The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014

by Deborah Blum

  These questions have no logical or empirical answers. They are philosophical problems par excellence. Many thinkers, including Cicero, Montaigne, Karl Jaspers, and “The Stone’s” own Simon Critchley, have argued that studying philosophy is learning how to die. If that’s true, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age—for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The rub is that now we have to learn how to die not as individuals but as a civilization.

  III.

  Learning how to die isn’t easy. In Iraq, at the beginning, I was terrified by the idea. Baghdad seemed incredibly dangerous, even though statistically I was pretty safe. We got shot at and mortared, and IEDs laced every highway, but I had good armor, we had a great medic, and we were part of the most powerful military the world had ever seen. The odds were good I would come home. Maybe wounded, but probably alive. Every day I went out on mission, though, I looked down the barrel of the future and saw a dark, empty hole.

  “For the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him,” wrote Simone Weil in her remarkable meditation on war, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force. “Yet the idea of man’s having death for a future is abhorrent to nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face.” That was the face I saw in the mirror, and its gaze nearly paralyzed me.

  I found my way forward through an eighteenth-century Samurai manual, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure, which commanded: “Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily.” Instead of fearing my end, I owned it. Every morning, after doing maintenance on my Humvee, I’d imagine getting blown up by an IED, shot by a sniper, burned to death, run over by a tank, torn apart by dogs, captured and beheaded, and succumbing to dysentery. Then, before we rolled out through the gate, I’d tell myself that I didn’t need to worry, because I was already dead. The only thing that mattered was that I did my best to make sure everyone else came back alive. “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead,” wrote Tsunetomo, “he gains freedom in the Way.”

  I got through my tour in Iraq one day at a time, meditating each morning on my inevitable end. When I left Iraq and came back stateside, I thought I’d left that future behind. Then I saw it come home in the chaos that was unleashed after Katrina hit New Orleans. And then I saw it again when Sandy battered New York and New Jersey: government agencies failed to move quickly enough, and volunteer groups like Team Rubicon had to step in to manage disaster relief.

  Now, when I look into our future—into the Anthropocene—I see water rising up to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots, hurricanes, and climate refugees. I see 82nd Airborne soldiers shooting looters. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste, and plagues. I see Baghdad. I see the Rockaways. I see a strange, precarious world.

  Our new home.

  The human psyche naturally rebels against the idea of its end. Likewise, civilizations have throughout history marched blindly toward disaster, because humans are wired to believe that tomorrow will be much like today—it is unnatural for us to think that this way of life, this present moment, this order of things, is not stable and permanent. Across the world today, our actions testify to our belief that we can go on like this forever, burning oil, poisoning the seas, killing off other species, pumping carbon into the air, ignoring the ominous silence of our coal mine canaries in favor of the unending robotic tweets of our new digital imaginarium. Yet the reality of global climate change is going to keep intruding on our fantasies of perpetual growth, permanent innovation, and endless energy, just as the reality of mortality shocks our casual faith in permanence.

  The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up seawalls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

  The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.

  If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.

  KATE SHEPPARD

  Under Water

  FROM Mother Jones

  TWO MONTHS AFTER Hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City, Battery Park is again humming with tourists and hustlers, guys selling foam Statue of Liberty crowns, and commuters shuffling off the Staten Island ferry. On a winter day when the bright sun takes the edge off a frigid harbor breeze, it’s hard to imagine all this under water. But if you look closely, there are hints that not everything is back to normal.

  Take the boarded-up entrance to the new South Ferry subway station at the end of the No. 1 line. The metal structure covering the stairwell is dotted with rust and streaked with salt, tracing the high-water mark at 13.88 feet above the low-tide line—a level that surpassed all historical floods by nearly 4 feet. The saltwater submerged the station, turning it into a “large fish tank,” as the former Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman Joseph Lhota put it, corroding the signals and ruining the interior. While the city reopened the old station in early April, the newer one is expected to remain closed to the public for as long as three years.

  Before the storm, South Ferry was easily one of the more extravagant stations in the city, refurbished to the tune of $545 million in 2009 and praised by the former MTA CEO Elliot Sander as “artistically beautiful and highly functional.” Just three years later, the city is poised to spend more than that amount fixing it. Some have argued that South Ferry shouldn’t be reopened at all.

  The destruction in Battery Park could be seen as simple misfortune: after all, city planners couldn’t have known that within a few years the beautiful new station would be submerged in the most destructive storm to ever hit New York City.

  Except for one thing: they sort of did know. Back in February 2009, a month before the station was unveiled, a major report from the New York City Panel on Climate Change—which Mayor Michael Bloomberg convened to inform the city’s climate adaptation planning—warned that global warming and sea-level rise were increasing the likelihood that New York City would be paralyzed by major flooding. “Of course it flooded,” said George Deodatis, a civil engineer at Columbia University. “They spent a lot of money, but they didn’t put in any floodgates or any protection.”

  And it wasn’t just one warning. Eight years before the Panel on Climate Change’s report, an assessment of global warming’s impacts in New York City had also cautioned of potential flooding. “Basically pretty much everything that we projected happened,” says Cynthia Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the cochair of the Panel on Climate Change and coauthor of that 2001 report.

  Scientists often refer to the “hundred-year flood,” the highest water level expected over the course of a century. But with sea levels rising along the East Coast—a natural phenomenon accelerated by climate change—scientists project that in our lifetimes what was once considered a hundred-year flood will happen every three to twenty years. And truly catastrophic storms will do damage unimaginable today. “With the exact same Sandy one hundred years from now,” Deodatis says, “if you have, say, five feet of sea-level rise, it’s going to be much more devastating.”

  Roughly 123 million of us—39
percent of the U.S. population—dwell in coastal counties. And that spells trouble: 50 percent of the nation’s shorelines, 11,200 miles in all, are highly vulnerable to sea-level rise, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the problem isn’t so much that the surf laps a few inches higher: it’s what happens to all that extra water during a storm.

  We’re already getting a taste of what this will mean. Hurricane Sandy is expected to cost the federal government $60 billion. Over the past three years, ten other storms have each caused more than $1 billion in damage. In 2011 the federal government declared a record ninety-four weather-related major disasters, from hurricanes to wildfires.9 The United States averaged fifty-six such disasters per year from 2000 to 2010, and a mere eighteen a year in the 1960s.

  The consequences for the federal budget are staggering. In just the past two years, natural disasters have cost the Treasury $188 billion—nearly $2 billion a week. The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which covers more than $1 trillion in assets, is one of the nation’s largest fiscal liabilities. The program went $16 billion in the hole on Hurricane Katrina, and after Sandy it will be at least $25 billion in debt—a deficit unlikely ever to be fixed.

  Meanwhile, Washington is stuck in an endless cycle of disaster response. The U.S. government spends billions of dollars on disasters after they happen, but it pinches pennies when it comes to preparing for them. And both federal and state policies create incentives for people to build and rebuild in increasingly risky coastal areas. “The large fiscal machinery at the federal level is cranking ahead as if there’s no sea-level rise, and as if Sandy never happened,” says David Conrad, a water consultant who has been working on flood policy for decades. “This issue is moving so much faster than the governmental apparatus right now.”

  Put another way, we’re already deep under water.

  Some 350 miles south of the South Ferry subway station, on Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, is Gloucester County. The red-brick homes and matching sidewalks give the county seat, Gloucester Courthouse, a colonial feel. The county was the site of Werowocomoco, the capital of the Powhatan Confederacy, and just across the York River to the southwest are Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg, some of the earliest English settlements in North America. Europeans first settled the county in 1651, and some local families date back just about that far. In the more remote necks on the bay, watermen still speak Guinean, a dialect full of “ye” and other archaic words along with the lilt of dropped r’s and d’s of the greater Tidewater area.

  Gloucester County’s population of 36,886 is spread over 217 square miles, with a median household income of $62,000. Historically, most in the region relied on fishing and agriculture, but now many commute over the George P. Coleman Memorial Bridge to Williamsburg and Norfolk. A few McMansions have popped up, but they look out of place; I saw one fancy house sitting next to a trailer with a goat roped to the front porch.

  Gloucester is one of the biggest losers in the geographic lottery when it comes to sea-level rise—low, surrounded by water, and flat as a billiard table. In 2003 Hurricane Isabel walloped the county, causing $1.9 billion in damage throughout the state of Virginia. And that was just the beginning.

  On a warmer-than-it-should-be spring morning, I meet Chris West, a burly tugboat engineer whose gray rancher sits about 120 yards from the Severn River and about 3 feet above sea level. He’s in his driveway, waiting for a team of contractors to jack his home 6 feet up in the air. West’s parents built the house sixty years ago, and he’s lived there his whole life.

  West, forty-three, watches as the contractors clear brush and unhook his utilities; soon they will break the foundation, shove giant wooden beams under the house, and crank it up on hydraulic jacks. Then they will stack four wooden piers beneath the structure, like Lincoln Logs, to hold it up as they pour cement for a new foundation 6 feet higher. West and his dogs will stay at his girlfriend’s house while the house is under construction.

  “I got butterflies,” he says.

  Raising up the house would have cost West $85,000, but it’s being subsidized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, so he only has to cover around $4,000. So far FEMA has given Gloucester County $11.8 million to raise sixty homes, and another fifty-nine homes and businesses are in line for a lift. The county also offers residents an outright buyout, but only seventeen families and one business have gone that route.

  Neither FEMA nor county officials promote the grants as a climate change adaptation program—even if that’s exactly what they are becoming. “Even the naysayers have noticed the increased number of storms,” says Anne Ducey-Ortiz, Gloucester’s director of planning. “Even when people don’t want to deal with climate change, they are willing to talk about increased flooding.”

  For West, the reality hit home during Hurricane Isabel. The storm pushed water from the Chesapeake Bay into the Mobjack Bay, then up into the Severn, through his backyard, over the deck, and into the house. He had 18 inches of seawater inside and nearly $30,000 in damage. He spent three and a half months living with his in-laws as he tore out drywall and carpets and replaced all his furniture.

  Isabel was the worst storm in this region as far back as most people here can remember, and folks assumed the next one wouldn’t come for a long while. “You think, ‘Thirty more years I won’t be living here anyhow, I’ll be in a nursing home,’” West says. But then just three years later, a tropical storm named Ernesto blew through, bringing the water an inch and a half short of his deck. Then there was Nor’Ida in November 2009, and Hurricane Irene in August 2011, again bringing the water under the deck and inches below the threshold of his back door. Even the average tides behind the house, West reckons, seem almost a foot and a half higher than they used to be.

  Tide measurements have found that the sea level along this part of Virginia’s southern coast has risen 14.5 inches in the past eighty years, and scientists expect the rate of increase to double for the rest of this century, adding another 27.2 inches. Meanwhile, the land is getting lower: the earth here has been settling, due to the double whammy of a glacial retreat in the Pleistocene era 20,000 years ago and a giant meteor that hit some 35 million years before that. Removing massive amounts of groundwater for paper mills and other industrial uses has aggravated the sinking, much like the aquifer depletion that’s been causing killer sinkholes in Florida. The upshot, says Pam Mason, a senior coastal management scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester: “You take our little two-foot tide and you put one more foot on it, and it starts to make a difference. We’ve gotten complacent. We’ve gotten really close to the edge.”

  Ducey-Ortiz says that in a number of areas the county would prefer just to buy out homeowners because, even if you lift up the houses, flooding will submerge the roads, trapping residents and cutting off emergency services. Still, authorities won’t force anyone to move. “You’re allowing people to stay in a hazard area,” she acknowledges. But “in Gloucester, that’s our heritage, that whole Guinea area. To abandon those people, those families that live out there, people who just love living on the water—we want to help them.”

  West says he might have considered taking a buyout, but it would have had to be at least $200,000—what he owes on his mortgage right now. Like most in Gloucester, he elected to stay. “It’s hard to take people out of their home, their true home,” he says. Most of his neighbors, “the only time they’ve left has been in a pine box.”

  Perhaps the only topic touchier than whether people should abandon their homes is why the problem even exists. West has heard of global warming, but he’s not entirely sure it’s responsible for the rising water. “Nobody knows, I don’t think. Everybody speculates,” he says. Local authorities rarely, if ever, speak the words “climate change.”

  “I wouldn’t want to turn some positive influences off by coming up with a political term,” said Paul Koll, Gloucester County’s building offic
ial. “I am really conscious of not labeling it anything so I don’t shoot myself in the foot.” Two years ago, when leaders in neighboring Mathews County broached the subject of sea-level rise, Tea Partiers packed meetings, warning of an environmentalist plot to “put nature above man.” They linked a proposal to build dikes to a United Nations sustainability plan known as Agenda 21, which has inspired a number of conspiracy theories among far-right activists.

  Never mind that the Middle Peninsula, made up of Gloucester and five other counties, expects up to $249 million in new climate-related costs by 2050, a figure that doesn’t even include potential damage from storms like Isabel or Ida. The American Security Project, a Washington think tank, projects that climate impacts could cost the state a whopping $45.4 billion by 2050, with extreme storms alone putting $129.7 billion worth of property at risk.

  Yet the Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, phased out a Governor’s Commission on Climate Change after taking office in 2010. His attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli (who won the state’s Republican gubernatorial nomination in May), has spent a good deal of his time in office seeking to prosecute the former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann for his work on historic temperature records. And when state lawmakers requested a study on sea-level rise, the Republican state delegate Chris Stolle retorted that the term was “left-wing.” (The legislature settled on “recurrent coastal flooding.”) And Virginia is better off than neighboring North Carolina, where lawmakers last year explicitly refused to consider scientists’ current projections in coastal building decisions.

  Just as New York City planners had data showing that a superstorm could devastate the city, the federal government has plenty of data on the climate cliff—the looming budgetary catastrophe from emergency spending. In January the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee released a draft of its latest report, warning of the “high vulnerability of coasts to climate change.” The report optimistically added that “proactively managing the risks will reduce costs over time.” But with congressional Republicans actively derisive of climate science, the odds of that are not great.