Rising Quotes

“I call this new form of climate anxiety endsickness. Like motion sickness or sea sickness, endsickness is its own kind of vertigo—a physical response to living in a world that is moving in unusual ways, toward what I imagine as a kind of event horizon.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“We are individually preoccupied by the lives of those we know and expect to know: our grandparents, parents, children, and, if we are lucky, grandchildren. Which is why it is so fantastically difficult for us to recognize that in our frenzied attempt to keep nearly eight billion people fed, watered, clothed, sheltered, and distracted, we are fundamentally altering the geophysical composition of the planet at a pace previously caused only by cataclysmic events, like the massive asteroid that smashed into eastern Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“What we’re doing is buying time, some buffer, in which to wrap our heads around the fact that—in the grand scheme of things—this isn’t going to work,” Jeremy says. “We’re going to have to move infrastructure; we’re going to have to move people. Lots of them. And in the meantime, if we can make our marshes more resilient to buy us all—humans, plants, and animals—some breathing room in which to figure out how to retreat responsibly, then let’s do that.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“It’s often folks with the least that share the most.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“I am told that the amount of rain that fell on Pensacola that day was so uncommon that events like it are statistically supposed to occur only once every five hundred years. Eight hundred and forty days later, the intense precipitation that drowned Baton Rouge was dubbed a thousand-year storm. And a year after that, Houston was inundated during a thousand-year hurricane. In a little more than three years, residents of the Gulf Coast have seen millennia’s worth of ruinous water.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“We have to start relocating the things we value,” he says. “Like the Smithsonian Institution, which is sited on top of an old marsh. We have to make seed banks, a global archive for the future, and we have to move our power plants, in order to maintain a functioning society. We have to start lining the trash dumps that line our shores, we have to start preparing for inundation. Remember, the last time carbon dioxide levels were the same as they are today, the ocean was one hundred feet higher.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“In recent years scientists have discovered that coastal wetlands—salt marshes, but also mangroves and saw grass meadows—store a quarter of the carbon found in the earth’s soil, despite covering only 5 percent of the planet’s land area. That means that an acre of healthy coastal wetlands will clean far more air than an acre of the Amazon. “They sequester about fifteen times more carbon than upland forests,” Beverly tells me. “But how effective are these ecosystems when they have been dammed, diked, culverted, or drained? That’s what we’d like to know.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“have started to think that those who lived on the island and fled are some of the first climate refugees. By 2050 there will be two hundred million people like them worldwide, two million of whom will be from right here in Louisiana.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“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.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“Of the fourteen hundred endangered or threatened species in the United States, over half are wetland dependent.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“Essentially, he [Brother David Steindle-Rast] says that it is not that you can have gratitude for everything all the time but that there is always the possibility of gratitude; there is always something that you can tap into ... -- Laura Sewall”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“Vulnerability is inherited”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“We have to become more comfortable with uncertainty - Laura Sewall”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“summer, is going to be called Songs from Space Station H, meaning the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. “This place is so”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“The film Beasts of the Southern Wild, a”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“In Passamaquoddy [Maine] our sacred petroglyphs—those carvings in rock that were put there thousands of years ago—are now being put under water by the rising seas.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“Between 1992 and 2010, Harris County (of which Houston is a part) lost 30 percent of its wetlands to urban development. Had these natural sponges not been paved over, the “Bayou City” would have fared better during Harvey.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“that three Category 4 (or higher) hurricanes would make landfall in the United States over the same swampy fortnight seemed exceptional at first, and then it didn’t. We shouldn’t have been surprised; the surface temperature of the tropical Atlantic—where many hurricanes are born—was between one and three degrees Fahrenheit above average in 2017. Warmer seas, when combined with higher atmospheric temperatures, feed storms, helping to turn average hurricanes into spectacularly destructive events. Combine these conditions with higher tides and a half century of risky development, and you get large swaths of the North American coastline inundated in previously unimaginable amounts of water.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“in the latter half of 2017, ten consecutive storms became hurricanes. The last time this occurred was in 1893—and many meteorologists are skeptical of that, because technology and thus tracking were so much less advanced then. But in 2017 we had our cell phones out and the tidal gauges turned on. Together we bore witness to a string of storms so powerful that the National Weather Service had to invent not one but two entirely new colors to reflect their severity.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“Only three years after American soldiers seized the Mexican province of California, the Swamp Land Act of 1850 passed Congress, granting new states the right to sell flood-prone land to individuals as long as the water could be drained from it. The legislation sparked the nationwide annihilation of wetlands from the Florida Everglades to the San Francisco tidelands. The Swamp Land Act was a classic form of the get-rich-quick scheme that defined the colonial project: steal indigenous lands, auction them off to the highest bidder, and then enforce property taxes, guaranteeing a long-term source of funds. It would transfer the promise of future financial security away from the country’s first inhabitants. In just two years’ time, nearly 790,000 acres of California’s wetlands were shifted into the hands of fewer than two hundred private owners, who, having paid the bargain rate of $ 1.25 per acre with no money down, proceeded to dam, dike, drain, and fill the largest estuary on the Pacific coast.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“Jia Tolentino, a staff writer at the New Yorker, recently described the aftermath of sexual harassment and assault like this: “One of the cruelest things about these acts is the way that they entangle, and attempt to contaminate, all of the best things about you.” What you once thought of as strengths are twisted into weaknesses: if you are open then you are not good at delineating boundaries; if you are empathetic then you are easily manipulated; and if you are curious and friendly then you are asking for it.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“Today there are twenty-nine dams and locks on the upper Mississippi, and the lower Mississippi is lined with levees and floodwalls. Instead of preserving the low-lying land at the Mississippi’s mouth, these river controls have contributed to its destruction by impounding land-replenishing sediment behind man-made barriers upstream. Thanks in part to these interventions, the Isle de Jean Charles, and the wetlands surrounding it, started to disappear, not just temporarily beneath floodwaters, but for good.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“In 1951 the first oil rig was installed nearby, and with the rig came “channelization,” the digging of access routes through the marsh. The oil companies were supposed to “rock” each channel—to backfill it—when the rigs left, reducing the movement of water through the fragile marshland that surrounds and supports the bayous. “But they didn’t do that, they didn’t maintain the bayou like they said they would, and now the gulf is at our back door,” I was told in town. Every year, thanks to erosion, the channels grow wider, eating into the land that once comprised Jean Charles.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore

“Five times in the history of the earth nearly all life has winked out, the planet undergoing a series of changes so massive that the overwhelming majority of living species died. These great extinctions are so exceptional they even have a catchy name: the Big Five. Today seven out of ten scientists believe that we are in the middle of the sixth. But there is one thing that distinguishes those past die-offs from the one we are currently constructing: never before have humans been there to tell the tale.”
― Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore