Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

American author Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (2019) seeks to remedy a key issue related to the current climate crisis: that not all voices are being heard in discussions on the impacts of climate change. By blending reporting and first-person accounts, she enables coastal residents to tell their stories about how a changing climate is impacting their communities. In Phippsburg, Maine; Staten Island, New York; Miami Beach and Pensacola, Florida; Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana; and Alviso, California, Rush focuses on individuals, especially people of color and low- and middle-income individuals, who have historically been left out of environmental discourse in the United States. Rising was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction and won the National Outdoor Book Award.

Summary

Part 1 of Rising focuses on the natural and human loss resulting from transforming marshlands. Rush opens Rising by discussing tupelos, or trees that were once signs of a healthy wetland. Because of human interventions in the landscape, marshes are not able to retreat to higher elevation. As a result, these trees are becoming inundated with water and dying. Rampikes, or trees that have died from saline inundation, become Rush’s guiding star for marshlands already in trouble. She sees rampikes on Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles, an island that is home to an Indigenous community. In just a few decades, residents, including Chris Brunet, have seen monumental changes to their surroundings, including land erosion, increased flooding, and dolphins in waterways. For Chris, the fragmentation of his community is even more difficult to see than the environmental degradation. Like the island, Sprague River Marsh in Maine is on the brink of collapse. The land is literally rotting, releasing carbon and methane into the air and thus further contributing to the warming planet. Despite rising sea levels, it is difficult for people who call the marshlands home to leave. Laura Sewall expresses gratitude for living in such a beautiful and dynamic environment. In Florida, Dan Kipnis is angry that Miami city officials refuse to acknowledge that south Florida could one day be underwater. These wetlands are not just homes for people, but entwined with their individual and community identities.

Through the first-person accounts of Nicole Montalto of Staten Island, Marilynn Wiggins of Pensacola, Florida, and Chris Brunet, Part 2 illustrates how individuals living in coastal areas represent some of the most vulnerable populations in the United States. Coastal residents are often from low- or middle-income backgrounds, like Nicole Montalto’s father, who died in Hurricane Sandy. They also are often people of color like both Marilynn Wiggins and Chris Brunet. Properties in wetlands have been historically cheap, often because they are prone to flooding and because they were located next to industrial plants or landfills. These areas have also offered safe harbor for Indigenous groups, runaway slaves, and other marginalized people because they are difficult to attack and easy to defend. Descendants of these first residents often do not have the financial or physical means to leave as flooding has gotten worse. These vulnerable citizens are made even more vulnerable by decades of neglect from city, state, and federal governments. Despite all of this, these residents are determined to regain control over their communities’ destiny. They are awakening to their own vulnerability and how it is collectively shared among them. In doing so, they are banding together to figure out adaptive strategies that work for them, such as relocating their communities. Coastal residents are more like rhizomes than rampikes.

In Part 3, Rush struggles with the question of whether humans will repair our relationships with nature and one another. As her dispatch from H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest shows, ecosystems are interconnected. The loss of a single species reverberates throughout an ecosystem. Humans must learn to see other living beings as kin, or entire webs of life will be obliterated. Rush worries that human interventions in the environment, even when they are intended to heal marshes (such as the Salt Pond Restoration Project), will continue to harm the environment and exacerbate social and economic inequality.

Rush hopes that as people get to tell their stories and feel heard, the resistance to climate change will lessen. She also believes that as more and more people use words like tupelo and rufous hummingbird, we collectively are awakened to an understanding of what we are losing. While it is unlikely that we will reverse rising sea levels, it is paramount that we do not forget all the lives lost to humanity’s intervention in the environment. By accepting the consequences our actions have caused, perhaps we can seize the opportunity to rise with the sea. For Rush, if we can learn to care about nature and one another, we might have a chance at building a more just and equitable Earth for all living beings.