Resisting Extraction: An Interview with Elizabeth Rush

For the most part, people really wanted to speak with me. In the beginning, that felt very radical.
 

Introduction

There are many ways to read Elizabeth Rush’s multifaceted Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Milkweed Editions, 2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. Most straightforwardly, it is creative reportage about the precarious state of various U.S. communities facing coastal flooding in recent decades. Its first-person testimonies position the reader in the place of those facing climate’s disastrous effects—at once tragic, absurd, and predictable.

It is also an interpolated memoir of Rush’s own experiences, ranging from her flight from an abusive relationship to meeting countless strangers in seaside towns. These moments underscore the book’s function as Rush’s parallel reconstruction of her own identity in a time of crisis. Not unlike Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, an accounting from witnesses of the disastrous explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986 and one of Rush’s key influences, Rising is a “chronicle of the future”: it excavates for us the times ahead as the seas rise and economic ideologies clash with lived experiences.

At Bryn Mawr College, located just outside Philadelphia, I teach primarily Russian culture of various sorts. But when designing a course on ecological displacement, I knew I wanted to incorporate Rising. Rush’s use of the Biblical flood as a subtext for what is going on around us on the coasts, for instance, echoed how Russophone writers turn to the mythological, folkloric, and religious for meaning in the face of tragedy. The oral history techniques that undergird Rising mirrored those of Alexievich in Voices from Chernobyl. My students had the chance to explore these resonances in an interview with Rush via Zoom, where we discussed her methods, her inspirations, and her hope of escaping the extractive pitfalls of telling these sorts of stories.

None of those stories about the slow violence of climate change and the storm’s aftermath were making it into the news in a way that felt meaningful to me.

Interview

Cassy Fantini: How did you choose the topic of coastal flooding for your book? What, in the context of climate reporting, made you feel that this was the story you wanted to tell at that particular time?

Elizabeth Rush: Rising came out in 2018. I became a mother in 2020, and with the pandemic, it feels like I birthed that book into a completely separate world—for better and worse. I’ve been writing about climate change for about 12 years now. Early on, in 2010 to 2011, it was hard to get climate change stories into the news at all. It was a different landscape. If you were going to get climate change into the news, you had to tie your stories to some record-breaking storm, heat wave, or weather event. There was very little space for the kinds of stories that were most transformative to me as someone who was spending so much time in frontline flood communities.

I was teaching at the College of Staten Island (CSI) when Hurricane Sandy hit. Our school shut down for two weeks. When I came back to the classroom, a lot of my students were missing. Many of the students at CSI are first-generation students who are holding down jobs. Students were displaced by this storm and had to move into housing far away from the college campus. They had to decide whether they had time to commute, go to school, and work. A lot of students had to say, “No, I don’t have time to go to school right now.” I lost track of almost all of those students. I think of one student from Russia who was living in a basement apartment that flooded. She was one of my most brilliant students, and she never made it back into the classroom. I suspect that her ability to get a degree was lost as a result of this storm. None of those stories about the slow violence of climate change and the storm’s aftermath were making it into the news in a way that felt meaningful to me.

I knew that how we were talking about climate change in the news media landscape was significantly flawed. I started to write grant applications to try to buy myself time to write differently about sea level rise. At this point in my career, I was a freelance journalist and an adjunct professor. I thought of being an adjunct professor as the base foundation of my yearly salary. Together, my adjunct and freelance work made it barely possible for me to live in New York City. I started writing grants to try to get into a postdoctoral position that would pay me to teach at a higher salary point so that I could free up time to write about sea level rise in a manner that felt closer to the emotional, spiritual, and psychological experiences taking place in frontline communities. I was really lucky to land an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in the humanities at Bates College, so I left New York and my husband got a job at Brown University. I moved to Providence and started working part-time at this postdoctoral position in Maine.

Grace Sewell: In some of your interviews, you’ve noted the impact that Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl has had on you as a writer. How do you situate your own work and methods in relation to Alexievich’s texts?

Elizabeth Rush: One of the professors at Bates was a woman named Jane Costlow, who studied environmental literature and Russian literature. We became close friends and colleagues. At some point during my first year, she handed me Voices from Chernobyl. As soon as I read that book, something clicked into place in my brain. I realized that all of the flood survivor testimonies I had been collecting and transcribing for five years could enter into this book without being mediated by me. These people did not have to be characters in my text. They could speak from the pages of this book in their own voices.

That felt particularly important to me in the context of the story of Nicole Montalto, who lost her father during Hurricane Sandy. To this day, I remember when she told me that story. I had been spending time in her community for over a year. The day she told me her story, I had never met her before. Nicole said to me, “You’re writing a book, so I’m going to tell you the story of what happened to me and my father on the night of Hurricane Sandy.” Nicole had not been wanting to speak to reporters after the storm, because she felt like they often got the story wrong. She told me the story for two hours. I just listened. I went home and transcribed that interview and did nothing with it until Jane put Voices from Chernobyl in front of me.

What you read in the book is about 5 percent of what Nicole told me. To get to that 5 percent, I cut out parts of the text and moved things around. I wrote some introductory phrases in places to reconstruct the story and allow it to flow. I sent that revised version to Nicole and asked whether she wanted anything significantly changed and if she would be willing to have her story open the chapter. I was very nervous about asking, given that the story is so personal, but I knew that I did not want to include it in the book if she was unhappy with it. That would be too akin to the extractive practices that disregard frontline communities, which bear the brunt of our climate change present and future. The act of taking the story out of the frontline community without being accountable to the speaker felt too similar to the things that I wanted this book to critique. Nicole became my collaborator. I entered into a collaborative dance with every speaker who gives testimony in Rising.

José Vergara: Along similar lines, there are moments in Alexievich’s texts when she intrudes as an editor with parentheses, brackets, or some kind of commentary on what is going on—crying, silence. When and how did you make the decision to intervene in the testimonies in your book?

Elizabeth Rush: Testimony gives the illusion of the writer not being present. The extent to which you want to remind the reader that you are shaping the voice on the page is up to the writer. I think of Alexievich intervening in the titling of the testimonies and the places where she notes the physical action of the speaker. For me, these gestures are there to subtly remind the reader that I’m still controlling this narrative. I think it’s more manipulative to pretend that I’m not present. I don’t want the relationship to seem completely horizontal; there always is a power dynamic at play. These moments remind the reader not to forget about the exchange that’s at the heart of the book. I teach testimonial storytelling at Brown, and we talk about titles and things that exist outside of the testimony as paratext. I place great emphasis on my students thinking about what they want the paratext to be, if it should be there at all, and what its function should be. I think about Studs Terkel, who is much more present in the devices used to frame the speakers than Alexievich. It’s a choice to obfuscate your presence completely—in some texts, the compilers disappear.

Sophia Cunningham: How do you work to balance scientific evidence with personal testimonies as you did in Rising to create a broader image of the current climate crisis? To gain a better understanding of climate change and the disasters stemming from it, we need to combine these tactics, which are seen as opposites by some. Do you feel that more personal stories are needed in scientific reportage of the environment currently?

Elizabeth Rush: As I have reflected on the success of that gesture—trying to involve the speakers in the editing process—I have noticed that the people with whom I developed the closest relationships made the most changes to their testimonies. I think that has to do with the comfort level they felt with me. I registered as an expert for the people I did not know well so they hesitated to question my authority. However, I was able to grow into a more horizontal relationship with some of the participants. I’m in the middle of sending the testimonies to the speakers for their feedback as part of my current book project, which is about a journey that I took to the edge of Antarctica to the Thwaites Glacier, which nobody had been to before. The book tells that story as well as the story of choosing to have a child as the climate crisis accelerates, both from my perspective and from the perspectives of 23 of my shipmates. Since I lived alongside these people for three months, they are much more involved in making changes to their testimonies.

I’ve never had someone ask me to change something that I thought would change the heart of the story or their intention at that moment. It’s always those tiny details that matter to the speakers inside of their communities. In terms of my writing process, I’m trying to be more deliberate about forming horizontal relationships with the people who speak in my books so that I can guarantee that they are part of the collaborative process as we bring the testimony to print.

I do think that our storytelling inside of the climate change conversation is significantly lacking that human element and that artistic element.

Isolde Gerosa: Do you think there are qualifications that should be met, by writers, to write about the climate crisis? For instance, you have academic and professional experience in environmental journalism, which aided in your ability to connect and interview victims of environmental disaster, but in a time where these human stories need to be shared, do you think we should limit who can and can’t write about them? 

Elizabeth Rush: Can I ask you a question?

Isolde Gerosa: Yeah.

Elizabeth Rush: Is your question concerned with getting the science wrong, or is your question concerned with being an outsider and writing stories about communities that have historically been outside of this discourse?

Isolde Gerosa: Both. I think sometimes there is a disconnect between the stories and the science, whereas they’re still very much connected.

Elizabeth Rush: Okay. How would I put it…? Since Rising has been published, the amount of climate change news that we have has expanded exponentially, and it’s also become a conversation that’s much more aware of the way that structural inequality informs climate vulnerability, and those things in an abstract sense are really great. As someone who follows this conversation so closely and is so immersed in it, I also worry that the abundance of poorly written stories in that genre makes us sort of immune to the news. I just feel like we’ve sort of cycled from this moment of no one caring about climate change, to so many people caring about climate change, to “Oh, yeah, climate is yesterday’s news.” We saw it with the IPCC report that came out [in February 2022], and it’s Russia invading Ukraine that’s number one, and then number two is the IPCC that says the same shit they say, which is that it’s getting worse faster than we thought.

And there’s some part of us that’s so used to that story, in very non-emotional language, that it just doesn’t even register anymore, even though what that report is saying is if we don’t turn this ship around soon we’re talking about driving the extinction of half the known species on the planet. That’s mind bogglingly finite. And so, do I wish everyone was a better storyteller? I wish scientists were better storytellers, but they also need to be scientists to do the science. There’s some part of me that doesn’t want to limit who gets to tell that story. I’m fundamentally opposed to that as an idea, but I do think that our storytelling inside of the climate change conversation is significantly lacking that human element and that artistic element.

I also want to mention climate change writer Dan Sherrell’s book Warmth. It’s written in the form of a letter to his potential unborn child. He’s kind of a climate activist, and he’s just wrestling with how to live under the mantle of incredible grief and anxiety that comes with climate change. I think it’s a great book. And he said something like, “Oh, now all we’re doing is arguing about the narrative shape of the climate change story. If all you people who are arguing about the narrative shape of the climate change story just do boots-on-the-ground activism in your community, then we might actually turn things around.” There’s that issue, too.

Isolde Gerosa: I think what kind of inspired that question was that the only time I read about climate change in a more casual way, that is, before reading your book, was in The Water Will Come by… I forgot the author’s name, but I think those are the only two times I read about climate change in a less stat, stat, stat format but through bigger stories.

Elizabeth Rush: The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodall. He and I were on the same boat to Antarctica.

Isolde Gerosa: Oh, and is he a geologist or journalist?

Elizabeth Rush: He’s a journalist. He’s a journalist for Rolling Stone.

Isolde Gerosa: I thought of those two books in the same way, which led me to wonder about qualifications that people should have, or whether there even is a “should,” to write about these stories.

Elizabeth Rush: He wrote a series of articles about this scientific expedition that we were both a part of, that are all already published, and I’m working on this book about the expedition that will be out in maybe a year and a half. I sometimes look to his articles to see how he makes sense of language and the science that we were doing onboard the ship, and I’m keenly aware that he and I share very little stylistically, in that his pieces have this fast paced, kind of a little bit nerdy, dude-bruh tone to them. He’s like, “Look at these really cool gadgets!” But he also writes very punchy sentences. I just see that he’s been trained, and it makes sense that he writes for Rolling Stone. He has an imagined audience, and he’s been working to communicate effectively to that audience for decades, and he’s really good at it, so there’s a part of me that thinks, “Yeah, professional writers exist for a reason.” You know, I’ve never really thought about it, because there’s some training around training journalists on how to get up to date on climate change science, but what if we were to train journalists to become better writers? That would be nice.

Cassy Fantini: When you were in these communities were most people willing to speak to you, or was it hard to find people who wanted their stories to be published?

Elizabeth Rush: I’m not sure how clear it is in Rising that in almost every community that I worked in, I was going door to door and just knocking on stranger after stranger’s door. It was kind of easy to identify places that had flooding problems; you can often see it in the structures themselves. You see these hints of the water line and the way the paint peels. You increasingly can find the places that are flooding through apps like Climate Central’s Surging Seas that maps social vulnerability on top of flood risk.

I tended to be going door to door in communities that often were left out of mainstream news media coverage. For the most part, people really wanted to speak with me. In the beginning, that felt very radical. I thought, “Okay, I’m the first person who’s ever listened to them about this in this way.” The longer I’ve spent in those kinds of communities, the more I can recognize that I think there was also a hope, like, “Oh, if I share my story my circumstances are going to change.” And that is not the case. My listening to the story doesn’t generate infrastructure change inside this community, doesn’t generate national policy change. So the more I do this work, the more I’m up front in those initial encounters to say, “This is who I am, this is what I’m doing. I’m really interested in hearing your story. I can’t guarantee that anything is going to happen as a result of that.” I feel like that has to be on the table before this person takes a significant portion of their day to talk to me.

The other thing I can say on that front is that Rising as a book, as a thing in the publishing world, has done so much better than I ever imagined when I wrote it. I never imagined that years later I’d still be talking in university settings, never imagined it would be a finalist for the Pulitzer, never imagined any of that. And so the book’s done really well and I guess some part of me felt, “Oh, well, then things are going to change, right?” But just because people read your book doesn’t mean that change will come.

Again, thinking about my responsibility in these communities, as a writer, to the places that I write about as an outsider, one thing that I’ve started to do is sort of twofold. I now donate a portion of all my speaking fees to this really cool group called the Anthropocene Alliance, the largest collection of frontline flood survivors in the country. They have over 100,000 members, and their whole thing is to support frontline flood communities and the solutions they’d like to see implemented in their particular locale, and they do that by connecting them to pro bono legal counsel and pro bono hydrological assessments, in addition to just connecting all of these disparate communities to one another, so they can share what’s working for them and what’s not. We have a lot of that kind of networked climate change and adaptation solutions in fancy cities like Shanghai and Boston and New York, but there’s not a lot for places like the Isle de Jean Charles or Pensacola, and so this group is really special in these two ways.

The other thing is teaching writing workshops in frontline communities how to write an op-ed. I can use the skills I’ve developed in this very particular topic to help people get their own voices into more local conversations around what they’d like to see change in relation to their flooding.

People do want to talk to me and I feel like it’s my responsibility to be clear about what that might or might not produce. It sounds so cheesy, but it’s about being the change you want to see in the world; like when I got disappointed around the limits of what Rising achieved, I thought, “Well, I can change that, right? There’s some part of that that I have control over, so why don’t I throw in my chips on the part that I do control.”

Grace Sewell: In Rising, there are moments when you interweave your own story into the narrative, for example when you share your experiences with Chris [an islander faced with losing his home] and write that you “become a mirror in which he can test out and analyze the causes and consequences of leaving someone or something you love.” What motivates your decision to enter the narrative in this way? How does this component of your writing fit into your approach to conveying the impact of climate disaster and those most affected by it? 

Elizabeth Rush: I think it comes down to something basic—write the book you want to read. When I think about the books that I most enjoy in the creative nonfiction genre, I think of texts like Eula Biss’s On Immunity: An Inoculation and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. They’re books in which the author’s presence provides a throughline to humanize topics that can become theoretical or scientific. I also think these insertions provide a bit of voyeuristic pleasure for the reader. As an author, I write the kind of book I want to read, but I also understand that there is a strategy behind that choice that allows you to hold a reader’s attention.

In that exchange with Chris, and more generally, there was another lesson that happened before the construction of the book. If I was going to ask people to dig at their pain and tell me how much it hurts—to relive traumatic experiences with me—I had to mirror that openness myself and be vulnerable. Going door to door is a vulnerable act. Telling people that I’m leaving an abusive relationship and know what it is like to leave something you love that is not serving you is a vulnerable act. I think that this mutual vulnerability allowed the conversation to shift away from the political sticking points of climate change to address something that is more embodied and lived. It was a conversation, not an interview. That sense of conversing made Rising possible and is also visible in the structure of the book.

I knew that I would be a better writer if I could listen directly to the people I wanted to carry into my stories, and that’s very much true.

Jae Tak Kim: You noted in a few chapters that some of the people you interviewed did not necessarily attribute their specific hardship with the wider phenomenon of climate change. Was climate change a common topic of discussion with your interviewees, or were there difficulties in bringing up the broader issue due to politicization? Some, as I recall, told you that their homes should have never been built there in the first place and that the land should rightfully “go back to nature.” Was this reaction more common than a reaction that instead blamed nature for taking their homes?

Elizabeth Rush: In maybe 50 percent of the places that I spent time in, people did not necessarily connect their circumstances to climate change. But I didn’t always experience it as “climate change is a hoax.” I experienced it more as, “Yes, we’re flooding. Yes, it’s getting worse. You know who’s partly responsible? BJ’s Wholesale Club. They just put a BJ’s on top of a wetland next door, and they shouldn’t have done it, because the flooding got worse because of it.” Or, “You know who’s responsible? The city government for not fixing our stormwater infrastructure.” Or, “You know who’s responsible? The person who sold me this house because it flooded before I moved in, and I wouldn’t have bought it if I had known that.” So, it’s not “climate change is a hoax” even though a lot of the places I’m talking about would register as red and as Republican.

Part of what I think was happening was that people wanted to be able to identify sources of their flooding that they still could still have some sort of power over. Climate change can feel so abstracted and make one feel so powerless in the face of it, so the sidewinding dance that happens is partly about the potentiality of maintaining a semblance of control. And they’re not wrong: paving that wetland did increase flooding. We should have flood disclosure laws when we’re buying a home. Infrastructure is out of date in your community, because it was built to flood standards that were placed in 1976.

One community where I saw real success in achieving their adaptation strategy that they wanted is in Oakwood Beach. Most of the people who participated or organized for buyouts bought them, and 80 percent of those families stayed within five miles of their original home, so their community wasn’t fractured. They still went to the same butchers, they still kept the same friends, and they still went to the same schools. What had changed was their vulnerability to flooding. When I went back to that community years later and I asked them what they thought of the flood storm protection wall that was going to be put in, the community leaders said to me, “That’s a temporary solution. Climate change is real and seas are rising, and that’s going to make people safe.” No one in that community would have said that to me prior to their achieving the outcome that they wanted as a community. Once they adapted to flooding and they could see that they could be who they were but in a slightly different place, once some of that fundamental fear around control and identity assuaged, then they were able to say that climate change did play a part in it.

Leila Bagenstos: You mention a few times in the book that you became interested in sea level rise after a trip to Bangladesh. How and why have you approached the task of writing about climate change in the U.S. differently than you might approach the task of writing about climate change in South and Southeast Asia?

Elizabeth Rush: When I worked in Southeast Asia, I always had a translator. I usually chose my translator, and I would try to hire young women. Often, I would want to speak to the female head of household, and because of gender politics—I’m thinking especially in Bangladesh—that was a very radical move. So, I would hire a female translator to be my in-between person, because if I had a man acting in this role, it became even harder to get the woman to talk to him directly. The husband or partner almost always wanted to intervene and address my translator.

I developed that as a beat, because I lived in Hanoi for many years, but then I moved back to the U.S., and I didn’t want to keep traveling to Southeast Asia to write. It felt like both a time suck and a huge resource waste in terms of the environment. Also, I would often use simultaneous interpretation, and I knew shit was getting lost; it was the little, tiny things that really mattered to me. I knew that I would be a better writer if I could listen directly to the people I wanted to carry into my stories, and that’s very much true. I feel like my writing just deepened when I got to be the direct listener, the direct recipient of the stories.

Sophia Cunningham: Have you stayed in contact with anyone whom you interviewed for Rising, and would you be open to interviewing them again in the future as the flooding is exacerbated to continue monitoring the receding American shoreline?

Elizabeth Rush: I have stayed in touch with almost everyone who speaks in the testimonies of Rising. Everyone got their testimonies checked with them. I’m tempted to just give you the update on everyone, but the person who I spoke with most recently is Chris. He’s still on the island. His home was significantly damaged in Ida this past fall. I’m not sure if you recall, but he’s in a wheelchair, and the elevator, this kind of bucket elevator that he has, was ruined. A big portion of his roof caved in, and he was displaced to HOMA for a few months. Somewhat recently, a couple months ago, he returned home. His new house is starting to be built, but it’s not built yet. As I mentioned, I usually send a percentage of my speaking fees to the Anthropocene Alliance. The quarter when Ida hit, I sent it directly to Chris. He’s always calling me on Easter and Christmas.

I’m thinking of Laura Sewell and Dan Kipness, both of whom have sold their homes. I’m thinking of Nicole Montalto, who has two babies now, and her first baby is named after her father [who drowned in the flooding]. She lives three miles away from where she lived. All of them totally would be interviewed again, I’m sure. All of them are proud of this book. A lot of people have asked me if I want to do a follow-up to Rising by staying in touch with these people, and talking about where things go. Some part of me is not energized by that idea, and I don’t entirely know why. Maybe I will be in ten years. But I think that if you’re a writer who’s going to write a book, and if you’re going to write a book that’s well written, that book is going to take a long time. Rising took eight years to write. I don’t want to devote my time to a project that feels not energizing to me at the start.

Grace Sewell: One aspect of your work that I find especially compelling is how you repeatedly link the story of the Biblical flood and Noah’s ark to the threat of displacement in light of climate disaster. How do mythology and oral storytelling shape your writing, in terms of content and form?

Elizabeth Rush: It’s so interesting that you pick up on that aspect. In some ways, that was a short section that was hard for me to write, because I was not raised inside any religion. I feel emotionally distant from Noah and the Flood. We know, according to the geologic record, that the Earth has undergone moments of extreme rapid sea level rise. I was interested in the idea that such physical transformations might have informed myths in Genesis, Gilgamesh, etc. I’m fascinated by the challenge of mapping geologic time onto human time. The possibility of linking events that happened on this planet 15,000 years ago to stories that still circulate today felt like a way to close the gap between geologic time and human time. I haven’t thought about that section in the book in a long time. Right now, I’m teaching a class on nature writing, and students are struggling with the idea of deep time and human time coexisting on paper. Maybe I’ll bring that example in.

Isolde Gerosa: Early in Rising, you group sea level rise and the oil industry as both things to blame for erosion on the Louisiana coast. I feel that sea level rise is not something to blame but rather a consequence of actions by the oil industry. I’m interested in why, in this instance, you chose a natural element and a human element onto which to place blame, rather than just anthropogenic actions. 

Elizabeth Rush: I think the oil industry that I’m talking about there is the very physical way in which oil is extracted from the Louisiana bayou. So when I talk about the oil industry there, I’m talking about the sort of cutting of channels into the wetland to gain access to the oil rigs, and how the oil industry made these promises that they were going to essentially line those channels and stones, so as not to have the movement of water through the wetland increase erosion. And yet, they didn’t do that. They haven’t made good on this very basic gesture that was part of the environmental assessment reports when those wells were going in. And so that oil industry there is the specific choice not to honor the pledge that they need to work to slow erosion as a result of their physical being in the Louisiana bayou.

I do think of sea level rise as the result of the non-checked business practice on part of the oil and gas industry. I do place blame with them as a driver of sea level rise, so I don’t think sea level rise is separate from fossil fuel extraction at all. I also didn’t want that to be central to the argument of this book, just because I think there’s a lot of other literature out there that makes that argument very well, and I was like, “Oh, that’s not what I’m good at as a writer.” I’m good at listening to people, I’m good at the poetic line—I’m good at all of these other things. I’m going to play to my strengths and credit, and try to create something different, not a kind of rehash of what I felt was pre-existing. And, I guess, which I take as a bit of a baseline from which the book is written.

Jae Tak Kim: In your view, has your writing evolved or changed over time, and why?

Elizabeth Rush: When I started writing Rising, which was in 2015, the way I thought about the public for the book was that I could guarantee readers from Orion magazine, which is the leading environmental magazine in the country. I can guarantee that some of those readers would read this book. I had two goals in mind. I imagined that readership as your classic white weekend warrior type who’s going to go hiking and have their REI co-op membership. I fall into that category; I’m not trying to talk badly about it, but it’s a recognition of what that audience might look like.

At that moment in time, there really wasn’t much public conversation around the ways in which structural inequalities were shaping who is feeling the breath of climate change. If there was any conversation around it, it was often put under the heading of “environmental justice” and existed within more of an academic circle. The language that was used to talk about that phenomenon was jargony and cold. I wanted to get that idea into the Orion reader’s hands because I thought that was something that hadn’t reached that audience that much. I also wanted to write the book lyrically as a piece of literature so that I could imagine having a readership beyond those that are environmentally invested, that it’s going to read as a good book. It also felt important to think about that readership in order to depoliticize the climate conversation because that’s a readership that has a lot of moral high ground. You often hear them say, “We have been working on behalf of the environment for 30 years and no one has ever paid attention to us.” I wanted to surprise that group of people with the idea that the whole phenomenon is playing out right now, and it matters to the people living it. It felt important to introduce people who would be disregarded for their commitment to the right wing of this country. It’s so easy to disregard that perspective because it doesn’t take the environment as central to its political aims. I wanted to imagine what it means to listen to those people and listen to their experiences, and to find a way to talk about climate change that doesn’t dig us into the politics of climate change.

I gave birth two years ago and in the wake of my son’s coming into the world, the amount of time I had to devote to writing has shrunk in half or more. I really only focused on my next book at that time. So, in many ways I haven’t been paying attention to how to get climate stories into the news in a way that feels different and meaningful right now. I’m finishing the third draft of my next book that at a deep structural level refuses to settle so neatly into a kind of conclusion in the way that Rising does. Rising has a conclusion and talks about a need for retreat. It proposes a kind of solution. The new book doesn’t have a narrative that resolves so easily and I wanted to leave readers much more unsettled and unresolved at the end of it. I don’t think we need climate change stories that tell an ending to us. The happy ending or the sad ending foreclose the idea that radical change needs to happen now because it presents a way out of the mucky mire that we’re in. I don’t think that’s where we’re at, and we need stories that make us feel uncomfortable and unsettled. I’m surprised that by some metrics, Rising is an optimistic book, in that it really thinks about what’s possible as people rise into awareness and agency.

 
Read “The Password,” an excerpt of Rising by Elizabeth Rush appearing in Terrain.org.