In a single week in July, more than 100 million Americans, from Massachusetts to Arizona, were subjected to excessive heat warnings or notices temperatures have soared into the triple digits. Thousands of people were forced to evacuate their homes in California as the Oak Fire burned near Yosemite National Park. And at least 100 people had to be rescued when record rains flooded St. Louis, Mo.
“Everywhere, the weather, the sky, the water, even the land on which we have built our homes, is becoming unruly,” writes Madeline Ostrander, in her new book Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth. Ostrander, a Seattle-based science journalist, is interested in what happens to our sense of place and stability when the rhythms and seasons that characterize these places change.
To answer this question, she spent time in four communities on the front lines of the climate crisis: a small rural community in Washington recovering from a wildfire, a historic town on the Florida coast in the grappling with rising sea levels, an industrial factory town in the Bay Area whose residents live in the shadow of an oil refinery, and a Native village in Alaska that is being uprooted by permafrost erosion.
“In a way, I could have picked almost anywhere and told the story of how people are coping with the impacts of climate change because it’s happening everywhere,” Ostrander told me. The people she interviews are all faced with impossible decisions. A firefighter wonders if he should break up with his crew to try to save his family home from an encroaching wildfire. A Native Alaskan community navigates to higher ground as the river level rises.
“Today, more and more communities need to ask these questions about what climate change means to them,” Ostrander said. “This is their house. These are the things that matter to them.
—Danielle Renwick
Then, in 2010, I started spending a lot of time speaking with environmental justice groups. They were thinking about climate change in a much more local and tangible way, looking at disasters like Hurricane Katrina and having conversations like, “What does this mean for us?” and “How can we build resilience in our own communities?” »
They were doing a lot of really interesting, creative, very tangible things, and I felt that conversation was so much more powerful and immediate. Today, more and more communities have to ask themselves these questions about what climate change means for them. This is their house. These are the things that matter to them.
DR: You feature a firefighter in the Washington countryside; a historical curator in St. Augustine, Florida; a farmer in Richmond, California; and a Native community in Alaska. How did you choose the communities you reported on?
MO: The communities in the book tend to be small to medium sized communities. I think in smaller communities there is sometimes a more immediate dialogue between the people making the decisions and the people on the ground.
Big cities like New York or Seattle, where I live, have significant resources to devote to climate resilience. But small coastal communities like St. Augustine have to make tough choices about what to save because they have fewer resources.
DR: What are some of those tough decisions?
MO: In St. Augustine, city officials asked, “What can we afford to do as sea levels rise, so we can continue to deal with flooding? The city’s former mayor met with Senator Marco Rubio to ask if the Army Corps of Engineers could study what it would take to build major infrastructure, like Venice, Italy’s sluice system , although the gates of Venice are controversial.
A project like this is beyond the scope of what many places are going to be able to afford, and it may never be feasible for a place like St. Augustine.
Instead, the city is making choices on small steps to minimize flooding. Can we start raising the streets a bit so we have some extra strength against moderate storms and some hurricanes? Can we remove some parcels of flood-prone land and build flood control structures? Some of these efforts are controversial and none will ever be enough to save everything.
DR: How has the climate crisis changed your own sense of belonging?
MO: When I first moved to Seattle in the mid-2000s, people were talking about how the Pacific Northwest was going to be isolated from climate change. It would become a refuge for climate migrants, because we are surrounded by water and we had this very mild climate. But in recent years, we have found that we are not isolated. We are extremely affected by wildfire smoke and had the terrible heat dome event last summer.
It also impacted my thoughts on whether to start a family – I still don’t have any kids.
DR: The Covid-19 pandemic has made our lives increasingly online, and remote work has made many American workers more transient. How does this phenomenon affect the way you think about home?
MO: Another challenge is that a lot of resilience comes from knowing your community. There are a number of different studies, including work by sociologist Eric Klinenberg, which has shown that, for example, during a heat wave, even in very vulnerable places where there are many elderly and low-income people who cannot necessarily afford air conditioning, knowing your neighbors and being able to watch over them greatly reduces the [health] impact of the heat wave.
Having connections in your community makes it easier for you to respond and be resilient in the face of a disaster. So I fear that this disconnect will make us less resilient.
DR: Did the people you interviewed for this book talk about how climate disasters have changed them emotionally?
MO: For many of the people I write about, when they begin to feel the effects of climate change in their homes, it puts the spotlight on what matters to them. I think that’s the best possible answer: our homes are starting to change and that puts the focus on what we care about and what kind of future we want to have.
In less than ideal circumstances, it can be truly destabilizing – economically, socially, community and personally – when people lose their homes or feel unsafe or uncomfortable in their homes. There are profound implications for mental and physical health, and I think we are underestimating how profoundly this crisis is impacting people.
DR: What did you learn from the people you interviewed that have had an impact on how you deal with the climate crisis?
MO: I think we tend to define hope as the search for reassurance that everything will be fine if we just do the right thing. But the people I talked to didn’t necessarily think of it that way. They just knew they loved those places, they loved their communities, and they loved a particular landscape or a particular place. And if you love something, you’re ready to fight for it. You are ready to do whatever you can to try to protect this place and keep it a good place.
When we think about the climate crisis, perhaps it’s more important to ask not just how do we have hope, but what do we really love most in the world? What do we care about? And are we ready to fight for it? To me, that’s more motivating than the question of hope, and I think that’s what motivates a lot of people I’ve written about.