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Flood Survivors Find Common Ground in a Divided Nation
Laurie Mazur
Originally published April 12, 2021 in Environmental Health News
Virginia Wasserberg is a lifelong Republican, a deeply conservative home-schooling mom from Southeast Virginia.
Once a month, she logs onto Zoom to join an unlikely crew: there’s a community organizer from Austin, Texas; a grandmother from rural Missouri; and an environmental justice activist from Port Arthur, Texas.
Wasserberg and her Zoom companions are members of Higher Ground, a national network of flood survivors. On paper, they don’t have much in common. They span the income spectrum from working class to relatively affluent. They are African-American, white and Latinx; Democrats and Republicans; conservatives, moderates, and progressives. But they share one important experience: they are all dealing with floods in their homes and neighborhoods.
As the planet warms, those floods are becoming more severe. Stronger, wetter storms overflow the banks of Midwestern rivers, while hurricanes and sea-level rise inundate coastal communities. Antiquated infrastructure and short-sighted building practices make the problem worse. But as the waters are rising, so are flood survivors. Higher Ground, a project of the Florida-based nonprofit Anthropocene Alliance, now has 70 chapters in 22 states, plus Puerto Rico.
Wasserberg’s experience is typical of the group’s members. “On October 7, 2016, I couldn’t have cared less about climate change,” she said. “On October 8, a disaster woke me up.” That disaster was a massive storm surge from Hurricane Matthew, which flooded her Virginia Beach home. “As soon as we got back in the house, I started looking around and saying, ‘How did this happen and how can we prevent it from happening again?’”
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she said. That inquiry led Wasserberg to a new understanding of the science—and the politics—behind flooding and climate change.
Wasserberg got involved in her local civic league, then started organizing her neighbors through a group called Stop the Flooding Now. The group’s Facebook site was spotted by Harriet Festing, director of the Anthropocene Alliance, who reached out. Soon, Wasserberg was connecting with others in similar straits. “I discovered that there were other people, not just in my community but throughout my country, who had the same problems I was having,” Wasserberg said.
She met other flood survivors, including Dr. Gloria Horning, who is battling a dangerous new development in her flood-prone neighborhood in Pensacola, Florida. The group also includes Frances Acuña, whose Austin neighborhood experienced several “100-year” floods in the span of a few years, and David Southgate, whose neighbors in Ponce Playa, Puerto Rico, face possible displacement because of coastal erosion and flooding from climate-driven storms.
The first priority for Higher Ground members is to educate themselves—and others—on the root causes of flooding. To that end, Festing connects local groups with volunteer scientists from the Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX), a project of the American Geophysical Union.
Wasserberg was matched with Dr. Michelle Covi, a coastal resources expert at Old Dominion University. Covi linked her scientific explanations to real-life impacts: “She’d explain how what we are seeing on a graph translates to the water that’s in my front yard,” said Wasserberg. “It expanded my understanding, unlike anything ever could.”
Linking climate change science to real world impacts
That pragmatic approach—linking climate science to what’s happening in our front yards—has helped Wasserberg talk to her fellow conservatives, as well. Early on, a Higher Ground member from the Midwest counseled Wasserberg to lead with the what, rather than the why: “Just to get in the conversation, you start with ‘something is happening,’” she said. “The main thing is to keep focused on the flooding. Once people start discussing the what, it’s completely natural to end up on the why. That’s how it’s worked for me.”
