~ Anne Kilgannon
Take a moment to read the two epigraphs for this book. The author, Elizabeth Rush, carries them with her, in her heart and consciously in her mind, throughout her journeys of discovery studying sea level rise and its impact. She examines the physics of wind and tide and ineluctable every-day seeping and periodic storm-thrust rushing in of salt water over flimsy barriers, of lines we thought were drawn in the sand, now lost. To keep her bearings amidst such flux Rush looks to such teachers as John Bear Mitchell of the Penobscot Nation. He describes how sea rise has impacted his people living in coastal Maine and how they cope with the loss of cultural icons overwhelmed by encroaching salt water by turning to the wisdom embedded in the stories of their elders. Reinterpreted, they create new ground upon which to stand. Rush takes note and guidance, even while conscious that she is borrowing wisdom that is not hers by right. She holds it lightly and employs it with respect. As for Simone Weil’s insight, “Attention is prayer,” Rush adopts this as a practice in all her encounters, listening more than interrogating, questing for understanding, creating wells of quiet that can fill with the stories she seeks. This study is as much a memoir of her search for meaning as it is a record of devastation brought by climate change; it is both a master class in the science and a revelation of how to live with these truths.
This important book—high on my small stack of books I am deeply grateful to have read and which will now become a standard to measure all others—is subtitled “Dispatches from the New American Shore,” which signals that it is a series of reports from the frontlines of the struggles against this force overtaking so many places. Rush travels to these places most threatened by sea level rise. Incongruously, as I read her investigations into the longtime ravages of hurricanes in coastal Louisiana while sitting comfortably warm and dry in my chair, the news was announcing the next hurricane and its devastation of those places. Alternately reading and listening to the news, I felt I knew these places and the people again experiencing this current storm viscerally by way of Rush’s own connections made there. There was nothing superficial about her experience. Unlike some reporters, she didn’t skim her story from a quick in-and-out but went back to visit and develop lasting relationships with her interviewees. She stayed in touch; she shared her own stories and gave as well as took. She treated their experiences with dignity and compassion and resisted the urge—so common—to overwhelm them with her own well-earned knowledge of sea rise. Rush was there to learn. We readers are the beneficiaries. There is so much we don’t know but can now glimpse and appreciate.
Louisiana, Florida, parts of New York flooded by high voltage storms—these places and their tragedies are familiar to us from the news. But reading Rush, it’s clear we are just getting the barest sense of what is happening there, only the drama, the TV reporter with the wind and waves menacing but not the long un-newsworthy build up of infiltration, the rotting, tree-killing seepage of salt water and basement leaking heartbreak of home loss and neighborhood disintegration in places that don’t make the evening news. She takes us there, too. We would also miss the grit and hope of all the work quietly being conducted to understand and mitigate and work with our new reality without her reporting. Rush brings us these stories that deepen our concern, surely, but also deepens our will to not shrug and look away or fall into despair or look for blame. Or hold on ever more tightly with our sea walls and dikes and levees. She asks if we are ready for “the unthinkable: unsettling the American shore….a much larger trek toward letting go of the static image of the coast that we have spent two centuries developing and attempting to defend.” Rush asks the big questions: what does it mean to be resilient? Like the birds and plants that migrate up mountainsides in their search for cooler conditions to escape that flipside of rising waters, the heat and drought of interior continental locations, what happens when we reach the heights and there is nowhere to go? It’s all one earth; sea level rise is but one expression of the problem facing us, all of us. While pursuing her human stories, Rush notes the presence of birds—or their absence, the health of trees—or their deaths, and the beauty of the world amidst its bleakness. I am barely touching on all she considers. Amid the mud and pain, still she reminds us of the joy of frog song, sunrise, and the power of human connection. This is why we care; this is why it all matters. This is how we should pay attention to the work of Elizabeth Rush and to the experience of so many on the front of change, attentively, like prayer.
