Margaret Renki has an opinion piece in the New York Times today: Nobody Cared When Nashville Drowned.
NASHVILLE — On the Saturday I had set aside to visit a new exhibit at the Frist Art Museum, it rained so hard I was afraid to leave the house. Nashville was built on the Cumberland River, and even those of us who live far from its banks are invariably a stone’s throw from at least one creek that drains into the great Cumberland or one of its tributaries. A deluge falling on saturated soil will flood the creeks and leave water pooling on low-lying roads. “Turn Around Don’t Drown” is a truism I conscientiously heed.
The exhibit I planned to visit that day, ironically enough, was a retrospective of the devastating 2010 flood that dropped more than 13 inches of rain on this area in 36 hours — obliterating, twice over, the previous two-day rainfall record. The Cumberland River crested more than 11 feet above flood level, leaving 10,000 people displaced in the region and 26 others dead, including an elderly couple who drowned when their car was swept off the road not far from my house.
Renki goes on to describe the devastation, the millions of dollars in damage, and the heroic efforts of ordinary people to rescue others from the flood, the “redneck armada”. She also notes that it took a while for the rest of the country to notice anything had happened.
Days later, Anderson Cooper finally showed up. “When Anderson Cooper is late to your local disaster,” Jeff Severns Guntzel pointed out in the Utne Reader, “you know something is wrong.”
She attributes the lack of national attention to other news stories that broke about the same time; a terror attack in Times Square, the Deepwater Horizon blow-out in the Gulf. She ends the commentary with this:
A decade ago, we got hit by a “thousand-year flood,” but we know now that such estimates no longer hold. Nashville has taken measures to mitigate the damage of the next flood because we know there will be a next one. Smaller, poorer towns will simply have to hope for the best. That’s why “This region stands to bear the brunt and lose the most from the effects of climate change,” as Lyndsey Gilpin, editor of the indispensable website Southerly, points out. Surely the national media won’t be able to turn away from it now.
Won’t they?
When this kind of story is happening everywhere with increasing frequency, will the media pay attention unless there’s something special that stands out? Tip to communities experiencing a disaster: find a human interest story to grab media attention, like a hair-raising rescue of puppies or an unlikely hero figure emerging from the chaos. You’ll be competing for attention with whatever celebrity scandal is going on.
Everything we are hearing from scientists around the world warns us we have much worse coming in the years ahead; too little has been done to ward off what is now in the pipeline. The current ‘leader’ of the country mocks efforts to prepare even as he actively makes things worse.
What happened to Nashville is going to be repeated again and again. James Howard Kunstler calls it “The Long Emergency”. He predicted a world where energy shortages from the decline of fossil fuels, the inability to ramp up alternative energy fast enough, and increasing effects of climate change disasters would result in an ongoing downward spiral. Some of his original predictions have been postponed. He has an updated new book coming out, Living in the Long Emergency, that addresses those predictions and looks at where we are now. I have an advance copy. It is not cheerful reading.
Going forward, we are will be living in a country with an increasing frequency of natural disasters. Some of them will be obvious and immediate: floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes. Some of them will be less immediately obvious: extended drought, depletion of water resources, heat waves that kill people and stress power systems as everyone cranks up the AC. Add in disease outbreaks, crop failures, etc. Our infrastructure will be increasingly inadequate for what is coming and will be breaking down. There will be increasing economic disruption and even mass relocation needed for threatened communities.
One of the two major political parties we allow ourselves is in complete denial about all of this. Expect them to resist anything that makes sense if it’s at their expense — and don’t underestimate their ability to make things worse. With the prospect of increasing stress on civil society, is it really a good idea to promote firearms as the answer? They are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the interests that have gotten us to this point. They think no further ahead than the next news cycle while others plan for the future. They expect all the lifeboats will be reserved for them — they’re counting on it.
The New York Times endorsement of a ‘radical’ candidate as well as a more traditional ‘realist’ is a recognition that we are entering into a different world than we have known, and while they are thinking in terms of politics, their apprehensions can also be applied to the climate crisis.
...But the events of the past few years have shaken the confidence of even the most committed institutionalists. We are not veering away from the values we espouse, but we are rattled by the weakness of the institutions that we trusted to undergird those values…
...Both the radical and the realist models warrant serious consideration. If there were ever a time to be open to new ideas, it is now. If there were ever a time to seek stability, now is it...
Once upon a time, the realist model accepted the principles that government could be a force for good, and that it was the common good, that government regulation was needed to restrain abuses of the ‘free’ markets, and that government had a responsibility to the future, not just the needs of the moment. One of the reasons our institutions are weakened is because those notions have been made to seem radical.
There’s an old saying: think globally — act locally. The motto of the organization formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America is “Be Prepared”. On an individual level, the Church of Latter Day Saints has some advice. Communities that start planning now and make the necessary investments for preparedness and adaptation will be the ones that do better in the Long Emergency.
The climate crisis is here. It can manifest as extreme weather events, or something as subtle as lack of snow affecting animal and plant survival through the winter, and water for crops in the spring. If we come together as a nation, as a planet, we can respond to this — but don’t hold your breath waiting for the answers to come from somewhere else. We have to start where we are and we have got be prepared to help each other as we can. Renki had this to say:
God knows we’re guilty, here in the red states, of inadequate environmental policy, of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot governance, of staying put when the smarter thing would be to leave. There are complicated reasons for those decisions, reasons not easily summed up in a single news story. But none of it should prevent a compassionate response to another human being’s suffering or admiration in the face of another human being’s heroism. The Redneck Armada saved countless lives, whatever you might think you know about “rednecks” in general. In any case, Nashville could not have made the rain stop falling any more than California can keep the San Andreas fault from shifting.
We’re all going to need that kind of spirit in the years ahead.