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Nonfiction

Searching for Language to Capture How Climate Change Has Altered Our World

Benjamin Prince, whose house was spared from the flood, paddles down a flooded residential street in Atlanta in 2009.Credit...Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

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RISING
Dispatches from the New American Shore
By Elizabeth Rush
Illustrated. 299 pp. Milkweed Editions. $26.

A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story. Noah and his biblical flood, a tale likely descended from the even older story of Utnapishtim in the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” but there is also Da Yu and the flood that supposedly inspired China’s imperial feats of hydraulic engineering, Brahma and Manu, and, perhaps oldest of all, the 10,000-year-old tales of certain indigenous peoples of Australia, who sing of homelands lost beneath the rising waves at the end of the last ice age. Most of these tales take the form of a warning and an elegy, and now Elizabeth Rush’s deeply felt “Rising” joins that long tradition.

This is a book about language, first and foremost, a literary approach to a real-world problem. So while facts and figures do find their way in, conveying how fast the waters will rise or how far the sea may ultimately intrude, they are not the main focus, unlike, say, in Cynthia Barnett’s illuminating and gorgeous “Rain: A Natural and Cultural History.” Instead, this book is interested in a new vocabulary — using words like “rampike” (a tree killed by saltwater intrusion) or the naturalist’s lingo of tupelo, catbrier and bull (rush, not animal). As Rush argues: “I believe that language can lessen the distance between humans and the world of which we are a part; I believe that it can foster interspecies intimacy and, as a result, care.”

Just as a wetland can adapt to rising sea levels through the process known as accretion — the slow buildup of organic material as the marsh lives and dies — so too does the accretion of detail here help make the case that the seas have already risen as a result of human-driven global warming, affecting Americans who confront this change on every coast with feelings of loss, fear and confusion. Even the maps have changed; in the most recent government surveys, Louisiana has shed the names of 31 bayous and other coastal features. Those bayous have slipped beneath the waves of living memory, along with some 1,900 square miles of land.

As befits a literary effort, the writing strives for beauty: A persimmon from Isle de Jean Charles becomes a “shiny globe,” “full of sun and the little freshwater that still snakes its way along the island’s stubborn spine.” Rush captures nature with precise words that almost amount to poetry; the book is further enriched with illuminating detail from the lives of those people inhabiting today’s coasts.

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But language raises as many questions as it answers in the case of this crisis. What distinguishes a refugee from a migrant from an exile? When does retreat become flight? What is wisdom versus recalcitrance, and who determines what makes a happy home? The American language seems to lack the words to adequately capture this creeping calamity, the words that will help Americans comprehend the future, accept the fact that the waters will rise and continue to rise for decades and centuries thanks both to melting glaciers and to the physical expansion of warmer waters. The last time carbon dioxide made up this proportion of the air, the rock record suggests sea levels were 100 feet higher. By 2100, the seas could rise anywhere between five inches and 10 feet, or more, depending on what we do and whom you trust to make that forecast. How profound our ignorance has been, how relatively new our knowledge. This provokes the need for new words, like “endsickness,” a kind of vertigo that Rush and others experience when confronted by weird climate phenomena like warmer waters intruding in the Gulf of Maine.

The dispatches of the subtitle really come straight from the people on the front lines of this drowning, much as Svetlana Alexievich skillfully accomplished in her Nobel Prize-winning reportage. Rush transcribes a range of voices, from a victim of Hurricane Sandy’s harrowing tale of devastating human loss to the plain truths spoken by people like Dan Kipnis, who has already fled Miami Beach: “Their dream is gonna drown.” To me, these are the most intense portions of the book, yet there is no character, not even Rush herself, to guide you through the whole of this story. Nor is there really a plot to follow, not even a chronology that points the way through a series of essays veering from haunting survivors’ tales to poetic musings on science.

It’s an intentional series of vignettes, however, bolstered by deep reporting and a sense of history, reminiscent in part of W. G. Sebald’s works evoking place, even up to including photographs, like the pictures of rampikes that mark various chapters. It’s often a treat to figure out where Rush is going with any particular story, “to discover the direction of your own thinking in the course of mining the past,” as she writes. “The conclusion arrived at not in advance but through the process, by unearthing whatever is buried in the strata.” There are also few solutions on offer beyond what she calls the “radically egalitarian” nature of “organized retreat” — the water will affect us all, and getting out of its way demands a collective response.

Rising seas trouble us so much not just because of global warming, but because of the choices our society has made about how to treat the coasts. Our ancestors filled in the wetlands, built more and more roads and homes along the seashore as well as dams that hold back replenishing, river-born silt, all of which has contributed to the coastal problems we face. We have hemmed in the natural world with urban forms, making it impossible for a wetland to retreat and adapt to changing conditions. And then there are the countless actions of heedless humans, constantly in motion in this time of great acceleration, perhaps even traveling to report a story about environmental change and changing the environment inexorably with that very travel. How much did all that travel add to the rising of the seas? I think it’s a question worth confronting.

Homo sapiens has long dealt with rising waters: Prehistoric Europeans had to move away from now-drowned Doggerland, the glacial outbursts of North America, even perhaps a sudden flooding at the Bosporus. Fine writing, no matter how exquisite, has yet to make most people care enough about global warming to make the changes necessary to combat it or adapt to it. That requires perhaps harsher language, like the conundrum of “raise or raze,” about the decision to increase a building’s height or relocate it along the future coastline. Class differences will determine who profits from this future coastline and who suffers, and, as Rush rightly notes, sea level rise could easily deepen the social problems we already face in this nation. On top of that, future flooding may not be gradual and manageable, but rather sudden and violent, like Hurricane Sandy.

This is a book for those who mourn the changing climate and coast as well as, perhaps, America’s diminishing literary culture; sadness benefits from lyrical prose. Rush’s faith in the power of words is real and touching and I obviously share it, or I wouldn’t be a writer myself. Elegies like this one will play an important role as people continue to confront a transformed, perhaps unnatural world, and grieve for the doomed or already lost. And then there will be a need for new tales, new songs, new speeches in perhaps the most important language in this crisis: the language of politics. To cope with the rising waters, we will need as many options — as many stories, especially ones of hope — as we can muster.

David Biello is the science curator for TED Talks and the author of “The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Here Comes the Flood. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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