Title: How to Plan for Inevitable Disaster

Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This year was Earth's hottest on record, and the Atlantic storm season brought with it five major hurricanes. 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.

Nathaniel Rich: Thanks for having me. It's great to be back.

Brooke Gladstone: How does New Orleans' perspective differ from other places where inevitable natural disaster is foreseen sometime in the future? I emphasize sometime in the future. What do you think?

Nathaniel Rich: 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 never would've expected this," or, "Who could've imagined?" Nobody says that kind of thing here. People here live with their eyes wide open to existential risk because we know every hurricane season might be the last.

Brooke Gladstone: How does that perspective play out in how New Orleanians plan?

Nathaniel Rich: 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, depending on the trajectory of a storm and the duration of the devastation. They say, "Pack a go bag or something," whenever-- FEMA says that whenever a hurricane is coming. We have go bags. We have go suitcases, and we don't need to be reminded.

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

Nathaniel Rich: Yes. I have to say that the local news is excellent at this, you say, then there's random people and amateurs on Twitter who follow this kind of thing more obsessively than even 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.

Brooke Gladstone: What models? [laughs]

Nathaniel Rich: Spaghetti models. Yes. There's a whole-- There are all these terms of art that I suppose I need to define-

Brooke Gladstone: Yes, you do. [laughs]

Nathaniel Rich: -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 where a storm will go. When you project all of those predictions on a map on top of one another, basically, it 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 not only do we monitor whatever's available publicly, I think everybody in the city has their own kind of inside source within Army Corps of Engineers or-

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] Really?

Nathaniel Rich: -city government. That's a bit obsessive, but of course, it's pretty high stakes. Hurricane season ends in November 30th, technically, but in New Orleans, it never ends.

Brooke Gladstone: 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."

Nathaniel Rich: Yes. On some psychological level, many of us have made peace with that. Maybe because there's no evading the reality of what we're up against.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Nathaniel Rich: The master plan is enormous. It's essentially an omnibus plan 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. It's in perpetuity a 50-year plan.

Brooke Gladstone: It's currently underway that would mitigate Louisiana's severe loss of coastal land, which was the number one problem, by essentially creating new land.

Nathaniel Rich: Yes, the core of the plan is called river diversion. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: They would create new rivers that would be among the five most powerful in the US. The first one is scheduled to start next year?

Nathaniel Rich: 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, before human settlement and before the construction of levees, would change course every year and flood its banks. Every time it flooded, it would deposit this silty water, and over generations, that all that silt would cohere and build up into land. They've already begun the basic construction, but in the last couple weeks, it's now come under some threat from the governor.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Nathaniel Rich: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Even in one of the nation's reddest states, it won wide bipartisan support, but there is one constituency strongly opposed. That's the oystermen, the shrimpers, the fishermen in the Gulf, 10 miles downriver of New Orleans. Why are they so against the plan?

Nathaniel Rich: 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 will alter drastically the fisheries that they use to make their livelihoods.

Brooke Gladstone: They have to choose between saving their homes or saving their livelihoods, and they've picked their livelihoods.

Nathaniel Rich: 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 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. 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 economies that are just upriver from the parish. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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, "break parts of Louisiana's culture because of the harm to these Gulf fishing communities."

Nathaniel Rich: Yes, he's giving them now priority over the voices of everyone else, 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.

Brooke Gladstone: They support the plan.

Nathaniel Rich: They support the plan because even though they've helped bring about many of the conditions that have forced this plan upon us, including putting pipelines and shipping canals through the marsh, not to mention greenhouse gas emissions, those industries have enormous infrastructures.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Nathaniel Rich: Yes, it's been enormously well studied and extensively. The one that's gained the most press and so the most political value, I think, for the critics is that it will lead to the death of something like 200 bottlenose dolphins that--

Brooke Gladstone: Don't kill the dolphins.

Nathaniel Rich: Well, I mean, the counterargument would be-- Not to defend dolphin murder, but they're swimming in places in the marsh that historically they never would have been. In fact, historically, it would've been dry land. They're only that close because the marshes are disappearing. 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. 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 Free Willy advocates and started giving dolphin tours and so on.

Brooke Gladstone: That is an important media point.

Nathaniel Rich: Well, they realized that people care more about dolphins than working class fishermen.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. Strauss said, "People find it very hard to accept that a city like New Orleans at some point will not exist anymore. 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." 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.

Nathaniel Rich: Yes, it hit me hard, too, when I first heard that. It was told to me by Tor Törnqvist, 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. 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 too 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. Once you can get there, once you can accept the idea of mortality, it focuses your thinking, and it forces you to really question what you value. It forces you to prioritize. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 said people in New York, they probably don't know about the water table. [chuckles]

Nathaniel Rich: Yes. 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. [chuckles] You know exactly how many inches you're above sea level, and you know the differences between one block and the next. I think it's bracing. It can be chilling in some ways, but I think it's actually healthy.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Nathaniel Rich: 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 les bons temps rouler and just get drunk and hope for the best. Although, of course, that's the way some people respond. 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 US, and yet the policies tend to be much more progressive. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: In the meantime, meaning in the moment. 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?

Nathaniel Rich: Absolutely. I think people who decide to live here, who have the ability to live other places, 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] Thank you so much.

Nathaniel Rich: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

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