Staten Island, New York

January 20, 2020

“So, can you tell us what the story is here?” Sonja asks.

I’ve been thinking about how to introduce this quest. It’s Monday, Martin Luther King Day. Since Friday, among other New Yorky outings we’ve toured Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Central Park, and the New Museum. Today is different. We’re cruising the backwaters of New York City’s least sexy borough, angling toward the southeastern shore. Still, this part of the trip is highest on my priority list: I want to see for myself what Elizabeth Rush saw in the reporting for her 2019 Pulitzer Prize–nominated book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore.

“This is where the future has already happened,” I say, slowing the car down to look at the stretch of bare lawn between Tarlton Street and Fox Beach Avenue. We’re in Oakwood Beach. Or what’s left of it. “This is one of the first places in America that people have left the coast to move to higher ground.”

A white car with security decals on its doors comes down the street after us. I wonder if the security presence signifies that Oakwood Beach is off limits entirely. That and the signs that say “No Parking Any Time” suggest we are interloping. I stop at a turnout and wait, watching the car move. It loops across a short connector street then drives away, just as slowly as it came. After that the town, aside from the handful of remaining houses, feels abandoned again.

I put the car in drive. At the end of Tarlton Street there is a secluded parking area, right before a wall of vegetation and uplifted earth. One other car is there; it appears that people are in it, smoking, listening to music. I park the car and we get out.

There is a narrow drive leading away from the lot. Pavement lined by tassel-headed stalks of marsh grass gives way to sand with tire ruts. The grass towers above our heads. We make our way toward the beach, our boots sinking in the sand. We walk past discarded cabinetry and propane tanks and a bucket of paint and an otherwise indescribable palette of trash that’s been dumped here. “Don’t pick that up: it’s trash,” we tell the children. “Don’t jump on that ice!” I say, spotting an old shoe frozen in a brown, cloudy substance. Nothing about this place is natural. The water remains out of view, beyond a small rise. “That must be the lip,” I say. “The edge of the bowl.”

I explain how, as I learned from Rising, on October 30, 2012 the storm surge caused by Hurricane Sandy rose and rose and rose until it finally crested the lip we are now scaling, then rushed into the town of Oakwood Beach, sending residents fleeing, trapping others on rooftops, and taking the lives of the unluckiest ones. (Fourteen people died in Staten, three of whom were Oakwood Beach residents. The story of one of the victims is recorded in detail in Rising.)

The ocean greets us. Cool winds that are still too warm for New York in January sweep over the bay. We walk out onto a concrete pier. Its pocked surface holds puddles and half oyster shells that sea birds must have dumped after meals. Our kids, Edel and Augi, are excited by the wild remoteness. Not so far away, and not so long ago, they craned their necks to see skyscrapers, then watched the Statue of Liberty pass by from the crowded ferry deck. The oyster shells fascinate them. We tell them not to pick them up; the platform sparkles with broken glass. We tell them to stay away from the edges of the pier. This it is necessary to say; the drop to the water is long and the water is green and looks cold. Augi gets down from the pier and runs through the sand in his boots.

Across the water tall buildings of an unknown part of Brooklyn shimmer in a haze; planes float across the sky. Closer to us, up the beach, a wall of sandbags tops the berm. I wonder if the wall was in place for Sandy, or if it has been installed later, in preparation for the next storm.

It is hard to know what to pay attention to. That a whole town has been disassembled, take-backsies, and converted into marshlands because of climate change seems a bit unreal. Hardly a ghost town is left: ghost roads, ghost power lines, ghost water utilities, and little more. And I would never have heard anything about it had I not read Rising. It’s one of those little bits of history that happens along the way that escapes notice, which yet in the end may turn out to have been big. Oakwood Beach has that effect. 

By the time we get back to the parking lot our winter boots are caked in muck. Worried about possible contaminants, Sonja takes Augi’s boots off, then puts a paper bag on the floor in front of Edel.  We get back in the car; I crank the heat. I drive slowly. Gaps in the curbs show where driveways once ramped to houses. On each of these gaps, a three-digit number has been spray-painted in red: former house numbers I guess. Still, the grass between the streets looks trimmed, and I wonder if anyone is looking out their windows to observe our disaster tourism (which was a phenomenon back in 2013, according to the book), and what led the people in these houses to decide to remain. Some of the houses are in stages of abandonment: a sign hung on the vinyl siding of one advises that the place has been treated with rat poison and is therefore unsafe. Between this house and its next-door neighbor, a barren acre away, a flock of geese mingles with several deer grazing in a yard with an upturned patio chair. All is forlorn.

This is the future, as stories every week are telling us. So many towns and even major cities were built just like this one: on backfilled marshes on America’s coasts. Now that the polar ice caps are melting and increasing the oceans, these mistake towns have to be abandoned, one by one.

In Oakwood Beach, Elizabeth Rush finds a rare success story, a loop of processes that she believes should be repeated nationwide. “The retreating residents of Oakwood, by banding together and demanding aid,” she writes, “are . . . an example for the rest of us to follow. Lights along the landing strip, illuminating the way.” By the time she visited Oakwood Beach in the summer of 2013, the federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program had already taken effect, and Rush was there to watch the backhoes tear down the last houses still standing on Kissam Avenue. The residents—and the landscape—had gotten a better-than-decent deal: “The federal government would pay prestorm prices for the homes, then knock them all down so the land might act as a buffer in the next storm.” On top of this, a separate program offered Oakwood Beachers financial incentives to relocate within New York City. Some holdouts remained but the town largely became replaced by the tidal wetlands.

Rush blames the forces of capitalism unleashed by the 1850 Swamp Land Act for what happened in Oakwood Beach. The legislation made it legal to backfill and develop the country’s marshes for housing. Huge tracts of most Atlantic coast cities sit on top of former wetlands, to say nothing of the Gulf and Pacific coasts. Now that the seas are rising to the point where these places are nonviable, what needs to happen is a conversation about how to unbuild these urbanized wetlands and move their residents inland. Are people ready to have this conversation? It appears the answer is “Not yet.”

At the Jan. 14 Democratic debate, the candidates were asked what they would do to help farms and factories that cannot be moved away from flooding areas (the debate took place in Iowa, where flooding in 2019 reportedly caused $2 billion in damages). After Pete Buttigieg gave a characteristically vague answer, something about “reaching out” and “enlisting” farmers and using  “federal funds to make sure that we are supporting” some group or groups of people, billionaire candidate Tom Steyer stepped in with real talk. “What he’s talking about is called ‘managed retreat,’ and it’s incredibly expensive.”

The federal government would pay prestorm prices for the homes, then knock them all down so the land might act as a buffer in the next storm. 

The managed retreat process, I learned from Rising and a handful of online articles, takes place via a patchwork of federal and local buyout programs and seems to involve two parts paperwork to one part bulldozers. It operates inefficiently and unfairly, according to Rob Moore, director of the Water & Climate Team at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). In an article for Yale Environment 360, Moore explains how “[r]esearch has found that these projects are generally implemented by whiter, wealthier communities, who have the capacity to take on the process of conducting buyouts using FEMA funding and jumping through the numerous bureaucratic hoops involved.”

Rush’s experiences bear out this finding.

The area formerly known as Oakwood Beach belongs to New York Assembly District 64, along with part of Brooklyn, and it so happens that in 2016 the Staten portion of this district voted 63 percent for Trump. Which is funny, because managed retreat buyout programs are government handouts, and Republicans notoriously pretend to hate those. More important, Republicans also disproportionately pretend to deny the very existence of climate change, or at least the idea that it is unnatural and deadly to human civilization.

(One of Rush’s Oakwood Beach interview subjects, in a remarkable turn of boomer Republicanspeak, tells her, “I don’t know for sure what is causing it, but we’ve been flooding worse and worse, year after year.” It’s impossible to determine whether he’s speaking from bad faith or abject stupidity. However in a later chapter Rush describes returning to Staten Island and hearing more acceptance of climate change.)

In Rising’s other major managed retreat case study, Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, things work out . . . differently. For those Gulf Shore victims of climate change, many or most of whom identify as Native American, “the state would purchase open space inland and build dignified residences for the islanders,” and rather than the program being presented as totally voluntary it takes the form of a quasi-threat: take the money or get used to swimming, because no further help will be coming.

The scenario becomes worse when Rush goes to Pensacola. On the one hand, she recalls meeting a couple who, by being able to contribute a five-figure amount of their own money, received more than $100,000 in a government handout “to raise their McMansion high above the highest high tide”—elevator and all. On the other hand, when she visits the Tanyard, “a mostly black residential community” that got hit hard by Hurricane Ivan in 2014, she finds Gulf Coast cottages that have been abandoned. Besides the Swamp Land Act, Rush identifies a second culprit: FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

Established in 1968, the program mandates that homeowners take out policies if they have a federally-backed mortgage on a home that lies within a “high-risk flood zone,” and often these policies are subsidized, which ironically prompted a boom in floodplain home construction. But the insurance mandate is not enforced, and so some people in the Tanyard—an economically depressed area—didn’t buy the insurance. The program offered assistance to people affected by Hurricane Ivan anyway, on the condition that they enroll in the program, the first three years of which would be heavily subsidized by the government. By the time Rush visited Pensacola, that three years was just about up, and the mandatory insurance was unaffordable to the elderly black man living on a fixed income whom she interviewed.

Squeezed between the compulsory expenditure of the NFIP and the absence of a voluntary buyout program like the one that saved the Republicans of Oakwood Beach, the option for the coastal poor becomes unmanaged retreat: to become climate refugees inside the world’s richest country.

Climate change is calling us to attention, drawing us to the water’s edge to ask with wonderment and fear whether there is, or ever really was, something that separates us from our environment.

Elizabeth Rush, Rising

A look around at the managed retreat discussion turns up pretty much what you would expect. The response to sea level rise is way behind, poisoned by racism and classism, and too small.

In January The Baffler published an article called “On the Waterfronts: Flood buyouts and the economics of climate catastrophe,” in which I learned that Oakwood Beaches are sprouting up in urbanized floodplains all over the place. The article’s description of Arbor Oaks, Houston, with its isolated houses “separated from each other by silent streets as long as football fields,” sounded just like what I had seen on Staten Island. “Funded by the federal government, local governments in coastal states are buying out thousands of homes in vulnerable areas every year, reshaping and breaking up communities as they go,” Jake Bittle writes. “In their wake, the departed residents of these communities have left what may be the country’s first climate ghost towns, abandoned places made uninhabitable by the warming of the planet.” 

Climate ghost towns. That’s what we’re seeing.

Rush’s and Bittle’s experiences show that learning to retreat means reversing the last hundred and seventy years of bad building choices. It means fixing the “mistakes of the shoreline mayors and governors who offered tax breaks to subsidize massive development along the Atlantic seaboard,” as Bittle writes. But currently the plan for fixing these mistakes is to more or less wing it. In California’s Bay Area, where the rich have built houses, offices, and critical infrastructure on the water’s edge, officials are just beginning to realize that combatting sea rise town-by-town could result in unequal outcomes and unintended consequences.

Rush herself visits the Bay Area, where Facebook has just built a $500 million campus on former tidal wetlands, and she sees how, unlike the locals who predate Silicon Valley’s arrival, affluent tech company employees can afford flood insurance and other measures to negotiate sea rise. “And with each dollar that they sink into the sinking land,” she goes on, “the more valuable it becomes and the more likely the local government is to fund the innovative, large-scale flood resiliency projects necessary to keep the waters out and the property taxes flowing in.” The response to rising seas is tiered by, as with all other things in America, money. At the top, you get luxury floodproofing infrastructure. Next, fully funded, voluntary buyouts. Then buyouts with serious strings attached. And at the bottom, means-tested, sunsetting help making compulsory insurance payments.

Climate experts agree that what’s needed is a retreat plan that is commensurate with the emergency. As Moore, the NRDC director, says, “we need programs that are able to function at a much larger scale and on a much faster timeline that is consistent with climate projections and the managed retreat that will be required.” In the case of Houston, which is mulling over a $400 million buyout of land not yet developed but which is in the path of development (and floodwater), real money will be spent to keep houses from springing up in the first place—a pre-crime version of managed retreat. Showing how difficult getting even slam-dunk projects done, in Los Angeles, environmentalists and eco-engineers disagree about whether to terraform the last 5 percent of the city’s original wetlands or just let nature run its course, to make the wetland—and the city it protects—more resilient against sea rise.

Then there’s that foremost question of the 21^st century: How are we gonna pAy FoR iT? The two major case studies in Rising, Oakwood Beach and Isle de Jean Charles, cost taxpayers $120 million and $48 million, respectively. And those are two very small towns.

For decades, the center of gravity around the climate change question was, Is it real, or fiction? and the official discourse kept it buried beneath a fatal mix of manufactured doubt and wishful thinking. All of a sudden it’s 2019, and Andrew Yang is onstage saying, “This is going to be a tough truth but we are too late; we are ten years too late. . . we . . .  need to start moving our people to higher ground.” (From there the July debate went on apace, but for me, and probably for a lot of people, it was a suck-your-breath-in moment.) Going cold turkey from “What climate change?” to “We need to move people to higher ground” is whiplash-inducing.

Floods come and go as they always have. But the science, as Rush adroitly conveys, is screaming that climate change-caused flooding can no longer be pretended away as acts of God. The cities are the proof. New York, Miami, Houston, San Francisco; Manila, Guangzhou, Jakarta, Venice—these cities and many others are scrambling to figure out how to worm their way out of nature’s increasingly insistent entanglements. They are slowly drowning. “Global sea levels,” she writes, “have risen about nine inches since we started keeping track in the 1880s,” adding that scientists generally predict between 24 and 84 inches of rising by 2100. That seems a long way into the future but it’s not; it’s three generations away. Eighty years ago it was 1940, and both my grandmothers, who are still living today, were children. 

But even predictions based on science may be unrealistic, given that sea level rise, like other metrics that describe our new epoch, is an uncertain, accelerating quantity. One earth scientist Rush talks to says that, based on the observation that the rate of sea level rise has been doubling every seven years, by 2095 the rise could possibly amount to fifteen feet. Or more. Or even much more.

Theoretically, my children could return to Oakwood Beach in eighty years, in 2100. They may cross Staten Island by car, just like we have today, and they might see the same shimmering buildings in the distance where Brooklyn would still be. But they would have to get into a boat to continue the tour. Drifting away from shore, on another warm (or hot) January day, they would look down through the water, old eyes searching, while inwardly their distant memories struggle to resurface. Several meters below the calm waves, covered by waving seaweed, a slab of concrete; recognizing the pier on which they ran and kicked oyster shells when they were small, they would be confronted by the fact that their childhoods were lived on a different planet.

Rising is the result of a quest. Rush sets out to document evidence of higher sea levels on American coasts, and to assess responses to this manifestation of climate change. She interviews the people who dwell where no human being will be able to dwell by the end of the century. Many of these people are on their own. (The subtext of loneliness and atomization, of an every-man-for-himself ethos, pervades the book and speaks to a compounding difficulty in responding to climate change—that we Americans have grown unaccustomed to social consciousness.) She meets bewildered people who are caught in a system that doesn’t quite know what to do with them, which is itself caught within an even bigger system, a natural one that obeys no man-made laws and that is changing in myriad ways faster than we can adapt.

Of even more urgent concern than the people are the plants and animals who depend on coastal wetlands for feeding, breeding, and cover. Talking to experts who study these ecosystems, Rush learns that these habitats, which have been shrinking the whole time that America has been growing, provide crucial services to hundreds of endangered species. In fact, she argues, it is by turning our care toward these most vulnerable citizens of earth that we may best protect ourselves.

In the end, Rush calls for a managed retreat that is race- and class-conscious and laser-focused on species and habitat protection. “It is this, the radically egalitarian nature of retreat, that interests me most,” she writes. “Because individual vulnerability isn’t arrived at by chance, it’s a product of the same plunderous system that got us into this mess. We must learn to retreat because, in the end, there are other living beings far more vulnerable even than the residents of [coastal towns and cities].” And those beings are many: “roughly half of the over fourteen hundred plants and animals considered at risk of extinction in the United States pass through wetlands at some point in their lives.” These “wetland dependent” species include the red knot, the rufous hummingbird, the whooping crane, the tupelo tree, and the salt marsh sparrow. Unlike churches, roads, and houses, once gone they cannot be brought back.

By restoring and preserving wetlands along the coasts now, not only do we save human lives and money from the coming storms, we can buy a few decades for wetland-dependent plants and animals to adapt to climate change. By unbuilding the coast, we may save species from extinction.

Though I live far from the shore, I see climate change in snowsuits that hardly get worn and sleds that rarely see use; in mornings I don’t need my gloves to grip the handles of my bike as I ride to work; in a January day in Pennsylvania where the snow simply gives up and switches over to rain. These signs, and places like Oakwood Beach, tell us that our story is not the story we once imagined it to be. That our story we’ve been telling ourselves—that history is progress, and that progress is good and that it marches in one direction—is wrong. That the way people have built cities in the recent past, by ignoring the natural histories of native landscapes when laws allow, was a big mistake. That it was suicidal gross negligence (and malevolence) to set up our entire society on the ideology of continuous economic growth enabled by the combustion of fossil fuels.

Coastal ghost towns—ghostal towns?—show us that the people in charge were full of it all along, and that we can ignore them and indeed should ignore them if we want to preserve the planet’s ability to keep us happy and safe. We must treat with skepticism and sometimes derision those who say we can fight climate change by increments. As Greta Thunberg is telling us every day, the first step in solving the climate crisis is getting everyone to act like it’s a crisis.

“We tend to think in human lifetimes,” Rush laments. “Which is why it is so fantastically difficult for us to recognize that in our frenzied attempt to keep nearly eight billion people fed, watered, clothed, sheltered, and distracted, we are fundamentally altering the geophysical composition of the planet at a pace previously caused only by cataclysmic events, like the massive asteroid that smashed into eastern Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago” [emphasis mine; see my essay on Lupercalia].

In comparison to Homo sapiens, the dinosaurs had a really, really good run. From the Middle Triassic Period, around 250 million years ago, until a meteor ended the Mesozoic Era 66 million years ago, the reptiles enjoyed 184 million years of dino evolution, dino society, dino culture. As Peter Brannen wrote in The Atlantic in August, it’s even possible the dinosaurs became an advanced society and we would never know about it. “If,” Brannen says, “in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory six-mile space rock hurtling senselessly toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell.”

That’s because the forces of decay and erosion working over geological time—tens of millions of years—make the survival of any trace of the distant past a miracle. A thousand lucky breaks had to happen to give us each fossil we have, Brannen explains. For all we know, the story that the fossils tell us could have enormous gaps—a dino library of Alexandria could have burned.

“All we do know is that an asteroid did hit,” he continues, “and that the fossils in the millions of years afterward look very different than in the millions of years prior.” His point: let’s not put the cart before the horse by thinking there will be future civilizations poring over our human artifacts and being dazzled by our works—it’s more likely we’ll leave no trace at all. Human history as we understand it has happened entirely within the Holocene Epoch, which spans the last 12,000 years. That’s nothing the earth couldn’t erode back into essential elements in another 5 or 10 or 20 million years. Every pane of glass in every skyscraper on earth was once sand and will be sand again.

We must learn to retreat because, in the end, there are other living beings far more vulnerable. . . .

Up until now, our planet was a spaceship perfectly designed to allow human beings to thrive and build. Four seasons, plentiful fresh air, clean water, abundant food, beauty. But we’ve already changed it almost beyond recognition. In all the 12,000 years that we’ve been farming, building, sailing, and writing, our atmosphere contained far less carbon than it does at this very moment. Here’s a fuck of a statistic: Just in my own lifetime, the atmospheric concentration of carbon has leapt from 340 ppm to over 410 ppm.

Now zoom out: From before the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s until my birth, the ppm went from 280 ppm to 340 ppm. In other words, we carbon profiteers have helped spew more greenhouse gasses into the air since 1980 than we did in all of human history before 1980. That is our “frenzied” attempt to separate ourselves from nature. Part of recognizing the crisis we’re in requires us to see what’s in front of our noses. Places like Oakwood Beach—the unbuilt, the fled-from—can help us do that. Making coastal cities the stage on which we honor the relationships between water, marsh plants, and wetland wildlife may be the beginning of a new, better deal.

Even as the landmasses shrink, can we prolong the experiment that is human society? Rush finds hope that we can start by resigning ourselves to the reality of rising seas, by learning to retreat.

I find the concept of a system of new national parks ringing the entire continent appealing. A unified coastal wildlife highway. With places for people to explore and learn by exposure about climate change and its material impacts. Such places should insist on visitors seeing nature and human civilization as intertwined.

As we drive along Mill Road toward my final stop in Oakwood Beach, Kissam Avenue, we pass the white security car coming the other way, now driving quickly and followed close behind by an NYC Parks SUV. I suspect the security person has gone and fetched the real authorities, but for what purpose, I can only speculate—maybe to go talk to the people in that car who were loitering in the lot by the beach.

I turn right on Kissam Avenue. I swerve around the potholes. Driveway after driveway ends at the wall of golden grass ten feet tall. At the end of the street I do a three-point turn to get the car pointed away from the beach then park it and get out. I head for the beach, skirting the edge of a puddle that is twenty-five feet wide. Climbing the sandy rise, I find the best view yet: from atop the sandbag berm.

The ocean behind me, I look over a plain of mud disguised by wheaty tassels. Eventually the whole floodplain will subside into the Atlantic Ocean but for now it serves as a sponger of storm waters and wildlife habitat, having been rewilded. When I get home I will reread how “[t]he surge would destroy over half the homes on Kissam Avenue. Flattening some and sweeping others off their foundations, dragging them through the cordgrass and depositing their shattered forms in the surrounding saltwater marsh.” Saltwater marsh, yes, but cordgrass, no: Either the book makes a botanical error, or the environment has changed, and I’m more inclined to believe the latter—a photograph in the back of the book that appears to be of Oakwood Beach juxtaposes background marsh grass against a Dead End sign, showing the grass to be much shorter than the rangey stalks we saw.

Later research will tell me that what I am looking at now is not saltmarsh/smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora), which grows native along the entire Atlantic coast, but rather common reed (Phragmites australis), a sometimes-invasive grass that proliferates in human-disturbed areas and which is banned in several coastal states. I will know the plant by its height: common reed can grow up to sixteen feet tall, whereas cordgrass maxes out at three feet. According to the webpage for the nearby Freshkills Park, while both species excel at controlling erosion and offering cover, only the cordgrass decomposes into a nutrient-rich peat that enhances its environment.

Even the comprehensive retreat that happened here fails to build adequate nature to replace us.

Standing on the bags, which give slightly under my weight, I realize Hurricane Sandy happened so long ago. Seven years—the better part of a decade! Seven years is enough time for the grass to grow higher than the car aboveground and thick below. Whatever debris from the managed-retreated houses that remained after the bulldozers left is now clutched tightly in the its roots, sinking in earth and water, breaking down.

I trot down the berm and rejoin my family in the car. The kids are hungry; it’s time to leave. The tilting telephone poles, the defunct hydrants, the geese and the deer and the birds, the graffitied signs, the reeds and the debris, the water climbing inch by inch—we leave the future behind us.

Special thanks to the good folks at Humans and Nature, humansandnature.org, for the review copy of Rising.