BOOKS+FILMS+AUDIO
Illustrations by Frances Murphy
When the Climate Crisis Hits Home Lornet Turnbull
HOME. The thought of it conjures up a tangle of images, of safeness and permanence and comfortable refuge. Home is also tenuous shelter under a busy overpass, in a neighborhood park, or on a friend’s living room couch. Now, increasingly, rapid changes in the world’s climate are forcing us all to reevaluate the way we think about home. In her new book, At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth, Madeline Ostrander explores the calamitous consequences of a warming planet through the experiences of those on the front lines of climate change. She reflects on its symptoms—drought, floods, hurricanes, changing rain and snow patterns, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, rising sea levels, warming oceans—that have left no corner of the world untouched. “In an era of climate crisis,” she writes, “we will have to reckon with new complexities in our relationships to home, and even more people will experience the shock of being uprooted. In the long run, if we fail to address the crisis that is disrupting our planetary home, there will be hardly any safe refuge left.” In 2019, she points out, 24.9 million people across the world were forced from their homes because of the impact of climate change and other natural disasters—1.5 million of them in the Americas. She writes about communities in the Pacific Northwest ravaged by wildfires, and about the scientists, firefighters, and community leaders working to understand how to better prepare for and manage them. We learn about how collapsing permafrost in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region of Alaska created America’s first climate refugees, most of them Alaska Natives struggling to establish a new home on higher ground; about how farming and sustainable agriculture efforts in the Northern California town of Richmond emerged from within the shadows of a refinery explosion; and about hurricanes and flooding in Florida and one preservationist’s effort to save the historic city of St. Augustine. They are stories not about tragedy or trauma but about resiliency and hope, and about how we persevere even when faced with the most unimaginable of circumstances. yesmagazine.org :: yes! fall 2022
63
