I’ll start on a personal note.
I grew up—as did my mom, dad, and grandfather—in an early 20th-century neighborhood in Long Beach, California. We lived—and my parents still live—a few blocks from a south-facing bluff along the Pacific. Between the bluff and the ocean, there’s a nice, wide beach that’s protected in part by the Breakwater, a sea wall of stone and clay constructed in the 1940s to protect what was then a naval shipyard from intrusions by submarines and to help establish a deep-water port.
Unfortunately, the breakwater diminished Long Beach’s once-celebrated surf and for decades has served to retain pollution near the shore. Before the sea wall, my grandfather and his brother surfed there, participating in surf contests in the late 1930s. My grandfather, a Long Beach lifeguard, stands in the middle of this 1939 photo:
My grandfather told me about how great the waves used to be, but at the time his tales struck me as exaggerated. It’s still hard to imagine big waves along the southeasternmost portions of the beach, as the beach narrows there and forms a peninsula with the beach on one side, quiet Alamitos Bay on the other, and a couple blocks of houses between them. On the other side of Alamitos Bay sits Naples Island, a wealthy neighborhood of multimillion dollar homes whose outer rim is lined with sailboats and yachts. As a child, I spent many summer days splashing and swimming in the calm, safe waters of the bay, which was about a 10-minute drive from our house.
When I have visited family over the past decade, I’ve noticed water seeping through cracks in the waist-high walls that line the sidewalks in front of the Naples homes. I’ve noted as well the growth of the sandy berms placed between the ocean and the houses on the Peninsula, and I’ve observed the damp sandbags and salty puddles on the streets of the Peninsula neighborhood. High tides can reach the front porches of homes along the Peninsula on Alamitos Bay.
According to Zillow, the average home value in 90803, the zip code that comprises the Peninsula and Naples, as well as the still-pricey but relatively modest neighborhoods of Belmont Shore—whose streets are lined with beachy Spanish- or Mediterranean-inflected bungalows—and the more traditional, early-20th-century Southern California neighborhood of Belmont Heights, is $956,600. In Naples, the homes run a bit more than that:
Sea-level rise
In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists published When Rising Seas Hit Home, a projection of the impact of climate change on coastal communities in the U.S. The online version of the report includes an interactive map detailing areas of chronic inundation. On the following maps, the teal-colored areas are those that are likely to experience chronic inundation (26 days or more per year) under a scenario of slower, moderate sea-level rise. (The areas marked in green are those protected by federal levees.) Here are screen shots from those projected inundation maps of Naples and the Peninsula, by year:
And here are the projections for faster, higher sea-level rise. On these maps, orange indicates areas of chronic flooding:
Since the publication of When Rising Seas Hit Home, projections for sea-level rise have increased significantly—and the estimates the city used for planning in some cases fall several feet short of anticipated high tides. As the Long Beach Press-Telegram reported in May 2019,
Projections used by the city and state show the region’s sea levels rising by 11 inches in 2030, 24 inches in 2050 and between 37 and 66 inches by 2100. But Jerry Schubel, a marine scientist and CEO of the Aquarium of the Pacific, told residents at a January CAAP workshop that projections have been steadily increasing and the rise by the end of the century could be 7 feet to 10 feet.
The Union of Concerned Scientists’ maps aren’t based on such high projections. So what does 7-10 feet of sea-level rise look like for Long Beach? The Our Coast, Our Future project offers an interactive map that comes close to the 7-foot mark. Here’s the map of Long Beach in a scenario with 6.6 feet of sea-level rise:
And here is a map of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s projections of what 10 feet of sea level rise means for the eastern portion of Long Beach. Note that much of California State University at Long Beach is submerged in this scenario, and the water will come perilously close to Puvunga, an indigenous town site and ritual center that, even though not inhabited by the Tongva people since approximately 1805, remains a sacred site to citizens of the Gabrielino-Tongva nation.
Here’s a glimpse of what inundation looks like at ground level in Long Beach today. It erases entire beaches along Alamitos Bay during some high tides. Sea-level rise projections show such inundation will be higher and more frequent in the near future.
I don’t share these maps and information because they indicate a large number of white millionaires will be affected, or just because I have family members currently living in an affected zone under the higher sea-level-rise scenario. After all, research shows that impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged communities worldwide will be far more heavily impacted by—and already are experiencing the devastating effects of—climate change. In fact, even though sea-level rise will damage both working-class communities and wealthy coastal enclaves, climate change is expected to amplify social inequality rather than serve as any kind of equalizing force.
Rather, I share them to demonstrate that the area my family has lived or recreated in for nearly a century—and in which hundreds of thousands of people have resided or visited—will, within my lifetime or that of my child, be wiped from the map. My own grandchildren will never run up and down the beach on Alamitos Bay. They won’t be able to visit the boathouse where my aunt and uncle trained to row in the Olympics, nor drive by one of the elementary schools I attended—all will be inundated by seawater in my teenaged son’s lifetime, if not my own. That’s a lot of shared history to lose, for my family and for others’.
If you live on any low-lying piece of the U.S. coast, there’s a very good chance the physical places of your family’s history will be similarly affected or entirely eradicated. I encourage you to search for your region on the Union of Concerned Scientists’ chronic inundation map. If you live in coastal California, check out the California Coastal Commission’s King Tides gallery to see photos documenting how sea-level rise is already affecting coastal landscapes and communities.
Adaptation plans
The California Coastal Commission has encouraged beachside cities to develop managed retreat plans instead of fighting an endless war with sea-level rise. According to one panel at the 2019 National Planning Conference, “with planned, orderly managed retreat, the idea is to maintain resilience (e.g., asset function, community economy, etc.) rather than succumb to event-driven crisis responses.” Some cities have resisted, while others are planning to cede their beachfront property to the Pacific.
For its part, Long Beach is developing a Climate Adaptation Action Plan (CAAP) that anticipates coastal flooding, extreme heat, decreases in air quality, and extended drought. Even as it calls for incorporating “sea level rise language into citywide plans, policies, and regulations” to “mainstream sea level rise adaptation,” The city’s draft plan carefully avoids committing to a managed retreat from the shoreline before 2100 for any infrastructure beyond waterfront parking lots. Vulnerable “critical infrastructure” won’t be subject to the unpopular, dreaded “retreat”; rather, it will be “relocated” or “elevated” between 2030 and 2050.
In fact, the report uses the term “retreat” only eight times in 64 pages. Instead, the proposal calls upon the city merely to “investigate [the] feasibility of managed retreat.” This suggestion, printed in small text, is buried in a table on page 62, at the very end of the report. The next cell in the table explains that this investigation will take the form of an exploration of “managed retreat options for vulnerable shoreline infrastructure through land acquisition and relocation programs,” and that targeted neighborhoods include “communities adjacent to Alamitos Bay, including Belmont Shore, Naples, and Marina Pacifica.”
Resilience, anxiety, and anticipatory grief
Long Beach’s Climate Adaptation Action Plan does not address the psychological and emotional impacts of sea-level rise and other climate-change phenomena. Not surprisingly, in their public planning, coastal cities are emphasizing resilience and opportunity (e.g., encouraging drought-friendly urban agriculture and electrifying school buses) over grief and loss. The Long Beach CAAP website includes colorful infographics—available in English, Spanish, Khmer, and Tagalog—about the city’s proposed mitigation and adaptation.
What’s missing from these plans is a call to emotional and psychological resilience. The psychological and emotional toll will be staggering. Already a majority of U.S. Americans are reporting anxiety and symptoms of what one forensic psychiatrist has termed “pre-traumatic stress disorder“—and for good reason. This week The Independent reported, “Eleven thousand scientists in 153 countries have declared a climate emergency and warned that ‘untold human suffering’ is unavoidable without huge shifts in the way we live.” (Meanwhile, the Trump Administration, demonstrating it is indeed an apocalyptic death cult, has given notice to the United Nations that it will withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change.)
The failure of Long Beach’s CAAP to address the growing anticipatory grief of the losses coming due to climate change is not unusual. Writing in the journal Ethics & the Environment, Ashlee Cunsolo Willox notes that “the grief and mourning experienced by individuals and communities globally to anthropogenic climate change seems strangely silenced in public climate change discourse.” Cunsolo Willox makes the case for thinking of climate change as a process of mourning. Drawing on the work of psychologists and others, Cunsolo Willox reminds us that mourning is not just the process of grieving a loss, but also a transformative experience. “In mourning,” she writes, “we not only lose something that was loved, but we also lose our former selves, the way we used to be before the loss.”
Acknowledging such a change is essential to addressing climate change in ways that will lessen the suffering of humans and perhaps slow the rapid extinction of plant and animal species. Climate change forces humans to leave their homes and homelands and to be more mindful about our use of shared resources: we will need to eat and drink differently, travel using methods not fueled by carbon, re-landscape our suburbs and cities, and even bathe differently. This is collaborative work, just as mourning is often shared work. As Cunsolo Willox points out, “grief and mourning have the ability to mobilize, to galvanize, and to cause conscious action through the recognition of others as fellow vulnerable beings, and through an understanding of shared suffering, not to privatize, silence and subdue.”
Long Beach and other cities must address the psychological and emotional stress of climate change and provide ways for the community to remain resilient. This is, after all, a community that bears the scars of uprisings in Watts and Los Angeles; rampaging by sailors at the naval base, who hunted for zoot-suited pachucos along the city’s Pike boardwalk; the persistence of the Tongva people in the face of lost treaty rights and sacred lands; an earthquake so destructive it changed state laws related to school design and construction; decades of air quality so consistently poor that its residents have nearly twice the national rate of asthma; and ongoing challenges related to poverty, coastal pollution, affordable housing, and violence. At the same time, the city’s residents have, through public and private investment in arts, music, education, social services, and other community-building activities, developed the city’s reputation as a vibrant cultural crossroads. The city’s CAAP needs to explain how city employees and others working on climate change adaptation will tap into that history of physical, psychological, and emotional communal resilience.
History in this age of disaster
The project this website documents, History in the Age of Disaster, explores the value of historical thought and practice—the knowledge and skill sets of historians, and public historians in particular—to addressing climate change and other existential threats. We have seen how social workers, geoscientists, public health professionals, physicians, psychologists, artists, and others have responded to such issues as climate change, gun violence, mass migration, environmental injustice, and terrorism. Such professionals tend to have a fairly clear sense of how to apply their experience and expertise to protect life of all kinds and/or to help humans recover from trauma.
Whether or not their work directly or explicitly addresses this apocalyptic cultural moment, any public historian can list the skills that could be brought to bear in response to it: Undertaking deep archival research. Analyzing diverse and sometimes arcane primary sources. Interpreting these remnants of the past for the public. Conducting oral histories. Identifying analogous crises in the past and learning from our ancestors’ resilience. Working with communities of all kinds to tell their own stories and express what matters to those communities. Collaborating with interdisciplinary teams to design monuments and memorials that capture the spirit of and describe what was lost.
But how are public historians and those in adjacent disciplines—including archivists, museum professionals, and cultural resource managers—actually applying those skills? This project aims to find out. Among others, I’ll be talking with archivists who have accessioned condolence memorials after school shootings, historians who are helping residents of low-lying coastal regions adapt to the permanent flooding of their communities, and historians recreating—virtually or physically—cultural patrimony lost to terrorism.
I expect some emerging best practices to surface during my conversations with these public historians, archivists, and others, and I’ll share them here. If you are engaged with this urgent and important work, or you know someone who is, please contact me—I’d love to learn more about such projects and programs. I’m best reached via e-mail at lmadsen -at- boisestate -dot- edu.