Emotions give us stronger reasons than reason.

My most vivid motivations for worrying about climate change are

Cuttyhunk Pond, MA,    St. Helena Island, SC,    and the  Norfolk Broads, UK.

These are places I’ve loved and taken for granted all my life. I can’t bear to think of their slow destruction.

As a teenager with my brothers I cruised the New England coast for weeks at a time in a 25′ gaff-rigged sloop.

My English wife and I sailed an even smaller boat around the British Isles before we were married.

And I rowed the coast of New England in an 18′ dory, camping on beaches and islands.

Mostly in shallow water, we traveled slowly along the sand and rock and grassy mud flats that make up the beautiful margin between land and sea.

Climate models tell us that the parts of the world’s coastline as low-lying as these will be inundated. It seems silly, perhaps irresponsible, to worry about unpopulated marshland. There are other, bigger, reasons to prevent sea-level rise, starting with half of Bangladesh and all of Houston.

But the viscreal feeling of losing the beaches, the shallow coves, the eelgrass-lined estuaries of my youth – that feeling gets to me like nothing else.

So I confess I worry – I hope needlessly – about them.

I suspect you have your own special places you worry about too. Tell us about them.