Thursday marked the beginning of the 2006 hurricane season, one that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts will be "above normal," with four to six major hurricanes expected to form in the Atlantic — storms that could make landfall anywhere from Boston to Galveston.

Everyone agrees that we're into a decades-long cycle of intensified Atlantic hurricanes linked to a periodic 1-degree warming in the North Atlantic. Add an additional degree of ocean warming since 1970 from man-made carbon-dioxide emissions and you have the makings of a hurricane cycle that may never return to a more tranquil phase. Yet when it comes to the way we live in hurricane territory, we're stuck in the 1970s and 1980s, when a lull in storm activity aided and abetted unprecedented development along the Atlantic Seaboard, helping assure that 17 of the 20 fastest-growing counties in the U.S. were coastal.

Florida, which was lucky last year in comparison with Louisiana and Mississippi, is still a poster child for hurricane devastation. Flying into Fort Lauderdale, it looks like someone scattered blue Chiclets across the landscape. That's how many blue tarps cover roofs blown away by Hurricane Wilma last October. At the Broward County courthouse, windows are still covered in plywood eight months after the storm.

What might be called "early greenhouse century" hubris abounds. A woman I met in Key West told me about her retired parents who had to flee their home four times in the past two years. Instead of moving, they're investing in an "evacuation RV" so they can flee the next storm in comfort. And in Miami, the skyline is swarming with construction cranes as developers build high-rise condos as close to the ocean as possible. Congress has approved funding that will allow the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay off $23 billion in property claims from last year's storms without making any commitment to reforming the flood insurance program. The levees in New Orleans are being rebuilt to something like pre-Katrina levels of safety, again paid for with federal money. The Bush administration and the Department of Homeland Security have been bragging about the pre-positioning of emergency relief supplies. Yet federal policymakers continue to ignore the causal factors that transform major storms into human catastrophes, such as the loss of protective wetlands and coastal sprawl.

So far, none of the tens of billions of dollars of hurricane relief funding that have gone into the Gulf region has been earmarked for wetlands restoration. Wetlands in Mississippi and Louisiana historically have acted as effective hurricane buffers. One often-cited Army Corps of Engineers study found that every 2 1/2 miles of marshes and trees reduce storm surge by a foot. But in the 1990s, Biloxi wetlands were replaced by floating casinos and waterfront development. And in Louisiana, Hurricane Katrina destroyed 118 square miles of wetlands and barrier islands on top of the average 30 square miles of wetlands lost every year in recent decades because of dredging and subsidence from Corps of Engineers and oil industry operations. "Even though I'm fairly jaded, I thought we'd have found the courage and the vision to at least begin the process of restoration, but so far nothing has changed," said Mark Davis, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, a private group that has spent a decade pushing a $14 billion plan to bring back the wetlands.

Congress also has failed to show the courage to stand up to the coastal real-estate developers lobby, and some coastal homeowners, and implement needed change. Proposals have included limiting federal flood insurance to owner-occupants rather than second-home owners and owners of rental properties, moving to a real-market insurance rate (rather than a subsidized one) for high-risk properties, and extending areas that require flood insurance to cover a wider zone of potential destruction. With a FEMA study suggesting one in four homes built within 500 feet of the ocean will be destroyed in the next 45 years, a new approach is needed to discourage shoreline and barrier-island construction and to encourage a planned retreat from along our coasts.

The facts are simple. The best available science tells us that we're faced with a projected sea-level rise and an increase in Category 4 and 5 hurricanes. We need a pragmatic approach to a changed reality. Those who think they can rebuild in harm's way using the same assumptions that worked in the last century, or who believe they can manage nature by stockpiling generators and water bottles, are living a dangerous fantasy. Unfortunately, theirs is a fantasy we're all having to pay for.

David Helvarg is president of the Blue Frontier Campaign and author of "50 Ways to Save the Ocean" and "Blue Frontier: Dispatches From America's Ocean Wilderness." He wrote this commentary for the Los Angeles Times.