Against the Seas
Saving Civilizations from Rising Waters
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An incredible read.… While unflinching in her analysis, Soderstrom nevertheless gifts us with a message of hope and resilience. — MAUDE BARLOW, activist and author of Still Hopeful: Lessons from a Lifetime of Activism.
What can we learn about coping with rising sea levels from ancient times?
The scenario we are facing is scary: within a few decades, sea levels around the world may well rise by a metre or more as glaciers and ice caps melt due to climate change. Large parts of our coastal cities will be flooded, the basic outline of our world will be changed, and torrential rains will present their own challenges. But this is not the first time that people have had to cope with threatening waters, because sea levels have been rising for thousands of years, ever since the end of the last Ice Age. Stories told by the Indigenous people in Australia and on the Pacific coast of North America, and those found in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as Roman and Chinese histories all bear witness to just how traumatic these experiences were. The responses to these challenges varied: people adapted by building dikes, canals, and seawalls; by resorting to prayer or magic; and, very often, by moving out of the way of the rushing waters.
Against the Seas explores these stories as well as the various measures being taken today to combat rising waters, focusing on five regions: Indonesia, Shanghai, the Sundarbans of Bangladesh, the Salish Sea, and the estuary of the St. Lawrence River. What happened in the past and what is being tried today may help us in the future and, if nothing else, give us hope that we will survive.
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Soderstrom (Concrete) investigates the consequences of rising sea levels in this prosaic outing. Exploring how societies across the globe are dealing with rising water levels, she focuses on regions most threatened by climate change, describing Indonesia's decision in 2019 to "move its capital from the climate-threatened megalopolis of Jakarta to the sparsely populated island of Borneo" and Bangladesh's efforts to preserve the large mangrove forest that helps protect the city of Dhaka from flooding. She details China's plans to insulate Shanghai from climate change, which include erecting a tidal barrier on the Yangtze River and reducing "population pressure" by building a new satellite city with green patches that will allow water to "easily percolate back into the earth." She advocates for adopting "low-tech approaches and a couple of very high-tech ones," including retreating from at-risk areas and expanding nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. The historical material on ancient flood myths and the now-sunken land bridge that once connected Britain and the Netherlands doesn't add much to the discussion of how contemporary humans might respond to climate change, and the case studies are serviceable if somewhat perfunctory, relying on extant research without bringing much new to the table. The result is a humdrum survey that meets its modest ambitions.
