Drowning
I wrote last week about not having enough water. Today I’m thinking about places that have too much water. I’ve been researching sea level rise in the past for my Very Big Project, with a particular focus on how it might have felt to the people who experienced it—which is hard, though not entirely impossible, to surmise based on the artifacts and architecture left behind in settlements that are now underwater. The people who built this sea wall, for example, were probably not thrilled about the encroaching water—but also not so freaked out that they didn’t try to adapt to it, at least for a while. Clearly there are many differences between how small groups of people could and did react to sea level rise 7,000 years ago and how we deal with it today. But our emotional responses are probably broadly similar, so I’m learning a lot from reporting from places where sea level rise is already an inescapable fact of life.
There are two assumptions I think a lot of us make about sea level rise: 1. It’s not really happening yet, at least not in the way it will be happening in the (somewhere between near and distant) future; and 2. People are going to leave drowning places. Neither is true. Sea level rise is already affecting many, many places, from Pacific islands to New England estuaries to Bangladeshi river deltas to Bay Area bluffs. The New York Times has recently published two reports from two different parts of the Philippines that are already underwater for large parts of the year. The people who live in both these places have not left. They wade through flooded streets, take boats to church, raise the floors of their houses and schools, move plants from gardens to pots, and sleep on platforms that are above the water (for now). Some of them would like to go and can’t afford to. But many of them don’t want to leave. These areas are their homes, and they are deeply attached to them, as we all are. Plus, the sea isn’t considered a threat, or at least not just a threat, though it may look that way to outsiders. It’s also their livelihoods, as many people in these communities make their living from fishing, as generations of their relatives have before them. “We don’t need much land,” says one women with a fishing business. “We have the whole sea.”
I feel confident in saying that eventually these islands will be entirely underwater and no one will live there. But sea level rise isn’t a steady process, so you get these long in-between times where people work out how to stay. And in case you think it’s only poor people in developing countries who have nowhere else to go, one of the Times stories also looks at the Bay Area, where houses in a town that has already lost huge chunks of land to erosion are delusionally valued at $1 million and “managed retreat” can barely be discussed in public. People will do anything they can to stay in their homes for as long as possible. You don’t abandon a place that means so much to you, even when that place becomes almost unrecognizable and outsiders consider life there to be unacceptably precarious. You learn how to cope, logistically and psychologically. No place in the world is entirely safe, and this particular not-safe place is yours. How could you just walk away? How could you let it disappear?
What’s true for the Philippines or California in 2020 is also true for Tel Hreiz, and Doggerland, and Beringia, and Kangaroo Island, and everywhere else affected by sea level rise 7,000+ years ago, which was everywhere. Every drowned coastline or cut-off island was a home, with generations of names, stories, and memories attached to them. They wouldn’t have been easy to lose, and people would have kept them alive for as long as they could, by staying and then by remembering. As it was, so it will be again. It already is.