Happy Nice Mall

There is a lot of shouting about climate change, especially in North America and Europe. This makes it easy for the rest of the world to fall into a kind of silence—for Westerners to assume they have nothing to add and let the so-called “experts” speak. But we all need to talk about climate change and raise the voices of those who suffer the most.

Climate science is very important, but by putting it in context with the stories of people actively experiencing climate change, we can begin to think more creatively about technological solutions.

This needs to happen not only at major international meetings like COP26, but also on a daily basis. Any powerful room where decisions are made must have people who can talk firsthand about the climate crisis. Storytelling is an intervention in climate silence, an invitation to use ancient human technology through language and narrative to prevent inactivity. It is often a way of bringing weaker sounds into strong rooms.

That’s what I tried to do by documenting the stories of people who were already experiencing the effects of a climate in crisis.

I was living in Boston at the time of the marathon bombing in 2013. When the city was locked up and lifted, all I wanted was to get out: to walk, breathe and hear other people’s voices. I needed to connect to remind myself that not everyone is a villain. In a moment of inspiration, I opened a tin of broccoli and wrote “Open call for stories” to Sharpie.

I wore a cardboard mark around my neck. People mostly stared. But some of them approached me. When I started listening to strangers, I didn’t want to stop.

That summer, I rode the Mississippi River to listen to the stories people had to share. I brought the sign with me. One story was so tacky that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months, and it finally took me on a trip around the world.

“We are fighting for the protection of our sets. Every time we have a hurricane, we fight for our swamp. I could not have imagined living anywhere else.”

I met Franny Connetti, 57, 80 miles south of New Orleans, when I stopped in front of her office to check my tires; invited me inside to get out of the afternoon sun. Franny shared her fried shrimp lunch with me. In between bites, he told me how Hurricane Isaac destroyed his home and neighborhood in 2012.

Despite this tragedy, she and her husband returned to their estate in a mobile home just months after the storm.

“We are fighting for the protection of our sets. “Every time we have a hurricane, we fight for our swamp,” he said. “I couldn’t have imagined living anywhere else.”

Twenty miles ahead, I could see where the ocean crossed the road at low tide. An orange sign read “Water on the Road”. Locals jokingly refer to the end of Louisiana State Highway 23 as “The End of the World.” It was creepy to imagine the way I was biking underwater.

GIANT STEEL BOARD

Here is a front line of climate change, a story. I wondered what it would mean to put this in dialogue with stories from other parts of the world, from other frontlines, with local influences experienced through the water. My goal was to listen to and reproduce those stories.

Water is what most of the world will experience climate change to. It’s not human-made like degrees Celsius. It’s something we see and feel intensely. When there is not enough water, crops die, fires rage, and people are thirsty. When there is too much, water becomes a destructive force, destroying homes, businesses and lives. Talking about water is almost always easier than talking about climate change. But the two are deeply intertwined.

I also set out to address another problem: The language we use to discuss climate change is often abstract and inaccessible. We hear about sea level rising meters or one part per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but what does this really mean for people’s daily lives? I thought storytelling could bridge that distinction.

One of the first stops on my trip was Tuvalu, a low coral atoll country in the South Pacific, 585 miles south of the equator. Home to nearly 10,000 people, Tuvalu is on its way to being uninhabitable for my lifetime.

In 2014, Tauala Katea, a meteorologist, turned on her computer to show an image of a recent flood on an island. The sea water had swelled near where we were sitting. “This is what climate change looks like,” he said.

In 2000, Tuvaluans living on the outer islands noticed that their taro and pulaka crops were suffering,” he said. “The root crops looked rotten and were shrinking in size.” Taro and pulaka, the two starchy staples of Tuvaluan cuisine, are grown in underground pits.

Tauala and his team went to the outer islands to take soil samples. The culprit was the ingress of salt water linked to sea level rise. Seas have been rising four millimeters a year since measurements began in the early 1990s. While this may sound like a small amount, this change has a dramatic impact on Tuvaluan access to drinking water. The highest point is just 13 feet above sea level.

A lot has changed in Tuvalu as a result. The freshwater lens, a layer of groundwater floating above the denser seawater, became salty and contaminated. Thatched roofs and freshwater wells are a thing of the past. Every house now has a water tank connected to the corrugated iron roof by a gutter. All the water needed for washing, cooking and drinking now comes from rain. This rainwater is boiled for drinking and used for washing clothes, washing dishes and bathing. The wells were redesigned as garbage heaps.

Sometimes families have to make tough decisions about how to allocate water. Angelina, mother of three, said her middle daughter Siulai was only a few months old during the drought a few years ago. She, her husband and eldest daughter were able to swim in the sea to wash themselves and their clothes. “We only saved water for drinking and cooking,” he said. But her newborn baby’s skin was too sensitive to bathe in the ocean. Salt water would give him a terrible rash. This meant that Angelina had to decide between drinking water and bathing her child.