- Climate change is reshaping America's coastline, from Maine, to the Gulf of Mexico, from Staten Island New York, to California.

For most of us, the change is not visible to the eye, but today's guest tell us that's in part because we don't know what we're seeing.

She's Elizabeth Rush, this week on Story in the Public Square.

(uplifting music) Hello, and welcome to Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Alongside me is my friend and co-host, G. Wayne Miller of the Providence Journal.

Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests.

Authors, journalists, artists, and more, to make sense of the stories that shape public life in the United States today.

To help us this week, we're joined by Elizabeth Rush who's the author of a powerful book titled "Rising: "Dispatches from the New American Shore," a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Elizabeth, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

- And congratulations, really.

This is, we talked about this a little bit back in the green room, but I wish I wrote like you.

This is just beautifully written.

Beautifully written, and just a remarkable book.

I'm curious, though, the inspiration for writing it.

Where did that come from?

- You know, initially I started reporting on sea level rise back in 2011.

I was sent to the India-Bangladesh border by an international newspaper to do a story on the India-Bangladesh border fence.

And interestingly in Bangladesh, everyone told me the fence isn't really a problem.

You can bribe your way through.

You can walk through under the cover of darkness.

The real issue is this arrival of saline in the aquifer and how it's decimating our crops and leading to widespread displacement.

And I remember coming back to my editor and saying okay, well the fence is important, but I'd also really like to get a significant amount on the page about sea level rise.

And they gave me like 200 words, they gave me a sidebar, but it felt really sort of disproportionate to the threat that I was seeing unfold in front of me.

And so I started to cover sea level rise more regularly and I found that often you would run into this problem that to get it in the newspaper, you'd get a little tiny story, or you'd have to write it in really deeply apocalyptic terms that didn't map onto the lived experience that I was seeing in these frontline communities struggling with sea level rise in the present tense.

And so, when I realized that my journalistic register didn't map what was so moving to me in terms of my field research, I started to apply for grants to work on a longer, bigger project about sea level rise.

- And so, you mention register.

So I think about that in terms of music.

You've written with a very lyric style.

Why?

- In part because I believe in the power of language to enchant us.

I think that sometimes we write about climate change in this very scientific register, and that that dulls people to the dynamism at the heart of the changes that are taking place all around us.

And so I thought this kind of lyricism might be able to wake us up to see really, this incredible planetary transformation that we're living through.

- So, I wanna ask just sort of, because I found this fascinating.

So in the journals that you were doing as a freelancer, it was sort of straight journalistic reportage, right?

- [Elizabeth] Absolutely.

- Was this a tool, in the toolbox that you reached for in terms of I'm gonna tell the story with a certain voice because that's gonna capture the power of it more fully than a straight journalistic account?

- I think so.

Originally I was trained as a poet as well, so there was some part of me that quite frankly turned to journalism out of necessity in order to get paid to write, I had to write in a journalistic register.

I remember the first poem I sold, I sold for $35, and the first article I sold I sold for a couple thousand, and I was like, oh well.

- [Jim] Look at that.

(laughing) - Yeah.

And so there was some part of me that, it felt like a bit of a homecoming to be able to meld together that poetic voice that I had so loved in my training and then to meld that with the kind of journalism that I was doing.

- So Jim used the word lyrical which is entirely accurate, and you use the word enchant.

What do you mean by enchant?

It's an enchanting word itself, if you'll pardon the bad pun.

- Absolutely.

I think at this deep level we live in a moment where we have often, many people have lost touch with the more than human world, and I think there's a really interesting project that a guy named Robert McFarland recently did called The Lost Words, where he found out that the Oxford English Dictionary was taking out words like bluebell, and turn, and all of these different words that are related to the natural world in the dictionary because they were being replaced with broadband, internet, wavelength.

And so he created this children's book of all the words that had been taken out of this dictionary.

Had a fabulous illustrator make it, and now it's become a phenomenon in and of itself.

It's spreading across England, a bunch of different public schools are assigning it to their students.

And his proposition is something that I really believe in.

That in order to fall in love with the more than human world we need to have the language that describes that relationship, and I think that we live in a moment where we've lost a lot of it.

We've lost our connection, and I think that's partly a linguistic problem.

So I do believe that some of the words that I excavate in this book, this way of talking about, writing about, our relationship to the more than human world is also about re-enlivening that relationship and making us be enchanted by it once again.

- So why have we, or many of us, lost that connection, that relationship?

- I remember a conversation I had with someone who actually appears in "Rising," Laura Sewell who's an eco-psychologist, eco, yeah, eco-psychologist by training.

She says that we live so much of our lives looking at a screen that's 16 inches in front of our faces that we're actually losing the physical ability to see with great depth of field.

To be able to walk into a space and read it visually from movement that can happen really close to you to seeing a line of trees on the horizon.

She says that we actually have lost some of that ability because of the technology that we're so dependent upon.

- And that screen also has an addictive element for many people.

- Absolutely.

- So once you get drawn into that world, that becomes, to an extent, your world.

- Absolutely.

I have a rule in my house that I'm not even allowed to turn on the internet before 10 a.m.

If I want to get any good writing done.

- That's a great rule.

I'm gonna adopt that, and we talk about that.

I struggle with that every morning, which is when I write.

- So one of the other byproducts of this lyrical storytelling is that the people you introduce us to have a richness of character and depth that we might not otherwise have had.

And I'm assuming that was intentional on your part, but I'm curious if the idea was to evoke empathy?

- Absolutely.

I think that the seven years that I spent writing this book as I reflected upon what most moved me the more as I learned about sea level rise and it's early impact on coastal communities, I realized that it wasn't the scientist saying six feet of rise by 2100.

It was sitting in someone's living room and listening to them talk about the first time they flooded, the second time they flooded.

- [Jim] So, this is really important.

So the book is about the lives of people that are being changed.

- [Elizabeth] Absolutely.

- [Jim] By climate change and sea level rise.

- Absolutely.

So, every chapter opens with what I call a testimony, and that's delivered in the voice of a resident who lives in one of these flood-prone communities, and really the task for me was to try to get them to speak about an event in their lives that woke them up to the reality of sea level rise, and then what did they do with that knowledge.

And so I found in these stories, both stories of tremendous loss, but also sometimes stories of empowerment, that you can't just live in that space of mourning and devastation, that there is always a pathway away from that.

And that's something that I also think is really important in terms of what the book hopes to accomplish.

It's a story about sea level rise, but it's also about rising into awareness, rising into power.

Understanding that we're not alone as we struggle with coming to terms with climate change.

That's something that is increasingly a vulnerability that we share.

- Why your decision to focus on America?

We've had other great environmental writers on the show, Elizabeth Kohlbert just to cite one, who takes a more global approach.

But you've written globally, but you decided to focus on America.

Why?

- You know, when I was in Bangladesh and saw the early impacts of sea level rise in Bangladesh, that completely changed my thinking about climate change, that okay it's not a problem for the future, it's happening now in the present tense.

And yet I also knew that if there was one climate change cliche, it was a drowning Bangladesh.

And I thought to myself, if it's happening there, it has to be happening here as well.

And I felt like it wasn't getting the same coverage.

So really I set out, that was one of the first rules that I put in place when writing "Rising."

I'm gonna write about it at home in our backyards to try to make that problem, this problem that can feel sort of abstract or distant, feel much closer to your everyday reader in the United States.

- And so when we talk about the case of Bangladesh people talk about climate refugees.

But you're telling us there are climate refugees in the United States right now.

- Absolutely, there are climate refugees in the United States right now.

We don't often hear about them or think about them in those terms, but if you took an aerial photograph of Louisiana over the last 50 years, you would watch the southern, you'd watch the coastline disintegrate.

And you can go to these towns in the Louisiana Bayou that have just hemorrhaged inhabitants.

Gone from 3000 people to 1000 people, to 300 people, through a series of storms, through a series of losses that are both climate change but also oil and gas industry degradation of the wetlands.

It also has to do with the damming of the Mississippi and the withholding of silt behind all these different damns along the Mississippi.

But the reality is we have thousands of climate refugees in the United States, and that number is expected to only continue to rise in the coming decades.

- So taking again the case of Louisiana.

Where do these people go?

Or where did they go, where are they going, where will they go?

- So there's not a ton of great research on that.

That's one of, I think, the early things that's missing in terms of understanding climate change and its impact.

My anecdotal evidence says they go everywhere from five miles inland to live with their uncle to 50 miles inland because there's a job in a big city to two or 300 miles away.

We see with Hurricane Katrina, that's one place where you do have a little bit of tracking.

People displaced from New Orleans during Katrina often went to Houston.

And then we see that they're displaced again by Harvey.

They often move into lower income flood-prone communities and then find themselves again on the frontlines of these storms.

- So a lot of these people are economically disadvantaged.

They come from fishing communities.

We're not talking about Silicon Valley where they have software degrees.

So when they move they don't have necessarily the skills or the expertise to get a good decent paying job.

Am I making a correct assumption here?

- I think one of the things that most surprised me when I started writing "Rising" was that part of me thought okay, if I'm gonna write about the early impact of sea level rise on the United States, I'm gonna find myself in wealthy coastal communities, second home owners, tourist-y places.

And it turns out that a lot of the lowest lying land a lot of the most flood-prone land is often inhabited by lower income, marginalized disadvantaged communities.

Everyone from indigenous populations that sought wetlands out because they were literally land that wasn't desired by anyone else, to refugee and escaped slave, runaway slave communities, that ended up in wetlands because they could use them as a kind of invisibility cloak, which would offer protection.

In big cities you see working class communities living atop this land that used to be considered so wet it wasn't even land.

So I think you're absolutely right to point that out.

I would say also though that in the process of relocation when that happens, these are also some of the most resilient people I've ever met.

They're people that are used to adapting to a changing world, and so in some ways I think they have a lot of skills that the rest of us maybe don't have in terms of thinking about what we need to develop to live through climate change.

- So the reception for your book has been remarkable, and we should note that you're here in conjunction with Read Across Rhode Island, and the Rhode Island Center for the Book.

"Rising" is the statewide read in the state of Rhode Island.

I'm curious, when you wrote this and you thought about the audience, what did you want the reader to take away from the book?

- I think initially I had a couple aims.

One was to, something we've sort of touched upon, to say that climate change is neither just a problem for the future, nor a problem for faraway locations.

It's happening now in the United States.

I wanted to teach people to be able to see it.

So I think one of the issues with climate change is that we talk about the fact that the world has warmed by approximately one degree since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and what does that feel like?

One degree is very hard to point to.

That's the difference between 97 and 98 degrees.

I can't identify that difference.

But we can see the early impacts of climate change manifesting all along our shorelines, because as sea levels rise, species that are supposed to live in these tidal wetlands that have a very particular kind of water that they like to live in, in terms of its salinity, they're starting to die as the salinity increases.

So, to teach people how to see these giant dead trees along the shoreline as markers of the changes that are taking place all around us, that was a goal.

And then a third goal, which really developed in the writing of the project, was to be able to identify the ways in which climate change does impact the most vulnerable amongst us.

And to perhaps be able to identify that vulnerability as also a source of power, that climate change can help us create new collectives across class, across race, across groups that aren't historically thought of as sharing affinities, political or otherwise, that there's a way in which our vulnerability can be something that unites us.

I think that that ended up being maybe the most important goal in the end, though it certainly wasn't what I set out to do.

- So, needless to say, the coastal areas affected are not just Louisiana.

Talk about some of the other areas that you get into in your book.

- Sure.

- [G. Wayne] In your seven years of writing your book.

(laughs) - Yeah, so I mean really the book spans all the way from the coast of Maine down to Rhode Island, New York.

There's a couple locations in Florida, not surprisingly, Louisiana, and then my editor, whom I adore, at the very end, she was like listen, you've got to get the west coast in there.

So the southern tip of San Francisco Bay.

It's really a book that's meant to be a chronicle of how climate change is impacting residents in the United States today.

- And so one of the things that I think you accomplish is you mention this is reconnecting us to some of the language as a way of naming things that maybe we see, but we don't recognize.

So one of the things that, very early on in the book you identify, are rampikes.

What are they, and what do they tell us?

- So, rampikes are trees that have died because of saline inundation in the aquifer and I first started to see them when I went to coastal Louisiana.

You know, you drive out onto the bayou and what would have been a street lined in live oaks with this beautiful shade cast over it is now just flanked by these skeletal trees that have died because of the arrival of saltwater in the aquifer, and it was stunning, and really deeply unsettling to see that in Louisiana.

And then I started to see it everywhere I went.

So that was even, that was sort of like another level of awareness.

- And that's a tell, right?

That's a tell that something is changing because those trees lived there for a long time and now they don't.

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

So that's, some biologists have started to call them ghost forests.

It's a sign that sea levels have risen, will continue to rise.

So they're visible all around us.

If you take the train from Boston to New York, you'll run along a lot of wetlands.

And you'll see them.

- You'll see those.

Yeah.

Well, so another term that was at least new to me, you talk about end sickness.

What is end sickness?

- [G. Wayne] It's a creation of yours, is it not?

- You know, there's some part of me that wants to thank Margaret Atwood for it as well, but I've gone back and tried to find her reference to it and I haven't been able to unearth it.

So some part of that is perhaps influenced by Margaret Atwood, though I'm not entirely sure where or how.

It's that feeling that you get I can remember really well going for a jog in December in shorts and a T-shirt in Rhode Island and feeling nauseous, like knowing in my body that something is fundamentally off.

And not knowing what to do with that knowledge.

So it's a kind of like eco-anxiety.

It's about living in a world that's changing in really profound ways, and it's kind of thrown you off balance.

It's similar to a feeling of vertigo.

You just kind of don't know which way is up anymore.

And it's interesting that something that people have really attached themselves to when they talk to me about this book and this impact on them, they've said to me, that word end sickness, it's something that I'm familiar with but I hadn't had language to identify it.

- We had a couple of days like that this winter in Rhode Island, where we had record warmth.

And I wasn't using the term end sickness but I remember thinking this is so nice and warm, there's something not right about this.

In January to have 60 whatever degrees.

- [Jim] 70.

- [Elizabeth] 70.

- We hit 70 in one day.

That's what you're talking about.

- Yeah, so it's about living in the end of one world and not knowing how to make sense of it, and not knowing how to make sense of what's coming up.

Absolutely.

- So you described this in one passage in the book.

You're in a kayak in the Gulf of Maine, and you describe what the end sickness you felt in that moment, but you also walked the reader through a sequence of thoughts.

And there's a passage in the book, and I was hoping we could get you to read that for us.

- [Elizabeth] "Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer "than ever before, the bottom-dwelling cod, pollack, "and winter flounder are pulling away from shore.

"Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, "the shrimp fishery has been closed for years.

"Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, "phytoplankton are disappearing, green crab populations "are exploding, and sea squirts are smothering the seafloor.

"Because the Gulf of Maine is warmer than ever before, "the lobster are moving into deeper cooler waters, "keeping the lobstermen and women away from home for longer.

"Because the Gulf of Main is warmer than ever before, "everyone and everything that lives here "is changing radically."

- [G. Wayne] Powerful.

- So, what do you say to somebody who reads that, or feels that sense of end sickness, and feels overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem?

- It's going to sound sort of insane but I tell them to dwell in that for a while.

I think that it's really important for us to create space for the grief, for the confusion, for the anxiety, for the anger that comes with real climate change awareness.

It's something that I think is absolutely necessary to encounter if we're going to do anything on the scale of what this phenomenon, what this threat demands, we have to I think pass through some of those feelings that are really unsettling.

I think only from that place do we get to the place where we understand that urgent action is needed.

So I think we're in this moment where a lot of people are starting to wake up to climate change, and lately I found that at my book events, at different events, people ask me how do I have hope?

They want to jump right to the hope drug.

And I'm like, well maybe you need to be hopeless for a little while longer.

Maybe you need to dwell in some of that space in order to get to the idea that if it's gonna change we have to make it change, and that's gonna demand some really big transitions, some really big, I don't even want to say sacrifices, but fundamental societal changes on our part.

We have to make that happen.

- Well we have a few more seconds here, but in your travels you must have encountered people who don't believe in climate change or are skeptical of climate science.

What do you say to people who still claim-- - [Jim] 30 seconds.

- 30 seconds.

- You know, I think probably one of the most important things to do is listen.

So I don't go into that conversation and say oh let me show you my bar graph of parts per million in the atmosphere.

(laughing) I try to say, well have you noticed, has the environment changed?

How have changes in the environment impacted you?

And a lot of folks might be turned off by the terms climate change, but they'll talk to you about the ways in which the world around them is transforming.

- We need to leave it there.

Elizabeth Rush.

The book is "Rising."

Thank you so much for being with us.

That's all the time we have this week, but if you want to know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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