Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

This book is a treasure for our times, both present and future. As a scientist who grew up spending as much time as possible on the wetlands of Long Island, NY, this book truly brought me back to my roots. And also made me think about how these roots will be changing in the future.Throughout this book the author makes scenes come alive. She invites the reader into her experiences during her amazing 5 year journey of exploration in researching the topic of rising sea levels and the many aspects of life connected to this global climate change. She weaves science, history, politics, economics, social justice and so many other threads into a cohesive tapestry that is the reality of our engagement with our planet. And she brings humanity into clear focus while at the same time making the science accessible.I was impressed with how self-disclosing the author was about aspects of her personal life that played out during her 5 years of research. I admire her courage in that – and now that I’m done with the book I see how this honesty and openness invites the reader to reflect on their lives and how all of this fits in to what they are experiencing as we continue this journey into rising sea levels and warming climates. If Elizabeth can be this honest about how her life has evolved during her work on this book, the least we readers can do is to reflect on how rising sea levels will affect us all.One question that I had as I progressed through this book was what the “call to action” was going to be. I had a sense that it would reflect a holistic view of the changes that are here and those that are likely to be headed our way. As the chapters flew by, it became clear that the call to action was not “preachy” or overly political.I was pleased that by the end of the book the author had made a very strong case that we humans are going to have to recognize that the changes that are coming are going to involve forces larger and more complex than we fully understand. We, more than probably any other species, have the opportunity to make changes that will benefit us all, not to mention the rest of the planet. We can waste time arguing about the details, but at the end of the day/year/century, our time will be better spent thinking and acting like what we are: inhabitants of an amazing planet that supports an unbelievable array of life. But we are not going to be able to “bend” nature to what some may want. We are going to have to learn to co-exist and not “rule” or “dominate”.I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is curious about how climate change is affecting those living in coastal regions. But this book is more than a story about how climate change is affecting in these regions – it is a story about how we as a society have dealt with climate changes to date, and what is almost certain to happen if we do not fundamentally change our thoughts about nature and how we interact with our beautiful and precious planet.

Plenty of books about the impacts of climate change on shoreline communities focus on the risks to come. Some of those changes are already happening in the form of increased damage from coastal storms such as Sandy. Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore looks at communities impacted by these events and how governments have or have not responded to them.Elizabeth Rush visits and reports in depth on several shoreline communities on the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts that are losing the battle with climate change. In addition to her own well researched and extensively footnoted reporting, she includes several first-person essays from residents of these communities and offers plenty of personal impressions of her own.In many cases state and local governments are turning a blind eye to these communities, leaving the residents to either stick it out or pay their own way to relocation. In cases where there are funds available for buy outs these are used to buy out lower income blue collar neighborhoods while the richer second homeowners get their properties protected through beach replenishment.Market based solutions such as increased flood insurance premiums have the same problem, forcing poorer residents out while having minimal impact on the rich. Whether public or private, relocation incentives gentrify the shoreline.The book makes a good case for inclusion of communities at risk in decision making about their future but makes it clear that without a change in approach response to climate change is only going to further exacerbate inequality.I was recently an advisor on a project to assess the vulnerability to sea level rise of infrastructure and habitat in Puget Sound. When the only data sources on shoreline properties are property tax databases, it is not a shock that infrastructure is measured in dollars and that amenities like public beach access and parks are omitted. I recommended this book to all my colleagues on the team, and I recommend it to anyone who loves the shoreline.

Ms. Rush is an “environmental writer” and writes, at least in this book, as a sort of anthropologist documenting individual and community responses to their changing environment. The underlying environmental theme here is sea level rise and its impact on U.S. coastal wetlands (or what used to be wetlands) along with the people who live in them. Yet sea level is only a part of her story, a much more significant part being wetland degradation–environmental damage–caused by human activity (drainage, construction, agriculture, shipping) going back a hundred or more years.The patterns Ms. Rush finds in one place are often repeated. Whether in Maine or Louisiana, wetlands are not the most comfortable places to live permanently. Population pressure eventually forces people to make a go of it, and often, the poorest must suffer the burden of finding ways to live in those places. How they adapted and how they are presently adapting (or not) as the environmental collapse of these fragile areas accelerates is the meat of this book told with stories about individuals–sometimes scientists, more often residents–and communities.Ms. Rush paints her anthropological-literary portraits well. There is much of the poetic in her telling. If nothing else, one comes away from her survey with a heightened appreciation for human resiliency. Alas, as she notes, neither individuals nor communities can adapt indefinitely to accelerating sea level rise. A well-told addition to the growing corpus of books on the impact of our changing climate.