- [Anne] Floods and fires have always been with us, but environmental scientists and emergency managers say we have crossed over into a new stage of permacrisis. If it seems like the world is constantly reeling from one climate disaster to the next, you're right. So what does resilience look like when you know that this fire, this storm, this flood won't be the last? In this episode of "To The Best Of Our Knowledge," survival strategies for the age of disaster.
- [Announcer] From WPR.
- It's "To the Best of Our Knowledge." I'm Anne Strainchamps. 100-year floods now happen every year. Wildfires spread where they never used to go. And in every case, when the storm and the TV cameras are gone, the people left behind face and agonizing choice, do they stay or go? Rebuild or relocate? We have been asking that since Hurricane Katrina.
- [Man] It raised questions about, one, how to recover, and two, how to grapple with the reality that it was likely to happen again.
- [Man] I ain't going no place, man. I'm gonna stay right here. This is it. This is my home and this is where I'll be.
- [Anne] The city made the decision to rebuild, but was it the right choice? That question haunts urban planner, Brian Stone.
- [Brian] One of the lessons that we have from the Dutch, which is a full country that's mostly under sea level, is how, one, to defend with physical infrastructure, but two, how to accommodate the water that must and will periodically come in. That was one of the philosophies that was considered in the immediate aftermath through a commission appointed by the mayor. And so one of the strategies was to identify floodable spaces.
- [Man] Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Mr. Mayor.
- [Brian] The challenge with this particular episode is that this commission made decisions of where to locate floodable parks and they were locating the floodable parks in low elevation areas around New Orleans.
- [Man] None of us want to be in this particular place.
- [Brian] Many of the residents are not even in the city at this point, and already proposals being flooded to relocate residents. The other challenge here is that the lowest elevation zone to New Orleans are almost exclusively African American neighborhoods.
- [Woman] Does any of these local politicians do anything for you?
- [Protesters] Hell no.
- [Woman] Have they done anything for you?
- [Protesters] No.
- [Brian] You know, low elevation, high flood risk in many US cities is going to be communities of color because of historic redlining and other disparities. And so there was a lot of pushback against this proposal. And ultimately, it did not carry the day. The plan wasn't adopted.
- [Man] You been in the background trying to ski and get out the land just like that leader say, "I'm gonna die on mine."
- [Brian] In the longer term view, though, several of these neighborhoods have not recovered well in the intervening two decades. You know, only 80% of the population returned to New Orleans even today. The quality of life's not particularly high. In some cases, you don't have cultural centers, great access to fresh fruit and groceries. You may not have walking access to a school for your children just because there's not enough population to support these institutions. And so in hindsight, would it have made sense maybe to, with fair market value, work with community residents to relocate to areas with greater flood resilience within New Orleans and to assemble land, to build floodable spaces? Today, again, 20 years, hence billions of dollars put into flood defenses. New Orleans now floods every year, which is a much greater frequency than it was before Katrina. And so this speaks to the experience of many communities today and we're seeing it play out right now in Los Angeles about whether rebuilding everywhere is actually in the interest of both those specific neighborhoods that have been devastated and the neighborhoods that surround them.
- [Man] Who are they to tell me that I need to leave the neighborhood that I love so much?
- [Anne] These questions are coming for us all because the storms and wildfires and floods will not stop. Brian Stone directs the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech, and he believes that in this age of climate change, emergency preparedness isn't enough. We're gonna need a radical new mindset and the courage to ask some really tough questions. Shannon Henry Kleiber has her own.
- [Shannon] Yeah, we're at this moment where wildfires and droughts and floods and so many different disasters have become this terrifying but almost regular part of our lives. And, you know, even though people come out and say, "We're going to rebuild," it's this act of resilience. You've written that rebuilding disaster prone areas is lunacy. Why do you think it's that much of a bad idea?
- [Brian] So I'll contextualize this in the, what's ongoing in Los Angeles now because I think it's pretty salient. 2024 was not only the hottest year of all time, but that we had surpassed this critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius that have been established by both the global scientific community and the climate policy communities as kind of the bright line that we did not wanna cross, and we've just crossed it. And so there are many aspects of this disaster we can look at where preparedness could have been better. But the major issue here is that Los Angeles has not had really any rain since May. It's incredibly dry. We're coming off the hottest year that we've ever experienced. And there really is no way to defend against these kind of disruptive climate events, whether it's wildfires, sea level rise, drought. And so I think we have to give serious consideration to, not whether we build back, but where we build back and how that rebuilding not only restores some communities but enhances resilience for the next event. This isn't specific to California, this is everywhere in the United States.
- [Shannon] It's so tough to think about people having to give up their home where they have their culture and their traditions, more practically, their job, their connections. How do you tell someone who's in Fort Myers or Los Angeles or New Orleans, "You should move somewhere else"?
- [Brian] I'm personally not insensitive to this at all. I mean, I fully recognize how challenging this is and that people are grieving right now. They're grieving for the communities and they're grieving for their homes, and in some cases, they're grieving for family members that have been lost. So this is the absolute worst time to have a public conversation about how to rebuild and where to rebuild. We have the information we need to know where the highest climate risk zones are today. We already knew that many of these areas that are burned in Los Angeles were the highest risk zone. Some of them have burned before, and we'd already seen private insurers in large numbers pull out of these areas. And so that's a really important market signal. Private insurers are unwilling to insure your property really at any premium level, right? I mean, there are people that are willing to pay pretty high premiums to be in these fantastically gorgeous places, but private insurers are saying, "We're not interested at any premium rate because the risk is so high." We have kind of new state-supported entities that will do this, but they only do this by spreading the risk amongst those who live both within these high risk zones and outside of them. And so if those who live outside the highest risk zones are gonna shoulder some of the responsibility for the cost of rebuilding, we probably need to have a larger public dialogue about what level of risk we're willing to tolerate.
- [Shannon] Do you think it's time to start thinking differently about home ownership? This is the American dream of owning your own home. Is it also your sense of home that it's where you have been for a long time or it's where you feel comfortable? You know, how do you get around those philosophical ideas of, "I could live in another home, I could live in another place"?
- [Brian] We don't have protocols for deconstruction. You know, we have been a nation of expansionary thinking, of colonial expansion, frontierism, and we really are running into the limits of that as both a physical process, continual physical growth because the zone of our habitable land in just the United States is shrinking right now. It's shrinking as the oceans rise. We have less land we can develop and we're not gonna get it back anytime soon, and it's shrinking in terms of our burn zones. We have areas, in Arizona, for example, where there's just not sufficient water to support new residential development, and so it's being put on hold. And so the American frontier, like it or not, is physically shrinking. And I think an appropriate response to that is to think about also our cultural traditions about whether we can expect to remain physically rooted in one place for the entirety of our lives. Because climate change for most people is showing up not as hurricane force winds, but as economic disaster. It's the economic brunt of climate change that is probably most threatening to people more so than, you know, physically getting injured or dying in one of these events, although that happens.
- [Shannon] Can you take us through what deconstruction would look like? Because I think that is a little unfamiliar to some of us. We know about eminent domain and there's kind of the attention there of your house has been taken over and you didn't maybe want it to be taken over, but that's not exactly what we're talking about here. This is the moment where something like deconstruction might be a possibility for moving forward.
- [Brian] Yeah, deconstruction, we can understand that in a couple different respects. Yes, it can be relocating residents and homes in advance or in the aftermath of a disaster. And for some, to relocate in the aftermath and be given fair market value pre-impact is a very viable and attractive option. Again, for many people who might rebuild in LA, I don't know that they'll be able to get private property insurance. That said, I'm envisioning kind of a four-step, and I won't get too technical or academic about it, but I think there are four basic things that we need to bring about planned retreat if we wanna pursue this. And the first is just mapping, identifying where the high risk zones are. We largely have that, you know, FEMA floodplains are widely available, critical for determining whether you need flood insurance, and that's critical for getting a mortgage. So that's a model that's very useful for us. They're not perfect, but it is a federal resource. But we're capable of mapping, whether it's flood risk, wildfire risk, drought risk, we can develop these maps. Once those are established, then we need to determine, "Well, what are the standards where we would like to see retreat in one zone?" And that's really up to communities to play a role in that. And then what are the resources that are gonna fund this? And I'll just mention, you know, one of those resources are a new tool that is becoming more widespread, and that's superfund for a climate disaster and really having some of the fossil energy companies pay in to help recover from these disasters. And we have several states now that have passed this legislation. And then where we decide it's useful to relocate, we have to assemble the land, we have to relocate the families to locations that have greater resilience and that keep those families whole economically, and in terms of community were possible. We have some examples of this. And then last thing and I think is really critical is that, if we do acquire land with public funds and relocate families and have them go through that process, it's really critical that this land become not just a levee or a fuel break, but that it's open to public use and becomes an amenity. And so we've seen that, you know, in the aftermath of the campfire in Paradise, California, big fuel breaks that are now public land and they're there for recreation and biking and all kinds of uses. Those are the key steps, it's a framework that we can pursue. But we would, you know, ideally, we would have federal agencies working with state and local governments to do this, but I don't think we're gonna have that in the near term. So I think it's critical for states to consider pursuing this on their own.
- [Shannon] So the four steps you just went through, it's, you know, I can kind of picture it but it's really radical. This is a really radical reimagining of the country. How realistic is this? I mean, I think it sounds like a real plan, but is this gonna happen?
- [Brian] I think it will happen. We have precedents for this in other parts of the world. But just to respond to the notion this is radical, it is absolutely radical. There's another program I'll mention just, 'cause we're on the topic about how to structure a retreat program, and that's from, the Netherlands is a country that is largely below sea level. The Dutch are amazing engineers and over literally hundreds of years have developed infrastructure, even involving their famous iconic windmills that are designed to pump water over levees and drain land, and also help control flooding. There were some really catastrophic events, flooding events, one in the 1950s and more recently in the last 20 to 30 years, where the Dutch had just realized that there was no engineering their way out of sea level rise. And so they were going to need to think about whether some levees need to be deconstructed along large rivers and whether some of those levees were actually increasing risk. And we see this in New Orleans too. I mean, if you have the levee there, it signals that this is safe, controlled land and we can develop high densities behind it. And so that's not true when levees fail, when you have really catastrophic rainfall and flooding events. So the Dutch decided in a very famous now plan that translates as Room for the River to acknowledge that the river needed to have an expanded floodplain and that these large levees were narrowing the floodplain and they were increasing the likelihood of flash flooding. So they moved their levees back in many instances by a very long way to expand the natural floodway, the channel, and they had to relocate entire communities to do that. And they gave themselves many years to do it. You know, in this example, communities were not given a choice. They were given fair market value through a process of imminent domain. There were attempts to move entire communities together if that was desired. But it wasn't a choice because it was seen as a critical action to protect the larger communities here. We're having much more extreme flooding events than the Dutch, typically in the United States. This program is part of the reason why.
- [Anne] Brian Stone is the Director of the Urban Climate Lab at Georgia Tech, an author of "Radical Adaptation: Transforming Cities for a Climate Changed World." He was talking with Shannon Henry Kleiber. So it's human nature to assign blame after a disaster, to ask who's responsible, who should pay. But climate change is upending the old calculus.
- [Lorraine] I'm interested in natural disasters because I think they're like a radioactive isotope tracking massive changes in how we think about the boundary between the human and the natural, but also, how we think about blame and responsibility.
- [Anne] The deep history of our ideas about acts of God next. I'm Anne Strainchamps. It's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. It used to be that if lightning hit your house or a storm flooded your basement, it was an act of God, random, unpredictable, nobody's fault, and covered by insurance. But as insurance companies struggle to cover the losses caused by climate change, those old definitions are coming into question. Can you really call a flood or a wildfire a natural disaster or an act of God if human activity was involved? These aren't just legal questions. As science historian, Lorraine Daston, told Steve Paulson, they reflect our changing relationship with the natural world and have a deep history.
- [Lorraine] There was a time not so long ago when looking for culprits in natural disasters like hurricanes like Hurricane Katrina or earthquakes like the one that recently convulsed Turkey and Syria seemed as benighted as looking for witches. We had an enlightenment category of a disaster that had purely natural causes and therefore was not a question of blame and responsibility.
- [Steve] So to take one example, the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens a few decades ago, which killed several dozen people and devastated that area of a swath of a couple hundred miles or so. I think their reaction was, "Wow, that was terrible, but couldn't see it coming. You know, it was unfortunate and we just need to move on."
- [Lorraine] Yeah, there was nothing that anyone could have done about it. The New York Times had an editorial a few days after that explosion in May of 1980 saying, "There's some calm consolation to be derived from the fact that no one's to blame." You can't blame a volcano. I think if that were to happen now, there would be discussion about why are people living in proximity to the volcano? Why is it that we don't have an early warning system to evacuate whoever is still in the vicinity of possible damage? I think fingers would be pointed in the direction of all manner of culprits.
- [Steve] Hmm, so to contrast that with another disaster that happened a couple decades later, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, that had this terrible impact on New Orleans. Thousands of people died and many more were displaced and it really leveled the city of New Orleans, a lot of people were blamed for that.
- [Lorraine] Indeed. New Orleans is still reeling, I think, from the impact of Hurricane Katrina and subsequent hurricanes. There were plenty of accusing fingers pointed at the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for maintaining the levees, the politicians who had allowed people to build their homes in floodplains and the lack of any effective evacuation measures, which had surely increase the death toll. So by that time, a switch had happened. And once again, the New York Times as our witness, talked about this being an unnatural disaster.
- [Steve] Well, we should back up for a moment and talk about this, the very idea of natural disaster. If you think about those words, no one is to blame, not humans, not God. So where does that idea of natural disaster come from?
- [Lorraine] It's a very interesting idea. It's a relatively new one, at least if you're a historian taking a long view of events because it doesn't really emerge until the latter part of the 18th century. And it's as much the creation of theologians as it is the creation of scientists. Theologians, particularly in Protestant religions in Europe, begin to think that it's unseemly to accuse God of having temper tantrums, especially after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which killed, we think somewhere between 50 and 60,000 people. It seemed inexplicable that God would punish so many people at once, innocent ones.
- [Steve] So there's this phrase, an act of God, which is often attributed to natural disasters. And people still talk about that today even though we live in very secular times now. But doesn't that idea even come up in some legal cases when people are sort of jostling about, you know, who's to blame for our response to some disasters?
- [Lorraine] So the act of God seems to be used first in 1581 in an English court case. And it was used simply as a shorthand for releasing people from their contractual responsibilities. And it meant, and still means in legal parlance in the Anglo-American tradition, it means an event that was neither foreseeable nor preventable by reasonable exercise of foresight. The term itself is now considered by even the lawyers as quaint. It has its alternatives in other languages, force majeure in French, for example. And it's encoded in international law as well, but its primary meaning has always been some kind of natural catastrophe as a distinctive category of bad things.
- [Steve] Well, to come back to Hurricane Katrina, didn't the US Corps of Engineers, which of course had been targeted for, "Oh my god, you know, you didn't build strong enough levees to hold in the floodwaters." They tried to invoke, "Oh, this was an act of God this once in a century hurricane that that leveled New Orleans."
- [Lorraine] Yeah, exactly. So it's interesting the quantification of act of God, which is at least once in a century, not once in 10 years, not once in a century, or once in a millennium. And it's interesting also what's considered a reasonable precaution. In the case of the Army Corps of Engineers, a federal court judge decided that they should have been able to foresee it and they should have reinforced the levees to a level that would've been able to withstand a force five hurricane like Katrina and awarded damages of $700,000. That decision was later reversed but on a technicality about suing a federal agency. It's also the case that other countries, so for example, the Netherlands, which has, of course, been in a constant battle with the encroaching sea for centuries, is building their levees and dikes to a standard of once in 1,000-year storms. So the Army Corps of Engineers, I think, would now be considered to have set the bar very low with once in a century.
- [Steve] To cite another hurricane, Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in 2012, there were questions about should city officials have known it was coming and done more to prevent it? Wasn't that at issue as well?
- [Lorraine] There were quite a few court cases resulting from damages caused by Hurricane Sandy. There was a sort of cargo container firm on Staten Island that was exonerated from damages due to waterlogged cargo because they worked day and night to evacuate as much as they could beforehand. Whereas a firm in New Jersey did have to pay up damages because the only thing they had done to avert the damages was to move the boss' Porsche to higher ground. So, but here, you see the legal mind at work, which is, okay, especially if you're living in New York, meteorologists were tracking Hurricane Sandy all the way up the Atlantic Coast. It was pretty clear when it was going to hit. There was some time to take precautionary measures. Were the precautionary measures sufficient? So in this case, that is what the court cases hinged upon. But nowadays, reasonable foresight is expanding because in an age of climate change in which we believe both the frequency and intensity of such storms is going to increase, there is an argument now made by legal scholars that we should be prepared for the worst all the time.
- [Steve] Well, and to take another example, which might seem even harder to predict earthquakes, there was a case, I don't know, a decade ago where there was a big earthquake in northern Italy and six seismologists were actually arrested in prison because they were accused of, you know, "You should have been able to predict the earthquake coming if, you know, issued evacuation warnings."
- [Lorraine] This was the 2009 earthquake in northern Italy, I believe, over 300 people died in it. So it was a serious earthquake. The seismologists were rounded up in, at least by a lower card convicted of being unable to predict an earthquake. Now, of course, seismologists cannot predict earthquakes. and dissent so to speak, shockwaves through the seismological community about potential liability for things that were completely beyond their ken. I should say that that was also a decision reversed by Italy's Supreme Court eventually, but not until some of those seismologists had served prison time.
- [Steve] So what you're saying is that in all of these cases, I've always thought of as natural disasters, hurricanes, earthquakes, major floods, tsunamis, it's sort of like everyone is saying, "You should be able to see it coming. To some degree, I mean, you should be able to give some advanced warning or you should take the precautions so that people are not living right near where this terrible stuff could happen." It's like, is the whole concept of natural disaster going out the window?
- [Lorraine] It's certainly fading. These exonerating act of God, force majeure clauses are all about reasonable foresight and reasonable precautions. If you decide that the reasonable has now been elongated very, very far into the future and sometimes into the past, then you've also vastly expanded the scope of human culpability and liability.
- [Steve] So how has the insurance industry responded to all of this?
- [Lorraine] So the insurance industry first responded with horror. It's really interesting that the insurance agencies, especially the very big insurance agencies, the reinsurance agencies which insure all the primary insurers.
- [Steve] Okay, you'll have to explain that distinction.
- [Lorraine] Okay, so when we buy life insurance or fire insurance or home insurance, we are buying from primary insurers. But those insurers, in turn, want to hedge their bets. So they buy insurance on their policies that they're holding to these great big conglomerates, of which the two largest are Munich Reinsurance and Swiss Reinsurance. And these big reinsurance companies have vast reserves to cover a catastrophe, which suddenly might result in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of claims. These big insurance, reinsurance companies are very sensitive monitors of disasters everywhere in the world. And really, by the 1970s or 1980s, they already knew long before we were sensitized to climate change that something was happening. They could simply see by the number of claims that were ending up on their desks. And their first reaction was horror. And their idea was, "Look, we can't continue to ensure these kinds of things. It's too expensive." But something happened in the 1990s. They started not only to ensure such risks, they actively courted them and they began to issue what are called catastrophe bonds or cat bonds for short, which is a form of betting on two notoriously unpredictable events, first, natural disasters, and secondly, the stock market.
- [Steve] That's funny.
- [Lorraine] So the way it works is you have to be pretty wealthy to play this game, but if you have a pension fund, then you probably are willy-nilly without your knowledge paying it because the pension funds are amongst the biggest customers for these catastrophe bonds. You give a very large sum of money to Swiss Re and you and Swiss Re decide on a kind of package of risk, so an earthquake in California, a hurricane in the Caribbean, a wildfire in Spain, and a certain period of time, say four years. And if nothing happens, if you don't have the earthquake in California or the hurricane or whatever else you have specified in that period, you get all of your money back with interest, which is much higher than what the market would have given you, investments in the market. However, if such a disaster does happen of the specified type within the specified time period, you lose all your money.
- [Steve] Wow. So really, a high risk bet here.
- [Lorraine] This is a real, so you have these nervous Nellies, the reinsurers suddenly becoming riverboat gamblers.
- [Steve] Yeah. If we've gotten to the point now where we think that we should always be able to see a, I'm still gonna use the word natural disaster 'cause I don't know what else to call these, but if we should be able to either see it coming or take preventive measures to minimize the damage, what do we do about something like climate change where presumably is just gonna get worse and worse? There are gonna be bigger storms, there's gonna be more devastation. Who's accountable for that?
- [Lorraine] That's right, or is anyone accountable? I mean, the idea of accountability is, in a sense being attached to, "Well, who can pay?"
- [Steve] Yeah.
- [Lorraine] You may remember the case some years ago of the McDonald's hot coffee.
- [Steve] Oh, yeah, sure, right. Someone who bought some coffee and spilled it on their lap, right?
- [Lorraine] Right, that's right. So it was very hot coffee, and as I recall, the customer put it on her dashboard and then started to drive and she got very bad burns. It was a jury case trial, I believe, in Michigan. And one suspects that the reasoning of the jury was, "She really ought not to have done that." You know, it really, but given that she can't pay her medical bills and McDonald's can, perhaps that is the way in which the decision ought to go in a sense of larger justice.
- [Steve] I can't, how was that case decided?
- [Lorraine] She was awarded damages.
- [Steve] Okay.
- [Lorraine] And as I recall, McDonald's had to warn customers ever since that the coffee is very hot, so.
- [Steve] Well, it seems like there's also a larger philosophical question. It's as if humans are the guardians of planet Earth now because we've had such a large imprint. I mean, this is really the whole idea behind the Anthropocene, the concept of the Anthropocene. We have fundamentally altered the planet, we've altered the environment. Everything sort of has the human stamp on it, which in some ways makes a lot of sense and yet, there's also sort of an arrogance to this. We humans are determining everything that happens in the natural world and somehow we're responsible for that.
- [Lorraine] There is a kind of megalomania of guilt abroad. Yes, I see what you mean in the view that nature is no longer mighty nature, but rather our ward, our child almost in our custody.
- [Steve] Yeah. What do you see as the big questions that we need to resolve about accountability and human responsibility when it comes to these natural disasters?
- [Lorraine] I think we need to rethink reasonableness, but we are facing a truly urgent emergency. I do wonder whether or not the kind of philosophical and moral work and also scientific work that has to be done knowing what we can predict and what we can't predict, what we can avert and what we can't avert, whether we have time for that scale of reflection.
- [Steve] Well, this is all quite fascinating. Thank you so much.
- [Lorraine] It was my great pleasure, thank you.
- [Anne] Lorraine Daston is the former director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. That was Steve Paulson talking with her. We hear a lot of grim stories about this new era of climate disasters, but there are plenty of people who are already redesigning cities to help us live in this future, and their ideas and inspiration are coming from some surprising places.
- [Annalee] A lot of designers, architects, land planners, are having to think extremely creatively about how to deal with coastal flooding.
- [Anne] This is writer, Annalee Newitz.
- There was a group whose work I followed who were in Boston, and they're working in the Boston Harbor, which is an area subject to flooding. And they came up with this idea of what they call the Emerald Tutu, and it was inspired by an online aesthetic called Goblincore. Goblincore is very much inspired by things like "Lord of the Rings," dirt and mushrooms, and just a kind of woodsy, bucolic aesthetic. They were thinking about what would it be like if you had a city that was kinda Goblincorish. The Emerald Tutu is this incredible system where they take giant bags of biomass, which they call the chunguses. They connect all of these chunguses together with a network of cables, and they plant seeds on them to create this kind of distributed system of gardens. It looks like a little green skirt, an Emerald Tutu flaring out from the harbor edge. And what happens is that when you get coastal flooding and you get waves coming in, this structure actually lessens the power and energy of the waves. And so it helps storm surges be very mild and much less likely to damage urban infrastructure. And it also looks beautiful. This is the kind of future that I like to imagine when I'm thinking about how do we rebuild better. Their inspiration was fantasy alternate worlds, and now, they're making it real.
- [Anne] The survival value of stories in an age of climate catastrophe next. I'm Anne Strainchamps. It's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. We aren't the first people to face natural disasters, ecosystem change, even civilizational collapse. Ancient Rome burned three times, but survived. Angkor Wat rebuilt after a series of catastrophic floods. So if we want our cities to survive another 1,000 years, maybe we should look to history to find the strategies that already work. And the person to help us do that is Annalee Newitz, author of science fiction and nonfiction, co-founder of the sci-tech blogs, io9 and Gizmodo. Annalee has spent a lot of time walking around ancient lost cities in the company of archeologists and just as much time imagining future human civilizations on other planets. So meet a hardheaded, realistic optimist who believes the one technology that can save us is stories. Annalee, I'm so happy to talk with you. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
- [Annalee] Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
- [Anne] I've wanted to talk to you ever since I read Your "Lost Cities" book. You know, we're talking the week after the wildfires swept LA, and you've stood on the grounds of so many ruined cities, ruined a long time ago, but I was just curious about what's been going through your mind.
- [Annalee] Yeah, I mean, I definitely have been thinking a lot about stories I've read, histories I've read of cities that have been through horrific natural disasters. And one of the things that I learned in looking at these ancient cities is that it really is possible for a city to make it through pretty much any kind of natural disaster, whether it's earthquake or flood, or a fire, volcano, if they have a stable political infrastructure. The main problems we see, the moments when people choose to abandon a city rather than rebuild it are when there's political instability combined with some kind of natural disaster.
- [Anne] Oh, that's really interesting 'cause we do usually think that it's all about the disaster, right?
- [Annalee] Yeah, we imagine that it's just a matter of like, "All right, we've just gotta go back out into the street and dig things up and rebuild them." But there has to be some kind of organizing force behind that. That's why good governance really comes up again and again in ancient history when you look at disasters and you see things like, for example, when Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii and a number of other cities, the Roman government came in and did disaster relief. They paid to relocate refugees from their homes that had been destroyed in Pompeii, built new cities for them in the Bay of Naples, built new roads to reach the cities. We really forget that there's a cultural disaster that can go with a natural disaster, and that's when things get really, really difficult to recover from.
- [Anne] You've been fascinated by disasters and catastrophes for a really long time. I kind of think that you have come to believe that the stories themselves may be a form of disaster preparedness. I don't think I'm putting words in your mouth.
- [Annalee] No, not at all. I think stories are one of the only tools we have for preparing for disaster in a sense because a story can be a public policy about having first responders that are well-trained and well-compensated. But I also think that one of the things that's really interesting about disasters is that people hate to remember them. There's a lot of cultural amnesia around disasters. And, you know, when we were dealing with the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the things that people kept saying was, "Well, isn't this like the Spanish flu? What is this thing called Spanish flu? Who ever even heard of the Spanish Flu?" And there were a number of pieces and books and articles coming out about, "Hey, remember 1918? There was this thing, the Spanish flu." And a lot of folks have written about how after the Spanish flu was over, people worked very hard to never talk about it. And in some cases, there was direct, in the US, government suppression of information about the pandemic.
- [Anne] Really? How so?
- [Annalee] So this is during World War I that this is unfolding. And the idea that the pandemic was spreading in the United States was considered to be something that would lower morale and that would terrify people. And so a lot of information was actively and consciously being suppressed by the government. And they had, you might say, good intentions, they wanted America to seem strong.
- [Anne] You know, you can kind of see that playing out as you just look at some of the biggest disasters of the last 30 years or so, the people who went through the disaster don't wanna think about it ever again. The people who didn't go through it don't wanna think about it because they don't wanna think that it might happen to them in the future.
- [Annalee] Yeah, so a lot of historians talk about this as a form of cultural amnesia, and there's a phase of processing the information, and then just, you know, understandably, people are like, "No, I don't wanna think about it anymore." And so this is one of the things that makes it really difficult for us to prepare for disasters in the future. One of the problems that we have with storytelling right now is that we're in a phase in the United States of really centering stories about the worst of human behavior and the most horrific outcomes. In science fiction land, 'cause I write science fiction, we talk about this as dystopian storytelling. And a dystopia is just as much of a fantasy as a utopia. It's a place that can't exist 'cause it's impossibly bad just like utopia is impossibly good. But I think that when we're in these modes of cultural disaster thinking, we start to fool ourselves into believing that if we wanna be rational and clear-eyed, that the only way to do that is to assume that everyone will behave in the worst way possible and the world will come out in the worst way possible. That just seems like common sense, which it isn't. It's just as an extreme of view of, as the other side.
- [Anne] What's another example historically from the ancient cities that went through catastrophes? Because in some cases, I think we look at those cities and we say, "Oh my god, the worst happened here. All those people died and they're gone and their civilization was destroyed." Sometimes that's not actually what happened. Sometimes people moved, they scattered, they rebuilt in other places.
- [Annalee] One of the things that I find really interesting about the city of Cahokia, which was an indigenous city that was a big town about 1,000 years ago in southern Illinois, is that if we look at the layout of the city, it's very clear that the city has been through multiple phases of rebuilding and reimagining. One of the things I found super interesting when I was out there hanging out with archeologists is as they're digging, they're uncovering these layers. And there's a phase in the development of the city where everything was built on this rigid grid. The streets are laid out in this very planned way. It's very clear that there's some authority that is directing the way people are building. And there's a massive mound, a huge mound with the footprint of about the pyramids at Giza. It's enormous. It's not as tall, but it's huge where clearly there had been elite people on the top of it issuing edicts. There's a clear hierarchical civilization there. And then there's a big transformation. People totally change the way they live. They transform the grid structure into these courtyard structures that are much more cozy and neighborhood like. And they turn the area around this massive mound at the center of the city, they turn that into a garbage pit. You call it a garbage layer. That shows that people have been through this massive social transformation, but then they've reinvented the city, they've reimagined their relationships with each other and they've survived. And it's a great story for Americans to think about because a lot of the people who lived in the city were the ancestors of contemporary indigenous nations and tribes who have also survived their own apocalyptic experience. And a lot of indigenous thinkers now will say, "Yeah, we're a post-apocalyptic group of nations." That's the story that I'd like to see people thinking about is a story of what the indigenous author, Gerald Vizenor, calls survivants.
- [Anne] Oh, wonderful word.
- [Annalee] Instead of apocalypse.
- [Anne] Right, because I think part of their survival and the survival of their communities is because they resisted victimhood. That's been part of their strength.
- [Annalee] Yeah, we definitely need stories about survival, but we do also need stories that give visibility to groups. And, you know, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot as a trans and non-binary person who's been in the queer community pretty much my whole adult life is the problem of erasure and how much these dystopian visions, these natural disasters kind of play into this myth that we have in the United States that some cultures, some groups are just destined to die out, to be erased, and to be destroyed in some massive transformation. What happens, and what's happening right now with trans people is we're seeing a systematic removal of stories about their lives from school libraries and from public libraries. And when you have this purging of stories about a group of people, it makes it harder for that group to survive. And that's why history is so important because what history offers us is a story of community over time. And survival is always a story that takes place over time. You can't survive in a second, you only survive over years, over decades, centuries. And so that's one of the things that really worries me about cultural amnesia because it removes that context for us, and it makes it much more difficult to imagine that hopeful outcome.
- [Anne] One thing we heard from people when LA was on fire, so often people would say, "It's like being inside a disaster movie." They would have this surreal sense of having seen this before. And it made me really think about all those disaster movies, all those apocalypse movies, and how they set us up to handle the real thing. What's your take on what they, have gotten wrong or not?
- [Annalee] I've also heard that from a lot of people. And the problem, I think, with your classic disaster story narrative that we're all familiar with, whether it's, you know, a story about an asteroid hitting the planet or a mega fire or something like that, is that they always center death and destruction. And I get it. I love watching things blow up. I watched "Independence Day," that's fun. You know, we've all been kids. We all like smashing the sand castle. But what it does is it leaves us in this position where we can't imagine beyond the horizon of the disaster. We can only imagine the terror and the running around. We can imagine buildings collapsing, all of that stuff. We're like, "Oh yeah, seen it before." But we don't have a lot of stories about, "All right, here's the wreckage, what do we do now?" In my most recent novel, "The Terraformers," the characters are trying to recover from a massive disaster. And there's a lot of meetings, and I actually have characters saying to each other like, "Wow, democracy is so boring. Like, why are we in another meeting now?" And that's one of the challenges with this kind of storytelling, is how do you make a community planning meeting exciting? And how do you make building a better road or building better housing exciting?
- [Anne] Yeah, for a writer, you're right. I mean, how do you tell these kind of long range stories about, say, human resilience versus the page-turning excitement of the world is going up in flames. Yeah, so what are the strategies you found?
- [Annalee] Well, one strategy, I mean, as a fiction writer, of course, it's very lucky that I can have massive timescales in a story. So I can say like, "All right, skip ahead 800 years and here we are."
- [Anne] Yeah, doesn't "Terraformers," isn't that like 15,000 years you're covering?
- [Annalee] Yeah, no, there's quite a bit of time that goes by. I really love narratives that link together across generations and help us conceive of generational projects. And we have actually lots of great examples of people trying to tell those kinds of stories using infrastructure, which sounds like a weird thing to say. But if you look at a building like Notre-Dame, which, of course, people have been very sad about it burning down and it's been rebuilt. But that is a structure that took generations to build. And being able to see that building and think about all the generations who built it is a kind of exercise in storytelling. It's a way of saying, "Okay, this is what happens when people work together across generations. We can make something incredible." But it takes cross-generational cooperation. We have to cooperate with people who aren't born yet and cooperate with people who are long dead. And the power of story can bring us together with those people. The power of history brings us together with those people, and that's why we can't lose our history. And if we put together all these stories, that gives us a kind of social infrastructure for imagining where we wanna go next.
- [Anne] Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. Their most recent novel is "The Terraformers" and their most recent nonfiction book is a history of PSYOPs called "Stories Are Weapons." We also mentioned their earlier books for "Lost Cities" and "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction." "To the Best of Our Knowledge" comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. Our producers are Angelo Bautista, Shannon Henry Kleiber, Charles Monroe-Kane, and our technical director is Joe Hardtke with help from Sarah Hopefl. Additional music this week comes from Sergey Cheremisinov, Ketsa, Serge Quadrado, and Arc Sound. The executive producer of "To the Best of Our Knowledge" is Steve Paulson. And I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks for listening and stay safe.
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