Rising. Elizabeth Rush
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the result of two different physical and ecological processes. The first is called accretion. “As salt water flows in and out of the marsh, vegetation traps some of the sediments suspended in it, and as those sediments settle the marsh gradually gains elevation,” Cameron tells me. Accretion results in the building up of low-lying land; it is nature’s nimble backhoe. If accretion makes marsh migration possible, then rhizomes power the retreat. Dense, arterial, and interconnected, these specialized root systems run belowground, giving wetlands their shape. In the past, as sea levels rose and the marsh gained sediment, rhizomes would pull away from the increased salinity while simultaneously sending out new shoots, often uphill, in search of the kind of water that suited them best. As these plant communities moved up and in, the fauna that depended on them moved too. While the physical location of the salt marsh might change, its defining features would not.
But now that sea levels are rising faster than they have in the last twenty-eight centuries, the ocean and the tidal marsh are falling out of sequence. In the Ocean State, and along the rest of the Atlantic coast of North America, the rate of the rise is significantly higher than the global average. Here accretion is already being outpaced, which means that land that once was built up slowly is starting to slip beneath the sea’s surface. On top of that, if the marsh’s upland slope abuts some piece of human infrastructure—a road, or, as is the case at Jacob’s Point, an old railway line—as the rhizomes pull away there is nowhere less salty for them to thrust their spindly roots. The marsh is squeezed between the sea and the hard stop we built along its upland edge and, like the tupelo, it begins to drown in place.
“Maybe if the old Bristol line weren’t there, Jacob’s Point would stand a chance. But then again maybe not. It’s so hard to tell with accretion rates being what they are,” Cameron says. Then he adds, “It’s a terrifying and wonderful time to do the work that I do.”
Together we walk over the farthest bank, toward the shade of a bushy beach grape. Out in the Narragansett Bay, a flotilla of sailboats tacks back and forth, working its way south. The boats are from the nearby Barrington Yacht Club, which runs a summer program for locals. From where I stand it looks as though the campers can’t be much older than ten or twelve. “Capsize!” their instructor suddenly bellows, and all the little white sails dip beneath the surface of the bay. All, that is, but one. Then I hear another voice, whimpering, “I’m scared of being in over my head.” You and me both, kid.
That fall I attend the Rising Seas Summit at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston. I am there on a Metcalf Institute Fellowship, designed to deepen the relationship between environmental writers like me and the scientists on whom our work depends. Over the past twenty years, sea level rise modeling has gotten increasingly sophisticated. Today many modelers rely on a mixture of observational data (such as tidal gauge records), theorems that take into account the earth sciences (for example, factoring in the gravitational pull an ice sheet will have on a nearby body of water), and the geologic record (which provides insight into how quickly sea levels rose in the past). What nearly everyone agrees on is that sea level rise is accelerating at a rate far faster than modern man has ever witnessed. But precisely how high the waters will get, especially at any particular location and time in the future, remains somewhat difficult to predict. Among other things, sea level rise is not uniform. As ice sheets melt, their gravitational pull lessens and the ground beneath them rebounds, lowering sea levels nearby while simultaneously intensifying the phenomenon elsewhere. In other words, the places farthest from the largest chunks of melting ice, including the East Coast of the United States, are likely to experience higher rates of relative rise.
The ceiling of the Sheraton is covered in strings of crystal globes like dewdrops and ten-foot-wide linen lanterns likely dyed far away, in the cadmium-ripe fabric factories I’ve seen polluting the rivers around Dhaka. Beneath those looming lanterns and ridiculous lights I listen to all the different and conflicting predictions being made about the future of sea level rise. I hear about the two and a half feet of rise predicted by 2100—and the ten feet of rise predicted by 2100. The eighteen feet of rise if the planet heats another two degrees—and the thirty feet of rise if the planet heats by the same two degrees. I hear that, counterintuitively, the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will affect sea levels in Rhode Island more than the melting in Greenland—and I hear about the president of Kiribati buying land in Fiji because his island nation will soon be underwater.
“It is not a question of if but when,” says Ben Strauss, sea level rise expert and vice president of the nonprofit news organization Climate Central. Then he shows us a series of photorealistic mock-ups of the world’s major coastal cities, starting with Boston. “This image illustrates what four degrees of warming would look like, and corresponds roughly to business as usual,” he continues. “Business as usual” assumes that we will emit slightly more CO2 in the next eighty years than we have since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
On the screen above Ben’s head, light-blue water washes over just about everything in the city except Beacon Hill and the northernmost corner of Boston Common. MIT is underwater. So are Northeastern University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Fenway Park, Copley Square, and Newbury Street. That was the street where I bought my first Ani DiFranco album. The street my father revitalized in the late eighties by leasing town houses to European bistros and that above-mentioned record store. The street that transformed our formerly working-class family—my grandfather sold seltzer door-to-door—into one with the opportunities privilege provides. The street that paid for my college education.
On the screen, that street is gone.
Then Ben switches to a rendering that shows the maximum two degrees Celsius of warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends to avert catastrophe. The intersection of Massachusetts Avenue with Huntington Avenue—the very spot where Ben Strauss is standing—is still buried under a layer of blue.
In the ethereal hyperlight of the conference center I see that no matter what we do, many of the landmarks we have long navigated by are going to disappear. It is not a question of if but when.
During that fall I begin to suffer from an acute form of anxiety. Nameless storms so large they leave my house lightless and full of water spin into my dreams. My faith in natural processes, in the intricate systems of reciprocity that I was raised to believe keep nature from tilting out of balance, is lost. Gnawing uncertainty takes its place. I wonder if there is a threshold between immersing myself in my subject matter and drowning in it, and whether I have crossed that line. At night unprecedented storm surges rearrange the furniture and my family lineage. The commonly held notion that what has happened will happen again, that there are no new stories, this idea becomes fat with water, fully saturated, then it too slips beneath the sea’s dark surface.
Whenever I can, I pull away from my computer screen and ride back out to Jacob’s Point. There I wander in a landscape we do not yet have a name for, a marsh inundated by too much of the very thing that shaped it. I have read about the disappearance of tree frogs in Panama, the droughts scraping across Kenya, the heat waves killing thousands in Paris and Andhra Pradesh and Chicago and Dhaka and São Paulo. I have written about communities affected by sea level rise. But my life has seemed so removed, so buffered from those events.
At Jacob’s Point I am finally glimpsing the hem of the specter’s dressing gown. The tupelos, the dead tupelos that line the edge of this disappearing marshland, are my Delphi, my portal, my proof, the stone I pick up and drop in my pocket to remember. I see them and know that the erosion of species, of land, and, if we are not careful, of the very words we use to name the plants and animals that are disappearing is not a political lever or a fever dream. I see them and remember that those who live on the margins of our society are the most vulnerable, and that the story of species vanishing is repeating itself in nearly every borderland.
In a hundred years none of these trees will be here. No object thick with pitch to make the mind recollect. And if we do not call them by their names we will lose not only the trees themselves but also all trace of their having