Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“Sometimes the key arrives before the lock. Sometimes the password arrives before the impasse. Speak it and enter a world transformed by salt and blue. Say: tupelo.” 

This passage is a neat summation of the point Rush is trying to make to readers in this chapter: Words might grant us access to a previously unknown state. Americans read about the disappearance of tree frogs in Panama, the droughts occurring in parts of the Middle East and Africa, and the heat waves killing thousands in Europe and the United States, but they often feel removed from these events, even though they are happening in their own backyard and likely impacting their own lives. Rush believes this detachment is partly because we are not naming the living beings most impacted by the changing climate. If we were to be more explicit about learning and using names, we would be forced to acknowledge what many have refused to until this point: Climate change is here. By saying “tupelo,” we have become aware that the coast, and all living beings on it, are radically transforming. 

“The loss is pronounced enough that a few years ago the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had to remap the nearby Plaquemines Parish and in so doing removed thirty-one place names.” 

Human-driven climate change is fundamentally altering our shorelines. The bayous, natural ridges, and pathways that made up Louisiana’s riparian coast are disappearing under saltwater. As a result, Louisiana’s shape is changing, forcing us to also alter our maps. The Louisiana of today is not the Louisiana of the past.

“Eventually Chris arrives at the photo he wants to show me. In it his father is tilling the ground in a dirty white button-up shirt, flanked by okra plants. ‘That was all the way back in 1959,’ Chris says, ‘the year he married my mother.’ His father is working the land his parents gave him as a wedding gift. Chris runs his finger over the image and hands it to me. ‘It looked so different back then.’” 

One of the main purposes of Rush’s book is to give the people who are most impacted by the rising seas a microphone to tell their story. Chris Brunet is one such individual. In this passage, he is recounting how different Isle de Jean Charles looked just 60 years ago. Back then, his family was fairly self-sufficient, able to source much of their food from the land. As the ocean inundated more and more of the island, much of the food supply also evaporated. This reality underscores that the future of the island will look nothing like its past. It is not possible to stop the sea-level rise, given that the marshes are so badly decimated. The islanders have truly lost their island.

“But there are also nights in the winter when the wind will be blowing so hard I fear my metal roof is going to rip off and be shredded into pieces that pierce through the windows. This fear drives my spiritual work. Where I go with it, on a personal level, is toward making peace with uncertainty, toward being more fully in the present, and toward living a life where gratitude is near the surface.” 

Rising uses several first-hand accounts told by people who actually live in or near the marshes and who have been directly impacted by the rising sea levels. Laura Sewall provides one such account. She recognizes that living near the marsh is becoming increasingly dangerous as the water rises and storms become more intense, even acknowledging that she could one day drown in her own home. Despite the dangers, Laura guesses that she will not leave her home. Gratitude is one of the things that she has learned from the marsh. She is grateful for being able to see such an alive and dynamic environment, something so few Americans see first-hand. Despite the fear she sometimes has about the changing environment, she is also working towards excepting the uncertainty that surrounds whether the marsh and her own home will even be around in another few years. 

“I did not think, until coming to the Sprague, that it was possible for the ground itself to rot. Or that when it does it might just help heat up this precious pebble even faster.”

In this passage, Rush explains to her readers the important role that marshes play in the changing climate. Because the plants and grasses in Sprague are not able to escape the rising sea levels, they are rotting. What is happening at Sprague is taking place in tidal marshes all over the world, creating a closed and amplifying feedback loop. The carbon dioxide and methane that marshes once trapped are now being released into the atmosphere. Each molecule of these two gasses released into the air contributes to the warming of the atmosphere and ocean, which speeds up the rate at which ice sheets and glaciers are melting, thus accelerating sea-level rise. Rapidly rising saltwater makes it unlikely that marshes will be able to adapt, increasing the chances that they will continue to rot. The cycle continues anew. 

“In this version of history, the planets are formed at the very beginning of January. Sometime during the first week of the year, a giant object collides with Earth, and out pops the moon. It isn’t until late July that the first cells form. In August coral creeps across the ocean floor. Late in October multicellular organisms appear. Plants make their way onto land close to Thanksgiving. Around the first of December come the amphibians and insects. Dinosaurs arrive on December 12, and by December 26 they are gone. On the evening of December 31 the first hominoids emerge in East Africa. At ten minutes to midnight Neanderthals spread to Europe. We invent agriculture one minute before the clock strikes twelve. Shortly thereafter we start to write things down. All it takes is five short seconds for the Roman Empire to rise and fall. We enter the industrial era two seconds before midnight, the petroleum age a half a second before the year comes to a close. And in that fraction of a second we cause the end of an entire epoch.” 

Rush condenses 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history into a single calendar year to drive home to readers that while human civilization is insignificant, we have profoundly changed the planet in our short time on it. We are altering Earth’s geophysical composition and biodiversity in a way that usually only occurs with cataclysmic events, such as an asteroid smashing into Mexico, which caused the extinction of dinosaurs. Our inability to think beyond the human lifetime makes it very difficult for us to recognize that we are causing massive damage to the place we call home.

“In medicine, a pulse is something regular—a predictable throb of blood through veins, produced by a beating heart. It is so reliable, so steady, so definite that lack of a pulse is sometimes consider synonymous with death. A healthy adult will have a resting heart rate of sixty to one hundred beats per minute, every day, until they don’t. But a meltwater pulse is the opposite. It is an anomaly. The exception to the fifteen-thousand-year-rule.”

In contrast to a pulse in medicine, a meltwater pulse is very concerning. There is currently no scientific consensus around how much sea levels will rise. However, some researchers, such as Harold Wanless (or Hal), who is chair of the geology department at the University of Miami, believe that sea levels will rise by 15 feet by 2100, which would be the largest pulse in human history. If Hal’s predictions come true, then most of Florida will be underwater.

“Like Miami Beach, Shorecrest was built atop a former wetland. On the strip, where billions of dollars in real estate investment are at risk, the government is using a mixture of property taxes and municipal bonds to invest in formal sea level rise adaptation. But in Shorecrest, Hialeah, and Sweetwater—low-to-middle-income neighborhoods where the majority of residents are people of color and municipal services have long been difficult to maintain, thanks to the discriminatory banking practice known as redlining and the resulting decline in property taxes—residents are expected to remove their shoes and wade through the water.” 

A key theme in Rush’s book is that climate change will impact the most vulnerable and marginalized communities the hardest. Rush’s dispatch from South Florida illustrates this theme. She visits the Shorecrest neighborhood, which is located a few miles from downtown Miami, where she sees a woman wading through ankle-deep water to get to the bus stop. It is a clear day with no rain. Readers learn that this neighborhood floods whenever the tide is high. While this community is facing the physical impacts of rising sea levels, the city government will not provide them with funding for adaptation strategies. Yet, the city government is spending millions of dollars on such strategies in downtown Miami. This example reiterates how communities of color, which are often the most vulnerable to climate change, receive disproportionately low government funding compared to white and wealthier communities. 

“What’s not easy is giving up something you’ve been totally invested in your whole life, and for me that is Miami Beach, not just the house but the community.” 

This quote from Dan Kipnis highlights a key sentiment shared by many of the people Rush interviews in Rising: Their identity is tied to their community. For Dan, the community has been his entire life. He went to high school on a boat, made world fishing records in the local tributaries, and had a family in Miami. He knows the whole community, from the butcher to the postman to the mayor. Walking away is very difficult for him. However, he is tired of fighting the government to do something about rising sea levels. Dan knows we are facing cataclysmic climate change. In the near future, his home will be underwater, so he makes the decision to leave while he still can.

“It’s tough to see this neighborhood that I grew up in, that my father grew up in, that my sisters grew up in—I mean, we spent our entire lives there—being demolished. But on the other side, it’s nice knowing that this is to protect everyone else and that it can’t happen again. At least it can’t happen to the people I know and the people I love. And maybe the government really will do the right thing and let Oakwood go back to nature.” 

Nicole Montalto is a former resident of Oakwood Beach and provides one of the first-person accounts in the text about her escape from Hurricane Sandy, a storm that took her father’s life. Similar to many other residents of Oakwood Beach as well as coastal communities around the country, Nicole finds the buyout of her community bittersweet. It was tough to see her childhood neighborhood destroyed, but she hopes that returning the land to wetlands will ensure that no other family goes through what hers did.

“If you are struggling to imagine what happened in Oakwood Beach on the evening of October 30, 2012, taking a mixture bowl and place it in the bottom of your sink. Hold the bowl down while the sink fills with water. The inside of the bowl stays dry—that is, until the water reaches the lip, when it comes rushing in. That abrupt transition from mostly dry to anything but caught many off guard.” 

Throughout Rising, Rush meticulously documents how human interventions in the environment exacerbate the vulnerability of coastal communities. This passage provides one such example. A berm, which separated Oakwood Beach from the sea, is the reason that Hurricane Sandy’s storm surges caught Oakwood Beach residents off guard. Because Sandy was a slow-moving storm, water levels rose gradually, hemmed in by the berm. However, once the sea breached the berm, floodwater rapidly poured into the community, filling streets in minutes. While the berm was intended to protect this community from severe storms, it exacerbated their vulnerability by giving them false pretense that the community would not flood. 

“But in Oakwood I began to understand that the vulnerability of these places can and ought to be transformed into a battle cry. Yes, wetlands communities are the canaries in our coastal communities, the first to feel the ocean’s gathering force. And yet the retreating residents of Oakwood, by banding together and demanding aid, are also something else. An example for the rest of us to follow.” 

Since their initial construction, city, state, and federal governments have neglected many coastal communities. Yet, these residents are the first to recognize the transformations occurring in the environment around them. While many might not use the term “climate change,” they understand that flooding is becoming more frequent and severe. Instead of being victims of government neglect and sea-level rise, they are coming together to use their agency to demand help from the government. To Rush, this is something that all citizens must follow. We are reaching a point where climate change is not something of the future, but here, and we must demand that government officials start taking this phenomenon seriously. The survival of our country depends on it.

“For me, I don’t have a mortgage so I don’t have to have flood insurance. But I hear that there’s a possibility that we all are going to be forced to purchase it at some point in the future, and I don’t know what I would do then because I don’t think I can afford it.” 

In this passage, Marilynn underscores one of the key points that Rush tries to make to readers: Those who are most likely to live in flood-prone areas are often the least likely to be able to afford to protect themselves. Marilynn moved to the Tanyard when she was a child because her parents could afford housing in the neighborhood. She has chosen to continue living in the community for similar reasons. While the government should help Marilynn and other residents protect themselves from the flooding, they have only exacerbated their vulnerability. For example, flood insurance forces residents to rebuild in the same flood-prone area. For Marilynn and other impoverished and marginalized residents of coastal communities, flood insurance continues to put them at physical and financial risk rather than actually protecting them from the climate crisis. 

“But as a white woman and a nonfiction writer, I also know that I have blind spots, biases, responsibilities—and that these things can interfere with each other. I know that simply walking away is a privilege not always available to my subjects, those who make their lives along our shifting shore.” 

While Rush inserts her own personal reactions throughout the text, Risk is where she grapples with her own biases and privileges as a white woman. She recounts her initial fear of an impoverished, elderly, ailing Black man, Alvin Turner, calling out her own learned poisonous behaviors. She also acknowledges that unlike Alvin and many of the other residents she interviews, Rush is able to leave these neighborhoods and go back to her own life, where flooding is not a high risk. As an outsider, Rush will never truly understand what it is like to live in flood-prone areas that have been neglected by governments for decades. All she can do is amplify these voices in her writing so that more and more people become aware of the plight that other Americans face living on the shore.

“Vulnerability is inherited, like a garnet necklace or a debt.” 

At one time, Pensacola was considered one of the most racially mixed cities in the South. This changed at the end of the 19th century when higher-income white residents moved to neighborhoods located on hills and removed from regular flooding. Non-white residents were forced to remain in the neighborhood because it was all they could afford. They had children, and their children stayed in the community for the same reason. As such, people living in coastal communities have inherited their vulnerability from ancestors who moved to the wetlands in an attempt to carve out a living for themselves.

“When we relocate to higher ground we will at least be able to hold on to each other. I mean if we can stay together, then we won’t have lost as much.” 

One of the key reasons why Chris agreed to the relocation project is that it would help mend his community. So many members had left the island that their departure had fractured a once close-knit community. This relocation project extended to residents who both remained on the island and who had already left. While leaving his ancestral home was incredibly tough, Chris looked forward to being with his whole community again.

“I know for myself that no matter what kind of technology they possess they cannot bring it back to what it was. There is no way to recreate Louisiana’s coast, all the bayous and lakes, all the shrimping and the crabbing, and the other animals that lived out here. But if something can be done to slow down the tide and they can save what they still have, they should do it.” 

Like many other coastal residents that Rush interviews, Chris understands that technology cannot return the tidal marshes to their former glory. This perspective stands in stark contrast to researchers and city and government officials that Rush also talks to. They believe that they can reverse the damage that human interventions have done to these fragile environments through new human interventions. However, Chris and other coastal residents know the truth. Sea levels will continue to rise, further damaging the bayous and marshes. For them, it is more important now to protect what is left, which is why many agree to leave. 

“On my way back to the car I pass a new sign that Edison has tacked next to the old one. It reads, ‘THEY SAY THE ISLAND is FADiNg AWAY SOON WE WiLL NOT hAVE A ISLAND LEFT. iF THE ISLAND is NOT GOOD STAY AWAY. May God BleSS THE ISLAND!!!’” 

When Rush initially heard about the relocation project for the residents of Isle de Jean Charles, she was ecstatic. They represent one of the first communities that will be relocated in advance of the next storm. However, talking to Edison, who created the sign, causes her to realize that relocation is more complicated. She understands where Edison is coming from. She would not want anyone telling her where she could live, especially when she was happy living there, which is essentially what the government will do with the Isle de Jean Charles community. Already marginalized community members, like those from Isle de Jean Charles, not only had the least options going into a storm, but also have fewer equitable relocation options. 

“In the face of so much change, both Chris and Edison are retaining their control—if not over the physical world, then over the words they use to make sense of their experiences in it.” 

Chris and Edison represent two distinct, but equally respectable, perspectives on relocation. For Chris, he feels a connection to his Native American community. It hurt him to see the community start to unravel as more and more people left the island. As a result, he sees the opportunity to relocate as a chance to rebuild this community. Edison, in contrast, knows his identity is tied to the physical space of the island. Leaving the island would be like giving up a piece of himself. He views the relocation project as government coercion. Through their words and choices, both men are retaining control in a challenging and an uncertain situation. Rush believes that this control represents another adaptive strategy for humans living along the coast. It in an uncertain environment, it is critical that residents express their own agency in their decision to stay or leave.

“If these slight birds spun out silk as spiders do, each one would run through 8,849 spools a year in its migrations. When the rufous flies away, I imagine a single iridescent string trailing behind its feathered body. And then I imagine the many thousands of others in the Andres just like it. If the continent is a quilt, then these hummingbirds—so much smaller than my own hands—place the stitches that hold the fabric together.”

One key theme in Rising is the interconnectedness of the ecosystem. Rush uses the rufous hummingbird as one example to illustrate this point. The hummingbird travels back and forth between its breeding grounds in the Pacific Northwest and its wintering grounds in Mexico and the Gulf Coast. Along the Gulf Coast, its preferred habitats include marshes, bogs, and wetlands, the very environments that we are already losing to climate change. Rush forces the reader to ponder what will happen to these hummingbirds when their wintering grounds disappear. Moreover, these birds help pollinize numerous plants throughout the Pacific Northwest. While it is possible that another pollinator will fill the rufous’s niche or that the rufous will change its wintering grounds, it is also possible that the loss of the wetlands means the loss of the rufous and the biodiversity that depends on it.  

“Perhaps this is what the future will be like, I think, as the places we have long navigated by disappear beneath the surface of the sea. At first the disorientation is uncomfortable, but slowly my mind and body unclench, embracing the unknown.” 

Embracing uncertainty and the unknown is an adaptive strategy first introduced by Laura Sewall in “On Gratitude.” The rising sea levels are radically altering our shorelines. Because we are unsure how much sea levels will rise by, we do not fully know how substantial this transformation will be. Both Laura and Rush suggest that one way to cope with this change is to get comfortable with the unknown, which is what Rush is trying to do in this passage as she navigates the forest in the early morning hours. 

“Those wetlands are going to save the community I’ve fought so long to protect. I was skeptical at first, sure. I thought it was just a bunch of environmentalists mucking around in the weeds, but now I see it’s the best chances we’ve got to keep Alviso Alviso. To save the community and the ducks and the geese and sturgeon and all those other animals that have made this a wonderful place for me to live out all of my seventy-some-odd years.”

The first part of the passage highlights a reoccurring view among residents of coastal communities: skepticism towards government officials and researchers. This is partly because the human interventions put forward by these groups have played a role in the destruction of wetlands and communities. In this case, however, Richard ends up being happy with the wetland restoration project because he believes it will save his community. Similar to many others who gave first-person accounts in Rising, Richard has a deep love for the place he calls home.

“When wetlands restoration began in California the goal was nostalgic: to simply return things to how they used to be. Now it also involves figuring out how to transform one of the flattest and most vulnerable landscapes on the planet into something more robust, into a place that just might make it into the next century.”

The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project is one of the largest wetland restoration projects in the United States. As noted in this passage, its initial intent was to restore the habitat. With climate change, the goal has been expanded to try and make the wetlands resilient to a changing climate. Initially, Rush, like the reader, is intrigued by the scale and mission behind the project, but she prompts the reader to wonder if such a project will cause even more harm than good. We are in this climate crisis now because of human interventions in the landscape, and Rush wonders whether such human ingenuity can actually reverse the damage we have already caused.