Al Smith Never Had Sea Level to Worry Him

Most mornings, I run around Lower Manhattan timed roughly to the sunrise. For several months it’s meant careering through pylons, Jersey barriers and construction fences as city and private workers take to buffering the waterfront from rising seas. Call it a daily preview and status check of adaptation in the world’s richest country’s biggest city.

Sometimes a Romantic fade to blue sky or similar light show spurs me to stop and frame a picture on my phone. Today, chugging through Alfred E Smith Playground next to the school where my daughter went to pre-K, I photographed the statue of this former governor and presidential candidate as he seemed to look toward a church across the street.

Smith, a first-generation American, grew up nearby and built his political legend by working hard to refashion government as a more-or-less competent servant to all people. He rooted out inefficiencies but never demonized business. He wanted his constituents to work. In this way, he could sing in harmony with President Biden and the many (correct) public officials who see the construction and deployment of clean energy as sparkplugs for decent, honorable work throughout American classes and counties. (The same can go for civil-engineering public works to temper unlivable heat and floods.) But the confident twinkle Smith got from his sculptor would likely turn to a squint today.

He’d have to address the people with bad information, on whom bad actors plant the bad idea that climate survival conflicts with commerce and comfort. And he’d have to grapple with the fact that transforming the physical world moves at a slower tick than the climate changes.

The scaffolds and pylons under the highway nearby hew to a project aiming to blunt sea level rise. (The highway above the work takes its name from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who beat Smith for president and squelched his political model. The memorials coexist peacefully.) It’d be spoiled to complain that this work “takes so long,” especially when I see the workers in hardhats doing it while I run by. But it’s sober to note that it does take a long time - while campaigns still spit out campaign promises on the regular.

If today’s hero-makers want politicians to project a sense of confidence, they’ll wisely tune their ears to calls for patience and explanations about process. FDR ventured that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, unaware as he was of wildfire smoke or rainstorms that flood houses or social-media bots. Smith, though Roosevelt backhandedly saluted him as “the happy warrior of the political battlefield,” governed in some ways as more of a realist.

And on mornings between trash and implementation, when temperature swings in double-digit directions from one day to the next, I’m inviting us voters to focus on the horizon while both insisting that we change our foundation and realizing we’ve got a long way to look before things look stable.

Adaptations Large and Small

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A freelance writer and a concert pianist climb into an Uber in Trenton, NJ…

Back in March, you see, I’d bought an Amtrak ticket to and from Philadelphia so I could attend a panel of Chief Heat Officers from around the world at UPenn. I was thinking more about how cities and communities can clash or collaborate as they adapt to extreme heat, and I thought (correctly) that I’d take thorough notes on what I learned if I passed up the Zoom invitation and put myself in the room. Then, on the way home, I put myself in the path of a wave of brush fires that roared onto tracks in Edison, NJ and stalled all service between Philadelphia and New York. (You can look it up.)

You hear how public servants from Greece, Chile, Sierra Leone, and Florida are advocating for a lot more notice and a lot more shade, and then the commuter rail catches fire. You can’t make this stuff up, nor can you ignore it.

Well, I had the afternoon ahead of me and I could have milled about on the platform in Trenton, or walked around New Jersey’s capital looking for stories. But I saw a woman stride off the train, onto the now-crowded platform. She asked if anyone was going to New York and wanted to share an Uber taxi. And I thought I could add more net value at home - you know, sauteing greens, filling seltzer bottles, editing stories - than on the scene. So I volunteered to join her.

We walked through the russet-brownish station to the busy semicircle out front, where at least a dozen people were beseeching their GPSs to tell them how long it’d take them to make headway north. I told her I didn’t have a lot of cash, and she clapped me on the back and said: “You look trustworthy.” We introduced ourselves by first name. I hadn’t calculated the take for an Uber from Trenton to Manhattan during a rail failure, but the worth in sparking trust seemed higher. She told me she had to get to a concert at Columbia by 7. I assumed she had tickets to watch it. Turned out she was performing it.

Being a partway self-taught reporter, I pulled out my phone to check for a concert at Columbia that night. There it was. Being a lapsed musician, I had stuff to discuss with my new buddy.

Now, it took us more than a minute to say adios to Trenton, but once we crossed onto I-95 we came in for smooth sailing. The pianist and I talked about her growing up in Baltimore, her love for New York, and the abstract-expressionist path of my career. When a friend called to wish her well in the concert, which she seemed likelier and likelier to reach on time, she told the friend that she was riding with a “writer for the New York Times,” which is charitable.

Meanwhile, back at Penn…

The talk I watched served as the first dose in a longer conference looking at extreme heat. That means fires that come every year for months, that worm into peoples’ lungs rather than worrying their commutes, and that millions of people can’t spend their way into avoiding. It’s hokey for me to now think of how famously the concert pianist and I got along, or about how kindly she asked after the driver as he swiveled his shoulders to stretch a little once we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel.

And yet openness, friendly introductions, and the space to commit to getting yourself home so you can be accountable to others have to factor into the urban heat elixir. We can smell lots of fires on the tracks ahead. We could do much worse than to assist neighbors who have music to share.

Questioning Who Steers the Boat and Who Stands in It

These days, it’s sometimes all you can do to blink into the real world. It’s hotter than you remember, people are suffering more than you can take in and the people who aren’t suffering seem often to be dropping our necks to gaze into our phones. Who’s going to steer us away from the gorge that keeps getting closer? A project I started years ago aims to understand the men Americans have entrusted with the presidency. I read biographies of every president, and along the way became active in state-level politics. It all taught me what climate stress and cascading crisis also teach: for stability and for robust decisions, we should treat all public officials less as celebrities and more as employees.

I’m shopping a proposal for a book that recounts my twin journeys as a newbie historian and an as-needed activist. This excerpt from the first chapter, I hope, delivers ideas about how you can join with your neighbors or with people experiencing need in your city to ask how sharply public officials are seeing and hearing the public’s needs and demands. Here goes:

”But on our way that morning, I kept my daughter and her best friend company on a whispery subway as they quizzed each other for an upcoming Spelling Bee. I peeked at the phone of the guy wrapped around the pole beside me: “Stayed up all night watching this debacle.” And my sleep-addled brain then said: “Debacle. D-E-B-A-C-L-E. Debacle.” 

I was at that point reckoning with Ron Chernow’s six-pound Alexander Hamilton biography, which I thought would give context to the political strategists who created the presidency in the first place.  I hung with it, between emailing old friends, classmates, and cousins with details about new civic groups, and taking up the practice of marching and chanting. Not to mention poster fabrication.  The lime-green table centering our new family room, which we’d conceived as a place where our kids could make birthday cards without sitting on the floor, became home base for postcards, posters, and phone calls.  When we crashed, my wife and I would sleep for a few minutes and then one would sit up. “But what about…?”
We joined marches nearly every weekend in the winter, and I stopped by rallies at senators’ offices and plazas during the week.  At the protests, when people called out, “Not my president!” I thought, correct, but ours. As I was learning from Chernow, Adams ranked as few peoples’ preferred presidents, including Washington’s—but he was our president, and whatever happened on our national record happened through or in spite of him.  

By February, my wife and I had helped co-found a local branch of Sister District, a nationwide nonprofit that marshals volunteers in deeply Democratic areas to support contenders in close state races.  I ginned up a weekly newsletter called “Many Paths to Justice,” serving jiggers of courage and three actions to take to a mailing list of 150 or so friends, relations, and simpatico volunteers. We joked that marching and sign-making had become so routine that “protesting was the new laundry.”

Election Night 2017 found me in a white-box hotel in Boston’s seaport district for a business trip, drinking Scotch with cylindrical ice cubes.  I’d driven to Delaware and PA to knock on doors and my whole family had called voters in Virginia.  Would any of it be enough to stem the tide?  Having finished the Hamilton and Washington books, I was pecking at the early pages of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and lifting my phone every other paragraph for news updates. 

Our candidate, and the Democratic slate atop the ticket, won.  

The next day I rode Amtrak home taking comfort in the truth that even the most despotic presidents confront a federal labyrinth.  When sailing into state-guarded canals, locks, and culverts, in a yacht, a skiff, or a raft, they could all capsize. George Washington had known this and, with his battlefield halo firmly affixed, pedaled back from arbitrating the question of whether the states or the federal government claimed final authority. 

On that train, I knew what Washington had known all along. No president can decree a whole interlocking system according to his specs. Nor can any president assume that public servants will reach some equilibrium free of opportuning and faction. Each president could only interpret the mess and try to steer it based on the successes and failures of what came before.  And all their interlocking efforts created a path for the current plunderer-in-chief. How?”

Democracy hinges on the idea that people who share a place can start from a constellation of concerns and collectively appoint other people to take and see through hard decisions whose tradeoffs and investment optimize common values and overall well-being. Our democracy hitches a lot of that responsibility on the president - which flips a lot of the true responsibility back to the voters and the constellation of people representing them.

The water will stay choppy for the duration. The story of my biographical and political journey, which I hope to tell, shows the weight of knowing the quirks and weaknesses and attentiveness of the people with the cred to steer whatever boat carries us.

After the Tap, Admit and Adapt

Don’t envy me my acrobatic skill, but since an early age I’ve managed to carry more than one conflicting thought in my head at all times. These opposing ideas resolve when I focus, and that track record perhaps led me to want to work in helping groups harmonize competing claims amid climate stress. And they swirl in my head (and outside it) everywhere these days.

To illustrate: on a lucky two-week stretch of vacation along Rhode Island’s oceanfront this summer, I’d work out in the mornings by running along low stone walls past cliffs to the coast. I’d think: This place will inspire people for centuries. And an SUV would bellow past, and I’d think: This can’t last another decade.

The path we face contains the road between those realities. People, even when we rely on code to find our way and categorize our memories, rush to the horizons and coves that my biophilic friend Bill Browning calls “prospect and refuge.” And people will not prosper for long in the triple-wide cars or the quadruple-width houses on which I and other fortunate ones have grown up. The storms and fires and heat unspooling from the overcarbonized atmosphere guarantee a redesign covering the whole world. Even if you wanted to set up a fortress where you could order all your Pinots and chia seeds and stream all your inputs into the palm of your hand, the cost of transportation and insurance and human suffering would soar too high and would likely make you feel yucky.

And don’t take my word on that: consider the rolled-up newspaper that greeted me at the end of one of my more humid morning workouts.

So what to do? An instant switch looks unfair. People drive the cars they drive because they think they need them, and real estate occupies its reality thanks to a mix of design ideals, controlled-market enthusiasm, and sometimes dubious zoning laws. You can’t and shouldn’t level a vacation town and gin up a commune, and you shouldn’t begrudge people their time near the ocean or in the mountains, away from the concrete mazes we mostly know. The overriding task collapses to a word that’s coating investment and policy decisions as fully as foamy saltwater coats the shore: adapt.

Adaptation means, for government budgets, investing billions in capital to help people move when their homes no longer stand above water or can no longer stand heat. It also means reorienting trade routes, and fuels, and trip lengths, and ideas about personal prerogative, to a reality where everything is aflame or flooding or might be nearing one of those extremes.

Adaptation also means training mental muscles to sleep well at night knowing that knowledge and context change both gradually and suddenly. I’ve gotten used to the tap, in my vacation time and my parenting time and my organizing time. You likely have too. You tap to correct your way on a drive, learn where you can find coffee, grok what world leaders have decided to do about a given conflict. But codes only yield facts and imminent steps. Adapting the way you live, invest, vote and argue means admitting that sometimes you need to explore strange physical and psychological places, step by step. Doing that shows you where both the crevasses and the anchors sit.

And last, perhaps it means a call to ease off lightswitch narratives in which things are OK or not OK. A year ago, I read the Inflation Reduction Act as it became law and whistling air filled my chest. This year, I read about how local landowners’ misgivings about projects and a lack of thorough dialogue stalls deployment of clean energy projects, and a rock plunged in my stomach. But if you’re adapting, then you can balance your proverbial feet on the law’s ambition and the polity’s ambivalence. You can commit to thinking up ways to discuss, advocate, invest in and redesign solutions that bring carbon pollution down without bringing mistrust to new heights. You want a sense of peace, you lose it - and as you adapt, you do work to define the addressable problem.

And you recalibrate your demands, perhaps, of public servants. Demanding that the American president “get climate done” carries the same weight as demanding that coal mining continue as it did before renewable energies gained a cost advantage. Public servants should assess accurately, address honestly, and adapt constantly. We’ll have to carry conflicting costs in our heads as we invest and work and vote to demand that sort of attention from politicians. But here’s a secret - anyone can carry thoughts that way. If you couldn’t, few would feel romance in looking at an ocean that can swallow them.

The ocean needn’t swallow anyone who has a guardian or who knows how to swim. Our loneliness, brittle debate, and scorched climate needn’t swallow anyone either. The carbon weight bearing down on the town I love has to change, like the ocean does.

That means any number of conflicting impulses and thoughts to carry at once into the future. I’m wishing us all courage, patience and glimpses of beauty along the way.