Susan Crawford - Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm

Susan Crawford

Charleston

Race, Water, and the Coming Storm

Foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed

For Mitchell, and for everyone who has looked at a coastline and wondered

T he first decades of the twenty-first century will likely be remembered as a time of extreme political divisiveness in the United States. Efforts to address major problems through concerted action by government and other entities have been hampered by a degree of social polarization that some historians suggest rivals the decade of the 1850s and the lead up to the American Civil War. The dream of effectiveand bipartisanefforts to address problems that touch people all along the political spectrum seems elusive.

Political polarization has spilled over into science, with people taking sides on scientific issues based upon their political views. This has profoundly shaped the discourse about one of the most serious issues facing not just the United States, but the entire world: climate change. The consensus among the vast majority of scientists who study the issue is that the Earth is undergoing, and will continue to undergo, changes in climate that will transform agriculture, spur emigration from areas burdened by higher temperatures, create recurring catastrophic weather events, and flood cities built along coasts as ocean levels rise. Some, usually considered to be on the right, see talk of climate change and exhortations to try to do something as overblown and anti-economic growth. The charge that human beings may be the cause of, or are in some ways exacerbating the problem, is especially anathema to many in this group. They strenuously object to efforts to change human behavior with the goal of slowing down or arresting climate change. On the other side are environmentalists and those who are often designated as part of the left. They believe that drastic steps should be taken immediately to deal with what they see as an existential crisis.

As Susan Crawford makes plain in Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm, planet Earth has experienced extreme changes in climate for many millenniaice ages, changes in sea levels, land masses disappearing beneath oceans. But what is different about those situations and today is that we human beings have a greater awareness of what is happening, and actually have the chance to take measures to minimize the suffering that extreme conditions can cause. Our knowledge and predictive capacity allow for preparation. But how is this done in a society so riven by political partisanship and culture warring that people cannot, will not, agree on what constitutes knowledge. Moreover, efforts to prepare for the looming crisis are expensive. It is always difficult to get people to pay for future benefits at the expense of what they see as their current and immediate needs.

How does all of this play out in the context of Americas tortured racial history? Charleston raises this especially appropriate question because that history has been a significant source of the divisions that exist within American society today. The circumstances of Charleston, South Carolina are instructive on this point. Charleston was one of the major conduits for enslaved Africans brought to what would become the United States. It is estimated that nearly half of the captives passed through its historic port. Over the years, South Carolina became home to large numbers of African Americans. Indeed, by the time of the Civil War, there were three Black people for every one white person in the state. Of course, to protect the institution of racially based slavery, South Carolina led the Southern states out of the United States, precipitating the Civil War. After a brief period in Reconstruction when Black men participated in the government, the states legacy of resisting equal citizenship for Black people, through violence and legalized segregation, continued well into the twentieth century.

Now, as Charleston faces the prospects of sinking land and a rising sea level, Crawfords Charleston shows how important it is to consider the ways in which the legacies of slavery and racism have shaped and continue to shape the citys response (and nonresponse) to its precarious environmental position. For many white and well-off residents, Charlestons predicament is a real estate investment problem: do they sell now or remain? The questions are different for residents who are poor and do not own their homesrenters and residents of public housing. The story that unfolds in these pages reveals a history of second-class treatment of Black residents who, for generations, have lived burdened by recurrent flooding with little significant help from the city. Who have struggled to be heard despite great efforts by their community. All available evidence indicates that the problem of flooding will grow worse and worse, and the most economically and socially vulnerable people will be in ever more dire straits. Will the government authorities be able to rise above historical patterns and take action on behalf of the marginalized people in the city? It is a question for the local, state, and the federal governments, and it is one that will be asked about other American coastal cities. The nation deserves a good and right answer.

Annette Gordon-Reed

Carl M. Loeb University Professor

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

W e believe the map of the worlds coastlines is drawn by human occupation. In the minds eye, teeming masses of people stand on the edge of what they believe to be solid ground, gazing outward at the sea, their places taken seamlessly, endlessly, by younger versions of themselves. Some of those people, lucky and well-organized, supported by the societies in which they live, build structures whose windows look seaward as well, heaps of them, great clotted tangles of mud, steel, glass, and iron pressed, more or less, up against the water. From above, all these people and buildings together make up dark, comfortably solid shapes marking where land ends and liquid begins.

In reality, this map is not drawn by us. Over millions of years, sea levels have gone up and down. During the last ice age, tens of thousands of years ago, global shorelines extended miles beyond current land masses and sea levels were about 400 feet lower than they are now.

About 20,000 years ago, much of the watery area we now know as the North Sea was dry land. Imagine a continuous mass about the size of Denmark, plunked down between Britain and Holland. Now add gentle hills, valleys, streams, lakes, fish, birds, and ample quiet. Humans, too; in fact, people had likely been living there for almost a million years at that point, as far as we can tell. It must have been delightfulthere was beauty, and there was plenty to eat. Historians call this place Doggerland.

Then, about 8,500 years ago, ice lakes started to melt into the North Sea. The waters surrounding the residents of Doggerland began to rise. The richness of the land they lived on gradually started to change, as trees and vegetation were swallowed by wetlands, and as firm ground morphed from soil to sand to marsh. High places that had been linked by land became islands. New water channels gradually emerged. It was a slow process, but it was inexorable. The people of Doggerland would have had to change their ways over time, do things differently than their ancestors had done, in response to the rising waters.