The Rising Sea

Revisiting the role of risk in mobilizing mass climate action

Last Sunday morning when Bob and I hiked the two-mile-long Morse Mountain trail through a forest of multistory pines and moss covered rocky outcroppings towards Maggie’s Beach and the ocean, the sun was so warm on our faces, the ground under our feet so muddy and smelling so fecund, it was hard to reconcile the date, Sunday, February 11, with the feeling that spring had arrived bestowing on us and the land all its generosity.  It had been years since we’d walked this trail which holds our memories of when we were a young family filled with optimism, of when our bodies were youthful and limber, and of a time before the catastrophic changes facing us and the earth were even a blip in our minds.  

As I followed the path up and down its rolling hills, I felt a deep longing for those times, and beside that a deep sadness, particularly when the trail opened onto the beach and we confronted the once lush sand dunes, now deeply scarred by the force of the January storms.

After an hour or two of lying on the warm sand and scavenging shells streaked purple and orange and blue by the deft hand of nature, we headed back to the car.  Or we tried to head back to the car.  I hadn’t considered the word flood on this blue-skied day or reckoned with the word danger.  But we turned a corner and there it was: the trail over the saltmarsh which a few hours ago had been high and dry was now awash in water.  A young couple who had just crossed the path in the high water warned us that it was thigh-high and, of course, shockingly cold, the path underfoot unstable.  They’d taken off their shoes and socks and were waiting for the blood to return to their now bright pink feet. 

The tide was still rushing in over the marsh, making its low burbling sound. Before us lies our altered world, I thought to myself.  “I guess this is it,” I said out loud to the couple, wondering what sense they were making of this moment.  “Yup,” the man said, “this is the new normal.  I’m from here and I’ve seen all kinds of changes in just the last few years. This marsh never used to flood. At least not like this.  It’s sad.  And scary.  There’s a word for that.  What is it?” he asked. “Solastalgia,” I answered.  “Yes, that’s it,” he replied.  Then we stood in the silence, witnessing. 

7.5 inches.  That’s how much the sea has risen here in Maine in the last fifty years. Sometimes it’s easy to dismiss that number as I know the fishermen I talked to a few years ago up in Jonesport did.  Normal they called it.  I wonder what they call it now that so much of that industry’s infrastructure was destroyed in the January storms.   

“Do you, like, do anything to address this?” I asked the couple, opening my arms to the earth.  And there on the edge of the flood she told me her story.  Climate action has been her life’s work.  For many years she was involved with 350 Maine. Now she works with a hands-on ecology center as well as with Maine Climate Action Now, the successor to 350.  I told her about the work I do and together we marveled that this climate hiccup caused by an exceptionally high tide brought us together.

Soon a strong-bodied young man and woman arrived and began to ready themselves for the trip across.  It would be a good hour or two before the tide would recede, so Bob and I were torn about whether to stay or to cross.  We were hungry and hadn’t brought any water with us so we decided to cross and asked the couple if we could cross with them.  In retrospect, I think our ask was too much.  I am still sure-footed but Bob, with 7 more years on his birth certificate, is not and the journey proved very difficult for him.

He needed support to keep from falling into the ice-cold water during the long crossing and when the young man saw this, he put his arm around Bob and, though it prolonged his own time in the cold water, eased him safely across.  In another small, serendipitous gift from the universe, the man told Bob he was a fireman and just the day before had been trained in cold-water rescues so if Bob needed to be carried he was prepared to do that for him.

This time we got safely to the other side where about twenty people were waiting for the tide to go down.  This time we had help.  This time the risk was not too great. But the whole experience made me wonder: what happens next time, what risks are ahead of us?  And too, how much risk will it take for more people to join us in Third Act and FreeportCAN and what kinds of actions do we need to take that will make a difference in the ever-shrinking window of time that is left before we blow past not the once forbidden 1.5º C (which we have already passed) but the unthinkable 2º C. 

A new book, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action, has some answers to these questions and it was my good fortune to be a guest on the Cambridge Forum panel with the author of this book, Dana R. Fisher, just two days after wading across the flooded marsh.  In her book, Dana, a professor at American University and researcher in social movements, is clear eyed about the lack of progress which governments or corporations have made towards the kind of structural change we need to address the climate crisis. 

“Thirty years into attempts to address climate change, it is abundantly clear that those actors who have amassed their wealth and power through industrialization powered by fossil fuel extraction and combustion have a stranglehold on economic and political power.”

So how will change happen? Dana posits the idea of risk as a social pivot. She calls it AnthroShift.  Her research shows that only when the risks to society and well-being are perceived as very high will we be able to force the kinds of changes we need.  After all the years of listening to scientists and climate activists warn the rest of us not to scare people too much, not to use words like “crisis” and “emergency,” I am relieved to finally hear what has felt much truer to me: high degrees of fear are motivating and need to be capitalized on.   

The risk to myself and Bob on Sunday was not high but when it combines with other news from this week my perception of risk, like the tide at Morse Mountain, rises way beyond where it’s been before: first there is the destruction we saw on the beach and the destruction to infrastructure up and down the coast from recent storms;  then there is the news that made Bill McKibben feel “sucker punched and melancholy” that Chase Bank and Blackrock had decided to pull out of the Climate 100 alliance of businesses that were at least nominally concerned with decarbonizing the earth; and lastly the news that the Atlantic ocean current, known as AMOC, could, very soon, reach a tipping point that would cause it to stop entirely, bringing with it unfathomable loss.  This piece by Jason Anthony entitled Running AMOC in his Substack blog will, I hope, scare the pants off you. 

Perhaps the job of writers and story tellers is to wade through the storm of news that rains down on us and fish out those stories of risk and threat to wellbeing that Dana posits will motivate people to take action, then serve them up in unflinching language.

What kind of action does Dana’s book recommend?  While she recognizes that things like buying an electric car, eating plants, installing solar panels are important, she is “acutely aware that none of them alone or together is enough. In fact, even the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) concluded in fall 2020 that “incremental change is ‘no longer an option.’” Instead, Dana recognizes we need “mass mobilization which responds to the growing severity and frequency of disastrous events.”

I hope Dana is right that people will be ready to take this kind of action when the risks are perceived as high enough.  I believe she’s right that this kind of action is essential for the kind of structural change we need.  But I can think of a lot of reasons why it’s hard here at home to get people out into the street, starting with the notion that it’s not polite to stand out there. This is New England after all, not New York or Berkeley!   I’ve done some standing out there and I can tell you, it’s hard.  People look at you like you have gone stark raving mad.  Or they ignore you as if you are invisible or covered with smallpox.  It’s really weird to suddenly be invisible.  You have to pinch yourself to come back to life.

That said, I have a lot to learn from Dana. Her book offers clues and insights into how to build movements of resistance to the murderous fossil fuel industry.   I will discuss them more in next week’s blog.  She’s promised to come to Maine to speak sometime soon and I know she is scheduled to do a National Call with Third Act in the spring. 

Mass mobilization!  Let’s face how much risk this moment holds and realize that this time no one, not even a kind fireman with cold water rescue training, is coming to save us.  I’m ready.  Let’s take it to the streets!