key: cord-0299493-8gj82d0w
authors: Zackary Seitz, R.
title: E. Rush Rising: Dispatches from the new American shore 2019 Milkweed Editions Minneapolis, MN 264 pages, $16 (paperback), ISBN: 978- 1- 57131-381- 2
date: 2020-10-21
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1016/j.jssr.2020.09.001
sha: 6e11cb6d7e07a8be7d8cbb879f7e0872c9583501
doc_id: 299493
cord_uid: 8gj82d0w

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In Rising, Elizabeth Rush uses her experience as a female journalist and scholar to eloquently tell the stories of those impacted by a changing climate in America, and situate those experiences within the broader story of climate change. Specifically, Rush documents the story of changing coastlines, and what that means for the vulnerable residents who live within these rapidly evolving environments. Hearing the voices of vulnerable citizens already impacted by rising seas and environmental degradation brings clarity and power to voices often ignored by those in positions of power, and humanizes the threat that anthropogenic climate change poses. This work bridges the gap between the research and reporting on the changing climate and rising seas, with the citizens already impacted by the scientific research, and if we are living through the sixth great extinction event in the history of Earth, then "never before have humans been there to tell the tale" (Rush, 2019, p. 7). Rush explains, (U)nlike Descartes, 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. If, as Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests in her essay on the power of identifying all living beings with personal pronouns, "naming is the beginning of justice." (pp. 5e6)

Rising is an attempt to name and hear the voices of those already impacted by the changing world in which we live. By listening to their stories, we can begin to see the interconnectedness between the social constructs we create with the environment in which we live. Gone is the invisible barrier between our environment and our lived experience. The social studies presents unique opportunities for educators and scholars to analyze this interconnectedness and redefine what it means to be human within a changing ecological structure. Personalizing her realization of the rapidly changing and disappearing world, Rush writes, The dead tupelos that line the edge of this disappearing mashland, 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. (p. 14)

The central focus of the book is not based on the science behind climate change and sea level rise (though that science is present), but rather on how these scientific phenomena impact people that live in climate sensitive areas. Rush is currently a visiting lecturer in the English Department at Brown University, and has written articles appearing in The New York Times, Harpers, Orion, Le Monde Diplomatique and others (Rush, 2020) . In bringing to life the stories of people impacted by climate change, Rush utilizes creative non-fiction as her storytelling method, blending her narrative with those of whom she is interviewing, while aggregating it against the backdrop of impending sea level rise. In humanizing such a monumental, slow moving catastrophe, the reader feels the building pressure that sea level rise and increasing temperatures are bringing to communities, and how that pressure stretches the social fabric of what it means to be a citizen, and community member.

One of the core pillars of social studies education has been to aid in the "development of an appreciation of the nature and laws of social life, a sense of responsibility of the individual as a member of social groups, and the intelligence and the will to participate effectively in the promotion of the social well-being." (Dunn, 1916, p. 9 

The Journal of Social Studies Research j o u rn a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e ls e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / j s s r largest problem facing society, requiring complicated solutions to be implemented on a global scale. Teaching our students the social impacts of climate change foregrounds learning about solutions to the crisis, and presses the importance of implementing these solutions.

Rising's three sections lay out the story of climate change and how it impacts different parts of society. Grounded in a blend of reporting and creative non-fiction, each section features a mix between dispatches (explanations about the climate crisis "reported" from various locations) and first-person accounts of how climate change has impacted citizens in their everyday lives. Through this marrying of reporting and storytelling that Rush elevates the story of climate change and rising seas from abstract figures, numbers and possibilities into concrete ramifications of how people are already being impacted by the ecological disaster of climate change.

2.1. The password and part one: "Rampikes"

The beginning of the book opens with Rush recounting her first trip to the tidal marshes of Jacob's Point in Rhode Island, where she first encounters dead Tupelos, a type of tree that grew in the marsh. These Tupelos were poisoned by the slow creep of saltwater from the ocean making its way into the marsh, turning these once thriving trees into rampikes, a tree that has died due to saline inundation. Rush sees the rampikes (in Jacobs Point and beyond) to serve as the first of many signals that climate change is here, writing "I've encountered so many of these rampikes that I have come to think of them as a series of memorials… Together they commemorate the tipping point: the moment the salt water began to move in" (p. 47e48). Beyond Rush's own account, other first person accounts in this chapter include the words of Laura Sewall, a resident in Maine who's home overlooks a tidal marsh and who has witnessed changes in the environment of the marsh in her time living there, and Dan Kipnis, a Miami Beach resident who shares the story of how his family's house has become ruined by sea-level rise.

These stories help crystalize Rush's dispatches from locations being impacted by rising oceans. The dispatches (written similarly to features you would find in The New York Times Magazine or The Atlantic) in this section focus on how life in Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, and Miami Beach, Florida have been altered for the citizens that remain in these communities and the science behind the rotting of the Sprague River Marsh. The dispatches serve to inform the reader of the harm brought to communities in climate sensitive regions, and how this further shapes the lives of citizens who remain behind. In Isle de Jean Charles, Rush recounts a conversation with a resident (Chris Brunet) about signs of environmental changes (in this case, the two of them witnessing a dolphin swimming in water that had previously been freshwater), and while for her this was a clear sign of environmental changes, for Chris "the worst destruction is taking place in our communities" (p. 25). The destruction within the community of Isle de Jean Charles are a result of how citizens have left, searching for better economic opportunity, and less vulnerability to the increasing destruction of storms.

Moving thousands of miles away, Rush then documents a group of scientists attempting to understand the rotting of the Sprague River Marsh in Phippsburg, Maine and how this explains the effects sea level rise has on our environments, and how those changes impact the planet as a whole. Because coastal wetlands (marshes, mangroves and saw grass meadows) store a quarter of the carbon found in the earth's soil while only comprising about five-percent of the land mass, destruction of these areas due to rising seas releases disproportionate amounts of sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere. In one section, Rush describes how humans have tried to alter these marshes through various engineering measures, and in doing so changed the complex ecosystems that made the marsh thrive.

Continuing with the theme of human interventions worsening environmental outcomes, Rush opens the next dispatch with "(i)n 1890, just over six thousand people lived in the damp lowlands of south Florida. Since then the wetlands… have been largely drained, strip malls have replaced Seminole camps, and the population has increased a thousandfold." (p. 71). Rush then discusses the current impact sea level rise is having on residents in south Florida, such as flooding caused simply by high tides, and projects those impacts into the future. Rush describes how discriminatory banking practices in the past, such as redlining, have made it difficult for low to middle-income cities (where the majority of citizens are people of color) to build and maintain strong property tax bases and provide basic services, much less mitigate the effects of climate change.

This section opens with perhaps the most powerful first person account of the book with the story of Nicole Montalto, a resident of Staten Island, New York. Nicole describes her harrowing escape from her childhood home that her father had lived in since he was six years old during Hurricane Sandy. Anyone familiar with watching media coverage of hurricanes is familiar with the large scale destruction that they can bring to communities and states. Nicole details the increasing severity of the storm, and the confusion and anxiety of not being able to contact her father, who remained behind while she drove to a safer location. Nicole's father ended up passing away, probably due to injuries sustained from the rush of water into their home.

Through Nicole's account, Rush details the science behind why communities, such as the east side of Staten Island, are vulnerable to extreme weather events like Sandy. Rush describes the compounding nature of how population increases in post-World-War-Two New York pushed people to develop communities further out on former tidal marshes. While this afforded them the ability to own their own property, the location of their land meant that they would be vulnerable to the first signs of climate change, a concept that would fail to become a part of the social zeitgeist for decades. Equally challenging is that solutions to relocating people away from vulnerable areas are complicated and require buy-in from members of the community who ultimately have to be the ones to make the decision to leave. Rhizomes, in this case, refer both to the interconnected and subterranean root systems of cordgrass that define a healthy tidal marsh, as well as the social fabric that binds communities together. Implementing policies to solve the impacts of climate change is going to require us to consider not just the scientific measures to take, but what those measures mean to the communities impacted by the crisis and the solutions to the crisis.

The next two chapters of this section delve more explicitly into the concept of vulnerability and risk. The account of Marilynn Wiggins illustrates an example of what it means to be a vulnerable citizen in the climate crisis. She details how the neighborhood in Pensacola, Florida that she resides, The Tanyard, is not only prone to floods, but is also home to an old sewage treatment plant and a mosquito control chemical plant. She explains how the neighborhood park was poisoned, and black dust comes from the water faucets in homes. Rush then discusses how this vulnerability becomes translated into risk by government agencies, researchers, and insurance companies. When the climate strikes and destroys homes, government regulations often force residents to rebuild new homes in the same vulnerable location as before, essentially throwing good money after bad.

Beyond the climate crisis, Rush takes this section to also discuss issues of being an outsider, a white woman, reporting on issues that disproportionately impact citizens who do not have her freedom to leave the situation that they are currently living in. Furthermore, Rush discusses the sexism that she encounters as a female researcher and reporter, facing sexual harassment by both people she meets and interviews, as well as a senior male colleague.

Detailing how this senior colleague went from being a source of support and offering her prestigious speaking opportunities and fellowships to her harasser affords White male researchers (which I am) to consider the power structures that allow for those in positions of power to take advantage of those who are more vulnerable, and the needless destruction that the harasser inflicts upon the harassed. While her experience was not directly related to the climate crisis, Rush connects the vulnerability that she felt in these situations (and the needless pain it caused) to the vulnerability that faces those who face immense obstacles to leaving regions vulnerable to destruction caused by climate change.

Ending this section, Rush returns to Isle de Jean Charles to report on the plan to relocate the citizens of the island to a different location, paid for by the government. While these plans to relocate whole communities offer a glimpse into the future for residents of vulnerable regions, it is clear that these solutions present a different kind of loss, one that isn't easily quantifiable. The idea that whole communities need to be relocated is an extreme measure, which should only be taken in the direst of circumstances. Yet, while reading this book, it becomes clear that those dire circumstances are already here for some, and they are spreading to other communities throughout the country.

The third part of the book begins with a dispatch from H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. While not located on the ocean, the forest is one of twenty-eight Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) centers in the United States. These centers provide scientists with the long-term research opportunities to study things like climate change. It is here that Rush encounters researchers tracking the movements of the Rufous hummingbird, a migratory bird no larger than a spool of thread that travels nearly five-thousand miles to their breeding grounds in the forest from their wintering areas surrounding the Gulf of Mexico, in the areas where Cypress trees meet the marshes that Rush has been reporting. Through these tiny hummingbirds, the interconnectedness and the scope of the crisis crystalizes. It is easy to focus only on the human causes and impacts of climate change, but when thinking about how our actions impact the broader web of life on Earth, it becomes more difficult to justify continuing extractive human behavior.

The book concludes with a dispatch from San Francisco's South Bay Salt Pond restoration project, an attempt to return the former salt ponds to their natural state of being an estuary. Documenting the attempt to return the salt ponds to their natural coastal wetland state highlights the destruction that was caused by human engineering, and the even greater feat of engineering needed to undo all of that engineering. The book ends with Rush describing how "organized retreat is one of the few adaptive strategies that feels appropriately humble and… acknowledges the scale of the threat." (p. 249). Organized retreat, as Rush describes it, involves having the government pay for communities to move en masse away from climate sensitive regions, and stay together as a community in a new location. Coupled with new investments in infrastructure and government support, organized retreat presents the opportunity to allow for coastal wetlands and marshes to return to their natural state, protect our coasts, and sequester excess carbon from our atmosphere.

Rising has been critically acclaimed, with numerous book reviews published including in The New York Times (Biello, 2018) , and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The book also appears on the list of recommended books for teaching climate justice by the Zinn Education Project. In reviewing this book through a social studies lens, I hope to help K-12 social studies educators see how the stories found in Rising can be used in classes as a way to investigate the social cost (Coase, 1960) of climate change, climate justice, and finding equitable solutions to climate change.

These topics, as well as discussions surrounding community, are powerful social studies topics, allow students to see past the statistics and models surrounding climate change, and engage in authentic intellectual work (King, Newman, & Carmichael, 2009 ) in the classroom.

We are living amid an ecological crisis (Kissling & Bell, 2020) . While teaching ecological issues within social studies is not necessarily a new concept (Hepburn, Shrum, & Simpson, 1978) , the topic is currently a fringe topic within the field due to the notion that "climate change is solely a scientific issue, that there is already much other social studies content with which to engage, and that climate change is politically controversial in the United States" (Kissling & Bell, 2019, p. 20) . However, there has been a recent push within the field to bring these issues to the forefront of the subject. Houser (2009) discussed the importance of "citizenship education being located within a broader context of environmental sustainability" (p. 204) through the teachings of an "ecological democracy" (p. 207). An ecological democracy would have students contemplate their place within the environmental matrix that supports human life. Kissling and Barton (2013) build on the concept of ecological democracy and argue for social studies teachers to include ecological citizenship to their traditional teachings of citizenship in social studies classrooms. Furthermore, there have been several practitioner-focused articles published to give teachers concrete lesson ideas on how to incorporate these issues in their classes. Rising, when read through the lens of social studies education, presents unique first and second person accounts of the climate crisis and how it impacts citizens throughout the country. These stories could complement studying climate issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, including reports of pollution exacerbating the severity of the infection (Kann, 2020) as well as air quality improvements due to less burning of fossil fuels (Goldbaum, 2020) . Using these examples and stories can give students the chance to see the human impacts of climate change and rising seas, and humanize an issue that often gets lost in scientific data.

The climate crisis presents long-term issues that are going to require equitable global solutions. While typically taught in science classrooms, teaching the social impacts of the climate crisis is important for students to understand the full impact that this poses for their lives. Because social studies has historically focused on citizenship education, it is uniquely poised to prepare students to learn not only the science behind the crisis, but how to advocate for the changes needed to solve the crisis. Rising gives teachers the opportunity to bring the human impacts of climate change into their classes, and allow students to have a more complete understanding of the issue.

Searching for language to capture how climate change has altered our world

The problem of social cost

NASA probes environment, COVID-19 impacts, possible links

Effects of coordinated environmental studies in social studies and science on student attitudes toward growth and pollution

Ecological democracy: An environmental approach to citizenship education. Theory & Research in Social Education

Poor air quality has been linked to Covid-19 impacts

Authentic intellectual work: Common standards for teaching social studies

Interdisciplinary study of the local power plant: Cultivating ecological citizens

Climate change and Pennsylvania social studies teaching

Teaching social studies amid ecological crisis. Theory & Research in Social Education