Writing about climate change is often fraught, and hard to do beautifully. Because the ruling party refuses to acknowledge that the problem is real, writing on the subject often lapses into a didactic style of pose. At the same time, it can be easy to fall into a doom-saying pattern that focuses on scientific foreboding, technical but blunt language about our dire predicament. In this context, Elizabeth Rush's Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore is a revelation. The book is the story of Rush's travels around the United States, visiting communities that are shrinking or disappearing because rising water levels have made them unsafe. Their stories, told through a combination of lyrical reportage and first-person accounts from her subjects, coalesce into a moving and urgent portrait.
The characters with whom Rush becomes most intimate are the members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native American tribe on Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana. Here, Chris Brunet, alongside his neighbors and former neighbors, have two chapters dedicated to them. One comes near the beginning and the other nearer to the end, and in a sense their stories shape the trajectory of the book. Louisiana is a sort of poster-state for the damage that rising sea levels can do. More so than any other state, the encroaching water has changed Louisiana's shape dramatically, and the changes in the communities that Rush visits reflect this encroachment. The state lost almost 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000, and is on pace to lose more, faster. "Over the past 30 years," Rush writes, "nearly 90 percent of islanders have moved inland."
Rush writes that she has started to think of those who left the island as some of the country's first climate refugees. There is a cruel irony in the way that their displacement affects both culture and climate. After Brunet tells Rush that, on his trips to Walmart, he often sees former islanders who have moved away, she seizes on the feedback loop that he and former residents are trapped in:
[For more on this story by BRADLEY BABENDIR, go to https://psmag.com/environment/...rion-call-on-climate]
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