How to Plan for Inevitable Disaster
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This is the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. So this year was Earth's hottest on record, and the Atlantic storm season brought with it five major hurricanes. And yet in December, the Pew Research Center found that only some 20% of Americans expect to make major sacrifices in their lifetime due to the climate crisis.

When it comes to planning for a fraught future, writer and essayist Nathaniel Rich recently argued in a piece in the New York Times that his city of New Orleans can set an example that the rest of the country would be wise to follow.

Welcome to the show, Nathaniel. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back. How does New Orleans' perspective differ from other places where inevitable natural disaster is foreseen sometime in the future? And I emphasize sometime in the future. What do you think?

I think the perspective down here is franker and more honest than you tend to see anywhere else in this country, certainly. I was struck by this kind of metronomic drumbeat of the reporting this hurricane season from places like Asheville or even to the Florida coast of people saying things like, "I would never would have expected this," or "Who could have imagined?" And nobody says that kind of thing.

People here live with their eyes wide open to existential risk because we know every hurricane season might be the last. And how does that perspective play out in how New Orleanians plan? We're ready. I think everybody here has a fully filled pantry. They have gallons of water. Those who can afford it have whole house generators.

There are evacuation plans, as you said, you know, depending on the trajectory of a storm and the duration of the devastation. You know, they say, you know, pack a go bag or something whenever, you know, FEMA says that whenever a hurricane is coming. We have go bags, you know, we have go suitcases and we don't need to be reminded of.

And you don't wait for a tropical storm to form. You track every depression and cyclone advisory with, you say, grim scrutiny. And local news tracks it, too. Yeah.

Yeah, I have to say that the local news is excellent at this. You say then there's sort of random people and amateurs on Twitter who follow this kind of thing more obsessively than even, you know, the state agencies at times. You become a kind of expert at reading advanced meteorological bulletins from the National Hurricane Center and various different spaghetti models. What models? Yeah.

Spaghetti models. Yes. There are all these terms of art that I suppose I need to define as I go along that I've just become completely accustomed to. There are a bunch of different modeling agencies around the world, and each of them have their own little calculation of what their algorithms to predict are.

where a storm will go. And when you project all of those predictions on a map on top of one another, basically looks like strands of spaghetti representing the possible paths of a storm. I mean, the other thing I wasn't able to get into in the piece is that, you know, not only do we monitor whatever's available publicly, I think everybody in the city has their own kind of inside security

source within, you know, Army Corps of Engineers or city government. It's a bit obsessive, but of course, it's pretty high stakes. You know, hurricane season ends in November 30th, technically, but in New Orleans, it never ends. And you've said, we are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will suffice.

Yeah, on some psychological level, many of us have made peace with that. You know, maybe because there's no evading the reality of what we're up against. You outlined something called the Coastal Master Plan, which has been endorsed by the city leadership. You describe it as the world's most expensive and most ambitious climate change adaptation plan. What makes it so incredible?

The master plan is enormous. It's essentially an omnibus plan of on the order of 200 projects to build land, to preserve land, to restore land. And then there's also a whole host of mitigation efforts built into it. It's a $50 billion plan, although that's seen as a gross understatement, that renews every five years. So it's in perpetuity, a 50-year plan.

And it's currently underway. It would mitigate Louisiana's severe loss of coastal land, which is the number one problem, by essentially creating new land. Yeah, the core of the plan is called river diversion. So they basically cut...

a gap into the levee in the riverbank and open up a new tributary of the river. And so strong is the flow of the Mississippi that even cutting these little diversions are enormously forceful. They've pinpointed two such places on the river, one on the East Bank, one on the West Bank, south of New Orleans. They would create new rivers that would be among the five most powerful in the U.S. And the first one is scheduled to start next year?

it's scheduled to start next year after an extraordinarily long political scientific process what's important to understand is effectively what the engineers are trying to do is to mimic the natural behavior of the mississippi river which you know before human settlement and before the construction of levees would change course every year and flood its banks and every time it flooded

It would deposit this silty water and over generations, all that silt would cohere and build up into land. They've already begun sort of the basic construction, but in the last couple weeks, it's now come under some threat from the governor. And yet the planners concede it's not going to really solve the big issue, which is saving the coast. It's just buying time. It's soberly facing the reality of climate change.

The genius of the plan, I think, or really the shrewdness of it, is that it's an enormously ambitious plan that doesn't ultimately...

intend to solve the major problem it addresses. But what it does do is it buys time. It might buy decades or even generations of time to prepare for that eventuality. Even in one of the nation's reddest states, it won wide bipartisan support. But there is one constituency strongly opposed to

That's the oystermen, the shrimpers, the fishermen in the Gulf, 10 miles downriver of New Orleans. So why are they so against the plan?

So the people living south of New Orleans who are the most threatened by sea level rise, by hurricanes, who live on this very narrow spit of land between the Mississippi and the swamps behind them, which lead to the Gulf and that are being eroded at this rapid rate, they are against the master plan because this pumping in of the Mississippi River water into the marshes behind their houses is

will alter drastically the fisheries that they use to make their livelihoods. So they have to choose between

saving their homes or saving their livelihoods, and they've picked their livelihoods. Well, it's really a question of timescale. They're not climate deniers down there. It's a very conservative parish, but they don't need to be convinced that the water is rising. They've seen the swamp disappear. They've seen places that used to be land turn into open water. However...

They're not really concerned about what's going to happen, you know, to them 10 or 15 or 30 years from now. They're concerned about whether they'll be able to make a living in the next year. I think that's valid. You know, they're not making anything up, but a decision has been made. I don't think the decision makers would put it in so crudely, but a decision has been made essentially to sacrifice the livelihood of a lot of these people down there in order to benefit the whole and save the much broader population.

that are just upriver from the parish. But it's created a political problem that's now threatening to be a real nightmare for the engineers and the other populations that are depending on the master plan being built. In fact, in the last couple of weeks, Governor Jeff Landry, who was just elected this year,

has been speaking out because he says it would, quote, break parts of Louisiana's culture because of the harm to these Gulf fishing communities. Yeah, he's giving them now priority over the voices of everyone else, which is,

which not only includes greater metropolitan New Orleans and the millions of people who live in fear of hurricanes coming over these depleted marshes, but frankly, his leading constituency, which is the oil and gas industry, enormously powerful in Louisiana. You could even say runs the state, basically in a petro-imperium down here. And they support the plan. They support the plan because even though they've helped bring about many of the conditions that have forced this plan up,

upon us, including putting pipelines and shipping canals through the marsh, not to mention greenhouse gas emissions. Those industries have enormous infrastructures. Just wondering, has there been any discussion of the potential ecological harm of diverting the Mississippi River, the second most toxic river in the country, on plants and wildlife and fishing ecosystems?

Yes, it's been enormously well studied and extensively. And the one that's gained the most press and the most political value, I think, for the critics is that it will lead to the death of something like 200 bottlenose dolphins. Don't kill the dolphins! Well, I mean, the counterargument would be not to defend dolphin murder, but they're swimming in places in the marsh that historically were

They never would have been. In fact, historically, it would have been dry land. And so they're only that close because the marshes are disappearing. But absolutely, I mean, flooding the swamps will have some negative impacts. There was this moment in which the fishermen had been failing for years to get anyone to care about them and their plight. And they realized that if they started talking about dolphins...

All of a sudden, the press coverage become much more favorable. And so overnight, all of these fishermen became these kind of sort of free willy advocates and started giving dolphin tours and so on. That is an important media point. Well, they realized that people care more about dolphins than working class fishermen.

In your piece, you quote Ben Strauss, who's head of Climate Central. That's a nonprofit composed of scientists and science journalists that report and also conduct research on climate change. And Strauss said, quote,

But why don't we think of the life of a city the way that we think about the life of a human being? Just because our lives are finite doesn't mean that they're worthless. And I think that's the point in your piece that actually hit me the hardest. And I thought it could really be applied to a whole host of situations in the world today.

Yeah, it hit me hard too when I first heard that. And it was told to me by Tor Tornquist, who's a professor of Tulane. It did put things into perspective for me because I realized that we have this fantasy, at least in this country, that cities are forever, that the culture is forever. And that's just not true. Civilizations are not forever.

And that's not, however, a reason to just give in to nihilism or despair. A problem we have facing climate change as a species psychologically is that we can't look at it directly. It's a bit like looking at one's own death because we're talking about civilizational death. That's what's on the table. And once you can get there, once you can accept that,

the idea of mortality. It focuses your thinking and it forces you to really question what you value. It forces you to prioritize. And in New Orleans, people live with full knowledge that the city will not live forever. And yet that does not make people give up for the most part. It makes people commit more fully to the life of the place. You suggest that in other places,

There's a big gap in what people know about climate change, for instance, and where they put their taxpayer money and investments. You know, you said people in New York, they probably don't know about the water table. Yeah, I don't know that people living downtown Manhattan look at the flood risk maps too closely before they've spent $5 million on an apartment.

In New Orleans, you do. You know exactly how many inches you're above sea level. And you know the differences between one block and the next. And I think it's bracing. It's a little, it can be chilling in some ways, but I think it's actually healthy. I know a lot of people in their 30s who really feel hopeless about the future. Everything from

thinking there isn't going to be a place to live, to not going to be able to get Social Security when they're old, or any number of things. And it is easy to throw up their hands. I just wonder, is there a way that this message of cherishing the moment in which we actually spend our lives can be an impetus to change?

Yes, but I also think there's a kind of in-between place, which is to say that I don't think the message of New Orleans is laissez le bon temps rouler and just get drunk and hope for the best. Although, of course, that's the way some people respond. But I think it's a message that forces one to try to improve the place and to withstand some of these pressures that are coming at us.

this binary of hope and despair, which has so dominated the conversation in activist circles in this country for the last couple decades. Whenever I speak with people in Europe about climate change issues, that whole binary doesn't enter into the conversation. If anything, people in Europe, especially Northern Europe, are far more pessimistic than would be allowed in any kind of activist circle in the U.S. And yet,

The policies tend to be much more progressive. And so I do wonder also to what extent is that a symptom of American culture, that everything that needs to be placed into this kind of marvel universe of are we going to save the world or are we going to fall into this apocalypse? It's a kind of mental shortcut that prevents us from thinking of

real measures that we can take to improve our lot in the meantime. In the meantime, meaning in the moment, you know, does thinking about the future enable us not just to plan for the future, but to better appreciate the moment?

Is that what New Orleans teaches us? Absolutely. And I think people who decide to live here, who have the ability to live other places, you know, you see a much stronger commitment to the place, to the life of the place, I think, here than in other cities I've lived in. If you're here, you're here for a reason. Now,

A lot of people are here who would leave if the rate of poverty wasn't as high as it is. And yet there's still this sense, I think, in the city, the culture of the city, that the people who are here are dedicated to it. And so there's a level of civic engagement that feels to me much more robust than I've encountered in other places. Part of it has to do with this shared sense of peril, frankly, precarity. Yeah.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Nathaniel Rich is the author of Second Nature, Scenes from a World Remade, and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

Thanks for listening to the On the Media podcast. Tune in to The Big Show on Friday evening to hear the final installment of the Harvard plan, all about the fallout of Claudine Gay's short and troubled tenure as president of the university and what it all means for the rest of higher education. I'm Ira Flato, host of Science Friday.

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