Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
- Dec 3, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
★★★★★
I was disappointed in Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First not because it’s not an important book but because it didn’t do for me what I hoped it would. His previous book, The Water Will Come, published in 2017, was on my list, too, but I thought that if I was looking for a book on sea level rise, perhaps I should turn elsewhere. I did, and found in Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore not exactly that but exactly what I was looking for nonetheless.
Rising is not about the science of sea level rise. It’s not really about sea level rise at all. Yes, rising oceans are necessary to Rush’s narrative, but saying the book is about sea level rise is like saying the TV show Ted Lasso is about football. Sea level rise, football: these are mere settings to the story that unfolds. In both cases, the story is a very human one.
Rush is a journalist with the heart of a poet. Part elegy, part ode, Rising chronicles, with an eloquence and lyricism rarely, if ever, found in journalism, coastal communities in Louisiana, Maine, Florida, New York, and California, what sea level rise is doing to these places and the people who live there, what is being done in response, and how we might see those responses in a different light. What are we doing? In many places, we are doing coastal wetland restoration. In others, we’re building levees and seawalls. The reality is that those measures are likely only to buy us time, to delay the inevitable. In many places, the inevitable is already here. For the rest, when it comes—and it will come—it won’t come at the same time or in the same way. But we are also adapting in another, perhaps surprising, way: we are retreating, moving inland, moving to higher ground, often without choice, but increasingly with choice, as empowered citizens coming together to take control of a shared destiny.
“Retreat” is not a particularly American word. “Resilience” is perhaps a more appropriate one, but, as Rush points out, resilience means different things in different places and to different people. In some places, it means billions of dollars in infrastructure to hold back the coming waters. In others, it means learning to live with those coming waters and the inevitable rebuilding that comes with it—at least for those fortunate enough to survive. In the midst of climate change, we might begin to rethink those two words. We might begin to think of planned retreat as one of the most progressive sea level rise adaptation techniques we have, that there can be resilience in retreat. As Rush concludes, “Perhaps together we will make the ever more popular protest chant come true: ‘The seas are rising and so are we.’”
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