways, scrimping on saving, and spending on swallowing the landscape, wouldn’t it be better to shine the headlights on the dangers of this quest for “victory” abroad through gluttony at home? Isn’t it time to inscribe Jack Kerouac’s classic question on our holiday cards this year: “Whither thou goest, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”