Over the last 20 years, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, has failed to enforce a law that would have made U.S. cities and towns more resilient to the impacts of climate change, according to a recent federal investigation by the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security.
The law, the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, required that FEMA write regulations and create policies to encourage communities to prepare for natural disasters and rebuild their infrastructure after emergency events so it is more resilient, taking measures such as improving stormwater management or strengthening buildings against earthquakes. As part of this mandate, FEMA was supposed to restrict the amount of federal funds available to communities to repair repetitively damaged infrastructure from 75 percent to 25 percent of project cost. But instead, the new report shows the same bridges and roads were repaired over and over again using FEMA aid — and in one case, seven times — costing taxpayers almost $2 billion from 2009 to 2018.
“Mitigating these vulnerabilities is way cheaper than putting it off and rebuilding,” said Rob Moore, a climate policy expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC.
For disasters, every federal dollar spent on mitigating risks today saves $6 in the future, according to a report from the National Institute of Building Sciences. Adopting recommended building codes saves $11 for every dollar spent. Private-sector building retrofits save $4 for every $1 spent. And, it all reduces the risk of injuries, fatalities, and property loss.
The report from the Office of Inspector General only looked at one FEMA public assistance disaster category, Category C: Roads and Bridges, out of seven, so the real impact of the agency’s noncompliance with the law is likely much greater.
Categories that weren’t analyzed in the investigation include water control facilities, public utilities, and parks and recreation.
In response to the findings, FEMA agreed with the Office of Inspector General that it hadn’t complied with the law, but said it was because the agency had been focusing on immediate disaster needs. The agency said it would now work to create the necessary regulations.
Moore says this investigation revealed just one area that FEMA desperately needs to make updates in.
“They have a number of programs and authorities that don’t reflect the frequency and severity of disasters we are currently experiencing,” he said, “most of which are attributable in some form to climate change.”
One example — the National Flood Insurance Program — established local building and zoning codes in 1968 in 22,000 communities across the country. But the zones haven’t been updated in decades. The NRDC and the Association of State Floodplain Managers filed a legal petition this year to get them revised, calling for stronger construction standards and updated flood maps.
According to an independent flood map calculation that takes into account sea-level rise, rainfall, and flooding along small creeks, the number of homes at risk of flooding are far more than current official maps show. And, it’s communities of color that are most affected by the miscalculations. In over 60 percent of states, areas with more residents of color had a greater share of unmapped flood risk than the state average.
The Inspector General report calls attention to the fact that the cost of repairing infrastructure will continue to rise unless FEMA starts enforcing the law, due to increasing severe weather events related to climate change that threaten weak or aging infrastructure.
In the 1970s and 1980s, FEMA spent an average of $1 billion annually on the federal disaster relief fund. As of 2019, it was up to $8 billion a year.
You know a heat wave when you feel it — oppressively hot weather that makes you desperate for an ice-cold drink, or better yet, air conditioning.
But nailing down what counts as a heat wave is surprisingly tricky. Temperatures vary widely from place to place — normal summertime weather in Las Vegas would be considered scorching in Seattle. Then there’s the matter of climate change. How do you even say what “normal” temperatures are when heat records are getting obliterated, sometimes over a weekend?
This isn’t a matter of semantics. It’s a matter of life and death. Excessive heat, according to the National Weather Service, is the number one weather-related killer in the United States. Defining a heat wave helps cities know when and how to respond to deadly temperatures — issuing heat advisories, sharing tips for surviving the heat, and opening up cooling centers.
Recent heat waves across the West have helped fueled wildfires now raging in Oregon, Washington, and California much earlier in the summer than usual. The Southwest blistered in its third heat wave of the summer last weekend, driving temperatures to new record highs. Death Valley had what’s thought to be the hottest 24-hour-period on the planet, averaging 118.1 degrees on Sunday.
And last month overall was the hottest June in North America’s recorded history. Two weeks ago, an unprecedented “heat dome” turned the Pacific Northwest into an oven, killing more than 200 people in Washington and Oregon and hundreds more in British Columbia. The heat reached 116 degrees in Portland, breaking streetcar cables. It melted almost three feet of snow off Mount Rainier in Washington and broke Canada’s all-time high at 121 degrees F, fanning the flames of a fire that burned down the town of Lytton in British Columbia.
“The temperatures were unbelievable,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor of global health at the University of Washington in Seattle. The heat wave was literally off the charts for what climatologists predicted was possible in the Pacific Northwest right now, she said, and it’s changing what models are showing for the future. A study out last week suggested that this particular heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.
If the world warms more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, researchers found, a heat wave this bad could happen every five to 10 years, becoming a recurring nightmare. Blistering temperatures are raising the bar for what’s “really hot” — the extreme heat of the past might someday be your average summer weather.
“There are hundreds of heat wave early warning systems around the world. A lot of work went into each one of those to define what is a heat wave,” Ebi said. “And a question that myself and many others keep posing is: How are you going to decide when you’re going to change that definition?”
A cooling station in Portland during a record-setting heat wave on June 28, 2021.
Kathryn Elsesser / AFP via Getty Images
Heat wasn’t top of mind for public health experts until relatively recently. In 1993, the city of Philadelphia launched the country’s first heat warning system, issuing alerts and assigning health workers and block captains to check in on older adults and people without homes. Further attention was brought to the problem in 1995, when Chicago was hit by triple-digit temperatures that killed more than 700 people in a week.
There are some general definitions for heat waves, although they’re a bit technical. The World Meteorological Society, for example, says it’s when five days in a row have a daily high temperature that’s hotter than the normal high by 9 degrees F. Going by other definitions, however, a heat wave might only be two days long, or have a different threshold to determine what truly counts as “hot.” For studies on heat, Ebi said, scientists sometimes analyze the top 95 percent of temperatures in a given region. Looking only at highs ignores other important factors: Summer nights, for instance, are warming even faster than the days, leaving homes with little chance to cool down in the evenings, a lethal risk for people without air conditioning.
Scott Sheridan, a professor of geography at Kent State who has helped create heat warning systems across the globe, says that the first step in setting a local threshold for heat waves is looking at what kinds of weather conditions cause an increase in hospitalizations and mortality. The human body can adapt to warmer temperatures, to a degree, meaning that the definition of dangerous heat might fluctuate with the season. A heat wave in the spring or early summer can be very deadly without reaching temperatures seen in August — evidence suggests that more people die from heat earlier in the season.
Heat wave boundaries are also sometimes used to determine what counts as a heat-related death. In New York City, for instance, an extreme heat event is defined as a period of at least two days where the heat index reaches 95 degrees F, or one day of at least 100 degrees. Advocacy organizations say that differing definitions for what counts as a “hot day” are one reason that the city might be undercounting heat-related mortality.
Heat waves are hard to define because they’re not simply determined by a set of meteorological conditions, but what those conditions mean for health. Ebi says she’d like to see a tiered warning system where meteorologists start issuing early heat warnings for vulnerable people — like adults over 65, babies, outdoor workers, and people with underlying medical conditions — when the weather puts them at risk, “so it’s not one message for everybody.”
To add to the complexity, heat interacts with the way towns are built. A phenomenon called “urban heat island effect” means that cities are hotter than surrounding areas like fields or forests, since tall buildings, dark roofs, and pavement soak up the sun’s rays. And historically red-lined districts, with more freeways and fewer parks and trees, can be up to 19 degrees F hotter than the coolest neighborhoods.
Cities are at least better prepared for heat waves than they used to be, Sheridan said, although many are not ready for the unexpectedly hot days that climate change is bringing. In Seattle, for example, only 31 percent of homes had air conditioning in 2013; in 2019, 44 percent did, and that number is climbing fast.
So how do you set a local bar for heat waves when the average temperature keeps climbing? For now, most local definitions are staying the same. Sheridan said that he didn’t know of any places that had already increased their thresholds, but it’s something that’s often talked about as an eventuality. The one thing you don’t want to do is declare a heat wave is coming so often that nobody pays attention anymore, he said.
“If you issued a heat warning every time the temperature was above 90 in Phoenix, you know, you would be doing that half the year.”
At the end of June, Detroit experienced its second 500-year flood in seven years. In some areas, 6 inches of rain fell in just five hours. Rain for the whole month of June is typically three inches. The extreme rains flooded homes and businesses with water and backed-up sewage, left around 1,000 cars stranded on the roads, and caused mass power outages.
It was a distressingly familiar experience for Detroiters. Detroit’s last 500-year flood, in 2014, caused $1.8 billion in damages. More major flooding followed in 2016, 2019, and 2020. A new preprint of a study by researchers at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University found that recurrent flooding is more prevalent than previously thought in Detroit and that primarily African-American neighborhoods are at risk.
In Detroit, flooding is both a climate crisis and an environmental justice crisis. Detroit is one of the poorest big cities in the country and has the most Black residents of any major city, and it’s increasingly being hit by extreme weather events associated with climate change that are impacting its most vulnerable residents. And it’s not just flooding. Detroit has also dealt with increasing cold and hot extremes in the last decade coupled with mass utility shut-offs and frequent outages, creating dangerous conditions for its residents. Last month, a study published in Environmental Science & Technology predicted that a combined heatwave and power outage in Detroit could result in more fatalities than Hurricane Katrina.
The Midwest has a reputation as a future safe haven for climate change migrants, with the abundant fresh water, vast agricultural land, and relatively cool temperatures. But the Midwest isn’t immune to the effects of climate change, and Detroit is just one example. Chicago is facing the potential of catastrophic flooding from the rising waters of Lake Michigan, which reached record-high levels in 2020. The Great Lakes ecosystems are threatened by warming even in the lakes’ deepest waters. Cities and rural areas across the Midwest are experiencing, and will experience even more, extreme heat events that threaten agricultural output as well as human health.
The results of FEMA’s assessment could lead the state to ask for a federal disaster designation, which, if granted, would unlock federal financial assistance for individual homeowners or for public use. If approved, it would still be several months before homeowners would get relief. Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, already declared a state of emergency for Wayne County, where Detroit is located, due to flooding, and later amended it to include surrounding suburbs due to threetornadoes that hit following the storms. A state of emergency dedicates more resources to recovery and allows for better coordination between state and local agencies in relief efforts.
Detroit needs major investments to make it more resilient to future flooding events. At the state level, Governor Whitmer’s Michigan Clean Water Plan, announced in 2020, proposes $238 million for stormwater upgrades. But it’s not enough. The Southeast Michigan Council of Governments estimates that it would cost $1 billion each year until 2045 to sufficiently shore up stormwater drainage infrastructure, and in just seven of Michigan’s 83 counties.
Environmental organizers like Michelle Martinez, executive director of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, are hoping that a federal infrastructure bill will provide relief to Detroit residents. A few months ago, President Joe Biden announced a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that would “tackle climate change” — a plan that has been significantly watered down in negotiations with centrist senators. Martinez decried the current plan’s failure to address climate change and called on Washington to make major investments in climate change mitigation and adaptation.
“This incident is not just about a flooded basement,” she said in an email message to coalition subscribers. “It’s about three generations of disinvestment in the infrastructure that supports our homes and schools, family businesses and houses of worship; compounded by racist policies like redlining and blockbusting.”
“What we need now is unprecedented investment in our infrastructure,” Martinez added.
Back in 2016, Michael Dahling did something crazy: He left a steady job and maxed out his credit cards to open Old County Inn, a restaurant in the tiny town of Pine, Arizona. Restaurants are always risky no matter where they’re located, but Pine is surrounded by the Tonto National Forest. In a good year, that means a steady stream of mountain hikers stopping in for a pizza, and cyclists telling jokes over rounds of beers. But last month, officials temporarily closed the national forest entirely due to drought and the threat of fire.
“Obviously Arizona gets dry, and you can definitely tell it’s getting drier. It seems like now every year they shut down the forest around Memorial Day,” Dahling said.
Michael Dahling owns Old Country Inn, seen here from the outside, near the Tonto National Forest. He says the dangerously dry vegetation has been challenging for business. Images courtesy of Old Country Inn.
As the Southwestern corner of the country baked to a crisp and fires began to flare in late June, officials also closed the Prescott, Kaibab, Apache-Sitgreaves, and Coconino national forests — all in Arizona. It is the largest number of simultaneous closures in Forest Service history. Forests have shut down in response to fire risk before, of course, but not all at once like this, Punky Moore, a fire communications specialist for the Forest Service’s southwestern region, told Grist.
These closures come just as businesses are trying to recover from COVID-19 losses, and when many people are desperate to get out to public lands for pandemic-safe activities and Instagrammable travel.
“The pent up demand is huge. I’ve never seen it like this before,” said Kevin Nissen, co-director of Friendly Pines Camp, which sits on private land in the middle of the Prescott National Forest “What you’ve got is parents who are really ready to get their kids outside and out from behind their screens, and campers who really want to get out of the house.”
The more people pour out of quarantine and into public lands, the more likely one of them is to accidentally spark a fire. And this year, the risk is perhaps higher than ever before.
All across the West, national forests and other public lands are dangerously dry. At the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, ecologist Matt Reeves runs the FuelCast model, which predicts the amounts of dry grass and brush on the non-wooded parts of the national forests. A few months ago, that model started spitting out numbers that made Reeves ask a programmer to check the model’s computer code for errors. “I called him up and said, ‘We’ve got a problem here,’” Reeves said. “‘Either there’s a hiccup in the data, or the algorithm blew up, or we are headed for uncharted territory.’”
There was nothing wrong with the model. The predictions were right. It is the extent of this dryness that makes it so unusual. Just about every prairie, desert, and shrubland in the western half of the United States is parched. There have been more intense droughts in the recent past, but they’ve been smaller, Reeves said. The fact that a model based on machine learning confidently predicted something that to human eyes looked like a mistake is evidence that the predictable order of things no longer applies. “The baselines are changing,” Reeves said. “That makes the systems too complicated for human beings, so we need to allow the computer to read the patterns.”
The Telegraph Fire burns into the Tonto National Forest in June 2021.
Andrew Avitt / USDA Forest Service
It was this intense dryness and fire risk that led Forest Service officials to make the difficult decision to close most of Arizona’s national forests completely — leaving many tourism and outdoors-based businesses wondering how they would cope. But in the end, the closures didn’t stop many tourists from rushing to these businesses. Soul Ride, a mountain bike shop and outfitting company in Prescott, lost business it would have done providing tours and shuttles on the area’s well-known trails. But money from sales, repairs, and beer — the business has craft brews on tap — made up for that lost revenue, said Cina Mcconaughy, co-owner of Soul Ride. “In the end, it didn’t really affect our business. People were so eager to get out and ride that they found a way,” she said.
Friendly Pines Camp had to shift the routes of their hiking and horseback riding excursions, but said the closures didn’t hit their bottom line, thankfully.
As for Dahling, he said that even without the hikers and bikers, there are enough people willing to make the two-hour drive from Phoenix to the Old County Inn for the views and the wood-fired pizza. The stream of day-trippers was strong enough that he even did brisk business through the pandemic. But while the restaurant can survive the forest closures, fires are a different story.
On June 18th, Dahlin was on the restaurant’s deck going over the menu with an employee when he saw a pillar of smoke looming over the town. “I don’t know about you,” he remembers saying, “but I’m going to get out of here.” A few hours later the sheriff came in to confirm that evacuation was mandatory. It was a disaster: A wedding party had just arrived for their rehearsal dinner. “You can imagine — Friday night, there were 30 to 40 people here already, the bride and groom were crying,” Dahling said. They dropped everything and left. The fire spared Pine, but it was eight days before officials gave the all-clear for the evacuees to return.
The first rains of the summer monsoon season finally came to Arizona over the July 4th weekend, allowing the Tonto, Prescott, Kaibab, Apache-Sitgreaves, and Coconino national forests to partially reopen. But that doesn’t mean the threat has gone away. Many areas remain closed or restricted, and fires are still burning. More than 90 percent of the West is in a state of drought.
This may be a high-water mark for the appreciation of public lands. It also could be the summer that the public loves those lands to death.
It is yet again a billion degrees outside this summer and I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that the fossil-fueled electricity used to power my air conditioner is contributing to these extreme heat waves. And now, to top it all off, we’re also being told in my city to conserve energy because the grid is under too much stress! I’m at a loss for how to keep my cool.
— Hanging Out, Torridly
Dear HOT,
You are living out one of the most acute conundrums of climate change: What do you do when the thing you need to survive warmer temperatures adds to the emissions crisis that creates said warmer temperatures? (The Department of Energy estimates that home air conditioning uses about 6 percent of the total electricity produced in the U.S.) Life in the 21st century is full of impossible choices!
But not all climate Catch-22s are associated with the same guilt level, HOT, and before you get all bothered about cranking up the air conditioner, let’s remember that heat itself is not a new weather phenomenon. Humans have been working on ways to survive a sweltering summer day for millennia. What is new is the scope and intensity of that heat. This June was the hottest on record in North America and the fourth hottest globally. Not only that, when normally temperate geographic regions — such as the Pacific Northwest, most recently — find themselves at 100+ degrees Fahrenheit without the proper infrastructure to deal with it, the situation can become fatal. Last week, at least 95 people in Oregon alone died from heat-related causes.
Would you tell someone at risk of heat stroke not to turn on the air conditioner because it would contribute to global warming? I don’t think so. Relief from high temperatures can be truly life-saving, which is why cities set up public cooling centers; they are not a luxury. Even though about 90 percent of U.S. homes are air-conditioned — by either a central system or window unit — the percentage of low-income households that have no air conditioning is roughly twice that of high-income households.
But when the heat is uncomfortable but not necessarily life-threatening, there are lower-tech, less grid-impacting ways to cool down than air conditioning. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a very helpful fact sheet on the different signs of heat- and sun-related illness in case you’re unclear on when to seek out the big blowers.) I went back through the Umbra archives and collected the old girl’s tips on sweet heat relief, because as it turns out she’s been advising on this topic for years and years.
Use windows to greater effect
A lot of the heavy lifting of cooling a home can be achieved through simple physics — i.e., window treatments and fan placement:
Quite a bit of the heat in your home — in some cases up to 40 percent — comes through your windows. Your situation may improve if you block light and air from entering your apartment during the hot parts of the day. If you don’t have window shades, off to Windows R Us with you. Shutters or window awnings are the best because they stop sun before it hits window glass, but even thick reflective interior shades will help. If mornings are cool and afternoons are hot, open the windows and shades in the morning and shut them before the unbearable afternoon sun. If the entire day is hot, humid, and miserable, keep everything shut until evening comes. You get the point.
You may further leverage nature if you have a layout (and weather) that permits a cross breeze. Open the incoming breeze window a little, and the outgoing window a lot. On the out window place an out-facing window fan, which will pull the air through the house. Even if you have only two windows, facing the same direction, you may get relief by opening both, placing an inward fan on one and an outward on the other. The feeling of air across your skin can make you feel comfortable even if the air itself is hot. Our standard summer comfort range is 72 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit, but we’ll be comfy at 82 degrees with the help of a light breeze. Don’t say I didn’t give you hard numbers.
Become a fan of fans
Even a small battalion of fans is generally more energy-efficient than an energy-conserving air conditioning unit — and all electrically powered cooling devices should be turned off when not in use!
If the fans are keeping you cool enough, stay with the status quo, because they are either equal to or better than a high-efficiency room air conditioner. Air conditioners also may contain environmentally damaging refrigerants, and while these should not be difficult to contain and properly dispose of, it still would be better to avoid using them. If your current fans are not doing the job, consider installing (or asking your landlord to install) a ceiling fan, which uses even less power than a floor fan and can help the whole room feel cooler. Still not cool enough? If you need to purchase a window air conditioner, please size it correctly for your home and buy the most efficient unit you can afford.
Either way, don’t forget that neither fans nor air conditioning should be operating when you are not at home. Fans make us feel cooler by convecting hot air away from our bods. If our bods are not there, the fan’s energy is wasted. And though we may think leaving AC on all day is more energy-efficient than having it kick into action after we get home, it is not. I repeat: leaving the air conditioning on all day is not energy-efficient. If you can’t stand coming home to a hot house, get a timer for the AC and set it for half an hour before homecoming.
Build your own swamp cooler
And then there is the innovation of something called the “swamp cooler,” which my colleagues Katie Herzog and Jesse Nichols constructed in this classic Grist do-it-yourself video. You basically insulate a fan inside a bucket and it blows cold air at you. I’m not a scientist but it works somehow!
But I do need to emphasize — as always! — that all of these methods for cooling off are proverbial Band-Aids when it comes to the very real and deadly threat of a hotter world. Vivek Shandas, director of sustaining urban places research at Portland State University, said in an email that major social and infrastructure policy overhaul is needed to create a more heat-resilient society.
“Social policies include those that ensure effective communications and engagement systems — generally necessary for all natural disasters — that allow communities to know, by neighborhoods, what resources are available to safeguard from extreme heat,” he wrote. “Engagement systems would create ‘heat ambassadors’ that would be from the community and be remunerated to go door-to-door before a heat wave, and provide information, materials, and other support for individual households — particularly in apartment buildings which face some of the greatest threats from heat — for taking necessary precautions.”
Shandas also wrote that, absent such a formal system, a very effective way to prevent deaths and illnesses during a heat wave is to check on your neighbors. “While we all tend to shelter, and sometimes even avoid our neighbors, heat waves offer an ideal reason for getting to know each other,” he said. Indeed, community bonds have been proven to be one of the strongest indicators of surviving a natural disaster.
On the infrastructure side, we will need insulated buildings that are designed to stay relatively cool without the use of electricity, an electric grid that neither contributes to global warming nor becomes overwhelmed by a lot of people using it simply to survive, and more well-shaded city streets that can mitigate the urban heat island effect. And we will need to ensure that people of color, low-income people, and people without housing also have access to all of that infrastructure so they do not continue to face the worst of extreme heat’s consequences.
Neighborhoods affected by redlining — the systematic refusal of loans and mortages so as to segregate non-white families — are as much as 10 degrees hotter than others, a reality becomes particularly dangerous under heat wave conditions. Jocelyn del Real, empower program coordinator with the Los Angeles organization East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, said in an email that affordable housing policies and renters’ rights are a crucial part of extreme heat resilience, because we need to “make sure community members are able to stay in their homes year-round and not put at risk of displacement. We are still in a pandemic, so this is crucial.”
Anyway, all that to say, please try to stay cool, my friend, and do not put yourself in peril to save a day’s worth of air-conditioner emissions!. Heat has been proven to not only be deadly, but infuriating. And when the mercury dips to only slightly uncomfortable, feel free to try some energy-friendly alternatives. I personally swear by quick, cold showers and a lot of ice water.
It was the most extreme heat wave on record in the Pacific Northwest. And as officials count the heat-related deaths over the next weeks, it will almost certainly turn out to be one of the deadliest.
In Vancouver, British Columbia, police responded to at least 65 sudden deaths suspected to be heat-related. And the province’s chief coroner said Wednesday that at least 486 deaths likely linked to the heat had been reported since Friday. The residents of one British Columbia community, Lytton, where a temperature of 121 degrees Fahrenheit was higher than any ever recorded in Canada, were ordered to evacuate because of an encroaching wildfire.
“We’ve never seen anything like this, and it breaks our hearts,” said Sgt. Steve Addison, a spokesman for the Vancouver police department.
Each summer, the surefire signs of climate change come into sharper focus in the United States. Wildfires and heat waves plague the West. Increasingly intense hurricanes pummel the Southeast. Sudden thunderstorms soak towns from the Midwest to the mountains. Lyme disease-carrying ticks sicken hikers along the East Coast. And melting ice leads to more shipping pollution in Alaska. This barrage of headlines reminds us that these “extreme” events have already become our new normal as a result of the greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.
Taken one at a time, it’s possible to consume these occasional pieces of disaster coverage and still cling to the idea that climate change is happening somewhere else, to someone else. But listening to the growing chorus of people impacted by the changing climate rising up from all corners of the country forces us to recognize ourselves in our neighbors’ hopes and fears.
We have collected six audio stories from people all over the country who are already coping with the devastating consequences from climate change — in their own words.
In Louisiana, back-to-back hurricanes leave no room to recover
Flood waters surround a house in Lake Charles, Louisiana, a day after Hurricane Delta passed through the area on October 10, 2020. Hurricane Delta made landfall as a Category 2 storm in Louisiana initially leaving some 300,000 customers without power.
Photo by Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images
Courtesy of Shonell Bacon
Shonell Bacon
Lake Charles, Louisiana
Listen to her story
My name is Shonell Bacon. I’m originally from Baltimore, but I moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 2001 to do my MFA program at McNeese State University here.
Every year from June 1st to November 30, we get fearful because half the year is worrying about when a hurricane is going to come. I keep a tab up for the National Hurricane Center all six months and I have a million apps on hurricanes and storms on my phones and tablets.
Currently, I live with my sister and my mom, and we were here for Laura and Delta. We were double hit because we had good ol’ Laura and then about 40 days later we had Delta. Those two events have been the most traumatizing moments of my life ever.
Left: Hurricane Laura’s high winds caused devastating damage, seen here in North Lake Charles, to many parts of Louisiana. A little over a month later, the area was hit by a second major storm, Delta. Photo by Shonell Bacon. Right: Many roofs, including these in North Lake Charles, Louisiana, collapsed as a result of Hurricane Laura’s high winds. Photo by Shonell Bacon.
I will admit that during Laura, I was fairly sure we were going to die because it sounded like a thousand trains just going as fast as they can above you, beside you, behind you, below you. And it lasted for what felt like forever. We thought for sure the roof was going to rip off. But it didn’t. We were so surprised when we woke up the next morning, there was a roof.
As soon as day broke, my mom, my sister, and my brother went outside and they started calling for me. They’re like, “Come see.” And that’s when I broke, because I went outside and the house across the street from us had half a roof, and then the house next door to us, all the windows were busted out. I’m going to get emotional just because when I talk about this, there was such devastation, and I felt so horrible that we got saved when so many people didn’t.
This whole city was decimated. There are parts that will probably never come back, and if they do, I won’t be here because we’re already planning to be gone before the next hurricane season. I’m not Louisiana strong. I don’t know what they have in them to keep rebuilding, but I don’t have that.
In coal country, severe flooding tests the limits of regional resilience
People stand in the middle of a mud-covered street left over from the flooding of the Elk River on June 25, 2016 in Clendenin, West Virginia.
Photo by Ty Wright / Getty Images
Photo courtesy of Andy Waddell
Andy Waddell
Clay County, West Virginia
Listen to his story
My name is Andy Waddell, I’m a 40-year resident of Clay County, West Virginia, Appalachian Mountains.
Clay County is 342 square miles. We are a place of tall mountains and very narrow valleys. We enjoy four seasons. What we don’t enjoy is, we regularly have flooding.
We had a flood five years ago; we called it a “once in a lifetime, hundred-year flood.” That’s how we explained it away. I can remember that weathercasters were saying this could just be a real damnation. And in a matter of two hours of really heavy rainfall, everything went to pot — roads were covered, creeks were out of their banks, propane tanks were floating, cars were submerged.
Kayakers float along the Elk River in Clay County, West Virginia. Residents hope the area’s natural beauty will attract more tourists, adding jobs to the formerly coal-driven economy. Photo courtesy of Andy Waddell
We’ve had other storms here and, sure, we might lose electricity for a day or two. That’s common. But this wiped out the utilities. For many people, it was three weeks without electricity. I mean, the county shut down. People were standing there with all they owned in their arms. Everything else was washed away.
We are a resilient people. We’ve been through floods. We’ve been through disasters. And the truth is, we like it here. It’s beautiful. But for many people in this county, we don’t talk about climate change, period. The scariest part for me is, have we waited too long to make the necessary changes? If next summer, here comes another “hundred-year flood,” I don’t know if we can start over.
In Alaska, melting ice brings a boatload of new issues
An Indigenous Alaskan man washes freshly caught salmon from the Northern Bering Sea.
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images
Courtesy of Austin Ahmasuk
Austin Ahmasuk
Nome, Alaska
Listen to his story
My name is Austin Ahmasuk. I was born and raised in Nome, Alaska, and I’ve been working as a tribal, environmental, and subsistence advocate here in my hometown since 1997.
Ways of life are changing here in the North very dramatically. A specific example was this last year during the first full moon in November. It’s a time when you can get out on land, access areas where ice isn’t terribly thick. And, for folks in the lower 48 that might not be able to understand cold, that’s always been a time in my life when river ice is generally two feet or more thick.
Left: A pile of debris gathered by Indigenous residents of Nome, Alaska during the Summer of 2020. Residents say the trash is associated with an increase in cargo shipping associated with melting ice. Photo by Austin Ahmasuk. Right: MA Russian tanker heads toward Nome, Alaska accompanied by a U.S. Coast Guard vessel Photo by Sara Francis/U.S. Coast Guard via Getty Images
Well, this past year on the first full moon in November, river ice was barely six inches. Rivers which are normally frozen substantially, were mostly open. And so hunters like myself are contemplating the possibility that the animals that we consume for food — fish, wildlife, marine mammals — some of those animals may go extinct locally or shift their distribution north. And we may have to focus on other things that we’re not entirely used to.
These things are happening in the context of climate change. Absolutely. As another example, as waters have gotten warmer, shipping has increased. This past summer, communities in my region dealt with, for the very first time, trash from shipping-related activity washing ashore — plastics and petrochemicals and fishing gear. That month-long foreign debris event was very disturbing. We had to weed through trash to obtain things we need from the ocean. Those beaches are normally pristine.
And so we realized with this event, we’re totally on our own. We’re going to have to clean up our beaches ourselves and address this ourselves.
In Iowa, farmers adjust to more intense conditions
Rows of flood-damaged and dying corn rot on a farm outside of Mt. Vernon, Iowa.
Photo by David Greedy / Getty Images
Courtesy of Meredith Nunnikhoven
Meredith Nunnikhoven
Oskaloosa, Iowa
Listen to her story
My name is Meredith Nunnikhoven and I live in Oskaloosa, Iowa. I’m a fifth-generation farmer. We farm fresh, cut flowers and I just installed six acres of a chestnut plantation — so that’s the new diverse crop that I brought to the farm.
Iowa, we have floods, we have blizzards, we have tornadoes, we have the gamut of all this crazy weather, right? But what I’ve noticed is the intensity of it. It just seems like there’s more of everything. So if we have monsoon rains for three weeks, which is what we had two years ago, that affects everything that we do.
Normally we’re ready to plant at the end of April or early May, and we start working the ground. That goes for flowers, vegetables, and our crops. But the past several years, we’ve been very hesitant to put those crops in until we see these rains come through.
Left: Meredith Nunnikhoven prepares a 6-acre plot of land at Barnswallow Farms for Chestnut trees. Her family has worked hard to remove the brome grasses from the area and re-seeded it with a cover crop of white dutch clover and short fescue grass. She has made many other climate-friendly changes to the farm over the past several years, including creating butterfly habitat, and improving soil drainage. Photo courtesy of Meredith Nunnikhoven Right: MA crop of fresh-cut flowers stand await sale at Barnswallow Farms in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Photo courtesy of Meredith Nunnikhoven
One year we had put in, I’d say, close to a thousand marigolds and several hundred tomato plants and peppers. Granted, those plants are pretty hardy, but I could visually see them outside getting intensely rained on for almost two and a half, three weeks. And we surely thought that they would die. And that makes us nervous now to put our crop in.
When I talked to my whole family, they all agreed: Climate change is real. We know it’s an issue and we’re trying to do everything we can here as farmers to combat that. We’re in it for the long haul. But for us to cover crop and start seeing improvement in our soils, that’s 10, sometimes 20, sometimes 30, if not longer, years until we would see those improvements from the adjustments that we’re making right now.
In California, the appeal of living near nature goes up in flames
A lingering morning fog hovers over charred homes and vegetation in Butte Creek Canyon, California. The town was burned in the 2018 Camp Fire, which also decimated the nearby town of Paradise, California.
Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Courtesy of Andrew Burke
Andrew Burke
Butte Creek Canyon, California
Listen to his story
Hello, my name is Andrew Burke and I’m a resident of Butte Creek Canyon, which was within the burn area of the California Camp Fire.
The Camp Fire was fast-moving. We heard, “Oh, it’s on the other side of Paradise. No big deal. Oh, it’s to Paradise. Uh oh, it’s halfway through Paradise. Oh, it’s completely through Paradise.” And we’re like, oh, wait a second. It’s only been half an hour. And as the crow flies, we’re not that far from Paradise. So, yeah, that’s when we really started hurrying hurrying hurrying to evacuate.
We packed up the back of the car. We helped my wife’s folks pack some picture boxes and stuff. I guess I didn’t mention that my wife was seven months pregnant at the time. So throughout this, we’re trying to keep stress levels down. And yeah, we scooted out.
We hit some traffic. You know, a lot of people got kind of stuck in traffic, but we made it through the fire burning down to where we were parked. We were kind of middle-of–the-road in how we were affected. I mean, we lost our home. We lost everything. Our whole community is gone. And that’s being middle-of-the-road in something like this.
An aerial view of a neighborhood burned by the 2018 Camp Fire. Climate change has contributed to the severity of California’s wildfires in recent years as a result of drier soil and hotter weather.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
When we came back to Butte Creek Canyon, it obviously didn’t look like anything we had ever seen. Everything was ash. Everything was charred. wWole trees were missing with just a hole in the ground where the roots were. I was just in awe. You knew there was a community here. You knew there were homes here and there was just nothing. It just didn’t look like a scene from Earth.
Even though it was really damaged. We decided to move back into the area, kind of within the burn scar — which is good and bad, because every day we have to look at the surroundings, take the kid on a stroller ride by our old home. But for the future, I hope that people are still able to live in these wild areas because they are nice places to live. On paper, this is a good place to raise a family.
We’re just going to have to learn to live with these fires and adapt. Just realize, OK. This is something that happens now.
In Upstate New York, warmer weather comes with a sickening bite
Emma Baker waters plants as part of her landscape design job in New York’s Hudson Valley. She says that dealing with ticks is a growing part of her experience working outside.
Photo by CDC/ James Gathany; William L. Nicholson, Ph.D.
Photo courtesy of Emma Baker
Emma Baker
Hudson Valley, New York
Listen to her story
My name is Emma Baker, and I am in Accord, New York, which is part of the Hudson Valley. I am a construction worker and landscape designer.
I’ve noticed changes in the environment since I grew up, even just walking around in the forest. I’ve noticed that the forests just don’t look as green and healthy as they used to when I was a kid. And, of course, there are way more ticks.
I do tick checks as soon as I get home and I try to pay attention. Other than that, I can’t change what I do for my work. That’s what I love to do. And it’s kind of inevitable that I’ll get bitten. Like just the other day when I was working, I found over 15 on me. I was like wading in tall grass and I found three on me at a time consistently for hours.
Emma Baker waters plants as part of her landscape design job in New York’s Hudson Valley. She says that dealing with ticks is a growing part of her experience working outside.
Photo courtesy of Emma Baker
Generally I find them like on my legs first crawling up the ankles. If you have leg hair, it usually helps a little bit — you can feel them moving around better and you try to get them right when they’re crawling on you before they latch on.
I was bitten by a tick at some point in my 10th grade year in high school, and I got really, really sick. I didn’t know what it was from, because I never got a rash or anything. Usually if you get sick from a tick, especially if you’re going to contract Lyme disease, you get a bull’s eye rash, which is a red rash and like a circle around the area that you were bitten.
My main symptoms were, I had very, very severe headaches pretty much constantly; I was really sensitive to light; and I was really, really tired, like my energy level completely tanked. So that was pretty serious. I had a PICC line in my arm, which is like a little opening that they give you antibiotics through. You attach a syringe to it twice a day for a month. And the treatment did work. I was really lucky. I don’t think that I have long-term effects, although it’s kind of hard to know.
This story was reported by Emily Pontecorvo, Nathanael Johnson, Eve Andrews, and Zoya Teirstein. Teresa Chin led the art direction and produced the audio. Jacky Myint handled design and development. Edits by Katherine Bagley, Nikhil Swaminathan, and Matthew Craft.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Vox Americana on Jul 1, 2021.
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Long famed for its spectacular fishing, sprawling coral reefs and literary residents such as Ernest Hemingway, the Florida Keys is now acknowledging a previously unthinkable reality: it faces being overwhelmed by the rising seas and not every home can be saved.
Following a grueling seven-hour public meeting on last week, held in the appropriately named city of Marathon, officials agreed to push ahead with a plan to elevate streets throughout the Keys to keep them from perpetual flooding, while admitting they do not have the money to do so.
The string of coral cay islands that unspool from the southern tip of Florida finds itself on the frontline of the climate crisis, forcing unenviable choices upon a place that styles itself as sunshine-drenched idyll. The lives of Keys residents — a mixture of wealthy, older white people, the one in four who are Hispanic or Latino, and those struggling in poverty — face being upended.
If the funding isn’t found, the Keys will become one of the first places in the United States — and certainly not the last — to inform residents that certain areas will have to be surrendered to the oncoming tides.
“The water is coming and we can’t stop it,” said Michelle Coldiron, mayor of Monroe County, which encompasses the Keys. “Some homes will have to be elevated, some will have to be bought out. It’s very difficult to have these conversations with homeowners, because this is where they live. It can get very emotional.”
Once people are unable to secure mortgages and insurance for soaked homes, the Keys will cease to be a livable place long before it’s fully underwater, according to Harold Wanless, a geographer at the University of Miami. “People don’t have a concept of what sea level rise will do to them. They just can’t conceive it,” he said.
At the meeting last week, the county gave details of its plan to spend $1.8 billion over the next 25 years to raise 150 miles of roads in the Keys, deploying a mixture of new drains, pump stations and vegetation to prevent the streets becoming inundated with seawater. The heightened roadways are eagerly anticipated by residentswho told the meeting of cars being ruined by the salt water and of donning boots to wade to front doors.
“The roads are shot, they’re full of cracks, the water is permeating up,” said Kimberly Sikora, who lives in a vulnerable neighborhood of Key Largo called Stillwright Point that is still awaiting a full road elevation proposal. “I’m just looking for some kind of relief.”
Another resident, Robert Schaller of Twin Lakes, an area further along in the planning process, muttered that he “should’ve done my due diligence” when buying his house last year. “I literally stand on my balcony and watch the water come up through my street,” he said. “It’s coming up right through the pavement.”
But Monroe County’s budget will not cover the raising of all the roads, nor any mass buyout of homes, and an appeal to Florida state lawmakers to levy a new tax to cover these mounting costs has been rebuffed. Further costs will pile up as the county grapples with how – and who pays – to keep critical infrastructure such as sewers and power substations, as well as people’s homes, from being flooded along with the roads.
“If we can’t raise additional money then we will have to look at prioritizing,” said Rhonda Haag, Monroe County’s chief resilience officer.
“For example, should we spend money on raising roads if people aren’t paying to raise their yards? We are blazing trails here. We are ahead of everyone in having to think about this.”
The pancake-flat Keys are in jeopardy from rising seas that are, as a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist told the county commissioners in last week’s meeting, accelerating upwards as the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt away. Human-caused global heating means an extra 17 inches of sea level rise by 2040, according to an intermediate NOAA projection used by the county.
Compounding this problem, the islands’ porous limestone allows the rising seawater to bubble up from below, meaning it just takes high tides on sunny days to turn roads into ponds, while global heating is also spurring fiercer hurricanes that can occasionally crunch into the archipelago.
“The Florida Keys are one of the most vulnerable places to flooding in North America,” said Kristina Hill, an environmental planner at the University of California, Berkeley, who warned that the islands would face growing road and pipe maintenance costs, more pollution leaks and harmful algal blooms.
“Without a change in strategy, parts of the Keys will become accessible only by boat,” said Hill, adding that the islands could have to resort to floating structures and navigable canals to remain viable. “The islands will gradually disappear into a higher ocean, potentially leaving a ruined landscape of leaky underground storage tanks, old pipes, and flooded road segments behind to pollute the water.”
The threats faced by the Keys are shrugged off by some of its wealthy retirees who view the situation with a certain fatalism, while others in this Republican-voting bastion openly question the science. Eddie Martinez, one of the county’s five elected commissioners, challenged the NOAA scientist, William Sweet, on his sea level rise projections last week.
The sea level rise to date is “really a nothing number,” said Martinez, who told Sweet: “You’re a little bit more on this CO2 side, I’m more on the actual measurement side.” Another commissioner, David Rice, said that “predicting the future is probably best done with a crystal ball” and speculated that global temperatures could change following several volcanic eruptions.
“There are people who don’t want to sell because they love it here, others who want to get out while they can and those in complete denial who call you a troublemaker who is driving down property values by talking about it,” said George Smyth, a retiree who moved to Key Largo a decade ago for the quiet, slow-paced lifestyle. In 2019, his neighborhood spent 90 days partially submerged in water.
The nature of the Keys has changed in this time. While the islands still include pockets of poverty, an influx of affluent second-home owners has caused new properties to sprout up around Smyth. “It used to be pretty rough and tumble, you’d see a few fights on a Saturday night,” he said. “Now everyone looks like they’ve just come from the cosmetic dentist.”
Other new realities are more laborious — Smyth has to wash his car continually to rid it of salt water and has to pay for trucks to unload piles of crushed-up rocks around his property as a buffer against the encroaching tides. While Smyth doesn’t class himself as particularly wealthy, these protections are beyond the means of low-income Keys residents, many of whom live in exposed mobile homes dotted along the islands.
Smyth fears that the county will require poorer residents to stump up the money for the roads, rather than put a levy on the tourists that flock to the Keys. “We feel we are being held hostage,” he said. “I feel sorrow for what is coming and the loss of what is a wonderful community.”
But the mayor defiantly insists the Keys can be saved, even if it is currently unclear how. “We know we live in paradise and we want to keep it that way,” said Coldiron.
One of the most extreme heat waves ever recorded baked the American West last week, with 40 million Americans affected by temperatures soaring above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Deemed a “mega-heat wave,” it broke temperature records over a century old. And it’s not over yet — this weekend is projected to bring another historic heat wave to the Pacific Northwest, with temperatures forecasted at about 30 degrees F above average, breaking 100 degrees F in Seattle, Portland, and Spokane.
A mega-heat wave in the middle of a decades-long megadrought is the reality of climate change in the American West. These boiling temperatures come with major public health risks; heat waves are the deadliest weather phenomenon in the United States, even when compared to hurricanes and floods, causing an average of 138 deaths per year since 1991. Climate change is increasing that statistic; on average, more than a third of heat-related deaths globally are due to climate change. These effects are not equally distributed in the U.S. — due to the racist history of redlining and inequitable access to green space and trees, people of color are disproportionately affected by heat.
The most obvious public health risk of heat waves is the risk of heat exhaustion or heat stroke, especially for those who work outside, including agricultural and construction workers, people experiencing homelessness, and those living with poor ventilation or without air conditioning. But that’s not the only public health risk of heat waves. Along with heat also comes bad air quality, which poses its own dangers.
As temperatures climbed across the West last week, so did pollution readings, including in Southern California, Texas, Phoenix, and Denver. In Phoenix, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality advised that people limit their time outside as ozone pollution (commonly known as smog) reached levels dangerous for public health. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued ozone warnings for six consecutive days in Dallas–Fort Worth.
Ground-level ozone pollution forms when heat and sunlight trigger a reaction between two other pollutants, nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds — which come from cars, industrial facilities, and oil and gas extraction. High temperatures therefore make ozone pollution more likely to form and harder to clean up. Drought and heat also increase the risk of wildfire, which can make air quality worse as smoke drives up levels of fine particulate matter — also known as PM2.5, or soot.
During heat waves, the air also becomes stagnant, trapping pollutants like ozone. “Everything – the pollution, the smoke, the ozone – gets trapped right here where we live, and it gets sealed in. It’s like a pot you put on a stove. It’s like putting a lid on that pot, and everything down here gets trapped,” meteorologist Chris Tomer said on local Denver news show FOX31 News. “The 100 degrees just keeps things kind of swirling down here, and we breathe it in. We’ll rebreathe it, days and days out.”
Both ozone and PM2.5 carry major health risks. Ozone can cause acute symptoms, including coughing and inflamed airways, and chronic effects, including asthma and increased diabetes risk. PM2.5 exposure can lead to an increased risk of asthma, heart attack, and strokes. Globally, long-term exposure to PM2.5 caused one in five deaths in 2018, including 350,000 deaths in the United States.
In mid-May, Klamath Tribal members and supporters stood at Sugarman’s Corner in downtown Klamath Falls, Oregon, holding signs like “Ecocide is Cultural Genocide,” “Save the Klamath” and “Honor the Treaty” as part of a caravan rally. The goal was to highlight Indigenous voices and priorities for the Klamath River basin, like protecting culturally important c’wam (Lost River suckers) and koptu (shortnose suckers) endemic to shallow Upper Klamath Lake.
Tensions were high in the basin, which spans the Oregon-California border. Just a day before the rally, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had announced that it wouldn’t release water in the basin to irrigators or national wildlife refuges because of dire drought forecasts.
Joey Gentry, a member of the Klamath Tribes who helped organize the event, nervously braced herself for an armed counterprotest, like the ones that happened in Klamath Falls during Black Lives Matter marches last year. To Gentry’s relief, however, no counterprotesters materialized. “Everyone empathizes with the plight of our farmers,” said Gentry, who farms hemp in the region. “But we also now know that food systems and agriculture systems must support ecosystems for all of us.”
This summer’s strife recalls the events of summer 2001, when drought caused the Bureau of Reclamation to cut off water to the majority of fields in the area and farmers staged a standoff to restore the flow. Now, the basin is facing an even worse drought: A large-scale fish kill has already happened, and, for the first time since 2001, the majority of farming in the basin must cease for lack of water.
Another factor reminiscent of 2001 is a new iteration of an old theme: An extremist element is present in the region, more energized and better organized than in the past. But there are critical political and legal differences between this year and 2001: Years of negotiations on large-scale settlements have built relationships between tribal nations, politicians, agencies and irrigators that didn’t exist before. And a slew of court cases over the past two decades have affirmed that the federal government must prioritize tribal nations’ water rights and protected species’ needs. “The state and the federal government, I believe, have a real responsibility to help folks,” said Klamath Tribes Chairman Don Gentry. (Don and Joey Gentry are siblings.) “It’s an environmental injustice … This is our homeland; all the things that were placed here should be here. We shouldn’t have to fight over them.”
The Klamath Basin contains Upper Klamath Lake, which supplies part of the water for the Klamath Project, a Bureau of Reclamation irrigation operation that waters 1,200 farms and over 240,000 acres of farmland. Water from the lake flows southwesterly via the Klamath River through the ancestral lands of the Klamath Tribes, Hoopa Tribe, Karuk Tribe and Yurok Tribe, emptying into the Pacific.
But more of that water is spoken for than actually exists. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates water flows would need to be 135% of average to fulfill all of the rights in the basin. Forecasts put this summer’s streamflow as low as 21% of average. “There’s really not enough water in a good water year,” said Adell Amos, Clayton R. Hess Professor of Law at University of Oregon, who worked as a staff lawyer for the U.S. Department of Interior during 2001. “But when we get a year like this year, it becomes really profound.”
A farmworker checks the sprinklers at a farm in the Klamath Basin outside Tulelake, California on May 18.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
In April 2001, the Bureau of Reclamation cut off all irrigation to 170,000 acres of farmland, the first time in U.S. history that farmers were forced to stop farming because the agency would not deliver water. Instead, it prioritized water for threatened and endangered species: coho salmon in the Klamath River, and c’wam and koptu upstream.
In response, farmer-activists illegally broke open the Klamath Project’s head gates and held protests, and convoys of outside supporters, including some with militia ties, rolled into town. The actions seemed to work: In midsummer, the George W. Bush administration released some water to farmers. But that did little to appease the protestors, and after the water ran out in September, 300 people climbed over a chain-link fence at the head gates and set up an encampment. The standoff ended in an uneasy truce after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.
The next summer, despite the same drought conditions, the Bush administration provided farmers their full water allocation. That left little water for the Klamath River itself and meant the federal government failed to meet its tribal trust obligations. In the fall, a devastating disease that proliferates in warm, shallow water ripped through coho, chinook and steelhead populations in the river, killing an estimated 34,000 adult salmon, the largest fish kill in U.S. history. A federal whistleblower later alleged that, due to political pressure, the Bureau of Reclamation had illegally ignored scientific findings and prevented biologists from fully assessing the risk of lower water levels.
Perhaps the biggest change in the basin over the past two decades is the heightened power of tribal sovereignty and water rights. In 2013, Oregon recognized the Klamath Tribes as the most senior water-rights holders in the Upper Klamath Basin. That means they can secure their water needs first in a dry year, leaving those with more junior rights with less water, or even none at all. The tribes exercised that right for the first time in 2013, to protect c’wam and koptu in Upper Klamath Lake, which meant that irrigators got less water. “It’s a blunt tool, but this was the only path available to us,” Tribal Council Member Jeff Mitchell told High Country News at the time. In March this year, they did the same — though at a much larger scale, which effectively curtailed water for both irrigators and threatened salmon downstream.
Another tool the tribes have used to protect fish and their ecosystems is litigation. Since 2016, for example, the Yurok Tribe, downriver from the Klamath Tribes, has ratcheted up its legal strategy against the Bureau of Reclamation and the Klamath Water Users Association, a group that advocates for Klamath Project farmers. Typically, the litigation is over who gets water, and when, to try to prevent another massive salmon die-off. A proposal to remove four dams on the Klamath River would alleviate pressure on the fish, and thus potentially free up water for protecting upstream species.
Still, other challenges remain: For example, the Yurok and Hoopa tribes and Congress have yet to reach settlements quantifying the exact amount of their water rights, a source of major uncertainty during yearly water allocations.
Federal leadership is also necessary for any sort of basin-wide agreement over water use, which could help bring stability to the region. After the conflict of the early 2000s, the Interior Department led negotiations that resulted in a handful of deals, but the largest one fell apart in 2016, when Congress failed to appropriate funds for it. Essentially no progress was made during the Trump administration. In April, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) mentioned a long-term plan in a memo to assistant secretaries, and acknowledged that, “given the dire and unprecedented drought conditions that we are facing, we know that difficult decisions will need to be made in the coming days and weeks to address water shortages.”
Meanwhile, the potential for another standoff over Klamath Basin water appears higher than at any time since 2001, and not only because of drought. The Department of Homeland Security warned earlier this year that right-wing extremists “may be emboldened by the January 6, 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., to target elected officials and government facilities.”
Right-wing extremist groups have voiced support for Klamath farmers, often on the grounds of ‘private property rights,’ even though Klamath Project water is not necessarily legally considered irrigators’ private property. In the spring, two farmers bought land on either side of the project’s head gates, and said that they will have a standoff this year. The same farmers were photographed breaking open head gates at the 2001 encampment, though nobody was charged with a crime.
But this year’s encampment has little political support, unlike the 2001 standoff. The Republican congressman who represents the area, Cliff Bentz, who was elected last year, explicitly declined to visit the encampment. “There’s been some people who have said, ‘Well, if it’s our water, we should take matters into our own hands and take it.’ And I would counsel against that,” Bentz said during a public event in early June, reported Jefferson Public Radio. Partly that’s because it could make it harder for Bentz to secure financial aid for basin farmers and others from Congress; his current proposed package is $57 million.
Those at this year’s encampment are also not representative of the irrigators who would take part in basin-wide negotiations. In May, Ben DuVal, the president of the Klamath Water Users Association, spoke out against putting Bureau of Reclamation employees’ personal information online to intimidate them or bringing in outsiders who could enflame the situation. “Stop it,” DuVal said. “It is completely out of line.”
This summer, as in 2001 and 2002, the dire position of all stakeholders could trigger a desire for fresh basin-wide conversations about a new large-scale agreement to halt the cycle of drought-related conflict within the Klamath Basin. True solutions, however, aren’t limited to policy or water quantities; they must include achieving justice and acknowledging tribal presence and sovereignty, said Joey Gentry, who helped organize this year’s rally for the Klamath ecosystem. “In addition to addressing some of the solutions in the fields and in the irrigation ditches, we also have to address this equity piece.”
Living along the path of a wildfire, hurricane, or tornado is a terrifying experience under the best of circumstances, but it can be a particularly dangerous situation for people who primarily speak languages other than English.
Maryam Kouhirostami knows that feeling well. In September 2019, the Iranian-born doctoral student was studying construction management at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Though she’d received an email warning from her school about Hurricane Dorian, which had just hit the Bahamas as a Category 5 storm, she had no idea what to expect. A friend had told her it would probably just be “a regular, rainy Florida day” where you could ride your bike down the street.
The storm weakened significantly by the time it hit Kouhirostami’s neighborhood, but it was still powerful enough to knock out her power for half a day. “It was scary, because I couldn’t see outside what was going on around the city, I could just see through the window,” she said. “It was heavy, heavy rain. I’ve never seen something like that in my country.”
Kouhirostami speaks English very well, but tough-to-translate words still mix her up occasionally. She said she felt unprepared for her encounters with hurricanes and tornadoes — which were not only foreign words, but completely foreign weather phenomena. After the storm hit, she stayed inside her apartment for four days, too terrified to leave, waiting for an email from the university telling her it was safe to come out.
A sign at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, displays instructions ahead of Hurricane Dorian on September 2, 2019.
MICHELE EVE SANDBERG / AFP via Getty Images
Migrants like Kouhirostami are especially vulnerable to disasters and systematically left behind when they strike, in part because local governments and institutions often fail to translate important notices. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, for example, many Vietnamese and Latino immigrants had a harder time understanding storm warnings and evacuation orders, since the broadcasts were only in English. In 2013, tornadoes in Oklahoma killed nine people from the Guatemalan community, and a National Weather Service report found that the lack of severe weather information in Spanish may have contributed to their deaths.
Roughly 1 in 5 residents in the United States — about 67 million people — speak a language other than English at home. While many also speak English fluently, recent research suggests that hearing emergency warnings in a non-native language can make it more difficult to process what’s happening in a situation where time is of the essence. To make matters worse, the changing climate has been making many natural hazards even more hazardous. Forecasters anticipate another active hurricane season in the warming Atlantic, following a record-breaking season last year. Wildfire season has already begun in the West, where widespread drought has left the land parched and ready to burn.
It’s imperative that local governments provide live translations of emergency information for migrants, interpreting warnings in a way that is culturally appropriate and sensitive to their needs, said Michael Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine. “It should be a requirement, in this day and age, in the era of climate change, that no county government should have an outdated disaster plan.”
The importance of translation in community disaster preparedness is a lesson many areas are only learning with hindsight.
In late 2017, the Thomas Fire began burning through California’s Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, where 1 in 3 residents speak a language other than English at home. Faced with the task of notifying community members about evacuation areas, shelters, road closures, air quality, and unsafe drinking water, local government officials found themselves largely unprepared, according to a study co-written by Méndez.
At first, crucial information was only made available in English. Ventura County eventually created a Spanish option using Google Translate — but the automated service was not a great fit for certain disaster vocabulary. For example, instead of turning the phrase “brush fire” into incendio forestal, it grabbed the Spanish word meaning “hairbrush.” Local justice groups stepped up to try to fill in the gaps, translating emergency information and providing resources for farmworkers and undocumented immigrants.
A California state audit later found that Ventura, Butte, and Sonoma counties had failed to send evacuation notices in languages other than English during the Thomas Fire, as well as the 2017 Sonoma Complex fires and the 2018 Camp Fire, putting people at increased risk.
The resulting public outcry helped prompt county-level officials to make some improvements in recent years. Méndez pointed to Sonoma County’s Office of Equity, established last year, and Ventura and Santa Barbara counties hiring full-time Spanish-speaking public information officers. But he says the problem is very far from being solved. While non-English speakers often get lumped into one group, they have very different needs — for example, many of the area’s Indigenous immigrants from Mexico speak languages like Mixtec, but neither English or Spanish.
Christine McMorrow, an information officer at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, said that the agency has been translating updates into Spanish when possible, both online and on camera, calling on Spanish speakers within the organization to help. The official website has options for translation into a dozen languages. McMorrow said that Cal Fire is aware that there is a “true need” for multilingual emergency information, and that the organization is gradually building that capability, prioritizing languages including Hmong and Arabic.
“We have so many languages that are spoken in California, and we know we’re not going to be able to translate everything into all of those languages,” she said. “But we are working towards language inclusiveness so that we can get that message out there to folks.”
Even when warnings do get translated, other problems can still arise. In a study last year, researchers at universities in Florida and the United Kingdom analyzed translations of common words in hazard communication, like resilience, vulnerability, and disaster. Using examples from 54 languages, they found that crowd-sourced translations of these words “often meant little to local people.” In Afrikaans, resilience was translated to veerkragtigheid, a word meaning “spring-like” that captures the sense of bouncing back, but not of overcoming an obstacle. Other translations emphasized unfortunate aspects of their meaning. Vulnerability, for instance, was often translated to words that conveyed weakness, portraying people as victims and disregarding their ability to cope.
The resulting language gap can add insult to injury, particularly in disaster-prone areas.
When Amer Abukhalaf moved from Columbus, Ohio, to Gainesville, Florida, a couple of years ago, hurricanes were on his mind. He arrived in August, peak season, and only had one month to settle in before Hurricane Dorian struck. As a native Arabic speaker and a PhD student researching emergency management, he did not think the storm warnings would be well-understood by the many migrants in the city. “We have a huge community here that literally has no idea what’s going on,” he said.
The experience prompted him to investigate, interviewing international students like Kouhirostami to learn more about these communication gaps. In the resulting study, Abukhalaf found that seemingly minor deviations in translation led to big problems: people confusing one disaster with another, misinterpreting advice, or even creating unnecessary panic.
When speaking a non-native language, “your mental activities are slower,” Abukhalaf said, “so you perceive things in a less accurate way, and you need more time to comprehend it.” Putting an additional translation burden on non-English speakers during a disaster, he argues, shows a lack of concern for their welfare.
“In times of emergencies, we’re assuming it’s very stressful times, but we still choose to communicate to these people in one language, and most of the time we’re doing it because it’s easier and it is just cheaper,” Abukhalaf said. “I hate the idea that if you’re not able to speak a certain language, then you become responsible for your own fate. It’s a very disturbing idea. If you don’t speak the language enough, then it’s your fault to be here? I don’t think that should be right.”
Things have to be really bad to cancel the annual fifth grade-versus-faculty kickball game.
Last Monday, thermometers at Dyer Elementary School in Portland, Maine, registered 93 degrees Fahrenheit, and teachers were forced to make the tough decision to call off the big, ceremonial event, which marks the end of elementary school for the fifth graders. “It sounds trivial, but the kids were really disappointed,” said Andrew Hodgkins, a special-ed technician at the school. The next day, administrators canceled school entirely, instructing teachers and students to instead go back to distance learning. It’s the first time Hodgkins, a Maine native, has heard of something like this happening. “I’m from around here,” he said. “I never had a heat day when I was growing up.”
One hundred miles south, in Groton, Massachusetts, Nicole Frietas, a Spanish teacher at Groton-Dunstable Regional High School, recorded temperatures of over 90 degrees F in her classroom. She managed to move her students into the library, one of the few air-conditioned areas on the school’s campus. “It was miserable,” Freitas said. “The students went from being really energetic and engaged to being really lethargic.”
Across the Northeast, record-breaking temperatures last week forced districts to cancel school or call for early dismissal, concerned about the dangerous combination of heat, a widespread lack of air conditioning, and COVID-19 rules that still limit fan usage and require mask wearing.
Education experts told Grist the heatwave illustrates just how underprepared schools in the United States are for the extreme weather that comes more frequently with climate change. “It’s showing that our schools are extremely out of date,” said Laura Schifter, who leads K12 Climate Action, a project of the nonprofit Aspen Institute that addresses climate change through schools.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office found that most school districts need major building-system repairs, like heating, ventilation, and air conditioning updates. Some of those are schools, like Dyer Elementary, that have never had air conditioning before. One district in Michigan told the researchers that 60 percent of its schools had never had air conditioning, and that in 2019 it had begun shuffling schedules to protect students from extreme heat.
Climate adaptation isn’t just about air conditioning: It’s also important for schools to figure out how to support students and communities reeling in the wake of a wildfire or hurricane, Shifter said. In recent years, schools in the West have closed for smoke days, when wildfires made breathing hazardous. In the towns around Paradise, California, schools strained to keep the students whose homes had burned down from falling through the cracks. In Miami, schools worked to accomodate an influx of families from Puerto Rico fleeing the destruction of hurricane Maria. Internationally, drought has emptied schools in Niger and Bolivia as families follow the receding water. Schools often don’t need new physical renovations to prepare for disasters: In some cases it’s as simple as making a plan. If a school knows ahead of time who will take responsibility for responding to a disaster, or sets up a system for tracking students before they scatter, that can reduce the chaos significantly.
In looking at the schools that need the most work to prepare for climate change, Schifter saw a familiar pattern. “The need is greatest in low-income communities and communities of color,” she said. These school districts have a harder time getting the money to pay for upgrades, she told Grist, and so instead they end up frittering away dollars on the maintenance of long-outdated systems.
And as temperatures in classrooms rise, so too does the impact on students’ education. Each 1-degree F increase in temperature reduces the amount that students learn by 1 percent, according to a study published last year in the journal American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. The study also found that in hotter parts of the U.S. with the greatest need for air conditioning, schools with a higher portion of Black and Hispanic students were less likely to have it.
Despite the need, most school districts are juggling so many issues that climate adaptation isn’t even on their radar. Air conditioning is expensive, noted Thomas A. Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents. “The fact that we have two blistering days and only a handful of schools are releasing on an abbreviated schedule indicates that we tend to just deal with it. It’s not that we wouldn’t like to have the options for A/C, but there isn’t a strong move to do it,” he wrote in an email during the Northeast’s heatwave last week.
But sometimes paying to prepare up front costs less in the long run. When Arlington, Virginia, began the process of designing a new school, the architects suggested that it wouldn’t cost much more to build in such a way that the structure generated all the energy it needed. Now, Discovery Elementary not only remains comfortable on hot days, but also saves the district around $100,000 in utility costs every year.
In the meantime, students keep sweating, and schools keep shuffling schedules. When the weather finally turned in Portland, Maine, Dyer Elementary rescheduled the kickball game. Hodgkins was dismayed to report that the teachers lost to the fifth graders, four to eight.
The West Coast housing market is metaphorically on fire — with rotting shacks selling for millions. Decades of policies to restrict housing in desirable neighborhoods has pushed prices up — and it has also pushed houses out into more rural, forested areas. As a result, West Coast housing is periodically on fire in the literal sense as well.
A report released Thursday by a group of scholars from the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation and the nonprofit think tank, Next 10, found that wildfire now threatens the lives and homes of more than a quarter of California’s population, largely due to current housing policies that often make it cheaper to construct homes in at-risk areas.
It’s hard to build in California cities because every new home must pass through a permitting odyssey, facing local reviews and the threat of lawsuits from neighbors. As a result, the report found, in recent decades, one in every two new homes built in California was out at the edge of wildlands, down winding roads, or shaded by towering pines. In other words, current policies are pushing half of all new housing into the path of wildfires.
This new housing — everything from inexpensive manufactured homes to mansions perched on hilltops — is always cheaper than the same type of house in a city. As a result, many people seeking more affordable housing have moved into wildfire hazard areas.
“The wildfire issue is intimately coupled with the issue of California’s enormous housing problem,” Robert Olshansky, a lead author of the new report and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, told Grist. “There’s pressure to build more housing, there’s resistance to putting it in the middle of towns, and there’s less resistance to putting it out on the edges, so that’s where they put it.”
Kelly McKenzie is one of the people who moved into California’s forests in 2018 in search of less expensive housing. The $729,000 her family paid for a house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada wouldn’t seem affordable in most parts of the country, but it was much cheaper than anything they could have bought in San Francisco, where they lived before. But as fires ripped through the region, her insurance company informed her that the home had become too risky for them, which left McKenzie’s family paying some $5,000 a year to be part of a high-risk insurance pool — much more than they had ever anticipated paying.
“We can afford to pay for it, but it annoys me greatly,” she sighed. “And I know that other people with less money face really difficult decisions.”
Wildfire is exacerbating the housing crisis, and the poorest residents feel the pinch most.
“More and more people are only able to afford housing in high-risk places,” said Katelyn Roedner Sutter, a climate expert for the Environmental Defense Fund and a member of an insurance reform committee organized by California’s Insurance Commissioner. “But housing is not affordable when you can’t afford to insure it.”
The fix seems simple: The report suggests that California should make it easier to build inside cities, while making it harder to build in hazardous wildfire areas. So far, the politics of making such a fix have proven to be complicated. In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have made it harder to build in the most dangerous fire zones, because he worried it would worsen the housing crisis. And many cities have campaigned fiercely against measures that would force them to allow developers to build new homes within their borders.
Still, the wildfires have proven to be such a massive ongoing disaster that lawmakers have no choice but to connect the dots between wildfires in the foothills and zoning ordinances restricting the number of apartment buildings in cities. “There are just so many bills in front of the California legislature now that recognize that all these things are related to each other,” Olshansky said. “Three years ago this wasn’t happening. I sense the political winds — the hot dry political winds, maybe we can say — have changed.”
Last Friday, for example, a working group organized by California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara, released a set of proposals to cope with climate risks, including policies that could stop new construction in the most hazardous areas. There’s a clear need to update insurance practices to reflect the reality of climate change. For most of the last half century, the report notes, the insurance industry paid out an average of $100 million per year in fire insurance claims in California. From 2011 to 2018, however, that figure jumped forty-fold to $4 billion per year — due to more intense fires.
Another solution suggested by the report, would be for fire-prone communities and nonprofits to buy up vulnerable residential areas and turn them into soccer fields, wetland habitat, or some other form of parkland that would serve as a fire break. At first, that seemed impossible to Olshansky: “When I first heard this I thought, that’s the kind of crazy idea that we come up with at a university but it can’t happen in real life,” he admitted. But the strategy is actually under consideration in the town of Paradise, which burned to the ground in 2018, where local government has a plan to buy lots where houses once stood and create exactly this sort of irrigated parkland buffer.
Put into practice, a mix of these policies would spur building in cities, while creating the possibility of retreat from the most dangerous wildfire areas. It’s not a relocation program Olshansky said, more of a persistent nudge for the coming scores of people likely to lose their homes to fire: “At the moment they get burned, while we are showing compassion and trying to help them rebuild, we should provide them with opportunities to relocate to safer places where they won’t be traumatized by these fires anymore,” he said.
Every year heat kills tens of thousands of people. Their breathing grows shallow, their heart rates flutter, their muscles spasm, and then they die. Heat killed over 100,000 people in 2018, when high temperatures broiled the European Union.
A new study suggests that climate change was responsible for many of those deaths. The paper, published Monday in Nature Climate Change, scrutinized summertime deaths in 43 countries between 1991 and 2018 — the largest collection of heat mortality data ever assembled.
The researchers estimate that higher temperatures driven by greenhouse gas emissions caused more than half the heat-related deaths in several countries, including Thailand, Peru and the Philippines. On average, climate change was at fault for 37 percent of heat-related deaths. The world has only warmed around 2 degrees Fahrenheit so far, but that’s already enough to kill roughly 100,000 people every year, if you apply this paper’s estimate to the entire world.
There are, however, some pretty big holes in the data for anyone trying to do that kind of extrapolation. There’s simply no data on heat-related deaths from huge swaths of the world, including major population centers in equatorial Africa, and India. “The main point of this paper is that the map is mainly empty!” wrote Friedi Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, in an email. And Otto’s own research suggests that that heat is particularly deadly in these places that don’t have sophisticated systems to record the cause of deaths.
In other words, reality could be worse than the estimates. “The countries where we do not have the necessary health data are often among the poorest and most susceptible to climate change, and, concerningly, are also the projected major hotspots of future population growth, ” according to Dann Mitchell, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol, in a piece accompanying the study.
To make their estimates, the authors analyzed 29,936,896 death records from around the world, zeroing in on the heat-related deaths. Then they did some fancy modelling to determine how much cooler it would have been if our pollution hadn’t wrapped round the planet like an overheavy comforter. And they finished it off with a little more math to estimate the number of people who would not have succumbed in that alternative (read: one without climate change) world.
These kinds of studies “are compelling for motivating the policy process because you can show there has been some number of deaths from climate change,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor of Global Health at the University of Washington.
Still, models that gin up these kinds of alternative worlds are never foolproof. Who knows what else would be different about a non-climate-changed world besides the temperatures? “There has been some acclimatization,” Ebi said. “In high-income countries there have been declining heat related deaths because of better air conditioning and better health care.”
But if you want to make the best estimate of how many heat deaths were caused by climate change, you’d use the methods in this study, Otto said. “So the numbers here are a conservative lower bound estimate of the true heat deaths due to climate change,” she said. “Heat kills, and climate change is an absolute game changer when it comes to heat, and we do not talk about this enough.”
Geneva – There is about a 40% chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level in at least one of the next five years – and these odds are increasing with time, according to a new climate update issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
There is a 90% likelihood of at least one year between 2021-2025 becoming the warmest on record, which would dislodge 2016 from the top ranking, according to the Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, produced by the United Kingdom’s Met Office, the WMO lead centre for such predictions.
Over 2021-2025, high-latitude regions and the Sahel are likely to be wetter and there is an increased chance of more tropical cyclones in the Atlantic compared to the recent past (defined as the 1981-2010 average).
The burning season has transformed California over the last half decade. The California summer of popular imagination is spent outside: a line of surfers on a wave, a night in the Sierra Nevada Mountains under endless stars. But in recent years, Californians have spent parts of each summer huddled inside, as wildfire smoke shrouds the sun.
California is beginning to spend serious money to reverse this trend, and none too soon. The state’s snowpack — which keeps rivers running and forests green through the long dry summer — has melted away to just 2 percent of normal levels for this time of year. Most of the state is already in extreme drought, and some 1,000 people recently evacuated from an early season fire near Los Angeles. Officials are worried.
“You are really seeing the warning signs of a really destructive fire season,” said Ricardo Lara, the state’s insurance commissioner, at an event on Wednesday.
California lawmakers have already set aside $500 million this year to fireproof homes, cut firebreaks, and thin forests. Governor Gavin Newsom has asked for more, bringing the total to $1.2 billion — orders of magnitude more than the $75 million the state budgeted for fire resilience last year. “That’s a huge, unprecedented, scale up in this year’s budget,” said Jessica Morse, deputy secretary for forest and wildfire resilience at California’s Natural Resources Agency.
And it matches California’s goals for a ramp up in activity: The state wants to thin 500,000 acres of overly dense forest every year by 2025. To do that, it’s creating a new workforce of prescribed burn experts, crews that clear brush with chainsaws and giant machines called masticators, and a new generation of loggers to harvest trees sustainably. It’s giving out small business loans to people starting up brush-cutting businesses and streamlining regulations to help build up this industry of forest management.
So far, the effort appears to be working: Private landowners cut brush and thinned trees on nearly 300,000 acres last year, and the state performed controlled burns on another 50,000 acres, according to Newsom’s Forest Management Task Force.
“We need them to scale up,” Morse said at the same conference last week.
That just might happen under the Biden administration. On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a “progress report” on “climate smart agriculture and forestry,” which said that the Forest Service should more than double its pace, thinning and burning 19 million acres across the country in the next 20 years.
California is also working on strategies to make use of all the excess wood that comes from these thinning efforts. “It’s kind of like a garden project at your home, where you realize you don’t have room in your trash can,” said Kelly Seyarto, a firefighter and California Assemblyman. So the state is working on ways to turn small trees into building materials and wood chips into clean energy.
Working on all these fronts, the state is beginning to make its way back toward a hot season that’s not dominated by smoke. Of the 20 largest fires in state history, all but three have occurred since 2000. That’s due, in large part, to climate change heating up the state, melting the mountain glaciers, and drying up the soil. As a result, nearly a third of California’s forestland has burned since 2000. Grim as that sounds, it has also reduced some of the tinder for future wildfires. If California and the U.S. Forest Service are able to work together to thin out a million acres of forest a year, summers could become a lot less hellish.
Amid the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Southwest Louisiana city faced three hurricanes in 2020, leaving thousands without homes and jobs. And this week it was pelted by a once-in-a-century rain event, which brought an estimated 15 inches of rain in just 12 hours. Lake Charles’ roughly 75,000 residents joined about 30 million people across the South threatened by flooding this week — and at least four people have already died statewide due to the storms.
Two weeks ago, President Joe Biden visited the city, using its destroyed homes, dilapidated roads, and the 70-year-old Calcasieu River Bridge as a backdrop to highlight the need for his new infrastructure package. While he was there, Biden pledged help with hurricane recovery: “I believe you need the help,” he said. “We’re going to try to make sure you get it. But the people of Louisiana always have picked themselves up, just like America always picks itself up.”
Darryl Malek-Wiley, a senior environmental justice organizer with the Sierra Club based in New Orleans, agrees that the country must update its crumbling infrastructure, including in places like Lake Charles. But when it comes to recovering from the extreme weather events that climate change is intensifying, leaders should focus less on citizens picking themselves up and more on the government addressing the needs of those bearing the brunt of disasters. “If you’re not making enough money to put food on the table,” Malek-Wiley said, “you’re just trying to survive.”
Nearly half of all residents in Lake Charles are Black and one-fourth live in poverty. However, poverty estimates are likely undercounts because of what the city has endured just in this last year: a deadly COVID-19 outbreak and four federally declared disasters (Hurricanes Laura, Delta, and Zeta, as well as the winter storm that crippled much of the U.S. Gulf coast in mid-February).
“We are a very resilient people. We are a very strong population,” Lake Charles Mayor Nic Hunter told USA Today after Monday’s downpour. “But, you know, eventually you do kind of get to a point where you ask Mother Nature: What more can you do to us?”
According to U.S. Postal Service data, the city suffered the most population loss in the country last year, with 6.7 percent of its residents leaving. Mass evictions and a slow federal aid process have left tens of thousands of people without shelter and their homes in disrepair, forcing many to take refuge in tents.
“The federal government and state governments are not designed to handle disaster, and FEMA is outdated in the way it handles this type of climate-related disasters — taking a slow, fragmented approach,” Malek-Wiley said. “What we need is proactive budgeting towards infrastructure, changing building codes, and making sure houses are livable, not just for wealthier communities.”
This holistic approach to combating climate change is required, Malek-Wiley says, because a place like Lake Charles, which faces regular natural disasters, is also situated heavily industrial area. In the last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has taken action against more than a dozen petrochemical plants in Lake Charles and surrounding communities for emitting more pollution than they’re allowed by law. “Not only is flooding a problem but then plants get flooded and shut down, which adds unchecked air and water emissions, adding insult to injury,” Malek-Wiley explained.
He says Hurricane Katrina showed the country the need for a way forward — that communities in low-lying areas like those in Southern Louisiana need to learn to live with water. In New Orleans, that’s meant thinking about more than just pumping water out of the city, but also finding ways to slow floodwaters by building green infrastructure.
“That needs to happen everywhere in this country,” Malek-Wiley said, “especially in Lake Charles.”
From a rise overlooking the unusually low San Luis Reservoir, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency for 39 of the state’s 58 counties on Monday. This was the second stop on his dry lake tour: Less than a month earlier, Newsom had stood on the cracked bottom of Lake Mendocino, a spot normally 20-feet underwater, and announced a drought emergency in Sonoma and Mendocino counties. Not far from where he spoke in April, an early wildfire raged, where spring grasses had prematurely yellowed to tinder.
“That’s unprecedented for this time of year, said Grant Davis, general manager of Sonoma Water, who spoke at the same lectern as Newsom that day. “We’ve had big fires three out of the last five years. Believe me this is climate change and extreme weather all rolled into one.”
As California’s not-so-wet season draws to a close, half the state is already in ‘extreme drought.’ That means that thousands of wells could go dry in the poorest rural areas in the coming months, and fish populations will suffer as rivers heat up. In the northern half of the state, reservoir levels are already as low as they were three years into the last major drought that ran from 2011 to 2017. But California emerged from that long spate of dry weather with hard-won skills that make it better prepared this time around.
The entire West has suffered from droughts in recent years, but there’s something that captures the public imagination when disaster hits California, the most populous state, that promised land of sunshine, fruit trees, and celluloid dreams. Whenever drought grips California, elements of the media fall into an ecstatic doom loop, producing headlines that make the state sound like an apocalyptic wasteland.
In some ways, things are definitely bad: The state has entered an era of consistent water scarcity and consistently higher temperatures. The last three California droughts have been among the driest, and also the warmest, on record. The little increase in temperatures has been disastrous, melting away snowpack, drying up soils, and exacerbating forest fires.
At the same time, California is adapting. Davis and other speakers at a presentation by the Public Policy Institute of California didn’t downplay the severity of the drought, but they also said officials were more prepared than in the past. “We have done a lot since the last drought, and we are in a much better position now,” said Alvar Escriva-Bou, a water research fellow at the institute.
Previous droughts spurred cities to invest in backup pipelines and wells. Some cities in the driest parts of the state — like in Mendocino and Sonoma — are beginning to ask residents to conserve but in general, Escriva-Bou said, “Cities shouldn’t see big impacts this time.”
It’s a different story in the rural parts of California: Escriva-Bou has projected that 2,400 wells could go dry around the state this year. That’s grim, but the fact that anyone is making those projections is an improvement over the last drought, when some 3,000 wells went dry without warning. “Now we know where they are and can be proactive,” he said.
State agencies have begun contacting communities that rely on shallow wells to help them find backups. If those preparations fail, California is ready to sweep in with emergency water supplies, said Laurel Firestone, a member of the California State Water Board. “We don’t want to be trucking water to houses or trucking fish to water,” she said. “Those are emergencies we want to do everything to avoid.”
Still, California is already making plans to move some fish in tanker trucks. Normally fish hatcheries release salmon into rivers, but this year those rivers are too low, and the water is too warm. So this year, instead of swimming downstream, the salmon will travel by truck to the Pacific Ocean.
California has also adapted by building better weather forecasting tools. In the past, water managers would open up dam spillways as big storms approached to make enough room in reservoirs to catch floods and protect towns downstreams. Errant forecasts often made a mess of the situation: The storm would turn off the projected course, leaving water managers with depleted reservoirs. The improved forecasting techniques this year have allowed water managers to hold onto an extra 3.5 billion gallons of water in Lake Mendocino, nearly a third of its remaining water, Davis said.
On Monday, Newsom vowed to spend $5 billion to improve California’s water systems and said the state had already made strides since the last drought. “Not only are we more prepared in terms of expertise and insight, but also by nature of the fact that 16 percent less water is being used in this state compared to the first drought proclamation last time,” he said.
Just a few short years ago, policy wonks were still arguing over whether governments should spend money on adapting to climate change, like preparing for droughts, or on efforts to prevent climate disasters from happening in the first place. Those debates seem quaint now.
The word “emergency” usually conjures images of ambulances with flashing lights, homes going up in flames, or tornadoes tearing through a town. But increasingly, governments are using the word to describe a slower-burning crisis: climate change.
On Thursday, Hawaii became the first state to declare a “climate emergency,” joining 1,933 cities, town councils, and countries, including the European Union. According to The Climate Mobilization, a U.S.-based advocacy group, almost 13 percent of the global population now lives in a jurisdiction that has made a similar declaration.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the country’s only island state, and only one in the tropics, is signaling the need for more drastic action on climate change.
Over the past two decades, the annual cost of flood damage in the United States has quadrupled. And as global temperatures continue to rise and extreme weather events intensify, scientists estimate such damage to homes could increase another 60 percent over the next 30 years. Yet despite these alarming numbers, many homeowners in the U.S. remain unaware of the risks their properties face: More than half of states do not have, or have inadequate, flood risk disclosure laws — meaning no one has to tell homebuyers if they’re purchasing a flood prone-property.
This lack of transparency has created a false real estate market in parts of the U.S., according to new research from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, found there are almost 4 million single-family homes located in floodplains nationwide that collectively are overvalued by $44 billion based on their flood risk, or an average $11,526 per house.
The impact of this schema is particularly harmful for low-income families. “There is a disproportionately high share of marginalized populations that live in floodplains, because often it’s the cheapest available land,” said Miyuki Hino, lead author of the study and a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. “If you’re a household that invested a lot of money into a home in one of these places, we would be extremely concerned about the possibility of that home’s value dropping a lot and really wiping out a lot of wealth in communities that are vulnerable to begin with.”
By not reflecting climate risk in housing values, it creates incentives for unnecessary development in hazardous areas, Hino found. It also blinds people to the financial risks of living in flood-prone neighborhoods, from riverfront towns in the Midwest to coastal Florida. Of the 10 states most at risk of severe flooding in the next 100 years, just three have flood risk disclosure laws — North Carolina, California, and Louisiana, according to data from the Natural Resources Defense Council. The latter two received passing scores for their laws, while North Carolina’s was rated as inadequate.
Floodplain maps maintained by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, are also woefully out of date in most parts of the country — leaving homebuyers in the dark about the risk they are acquiring.
Using publicly available flood maps and two decades of home sale data, the researchers evaluated what happened to a house’s sale price over time as flood maps were updated to include homes not previously identified in a flood zone. They saw a 2 percent decrease in the home’s price. Then, the researchers estimated what the cost of fully insuring these homes would be, and found it would actually cause the value of the house to decrease by 4.7 to 10.6 percent. If public flood maps were more thorough, the scientists said, the extent to which houses with flood risk are overvalued would likely be much greater.
The scientists argue their new research isn’t just useful for studying flooding, but can also be applied to other climate change-related disasters that affect housing, including wildfires. “We would have similar concerns with other types of hazards where the information is not really easily accessible or not forced to be disclosed to the buyer,” Hino said. ”You could get this type of overvaluation and this concern about how markets are going to fare over time as the climate changes.”
Cedar Rapids, Iowa — Terri Domer knows well what a brewing storm looks like.
Domer, 62, an Iowa native, has spent her life watching thunderstorms gather and tornadoes dash across rolling hills. Last August, when the midday sky darkened over the riverside homeless encampment where Domer and four other people spent most nights — built on a sandy bank near downtown, under tall trees — she quickly set about covering up their supplies.
A campmate said Domer was overreacting and left for a walk. “Suit yourself,” she told him.
Domer was busy weighing down a tent when she heard a shout: “I was wrong!” She turned to spot her companion racing back to camp. The sky behind him was “black,” Domer said — darker than it had been just moments earlier, darker than she’d ever seen it.
The derecho hit with a fury, winds whipping up sand and snapping limbs overhead. Domer rushed for cover, pulling a tent canopy over her head. Tornadoes typically come and go in minutes. But the derecho, a straight-line windstorm, was relentless. All around Domer, branches and whole trees crashed to the ground.
“I kept thinking, ‘When is it going to stop?’” Domer said. She said a prayer that she would live.
It’s an immutable truth of the climate crisis that the most vulnerable are hit first and hardest. At a time of rising homelessness in the U.S. and as climate-related disasters become common — wildfires in California, monster hurricanes that thrash the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, an arctic blast in Texas — the rule holds.
“We’re definitely seeing more homelessness, more housing disruption, as a result of these disasters,” said Steve Berg, programs and policy director at the Washington-based National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Climate change didn’t directly cause the Midwest derecho last year or any of those other disasters. Scientists are clear, however, that a warmer planet makes extreme weather more likely and more ferocious. For people experiencing homelessness, like Domer, the storms make matters only more difficult. Others are made homeless. In both cases, government agencies and nonprofits provide support, but increasingly the needs exceed their capacity.
Together, these experiences constitute a grim warning that the climate emergency is here already, draining resources and devastating lives.
There are an estimated 580,000 people experiencing homelessness in America, based on a single-night count in January 2020 — the fourth straight year homelessness had increased, according toa study released last monthby the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was the first year since HUD began collecting data that the number of homeless people with children had gone up. And, as usual, people of color remained starkly overrepresented compared with the U.S. population overall.
Crucially, that’s all pre-pandemic data, and the reality is likely to be worse than we know. Millions lost work because of Covid-19, and even as the economy recovers, there remain8.4 million fewer jobsthan before the pandemic hit. Eviction moratoriums have helped, advocates say, but as some of those expire soon, the situation could grow more dire still.
The homeless population in Cedar Rapids numbers in the hundreds. It’s a far cry from the tens of thousands in larger cities, like Los Angeles, but the derecho’s lingering impact here is a microcosm of the various crises that can befall homeless groups in the aftermath of extreme weather.
When the windstorm finally did let up, about 45 minutes after it had begun, Domer’s campsite was in tatters: tents ruined, stoves and lanterns simply gone and just about everything else soiled with wet grime.
What struck Domer most, however, was the quiet. Gone were the normal afternoon sounds of the city. Even the nearby corn processing plant, a reliable source of ambient churning, was silent.
“I realized the whole town had been hit, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God,’” Domer said.
The derecho swept across multiple states that day, leaving widespread and often severe damage in its wake. The Cedar Rapids areafared worst, with winds reaching140 mph, the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane. Two-thirds of the city’s famously lush tree canopywas gone, much of it displaced onto streets and homes. And the power was out. In some parts of town, it would be weeks before it returned.
For the homeless, natural disasters prove torturous for more than the obvious fact that it’s worse to be outside than inside during a storm.
Only one-quarter of the homeless population is considered “chronically homeless,” meaning homeless for more than a year or experiencing repeat bouts of homelessness. At any given time, then, the vast majority of homeless people, including some who are chronically homeless, are scraping their way back toward stability. After disasters, backslide is all but inevitable.
Encampments are destroyed. Resources, often hard-won, are lost. If infrastructure is damaged, a job might become more difficult or impossible to get to.
Furthermore, many people who are homeless wrestle with untreated medical or mental health conditions that disasters might worsen. Domer, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, said the derecho triggered substantial anxiety and depression, which she’s still coping with. Christian Murphy, who was also on the riverbank during the storm, said he worries that Cedar Rapids’ devastated tree stock will lead to lower air quality, complicating trouble he has already with breathing.
After the derecho, a short distance from Domer’s and Murphy’s encampment, Kari Fisher surveyed the damage to the duplex where she lived with her husband and six children, ages 1 to 10.
When the storm hit, Fisher had been home-schooling, a new responsibility due to the pandemic but one she enjoyed. Structural damage to the home was clear; in the unit opposite Fisher’s, a tree had smashed into the kitchen. City officials declared the home unfit for habitation, but with nowhere else to go, Fisher’s family stayed. Power was shot for good, so for months they got by using plastic coolers and a propane camping stove. (Thanks to the downed trees, Fisher jokes, they also had plenty of wood.)
In November, police cited the family for unlawful habitation. (Fisher is fighting the citation; she faces possible jail time, even though the family had continued to pay rent.) They were directed to Willis Dady, a homeless services nonprofit, which moved the family into a Hampton Inn & Suites north of town, using federal emergency funds made available to the city.
Fisher expected they’d be there for a couple weeks. Six months later, fully eight months on from the derecho, they’re stuck. In two hotel rooms, it’s Fisher, her husband, an ex-husband who has a disability, seven children — Fisher gave birth to a boy in February — and two dogs. In the same Hampton Inn & Suites, there are dozens more like Fisher, and it’s not the only hotel in town still housing people made homeless by the storm.
“It feels like sardines,” Fisher said. “It’s not sustainable.”
While her husband works, Fisher spends days searching Zillow, Zumper, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace for available homes. On rental application fees alone, the family has spent $4,500 — dipping ever further into diminished savings — but nothing comes through. With so many people looking, prices are high. By the time most units are listed, they’re already gone.
“We’re in a hole,” Fisher said. “No matter how much I do, no matter how many phone calls I make, we’re still here.” Her “worst nightmare” is that the money supporting their hotel stay will run out before the family finds new shelter.
“I’m waiting for it,” she said. “And when that happens, it’s ‘OK, what are we going to do now?’ A tent at a campground? I can’t raise children in a minivan.” As of mid-April, the family hoped to move into a trailer.
Fisher’s situation, advocates said, is characteristic. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — the first major storm in the U.S. that scientistslinked to climate change— disasters have been routine drivers of new homelessness.
In Houston, for example, homeless rates fell year over year starting in 2012. In 2018, the year after Hurricane Harvey, they ticked back up. Last year, 11 percent of the city’s unsheltered homeless population said they had become homeless because of the hurricane or another natural disaster, according to a survey by Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless.
The problem isn’t just that homes are destroyed. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, America is shortnearly 7 million affordable housing units. During an extreme weather event, affordable housing — more likely to have been built in disaster-prone areas in the first place — is especially vulnerable and often hit the hardest, shrinking the already limited inventory. Pricier homes aren’t immune to destruction, of course, so families who are financially better off might also find themselves in need of short-term, lower-cost options. Demand peaks at the same time that options are depleted the most.
“Disasters of this magnitude really trickle out,” said Ana Rausch, program operations director at the Coalition for the Homeless. After Harvey, she said, “our regular housing of the homeless pretty much came to a halt, because we were trying to house people in the disaster shelters. And not all of those individuals were homeless.”
The pattern goes like this: Disasters push people who had been housing secure toward insecurity. People who were already insecure or severely burdened by housing costs are pushed to the edge of homelessness. And, finally, people who were already homeless are pushed further back in the long wait for limited resources.
The web of government agencies and nonprofits designed to help, meanwhile, is stretched to the max.
In Cedar Rapids, Willis Dady typically serves 500 people in a year, including those who are actively homeless and those who are at risk of becoming homeless. Now, given the combined effects of Covid-19 and the derecho, 500 people need assistance every day, said Alicia Faust, the organization’s executive director. The staff has risen to the occasion, working overtime, extending shelter hours and taking on more clients than ever, but still it’s hard to keep up.
To fully meet the demand, Faust said, she would need 16 full-time homelessness prevention case managers, working 30 to 35 cases apiece. Willis Dady has three.
Bandwidth issues like that are a nationwide problem, said Berg, of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. And that’s in part because the government responses to homelessness and disasters have both tended to treat symptoms of problems and not their root causes.
“There’s always a response to the emergency,” Berg said. “But there isn’t an overall response to people becoming homeless or the [already homeless people] impacted by this weather.”
When it comes to homelessness, that is, the response is overwhelmingly oriented toward people already in crisis — not the broad economic currents that underlie homelessness, including soaring rent costs, stagnant wages and the dearth of affordable housing. As for disasters, the government mobilizes in their aftermath, but it hasn’t yet taken robust, transformational action to curb climate change and foster resilience.
Several recent and proposed policies could be cause for hope, however. And in some cases, solutions to homelessness and the climate crisis might be one and the same.
Between coronavirus relief measures passed during the Trump administration and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that President Joe Biden signed last month, nearly $80 billion was allocated to HUD, the Treasury Department and various federal grant recipients to fight homelessness and housing instability, a HUD spokesperson said in an email. Moreover, the White House’s newly announced $3 trillion-plus infrastructure plan includes funding to build and retrofit 1 million affordable and energy-efficient housing units.
“The Administration’s plan will extend affordable housing rental opportunities to underserved communities nationwide, including in rural and tribal areas,” the HUD spokesperson said. The plan would also “flexibly support communities in creating housing for people experiencing homelessness and the housing insecure.”
Another promise of Biden’s infrastructure proposal and Climate Action Plan: millions of jobs, as the administration seeks to build out America’s clean energy infrastructure.
Advocates for the homeless expressed cautious optimism. New affordable housing is a clear win, while the benefits of upgrading and retrofitting existing units are twofold: Just as energy efficiency is good for the planet, it lowers utility costs for renters. As for jobs, many people who experience homelessness find work in construction already. If enough training is packaged with the green jobs in Biden’s plan, as the administration says it will be, those jobs could be an apt fit and a much-needed path to stability.
Indeed, after the derecho, several members of the Cedar Rapids homeless community found work helping with the cleanup effort. Some continue to work in construction-related jobs as part of a Willis Dady employment initiative.
Domer, as it happens, has a background in road and home construction, with a former specialty in woodwork. She is in her 60s, and both shoulders give her trouble, so those days are probably behind her — she hopes to find work soon driving a cab. But plenty of people she knows, Domer said, would jump at the opportunity. At a time when many are still struggling with the storm’s repercussions, it could be a way to finally move on.
“Anything would help,” Domer said. “The pandemic was already tough, and then a derecho. We’re still trying to figure out what normal looks like.”
Over a period of about six months, the United States suffered two extreme weather events that had the same outcome: widespread energy disruptions through rolling power outages that left people dangerously vulnerable to the elements.
Last August, a powerful heat wave knocked out electricity for millions of Californians in what was the first statewide set of power outages in some 20 years. This past February, a brutal and deadly cold snap in Texas caused rolling blackouts, leaving millions of Texans without the usual means to stay warm.
Efforts among allies of the fossil fuel industry to paint these blackouts as primarily a result of unreliable renewable energy sources have since been disproved. With climate change increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events across the U.S., and as broad efforts to green the nation’s energy grid move forward, we must take a deep look at the tragic events that unfolded in Texas and California and learn from the mistakes that were made.
To discuss, we spoke with Joshua Rhodes, a research fellow at the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding partner of IdeaSmiths, an energy systems analytical firm.
Daniel Ross: What do you see as the most important lessons to be gleaned from the rolling blackouts that Texas experienced earlier this year?
Joshua Rhodes: One has to look at all of the systems. We rely heavily on our thermal fleet [predominantly powered through natural gas] to be available to meet that winter demand. I think it worked out that, at peak demand, we lost half of our thermal fleet when we relied on 90 percent of it to be there. Part of that comes from: We didn’t winterize the power plants; we had cooling water issues; we had cooling water sensor issues in the case of a nuclear facility. I think one of the big kickers is that the electricity sector was relying on the gas sector to be firm, and that turned out to be a bad assumption.
In particular with Texas, the natural gas we produce is a wet gas — there are lots of other liquids in water that come up with it, and that froze. We lost half of our natural gas production. And when half your gas plants rely on natural gas to make electricity, and you lose half of your fuel, you’re going to start off these events with one hand tied behind your back.
Renewables do get a knock for the fact you can’t turn them on any more than the sun’s shining and the wind’s blowing. But I think we learned lessons about fuel security. We need to take a broader look not only at the power plants that provide us with electricity but what fuels those power plants.
An official analysis blamed the rolling blackouts that we saw last year in California on three main things: extreme heat, antiquated grid reliability planning and an energy market that didn’t work as efficiently as it needed to. Do you see any similarities between what Texas and California experienced?
We [in Texas] don’t have the wind issues that California does with wildfires and things like that — or to that extent, anyway. But what they do share in common is if you take a system that was designed under a certain set of parameters — under a certain set of conditions — and you push it beyond the bounds it was designed for, then you’re going to have problems.
California has the target of reaching 100 percent clean energy production by 2045. Given the likelihood of extreme heat events along the West Coast becoming a more common occurrence, what does that state need to be mindful of in terms of energy resilience?
We really need to study the weather conditions that get us to these extreme events, which homes and businesses and people experience, because at the end of the day, it’s [about] buildings demanding electricity.
We need to figure out during those conditions what is happening. What is the sun doing? What is the wind doing? What are our neighbors doing? That’s especially the case for a place like California that relies a lot on [energy] imports, unlike Texas. If you become too comfortable thinking, “If we get into a bind, our neighbors will be able to help us,” but if everyone’s in a bind at the same time because you have a massive high-pressure system across the entire Western part of the United States, then that’s going to be an issue.
Broadly speaking, how have we planned in the past for extreme weather events?
That’s a great question. Historically, we’ve tended to look backwards in order to predict the future. We look at weather we’ve experienced in the past, and we use that as a marker with which to build our infrastructure to meet our future demands.
The problem is that under a changing climate, looking backwards is not a good way of looking forward. We’re going to have to come up with better ways of figuring out what future demands will be, given that a changing climate will impact those weather patterns that [historically] have given us our demands.
That’s hard. Looking backwards, you can actually look at data and you can actually see what happened. It’s something you can hold in your hand. It’s harder looking into the future because we haven’t seen that yet, so, in all likelihood, we’re probably going to get it wrong. But it would be better to err on that side of more extreme weather so that we’re ready for it, than get caught short without the infrastructure we need.
So, within our broader nationwide push toward greater clean energy reliance, what specifically do we need to be mindful of moving forward?
I think we need to keep the toolbox as big as possible.
There are folks out there who, when they think “clean energy future,” they think “renewable energy future” only. I think we can get really far with renewables — I’ve seen some studies showing 60, 70, 80 percent, depending where you are in the U.S., and depending on what your [energy] mix is like, and particularly whether or not you have something like hydro[electricity], which can be a good baseload. [Norway] can rely on very high [levels of] renewables because they’re [more than] 90 percent hydro. You can turn it off and on. It’s basically an emissions-free fossil fuel plant.
Getting that last 20 percent energy, I think that’s when it can become more expensive. It’s what most of the models show. And I think it’ll be harder for people to swallow going forward, and so, I think [we’ll need to be] keeping the toolbox open … paired with energy storage.
We’re pretty good now on short duration energy storage — the things that can modulate back and forth throughout the day. We don’t have good seasonal energy storage technology yet. And so, we need to be working on that. The more renewables we want to move from, say, a shoulder season to a summer or winter season, we need to focus on some of those kinds of [long-term] storage technologies.
How do you see Biden’s infrastructure plan — given available details — as a vehicle for needed change?
Nominally, there’s about $100 billion in the plan for grid upgrades. I think it’s a good start, but I think there’s some targeted investments that could be made, and I hope there’ll be a multiplier effect on that money that would allow more [of the] private sector to come into the system.
If you add up how much concrete and steel, how many wires and power plants and everything we have on the system — if we had to replace everything we have right now, it would cost about $5 trillion. There’s about $2 trillion worth of upgrades that need to be made on the system, and that’s just to keep things the way they are. If we want to transition to a different future than what we currently have, I imagine that’s going to cost trillions more dollars.
And so, we’ve got a long way to go in terms of building the energy infrastructure we frankly really need. If you look at the American Association of Civil Engineers, they grade our energy infrastructure as a C-, which, as a college professor, that’s barely a passing grade.
Most big studies that look over the entire U.S. show us how to get to high levels of clean energy, or high levels of renewable energy, and they build a lot of transmission [lines]. Sometimes, these weather events are large and they can take up an entire section of a country. And so, if we’re going to be able to import power to one part of the country from another part of the country that is not experiencing those conditions, that requires having really long extension cords.
Sometimes it’s not money that’s the problem — it’s getting all the people in the room to agree. One of the issues we have right now is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC; they have the ability to force everybody to get into the room to decide long-distance oil and gas pipelines, but they do not have the ability to do the same for electricity, for long-distance transmission lines. So, there’s a disconnect. There’s no one who can force everyone into the same room to even talk about the issue. It becomes a big logistics, red tape problem in order to build the infrastructure we need.
Honestly, if I could trade in the $100 billion, I would probably trade it in for the ability for FERC to help site those lines.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Our pre-pandemic “normal” was a deathtrap. So what should we be building instead? And how should we talk about it? In this episode, Kelly talks with artist and organizer Jayeesha Dutta about letting normalcy die and creating something new.
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about disasters and the lessons they bring. From COVID-19 to wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and much more, we are living in an era of compounding catastrophes. The spread of variants like B.1.1.7 has outpaced a troubled vaccine rollout in the U.S. and experts have already predicted another highly energetic hurricane season. And yet refrains about “getting back to normal” abound. But as most of us know, the normal we knew was already a disaster for many. It was the disaster of capitalism, which atomized us into individual narratives on the same sinking ship. It was the disaster of neoliberalism, a capitalist project that has systematized the destruction of many of the gains we had won under this system and decimated an already unsound social safety net. It was a ubiquitous and yet divided tragedy that allowed many people to feel just secure enough that they weren’t willing to fight for anything better or for each other.
Now in fairness, when most people say they want to “get back to normal,” what they really mean is that they want to feel safer than they do right now, and to see their families again. And to enjoy some of the simple pleasures they’ve lost during the pandemic. But all of those things have a context and it does matter how we talk about and envision the things we want, because it matters what kind of world we’re trying to imagine into being.
If we aren’t intentional about crafting a different context for our lives and aspirations, then we really are left with visions of normalcy dancing in our heads, a normalcy that is toxic by default. So what new context should we be imagining? How should we name it and how should we build it? To help tackle those questions, I am excited to welcome my dear friend, Jayeesha Dutta to the show.
Jayeesha is a tri-coastal Bengali-American artist, cultural organizer, and pop-ed facilitator. She’s also a co-founding member of Another Gulf Is Possible collaborative and serves on the steering committee for the Climate Justice Alliance, galvanizing voices and experiences from across the Gulf South to the Global South, and working towards a just transition for both people and the planet. Jayeesha, welcome to the show.
Jayeesha Dutta: Thanks Kelly. It’s really good to be here with you.
KH: How are you doing today, friend?
JD: I am pretty well. I’m hanging in this weekend.
KH: Well, I am so grateful to have you on the show today, because you are a voice I trust absolutely on this subject. Every time there is a disaster in the Gulf, you are the person I turn to for advice about where people should donate, and how they should pitch in, because I know Another Gulf Is Possible is always engaged and on top of what needs to be happening. And right now, we are in a disaster that a lot of people don’t want to admit is still happening, while also staring down many more disasters in the immediate future, and all of this is happening amid a longing for a really toxic status quo. And as much as I don’t think we should get holier than thou and lecture people for saying they want to “get back to normal,” I do think we need to continue to trouble the idea of normalcy, especially under capitalism where normalcy is a death march. And I mean sure, after the last year, a somewhat more chill death march with a little more freedom of movement may sound appealing by comparison, but we were already living in a pretty devastating cycle of disaster and grotesque response. And that’s basically what got us here. So we really need to make this a moment of reclaiming what we need to reclaim, but also dreaming bigger and envisioning things differently.
So to that end, I just want to start with the concept of a “Just Recovery.” Which I know is an idea you and some other grassroots folks in the Gulf came up with when you were organizing relief around Hurricane Harvey. Could you tell our listeners a bit about that, and what we mean when we say we need a Just Recovery?
JD: Yeah, happy to share the story. So the folks that I roll with in the Gulf South, my crew, so to speak, they’re folks who have been organizing since before Hurricane Katrina, during Hurricane Katrina, after Hurricane Katrina. So when we were preparing for Hurricane Harvey, which for those of us who have been facing this kind of climate catastrophe over and over again, when a hurricane is coming you don’t know where it’s going to go. There’s a cone of probability. So when it’s coming, we’re wanting to figure out, how can we support each other? As we know, the government and big NGOs are not necessarily going to come to the aid of the folks who I feel most accountable to in my work and the folks that we build with. So we were convening calls, these grassroots calls, rapid response calls in the days that were leading up to Hurricane Harvey. And at that point we didn’t know where it was going. It was somewhere between New Orleans and Houston. We were trying to identify who had capacity, who could take funds, where would the funds go — all of these kinds of questions in developing mutual aid. And at that time 2017, it was before it was really common parlance. Some of us were using that term, but we were just doing what we felt we had to do. And during one of those calls, we were trying to distinguish our work and our rapid response work in social media from the work of the mainstream, the Red Cross, FEMA, others. So we were spitballing hashtags just to make sure we could figure out a way to align and bring together our communications. And I don’t really remember. When you’re brainstorming something, lots of ideas are coming out. So I don’t actually remember if it was Bryan Parras, Ramsey Sprague or myself, but it was one of the three of us because I remember we were the three that were kind of hot and saying stuff. And someone said, “Just Harvey Recovery.” And all of those folks are now Another Gulf Is Possible collective members. So from that, we started using that hashtag, #JustHarveyRecovery, and it did go to Houston.
We now know that that was one of the most devastating natural disasters that Houston has faced. And then recently there was the polar vortex. Disaster after disaster keeps hitting the region. So we saw that that term get used, it was really kind of amazing to see how viral our page went at that time. That was my first experience in really seeing work go to every country in the world.
So that was really wonderful to see the support for Houston and for the grassroots at that moment. We then saw Hurricane Maria come to Puerto Rico, and the hashtag started to get used, dropping the Harvey part. So Just Recovery, and so in the work with the Climate Justice Alliance, that frame got taken up and then has kind of taken a life of its own, which in a way is really wonderful. As narrative strategists, narrative builders, we want to see our ideas kind of get out there and be used. But one of the issues with that is very similar to the term “resilience,” Just Recovery has now kind of been taken, and is at times being used by the very forces that we created the term to counter.
So we really want to reemphasize that the Just Recovery frame is about being grassroots-led and centered to make sure the needs and desires and what the most vulnerable, marginalized folks are really requesting in times of disaster is what is being met. The needs that are being met are not being determined by other people, and that we’re really centering folks talking and being with them, and the times — it’s us ourselves, right? So the whole idea of mutual aid is not that somebody is coming from the outside, that we figure out ways to help each other because the Red Cross, FEMA, all of these folks are not connected. They don’t know the groups that are really helping folks. They don’t know the grandma down the street that is going to need to make sure that a generator gets to her because she’s on oxygen.
Those kinds of things that you need to know to really support your community in these times of disaster. So, that’s kind of that immediate response moment. And so we really want to see the whole Just Recovery model as shifting from this aid, extract, displace, disaster capitalism model to a really radically new different way of thinking about how we approach disasters, which are going to continue to come, right? They’re not stopping. Grounded again in what people need, finding the resources, the tools, building support, creating brigades to get folks recovered to rebuild their homes, their workplaces, their places of worship, the places they play to get all of that rebuilt. So that at the end of the day, they’re not displaced. They’re not thrown out of their community, but they’re actually stronger, better than they were in the past. And I think sometimes there’s the stronger together, all these hashtags that happen after a disaster, but we see the same patterns over and over. So the intention of the Just Recovery framework is to break that pattern and for us to create a new vision that is really self-determined and that in this pandemic disaster, this chrysalis moment we’re collectively in as global whole society right now, we’re all hoping to emerge from cocoons.
I think that’s really resonant. We’re still in a response mode. We still haven’t exited the disaster itself, but we can start to think forward now about how that Just Recovery model can be used in this moment. It’s not exactly a climate disaster, but it’s a very similar recovery process that we’re going to be facing. So what does that rebuilding look like after we hopefully get out of this pandemic moment?
KH: Well, thank you for that history. And speaking of those brigades, I also know you were in Cuba during Hurricane Irma and you witnessed something very different than we see here in the U.S. when a hurricane hits. Can you say a bit about that?
JD: Yeah. I was in Cuba during… well, Hurricane Maria was approaching, but Hurricane Irma, I was there for the kind of approach, the impact, and the aftermath. And Hurricane Irma was right on the heels of Hurricane Harvey. So I really had the experience of seeing the difference between the response that folks have. I was there and it feels like every time there’s a hurricane in New Orleans, people just really have complete meltdowns. They freak out, they’re running around trying to get groceries, trying to get sandbags, trying to get all the things. And there’s this huge sense of panic.
People doing the same things you kind of have to do, but there’s always this panicked feeling that resonates throughout wherever you’re going to get your stuff. You feel everybody else is really nervous, panicked. People are calling each other. And so I noticed when I was in Cuba, it’s hard to communicate. I started getting all these texts from my friends and people trying to be like, “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” Because it was a category five hurricane that was approaching. And so I’m kind of freaking out cause that’s my instinct as a U.S. person is to freak out when a hurricane is coming. But I noticed everybody around me is super chill. Like not really, it’s not… “Like y’all know a hurricane is coming?” Pointing to the TV, they keep talking about “el ciclón, el ciclón.” And so I asked my host who I’m staying at, and I was like, “Is everything… are folks going to get ready?” And they were like, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. People will do what they need to do.” And then sure enough, it was like people went through their whole workday. Five o’clock, hurricane’s coming, they just started to put the machine into place to get ready. And you saw all these folks helping each other, right? At that point I’d been there for about a week, so I’d gotten to know the folks around me. And saw this shopkeeper helping that shopkeeper to take their signs down. It was just the whole community came together to make sure that they were prepared for the hurricane to come.
And around midnight that night the hurricane came, it was a category five. It was extremely intense, really scary. Didn’t know what was going to happen. Obviously power went down, all that sort of thing. But the next morning it was just, everyone went out. There was flooding. People were cleaning up all the debris. It didn’t take the direct impact where I was. The direct impact was further North on the island. But I heard nobody… I think maybe one person might’ve been injured, but nobody died in that hurricane. They were able to evacuate everybody from the place of direct impact. And one of the reasons for that was Cuba has developed the infrastructure to support people, to make sure people are cared for after a hurricane happens. And so while it’s government coordinated and the government creates the infrastructure, the people themselves kind of implement that infrastructure.
And really the biggest part that struck me was this brigades concept. And that each place has brigades, people who are volunteering to come together, take care of each other, evacuate, cleanup, help people get their houses back together, whatever is needed. And that I was just reflecting how effective that kind of model is. Cuba is not a highly resource rich country, but the way they develop that community infrastructure, the mutual aid, it reduced that feeling of being isolated, that fear of not being taken care of, of losing everything that you have.
So people’s approach to the disaster was so different and it really stuck with me because we’re not in a place for that yet. I’m thinking we’re closer than we were before, but I continue to ask myself, how can we create those kinds of structures here in the United States? And it might not come from the government right now, but I think at this point we can do it ourselves. So how do we do that, create those kinds of support networks, those brigade models?
And I’m really, really inspired by Cuba, and that has continued to resonate.
KH: I am likewise inspired. It seems like so much of the suffering we experience in the wake of these disasters is rooted in the fact that we rely on authority — authority that doesn’t give a damn whether we live or die — to rescue people, as opposed to having that kind of organization that you describe. I know here in Chicago, it was my dream for 2020 — what I wanted to do last year was work on creating community response teams for climate catastrophes and kind of help create those spaces as planning spaces for how we can help each other in crisis, which I think would also, ultimately create space for discussion and for political organization among people who are activated on behalf of each other’s survival and wellbeing. And then of course, the pandemic hit and there was a bit of a scramble in all directions, including the formation of mutual aid pods, and I personally had a lot of varying demands placed on my time, as an organizer, and as a person whose health was sort of in collapse.
But last spring, once reality began to set in for folks, we saw waves of participation and generosity. We saw a lot of things, but we also saw a lot of projects nationally that didn’t sustain over time because we didn’t have the time put in to building the infrastructure that folks needed to sustain some of the work that was happening. I really hope more people will pick up Dean Spade’s book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), which provides a lot of really great how-to and practical advice for people who want to build out sustainable work. Because our projects really need established protocols around things like how conflict gets resolved, and how money gets handled, and how we navigate difference and harm when they arise, because these things will always come up.
JD: Yeah, I think it’s a really good point on sustainability and mutual aid, because I think it’s really easy to burn out, to want to always be the shiny ball, and I think that’s a kind of syndrome the movement suffers from that we need to figure out how to not create conditions where we just elevate one person or one group, and then that group or that person has conflict with another group, that they don’t get funding, right?
We need to figure out a more mutual aid approach to our own organizational/movement infrastructure, where we can rotate in, we can rotate out. We can give people the time that they need to replenish after really hectic, hard times and not just expect the same people or the same organizations to be the ones who are constantly expected to do everything. And then if they get it wrong, we put them under fire and then throw them away, right? That way is not a mutual aid or regenerative way to approach the work. So I think this concept of mutual aid, to not just think about it in a individualistic way, but to start thinking about it even in terms of the infrastructure we’re building for the work itself.
KH: I want to take a moment to talk about the role of the prison industrial complex, and carcerality in these disasters. Prisons, jails and detention facilities are basically disaster zones of capitalism, even on their best days. For one thing, we have often seen prisons touted as vehicles for new economic growth in areas where coal mining, mountaintop removal and other highly toxic work has bottomed out, which leads to terrible health outcomes for imprisoned people, who are trapped in those toxic environments, and of course get next to no medical care. All of that is routine, but during climate catastrophes and during the pandemic, we have seen unthinkable levels of suffering and mass death play out. I’m thinking about the prisoners who were left behind in Orleans Parish Prison during Hurricane Katrina and how the city itself became a prison for people who were trying to escape after the storm, with Gretna police officers firing shots over the heads of refugees who were trying to leave the city on foot.
I’m also thinking about the people of the Little Village neighborhood here in Chicago and other highly policed neighborhoods, who faced much higher rates of infection during the pandemic due to the number of residents being cycled in and out of Cook County Jail, which was basically a COVID factory at the height of the pandemic.
In Little Village, of course, we also saw Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot greenlight a demolition project during shelter in place that basically engulfed the entire neighborhood in a toxic cloud of smoke while people were not only not being evacuated, but under orders to stay exactly where they were. Which to me is disturbingly reminiscent of the way imprisoned people find themselves trapped inside of toxicity and disaster, and the way the folks in New Orleans found themselves trapped after Hurricane Katrina. I think it’s crucial that we make these connections because in an era of constant crisis, we will see more of this kind of thing.
And right now, in Chicago, we are seeing The Final 5 Campaign, which is a campaign largely shaped by young people that’s dedicated to the closure of the final five youth prisons in Illinois, teaming up with the youth-led campaign to Stop General Iron from installing a metal shredder on Chicago’s South East Side. And there’s a real recognition there between the violence of incarceration and the violence of environmental racism.
My friend, Olivia Blocker, who’s the campaign manager with The Final 5 Campaign shared some thoughts with me recently about the show of solidarity between the two groups. And I just wanted to take a moment to share a few of her words if I could. She said, “I think about how spaces that lack life affirming resources due to generations of disinvestment are more easily exploitable by polluters and prisons. Even if the General Iron facility is being built in an urban setting and most Illinois youth prisons are built in rural settings, I think both in their own ways are spaces of isolation and resource deficiency. Lincoln, Illinois’ main economic resource is prisons. In both cases, these prisons and polluting industries move into desperate communities with the full political backing of alderman, legislators, and mayors to exploit a labor force with fewer options. I also think an undercurrent of all this is the fundamental idea of who was deemed disposable. Both stop General Iron and The Final 5 Campaign seek to protect Black and Brown youth and forefront those voices in our respective campaigns, because that is who is most impacted by pollution and prisons and that is who the state has deemed disposable.”
So Jayeesha, I know your connection to some of what I’m describing here runs deep and it’s very personal. So I wanted to get your take on this bond between carcerality and environmental racism and what it will take to stop these acts of devastation, and in some cases, annihilation.
JD: Yeah, I think it’s a really important connection to make. Living in Louisiana where we are the highest incarcerated state in the highest incarcerated country on the planet, and where plantations once were, prisons now sit in Louisiana. So yeah, I think that this fundamental model of extraction that our society is based on, that capitalism is based on, really resonates in terms of how in Louisiana there’s this reflexive instinct to extract. And that extraction, one of the ways that that extraction happens is taking people out of their communities, incarcerating them, and then basically forcing labor. And the prisons, as you know, in Louisiana are really horrible. But then we look at the situation of the oil and gas industry, and it’s a consistent form of extraction that we also demand from the Earth. So I think these reflexes and the muscles that we have built are one and the same in extracting from human beings and extracting from the planet. And seeing those precious resources as expendable, as extractable, as not things to show value, to cherish, to honor. And instead, I really feel like if we took the time to think about these harms, we would be really considering a transformative justice approach. And we would really think about a different way when there are harms in our community because we wouldn’t want to extract them. We wouldn’t want to take them out to their community and put them somewhere else where they’re isolated and abused. So in this fundamental shift, this whole idea of just transition and seeing Just Recovery as a bridge to just transition, we have to reconsider that instinct and that reflex and that urge that folks have to just take an extract. And just thinking about what it would mean to be regenerative, how to be more considerate of the value and inherent worth of every being and every precious resource that we have. And I’m really thinking and valuing every living being, and that in that we would be finding a more balanced and symbiotic way to live with the planet and with each other. And so right now where we’re at the carceral system is a really clear example to me of the horrible extraction. And we think about the hurricanes, when these forces come together, like the hurricanes that came to Houston, there wasn’t even a plan for how to evacuate the prisoners. It was just like, “Well, those people are expendable. They’re extractable [people], we don’t even need to have a plan for them.”
And that’s just really destructive. It’s unconscionably horrible, I think, to not be considering the needs of every human in these times of disaster. And I think it’s a very clear way that we can connect the way we treat people to the way we treat the planet. The fundamental premise of behind both, behind the fossil fuel industry and the prison industrial complex to me is one and the same. And I think once you start to put those dots together, you can’t stop that kind of intersectional thinking and you can’t stop understanding how much we need to change. And realizing that every thread in the fabric of our existence is currently really toxic and that we need to figure out a way to remediate that. And we need to remediate the whole fabric, the whole way of being. Once the veil is lifted, you can’t put it back.
KH: Absolutely, and there’s just so much to reckon with, and so many losses and harms to grieve. I think grief work is deeply important in this moment. And as you know, I have spent a lot of time organizing during the last year around collective grief as one of those necessary reckonings. In the last couple of months, my collective has been working on a mass distribution of KN95 masks in Chicago to help people combat the new strains.
And we’ve seen those distributed by mutual aid groups to students and to their families, to folks being released from jail, to essential workers and many others. But it’s very significant to me that they’re also being distributed by the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization at a memorial event this weekend, on the one-year anniversary of the Hilco smokestack implosion that covered the community in toxic smoke last year. The event is a memorial for people who’ve been lost to environmental racism in Little Village. But as people from that neighborhood tell me all the time, there’s really no separating COVID losses from people lost to environmental racism in a place like Little Village because pre-existing respiratory illnesses caused by pollution left so many people vulnerable to COVID-19.
The masks that are being shared at that event will actually be some reusable N95 masks we acquired to give people some ongoing protection. And I think tying our survival of environmental violence, COVID-19, and state violence together with our grief over those things, in an act of mutual aid is really powerful and it makes me wonder how else we might bind together those ideas and intentions in our work.
JD: Yeah, I think the grief holding space along with, or combined with the healing work that needs to happen are really present for me personally. I know that’s the direction my work has taken. I am currently working with the Windcall Institute, which is an organization that’s been providing residencies for movement organizers for over 30 years. And I’m an alumni of the program. And after experiencing kind of three weeks of rest, the gift of rest that that program gave me in 2019 really changed me forever, pre-pandemic, in realizing how much I needed to shift my approach to the work and how much the scale up of kind of healing justice approach was necessary. And so this need is just so great for organizers, at this moment I think for everybody, but I think the organizing community in particular is super burned out and —
KH: Yes, so burned out.
JD: Yes, we really need to think about how to hold the space for folks who are taking care of our communities, who are doing what has been needed for the last four years, for last generations, but particularly in the last year that we need to recognize how much people have been holding, how much they’ve been holding for their families, for their communities. And in this moment, we need to really, I think, put down some of the campaign work through the election to really take the time for the healing, for the holding of the grief, for the reckoning, for the deep understanding of the, I think, really personal changes we need to make to really think through what that’s going to mean for us in our individual lives, in our family lives, in our community lives. And I’m an optimist. I think you can’t be an organizer without being some kind of an optimist, dreamer, visionary. You have to have something you’re moving towards because this world we’re living in is so messed up. If you don’t have a North Star you’re moving towards, it’s not going to be worth it. So if we’re trying to build a just sustainable, equitable, healthy, vibrant world, we are going to need to do some real healing, some real grief holding for what this last year, but also what these last 500 years have meant in terms of the colonialism and extraction that we hold in our bones, right? That we hold all of that in our bodies. And so how do we take this time to really build this world we want to see?
We’re called Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative, I believe another world is possible. I want to see us hold the space that we need for the grief, for the healing to be able to achieve this audacious vision for justice. And I think there’ll be some sacrifices that we’ll all have to make, and I think there is, and I think you alluded to this at the beginning… some of the changes folks need to make are unclear. And so I think we need to hold space for the vision and also hold space for ourselves. And if we want to get to this dreamy future, we need to hold all of that [during the] pandemic. Can’t be always working for the cause and not taking care of ourselves. It can’t be only taking care of ourselves, not caring about the other. There needs to be this balance. And there needs to be a consideration of sometimes the thing you’re working for may not be something you actually get to experience, but you’re working towards that vision. You’re getting closer to the horizon. I’ve been working with Norma Wong and she often speaks of the horizon that we’re moving towards. And so to keep that horizon in your mind’s eye as you’re going through rough times.
And so there’s a quote by Rabindranath Tagore that I might not be saying exactly correct, but it’s something to the effect of, the person who plants the seed for the tree he’ll never know the shade of, is beginning to understand the meaning of life.
And so I think that’s where we’re at at this moment. We’re kind of holding the seed in our hands. We could just throw them away or we could plant them and know that we might not see that beautiful vision, but we can seed it, we can start to help nurture it and grow it and see some of the changes in the attitudes and behaviors, actions, and systems that need to happen so the future generations can feel that shade, experience the warmth of the sun, and be in that vision that we hold.
KH: Absolutely, and I know that healing piece looks different for different people. One thing I’ve discovered is important for me right now is to be taking in more than I’m trying to sort of put out or produce, if that makes sense. I need to be reading a lot and not just reading news stories, kind of keeping pace with the sort of violent barrage of everything that’s happening to the world and to us, but stepping outside of all of that, and reading real books, whether that means audio books or scrolling through e-books on my phone. And really reading intentionally, making space for that, and taking in good energy from other people. Cultivating within myself. Not just being sort of extracted from all the time. And I’ve had no real choice myself this last year but to really start building a practice around what healing and care look like in my own life due to the illness that I’ve experienced and the burnout that you referred to that many of us organizers have found ourselves experiencing during the pandemic.
Because I used to be a person who would just kind of laugh off the idea of reducing my stress level or workload. I just thought that wasn’t realistic. But it’s my friends who do deep healing justice work who have helped me see how harmful that outlook is because it doesn’t just hurt me to live like some kind of workhorse who’s not allowed to get sick, or go on a creative retreat, or step outside of urgency. Me living in that mode all the time, doesn’t make us stronger in collectivity. Me making space for healing and modeling that, and modeling the sustainability and collaboration that that kind of pause and rest and healing requires in our work, that makes us stronger. We’re making ourselves stronger and our communities stronger when we make space for healing and acknowledge that it’s a necessary component of everything we do.
So thank you so much for naming that. Because for me, that’s definitely one way I won’t be going back to normal on the other side of all this, because my normal was fucked up and I don’t want it back. I want something better and I want something better for all of us.
So if we’re not going to talk about “getting back to normal,” how should we talk about the future we want to build and what we want to restore? What should dreaming out loud with people about that sound like?
JD: Yeah, you know, I am an artist and someone who by nature also likes to bring people together to make art. And I think that’s actually how we first got to know each other was when I was doing art for that wild action camp, which we could do a whole episode on that action camp and the dynamics there, right? We could break that down.
KH: Yes, we could.
JD: But I think the invitation to folks to share their visions with each other and also consider how deep our need is to be around other humans and this dreaming space, this chrysalis moment we’re emerging from, we are right now poised in coming out of our homes to be able to be with each other again. And how do we want to be with each other again?
How do we want to create social spaces, create creative spaces, recreational spaces? I think about where I live and we’re a very bar-centric city. It’s this extremely bar-centric city, but a lot of bars have been closed in New Orleans. A lot of bars have not made it through the pandemic and our music venues have even been shut down. So as things start to reopen, we want to think about where those spaces are, which communities are we rebuilding intentionally, those spaces to be together, to dream together, to build together.
I actually have a dream to create an art tea house, a space that will bring people together for healing, for art-making, art expression, plant medicine, providing access to different kinds of plant medicine that folks might not have experienced before. And just thinking about those kinds of multi-modality spaces that people can not just dream, but actually manifest this future.
KH: So there are so many lessons that we will be taking away for years from everything we’ve been experiencing during the pandemic. Can you name one lesson that you hope we’ll all hold close as we move through what is hopefully the home stretch of this current disaster and into the many struggles to come?
JD: Yeah, one lesson, and I think I might give a different answer next week because I think there are so many lessons we’ve learned. I know I’ve learned so, so much about myself and just everything in the last year. But when I think right now as I’m a week out from going back home to New Orleans, where I will be living by myself, I’ve been with my family for over a year now attending to my elders and being with them 24/7. And it has really made me realize how important the people who are closest to you are. Who is your pod? For me, it was very obvious because I was with my family. But I think a lot of folks who were not with their families had to figure out who are the folks that will hold it down with them, who will be there for them. And I think that’s a lesson we need to keep considering in our hearts and minds as we go back to, again, not “normal,” but go out to whatever is next, to really value and care for those folks who are closest to us. And I think that will have a ripple out effect in how we treat others. If we are always feeling cared for, if we’re always feeling valued by those who love us, and those who are closest to us, that will, I think, impact how we treat others in the world.
And I’m really hoping, even though I will be physically not as close to my parents for a little, and honestly we’re all reconsidering our whole family structure, we all might move to so we can be together again. And I think we’ll also see a lot of those kinds of moves happening. I think people will be shifting their lives to make sure that they can be closer to the people they care the most about. Because at the end of the day, that’s what really matters. Not to be super cheesy, but love, I believe deeply in love. And I think this last year has given us a real opportunity to think through what that love looks like in action.
KH: I couldn’t agree more. And if folks want to learn more from Jayeesha and follow her work, and the work of Another Gulf is Possible, which I highly recommend y’all do, you can check out the show notes on our website at truthout.org.
Well, this has been an amazing conversation and I want to thank you so much for joining me today, Jayeesha. I deeply appreciate you.
JD: Yeah Kelly, it’s been really good to talk. Love you much.
KH: I love you too.
I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes:
To learn more from Jayeesha and follow her work, you can check out these groups and projects:
Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative is a women-of-color led, grassroots collaborative of ten members from Brownsville, Texas to Pensacola, Florida. The collaborative is built upon decades of organizing resulting in a strong and rooted ecosystem of relationships between individuals tied to a multitude of organizations, networks, communities, and alliances from the U.S. Gulf South to the Global South.
Mar Bari is a bath|art|tea house that will provide elemental healing, hydro-therapy, creative space, and plant medicine to cultivate community well being.
The Windcall Institute supports and sustains labor and community organizers, particularly people of color and women, through the Windcall Residency Program and Staying Power. Windcall offers organizers time and space for new ideas and ways of being to arise.
Alternate ROOTS supports the creation and presentation of original art that is rooted in community, place, tradition or spirit. We are a group of artists and cultural organizers based in the South creating a better world together.
To learn more about the campaign to halt construction of a metal shredder on Chicago’s South East Side, you can check out the Stop General Iron website.
To learn more about the campaign to close Illinois’ remaining five youth prisons, and prevent the opening of a new facility, you can check out the Final Five Campaign’s website.
If you’re under the impression that climate change drove ancient civilizations to their demise, you probably haven’t heard the full story.
The ancient Maya, for example, didn’t vanish when their civilization “collapsed” around the 9th century. Though droughts certainly caused hardship, and cities were abandoned, more than 7 million Maya still live throughout Mexico and Central America. The Maya dealt with dry conditions by developing elaborate irrigation systems, capturing rainwater, and moving to wetter areas — strategies that helped communities survive waves of drought.
A report recently published in the journal Nature argues that an obsession with catastrophe has driven much of the research into how societies responded to a shifting climate throughout history. That has resulted in a skewed view of the past that feeds a pessimistic view about our ability to respond to the crisis we face today.
“It would be rare that a society as a whole just kind of collapsed in the face of climate change,” said Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University and the lead author of the paper. The typical stories of environmentally-driven collapse that you might have heard about Easter Island or the Mayan civilization? “All those stories need to be retold, absolutely,” he said.
Painting a more complex picture of the past — one that includes stories of resilience in the face of abrupt shifts in the climate — might avoid the fatalism and despair that sets in when many people grasp the scale of the climate crisis. Degroot himself has noticed that his students were beginning to echo so-called “doomist” talking points: “Past societies have crumbled with just a little climate change, Doomists conclude — why will we be any different?” Part of the reason people study the past, Degroot said, “is because we care about the future, and about the present, for that matter.”
Of course, the idea that a changing climate can drive collapse isn’t wrong. It’s just not the whole story. “Certainly our article did not disprove that climate changes have had disastrous impacts on past societies — let alone that global warming has had, and will have, calamitous consequences for us,” Degroot wrote in a post. Even modest changes in the climate have caused problems. And today’s planetary changes are anything but modest: The world is on track to see an alarming 3.2 degrees C (5.8 degrees F) warming by the end of this century, even if countries meet their current commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement.
An engraving depicts Europeans measuring statues on the Polynesian island of Easter Island, 1786. Hulton Archive / Getty Images
The new paper looked at ways that societies adapted to a shifting climate over the last 2,000 years. Europe and North America endured periods of moderate cooling: the Late Antique Little Ice Age around the 6th century, and the Little Ice Age from the 13th to 19th centuries. Looking at case studies from these frigid eras, the researchers concluded that many societies responded with flexibility and ingenuity. They detail examples of people moving into different regions, developing trade networks, cooperating with others, altering their diets, and finding new opportunities.
When volcanic eruptions fueled the Late Antique Little Ice Age, for example, the Romans took advantage of a rainier Mediterranean. Settlements and market opportunities expanded as people began growing more grains and keeping more grazing animals. They built dams, channels, and pools to help farmers in more arid areas manage water, and, according to the paper, “the benefits were widespread.”
During the Little Ice Age in the 17th century, the whaling industry in Norway’s northern islands in the Arctic Ocean actually functioned more effectively during colder years. According to Degroot’s research, whalers coordinated with each other and concentrated their efforts on a limited number of days in spots where whales could be easily caught.
In what is now southeastern California, which vacillated between periods of severe drought and increased rain toward the end of the 15th century, Mojave settlements dealt with the unsteady climate by turning to regional trade. They developed new ceramic and basket-weaving techniques, trading for maize, beans, and squash produced by their southern Kwatsáan neighbors.
If stories of adaptation are so common, why aren’t they told more often? Maybe that’s because people are more interested in understanding catastrophes and why they happened, rather than ones that … didn’t. “You can imagine if you do that over and over again, then the entire field is going to focus on disaster,” Degroot said. “And that’s exactly what has happened, I think.”
In the study, an international team of archaeologists, historians, paleoclimatologists, and other experts reviewed 168 studies published on the Little Ice Age in Europe over the past 20 years. While 77 percent of the studies emphasized catastrophe, only 10 percent focused on resilience. In this context, “resilience” refers to the ability of a group to cope with hazards, responding and reorganizing without losing their core identity.
Stories of collapse are often told as parables of what happens when humans wreck things (think Noah’s Ark). The public’s interest in environment-driven collapse picked up in 2005 with the publication of Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Some took issue with the interpretations in the book. Take Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, the South Pacific island settled by Polynesians known for its monoliths of heads (actually, the rest of their bodies are underground). The book popularized the idea that the population crashed because the islanders slashed and burned all the trees — a cautionary tale on the perils of destroying the environment.
The new story about Rapa Nui is more complicated. In the article “The truth about Easter Island: a sustainable society has been falsely blamed for its own demise,” the archaeologist Catrine Jarman attributed deforestation to the tree-munching rats the Polynesians brought with them, and blames the population crash in the 19th century on slave raids and diseases introduced by European traders.
Recent research suggests that indigenous groups have been particularly good at adapting to climate changes, Degroot said, “either because they were able to migrate or because they were able to alter the distribution of resources that they relied upon.”
Even though many societies survived the pressures of the mini ice ages, Degroot found that resilience sometimes “is a product of one community having access to favorite resources, maybe over another.” The wealthy 17th-century Dutch, for example, imported grains from around the Baltic and then sold them for “lucrative profits” wherever the weather caused grain shortages in Europe. The lesson for today, Degroot said, is that “we need to think about building equality as a way of adapting to climate change.”
The report lays out best practices for researchers to follow when they study the history of climate and society, outlining ways to reduce biases and avoid the misuse of historical data. Following a more rigorous process may well end up unearthing more examples of people facing searing heat and dried-up wells, and still finding ways to survive. “We hope that this discourages the kind of doomist idea that the past tells us that we’re screwed,” Degroot said. “We might be! But the past does not tell us that.”
Despite all the dire warnings, corporate pledges, and tree-planting promises, forests keep falling at an alarming pace. In a report out Wednesday morning, experts tallied up all the acres of the most important forests lost in 2020 and found that it amounts to an area the size of the Netherlands.
“Those dense forests can be hundreds of years old and store significant amounts of carbon. Losing them has irreversible impacts on biodiversity and climate change,” said Rod Taylor, director of the forest program at the nonprofit World Resources Institute, which produced the report with Global Forest Watch. The two organizations have been monitoring the world’s forests for 20 years with satellite images.
These tropical old-growth forests that WRI focused on don’t go through regular cycles of harvesting and regeneration, like those managed by timber companies. In a better world, the 4.2 million hectares of primary tropical forest that fell this year would have remained standing forever. Levelling them resulted in the release of some 2.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide, according to the report, equivalent to twice the annual emissions from automobiles in the United States.
WRI / Global Forest Watch
Weather has become a driving force in forest loss. In places where weather was abnormally hot and dry last year, like Australia, Brazil, Bolivia, Germany, and Russia, forest fires flared and tree-cover loss spiked. The swampy Pantanal region in west-central Brazil lost nearly a third of its tree cover after a drought. In contrast, the numbers improved in Canada and Indonesia, where the weather was cooler and wetter.
It’s clear that forests are growing more vulnerable to severe weather as the climate warms, said Francis Seymour, an WRI fellow. “I mean wetlands are burning!” she exclaimed. “Nature has been whispering this risk to us for a long time, but now she is shouting.”
But there was some cause for hope: Indonesia, which has been among the top three deforesters for the previous 19 years, dropped into fourth place in 2020. That’s after four years of declining tree-cover loss.
Indonesia had good luck with the weather, with unusually heavy rains last year. Falling prices for palm oil during the pandemic relieved economic pressure to clear forests for palm plantations. But some of the credit should also go to the government, which took decisive action after devastating fires in 2016 and 2017 to squelch deforestation, Seymour said.
WRI / Global Forest Watch
Cargill, the Singapore-based Wilmar International, and other big corporations involved in the palm oil trade have promised to freeze out plantations that bulldoze forests, but there are still bad actors. Palm oil prices have rebounded this year, which might make it tough for them to keep their promises. “I think this year and the next two to three years will be a real test to see if Indonesia can maintain its performance in reducing deforestation,” said Andika Putraditama, sustainable commodities and business manager, at WRI Indonesia.
In Africa last year, deforestation seemed to be primarily driven by small-scale farmers moving from one spot to the next rather than big corporations with big plantations. Trees are falling to farmers just growing food to feed their families, or woodcutters harvesting fuel for cooking. So in central Africa, keeping trees upright requires improving agriculture practices, rather than restricting farming. People have been expanding into forests because they don’t have the basic resources, like fertilizer, to keep renewing existing farmland, said Elie Hakizumwami, WRI’s country manager for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Weather is not climate. A single devastating hurricane is not in itself proof that climate change is tipping the scales in favor of larger, slower-moving, and more extreme storms. But the notion that the two are entirely separate is a misconception, too.
“They’ve always been connected,” said J. Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist at the University of Georgia. “I just think there’s been a misunderstanding.”
Shepherd, who chairs NASA’s Earth Sciences Advisory Committee and has testified numerous times before Congress about climate change, is a former president of the American Meteorological Society and was the co-host of The Weather Channel’s Weather Geeks podcast. He has dedicated much of his career to correcting misconceptions about climate change. His 2013 TED talk, “Slaying the Climate Zombies” — one of the most-viewed climate lectures on YouTube — argues for turning climate change into a “dining room–table issue.” In it, he connects rising temperatures, extreme weather, and ballooning drought to things people care about: the future their children will inherit and the rising cost of household items like Cheerios.
“I’m here to slay the zombie climate theories and awaken climate literacy,” Shepherd says during his TED talk. That includes dispelling misconceptions around weather and climate, which he says are often circulated by people with “devious intent.”
Grist recently caught up with Shepherd to talk about what the future of climate action in the U.S. might look like. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, shortened and edited for clarity.
Q. Have you noticed a shift in how people think about and talk about climate change in recent years or even months?
A. A lot of people were really depressed about what was happening in the past presidential administration. We pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, and all kinds of things happened that people were really upset about. And they should have been.
But one of the things I noticed was that there was a lot more activity in places like Fortune 500 companies, faith-based organizations, the military, state and local government. So while there were some really ominous things going on in the federal sector, I still think there was a lot of activity in terms of climate change discussion, mitigation plans, climate action plans in cities and local organizations.
Of course with the new Biden administration, they’re all in on the climate science. But not just climate science — they’re really focused on spreading the climate crisis concern across all facets of government, whether it’s housing and urban development, transportation, energy, and so forth, which is encouraging. I think that’s the right approach.
A. I’m certainly hopeful about the general rebound of respect for the climate science and for scientists. I’m hopeful that there will be a conversation about solutions.
That’s where all the politics comes in. I’m not naive to the fact that we’ll still be reliant on fossil fuels for some time to come. But there needs to be a fair and sensible conversation about how we move forward. I’m hopeful that we’re now creating a culture at all levels — state, local, federal, and so forth — where businesses and churches and citizens and policymakers are not scared or are fearful of punitive actions if they talk or act on climate. I’m hopeful that we’re moving out of that type of toxic environment.
Q. Is there something you’re feeling pessimistic about?
A. I’m generally an optimistic person, but I’m always pessimistic about the fact that these things are so dependent upon the political cycle. You know, look, in two years, we could have a completely different composition of Congress. And so you’re likely not to get major legislation with such a tightly divided Congress right now. So that’s always discouraging.
But on the other hand, again, you know, I hope the culture that we’re creating among corporate America, faith communities, the military, and so forth, can help us build a groundswell that, no matter what your political affiliation is, you’re going to be forced to act on this because people want it. They see the impact on their lives.
Q. How do we keep the conversation going around this topic?
A. For too long, scientists, the media, and others have just focused on the climate science and the trend lines and “it’s getting warmer” and “there’s more CO2” and “the anomalies.” That’s been a disservice.
Biden’s all-government, all-society approach gets at what I call “kitchen-table issues.” We need to stop just talking about how it’s warmer. To me it’s not news anymore that 2020 is the second-warmest year on record, or we just passed the 1.5-whatever mark. That’s just overkill at this point. We know these things are gonna happen. It’s what we expected.
We’ve got to start telling the stories and telling people and policymakers about the implications to their grocery bill, their water supply, their public health — the “so what?” factor that ordinary people resonate with.
On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with participants in autonomous groups across Texas, including Cooperation Denton, Stop the Sweeps in Austin, Mutual Aid Houston, Houston Tenants Union, and North Texas Rural Resilience. The first in a two part series, this episode discusses the devastating storms which rocked Texas and the Southwest and the context that the “big freeze” happened within: from anti-Black police violence and attacks on the homeless community, to widespread neoliberal policies that left infrastructure and housing stock dilapidated and on the verge of collapse.
A hailstorm in South Texas. Tornadoes in Tennessee. Wildfires across the West. A barrage of Gulf Coast hurricanes. Those are among the record 22 weather and climate disasters that each topped $1 billion in damages last year in the United States.
In all, the price tag for 2020 hit a whopping $95 billion — and that’s just in the United States. Reinsurance firm Swiss Re put global economic losses at $175 billion last year, including $32 billion for floods in China and $13 billion in damages from Cyclone Amphan across India and Bangladesh.
The worst news? Our profligate burning of fossil fuels means we’re in store for more.
Studies show that climate change is supercharging some weather and climate events and will lead to more severe and longer-lasting heat waves, stronger hurricanes, an increased wildfire risk and a longer wildfire season. We can also expect more heavy rain events and severe droughts, not to mention other extreme events like February’s polar vortex.
“You can’t attribute any particular storm to climate change, but what we do know is that climate change tips the odds of making many of these events more severe,” says Bruce Stein, chief scientist and associate vice president at the National Wildlife Federation.
While experts tabulate the economic losses — homes destroyed, crops ruined, businesses shuttered — ecosystems and wildlife can also sustain damage that’s harder to quantify.
Many plants and wildlife evolved with and have adapted to dealing with large-scale disturbances, but we’re beginning to see “megadisturbances” at levels beyond what we saw in the past, says Stein.
And that can take a toll. Extreme weather can kill animals directly — or indirectly, like by destroying food sources, contaminating water or altering habitat, forcing a species to move into areas where there may be more competition, fewer resources or a greater risk of predation.
“What we begin to find when you get some of these mega disturbances is that it’s beyond the ability of a species — or their adaptive capacity — to bounce back,” says Stein.
The Research
The effects of climate change on the natural world are being felt at two speeds. One is more gradual, referred to by scientists as “ramping” — shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels. The second is quick, like extreme weather events.
Both are problematic, says Sean Maxwell, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. But, he adds, “I think the changes to acute events have the greatest potential to devastate local populations or ecosystems, and the impacts of these events are often more difficult to plan for or avoid.”
Maxwell was the lead author of a 2018 study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions that examined how changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and climate events affected wildlife. The researchers looked at 519 studies of ecological responses to extreme events — including cyclones, droughts, floods, and heat and cold waves — that took place from 1941 to 2015. They found that the response was negative 57% of the time. (And in those instances where species benefited, they were mostly invasive species.)
“Some of the negative responses we found were quite concerning, including more than 100 cases of dramatic population declines and 31 cases of local population extinction following an extreme event,” says Maxwell. “Populations of critically endangered bird species in Hawai’i, such as the palia, have been annihilated due to drought, and populations of lizard species have been wiped out due to cyclones in the Bahamas.”
Plant species, the researchers found, had the highest number of negative responses to extreme events, followed by reptiles and amphibians.
“Collectively, the studies in our review suggest that extreme weather and climate events have profound implications for species and ecosystem management,” the researchers concluded.
The Most Vulnerable
Species that are already threatened or endangered are of course especially at risk.
Take the Attwater prairie chicken. A million of these birds once ranged across the prairies of Texas and Louisiana.
Today fewer than 100 remain in the wild and scientists have sought to bolster their populations with captive breeding programs. But when Hurricane Harvey walloped Texas with 130-mile-per-hour winds and record rainfall in 2017, the birds were right in harm’s way.
“The Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge tracked 29 individual birds, mostly hens. Post-hurricane, staff confirmed only five of them still alive,” Texas Climate News reported. “The hurricane also killed roughly 80% of a prairie chicken population on private property in Goliad County.”
Other species with limited ranges, like those on islands, also face big threats.
“If a species is well distributed, then if one part of its range gets hit, there’s the ability for it to recover,” says Stein. “But if essentially all its eggs are in one basket, and that particular place gets hit by one of these big disturbances, that’s when you have a real concern.”
In 2017 Hurricane Maria cut the population of just 200 Puerto Rican parrots in half. The year before, Hurricane Matthew was believed to have wiped out the last Bahama nuthatches (Sitta insularis). It took two years before a few of the birds were found — and then Hurricane Dorian struck in 2019, making their survival unlikely, according to Diana Bell, a professor of conservation biology at the University of East Anglia.
“In fact, Dorian may have not only sealed the fate of the nuthatch but also severely impacted other birds endemic to these islands, particularly the Bahama warbler and the Abaco parrot,” Bell wrote in an essay for The Conversation. “Also known as the Bahama Amazon parrot, this subspecies uniquely nests in limestone cavities on the ground which are likely to have been flooded by the storm surge.”
Compounding Crises
The risk to wildlife from extreme storms can be compounded by the ramping effects of climate change, too.
“If you have increasingly severe hurricanes where you’ve also got sea-level rise essentially providing a higher lodge point for the storm surge, then you start seeing impacts beyond the historical record,” says Stein.
In other places, extreme weather is an extra blow to species already struggling with other environmental pressures, like habitat loss, invasive species or pollution.
Last year the world watched in horror as land-use management, climate change and drought helped push Australia’s bushfires to a terrifying new level, killing 34 people and burning 37,500 square miles.
A study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that the fire impacted the critical habitat of 832 native species, with 70 species losing more than 30% of their natural range. Twenty-one of those were already at risk of extinction.
Those that survived could find themselves hard-pressed in future climate disasters. “Multiple extreme events are likely to act in synergistic ways to exacerbate risk of species’ extinction,” wrote Maxwell and the other researchers of the 2018 study.
Australia already has one of the highest extinction rates, and the wildfires could limit the capacity of some species to recover — like the endangered Kangaroo Island dunnart and the long-footed potoroo — and threaten others. Australia’s record blazes last year could push the number of endangered species in the country up by 19%, the study in Nature Ecology and Evolution found.
Solutions
When Hurricane Irma sacked the Florida Keys in 2017, the storm tossed boats ashore, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and left a trail of debris across the islands.
It also endangered one of the region’s beloved endemic species, the tiny Key deer, which today primarily live on Big Pine Key. Some deer were killed in the storm, and surviving animals faced threats to their already limited freshwater supply as the storm surge dumped saline ocean water into freshwater pools.
Island residents responded the way folks often do after a disaster — they offered help to their neighbors.
“What you saw during and shortly after Irma is that these Key deer were coming up to houses looking for fresh water,” says Stein. “And people were putting out kiddie pools of water for them.”
Following Australia’s bushfires last year, the country’s government jumped to the aid of wildlife by dropping 4,000 pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes to starving brush-tailed rock-wallabies who lost their food source in the blazes.
“There’s a lot of things that we can do to help human communities as well as wildlife after these acute disturbances,” says Stein.
But beyond immediate food and water relief, there’s a much bigger task ahead: reducing greenhouse gas emissions to address the ongoing dangers of climate change and the ability of ecosystems to adapt. Key deer, for example, also face a long-term threat to their drinking water supply from rising seas, something no number of kiddie pools can repair. And more severe hurricanes are likely in their future, too.
“As climate change continues to ensure extreme climate and weather events are more and more common, we now need to act to ensure species have the best chance to survive,” says Maxwell. “Wherever possible, high-quality and intact habitat areas should be retained, as these are the places where species are most resilient to increasing exposure to extreme events.”
If such intact habitat doesn’t exist, ecological restoration efforts can be used to help species adapt, his study found.
And the more we know, the better.
“Incorporating extreme events into climate change vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans will be challenging,” the researchers of the 2018 paper concluded. “But by doing so we have a greater chance of arriving at conservation interventions that truly address the full range of climate change impacts.”
And that could give more species a fighting chance in a changing climate.
The Atlantic Ocean current that plays a major role in the world’s weather is at its weakest state in “over a millennium”, researchers have found.
The research combines various lines of evidence to create a “consistent picture” of how the ocean current system, which is known as the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” (AMOC), has changed over the past 1,600 years.
Sometimes called the Atlantic’s “conveyer belt”, the AMOC is a vast ocean current system that moves warm, salty water from the tropics to regions further north, such as the UK. The gulf stream is part of the AMOC.
As the AMOC carries warm water northward, it releases heat into the atmosphere. The release of ocean heat keeps countries warm – and without it, winters in the UK could be close to 5C colder.
More than 14.6 million Texans, about half of the population of the state, remained under a boil-water advisory Friday, according to Texas Commission on Environmental Quality spokeswoman Tiffany Young. This encompasses more than 1,225 water supply systems and 63 percent of Texas counties following the record winter storm which hit the state last weekend.
In a press conference Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros stated that “we know that there are tens of thousands of leaks,” and that the Austin Fire Department responded to “thousands upon thousands of burst pipes.” In Houston, the fire department received almost 5,000 reports of burst pipes.
Texas Republican officials are currently in the process of trying to pin the blame on each other for the disaster. Governor Greg Abbott blamed the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), claiming that it told state officials five days before the blackouts that everything would be under control.
