These stories, they are especially horrid when told by children. And many of the Juliana plaintiffs, three years into their court battle, are very much still children. Levi especially so. After trial is canceled, he flies home on Halloween, dressed in a Captain Climate costume handmade by his mother. The costume consists of a long-sleeved blue shirt and matching leggings, accessorized with an insignia globe, a cape, and an eye mask. He has a song that goes with it, too, a modified version of the Captain Planet theme song: “Captain Climate! He’s our hero!” Except in Levi’s version fossil fuel emissions get the takedown in the end.
His homecoming is bittersweet. Levi’s going-away party was less than two weeks earlier, and he’d been sent off by friends from his church for what was supposed to be an extended stay in Oregon for the trial. Now he is back on the barrier island between the US mainland and the Atlantic that he calls home.
Levi and I met there the same day Hurricane Michael hurtled toward land, October 10, 2018, less than three weeks before the trial had been planned to start. Satellite Beach is just south of Cocoa Beach, epitome of white sands, and I only narrowly succeeded in flying ahead of the hurricane to reach Levi there. I expected to be stuck in Florida until I could get out. And while Hurricane Michael derailed travel from Denver to Charlotte and decimated much in between, Levi and his mom, Leigh-Ann, showed me around as the sun still shone to the east, a condition soon to be disrupted by wind and rain.
Levi is standing outside the car door when I open it. To my utter horror, I am driving a sports car. It’s a newer Camaro with awful blind spots, and even though it is considered an upgrade from the standard economy car, it is also what the rental agency gives you at 2:30 a.m. when they don’t have anything else. Having flown from Jayden’s home in Louisiana, I came through the path of the hurricane as it approached, a circumstance that made for delays and uncertainty on top of the usual Dallas thunderstorms. Thus this car. Levi says he likes it right away, but then he doesn’t have to drive it. In addition to the awful blind spots, the defogger doesn’t work, a rough discovery on the dark stretch of swampy road between Orlando and Levi’s home. Now it’s afternoon, and some of us are still foggy. Hurricane Michael is set to make landfall in the panhandle—on the other side of the state—any minute. It’s still dry, but the wind is starting to blow, the odd gust pitching up to 25 miles an hour.
Levi is wearing a striped swimsuit and a button-down shirt patterned in yellow lemons. He greets me with the bald curiosity with which he greets most things: head cocked, big blond Afro blowing, like I am a strange exhibit at the zoo. He starts with questions about the car: “Is it a Camaro? How fast does it go?” Though Levi has been interviewed dozens of times by now and—it turns out—is good at talking about climate change and his case, his natural disposition is also as inquisitor, extrovert. It takes a few minutes to sort out which of us will be interviewed.
His mother explains that this is how Levi learns so much—he is always asking questions. On a recent trip to Calaveras Big Trees State Park in California, she says, he cornered a ranger and grilled the man for an hour. “We’re, like, sitting there eating lunch and he’s asking the ranger four million questions. I’m like, ‘All right, cool. That’s our homeschool activity for the day,’” says Leigh-Ann. She is thirty-two, petite and blonde like her son. She tells me this while Levi is walking to and from our post at the beach, interviewing the various other people who turn up and reporting back the details in enthusiastic dispatches.
“He does that kind of thing all the time,” she says. “We went to the courthouse on a field trip and him and one other kid—it was like two years ago, they were like nine—the two of them just bombarded these poor people with all these questions. But man, they learned so much. And even I learned a lot from just hearing like, ‘Well, what’s this? What’s that for? How do you figure out this? What happens here?’ They even had them in this little room that was the holding cell and they said, ‘This is all you get. You get a sandwich and it’s a peanut butter and jelly or a ham and cheese.’ And Levi goes, ‘What if you’re allergic to nuts and dairy and you’re a vegetarian?’ And they were like, ‘Well, too bad, you eat the apple.’” He got a taser demo too.
But this conversation is later. First, we walk onto the beach—a thin white strand fringed with seaweed—so I can get a better understanding of Levi’s claims against the government. He lives on just 3 square miles of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian River Lagoon system, the saltwater inlet that runs between the island and the mainland. And once on the beach, Levi is quickly off to the surf, thrilled with the viciousness of the tide as the weather begins its turn. “Look Mom, there’s perfect waves!” he hollers.
His homeschool group adopted a nearby beach for cleanup, so Levi is diligent about litter patrol even now. As we walk along the water, he has a plastic bag from a nearby dispenser that he starts filling with bits of trash. Bottle caps. Little scraps of whatever. A tiny rope he briefly turns into nunchucks. While he does this, we talk some. We start with how fortunate it is that Hurricane Michael will not make landfall here. Because of climate change, the annual tropical storms and hurricanes have increased in intensity in the last twenty years. And storm by storm, the changing weather is taking a toll.
“That’s the biggest problem for me and my family,” Levi says. He’s been evacuated from the island three times in his life. “When you leave the barrier island, you don’t know what you’re going to come home to or if you’ll even have a home when you come back.”
Scientists are still learning what impacts climate change will have on the frequency of hurricanes. But they’ve determined that when hurricanes do arrive, global warming likely boosts their rainfall and wind intensity. That’s also true for tropical cyclones—those storms will become increasingly vicious on a warmer planet, escalating to Category 4 or 5 storms more often, with rainfall up to 15 percent heavier. All of this boosts the odds Levi will be exposed to awful weather in his life, storms that are more than threats to his home and his island, his way of life. They are also threats to his emotional well-being, his sense of place and his identity.
Some of the damage these storms inflict is what you’d expect from severe weather. Hurricane Irma wrecked Levi’s school and knocked trees down behind his house in 2017. The trees took down the power lines, too, and cut off power for two weeks. Levi says the storms also cause flooding in town, and though his family sandbagged in 2017, the flood still walked straight up to the front door and waited creepily on the steps.
“I could clearly kayak down the street if I wanted to,” he says.
Then there are the other effects. Things that mix with island life as the climate slowly recalibrates. Like the fact that storms overwhelm the sanitary system here, and add bacteria to the seawater that threatens fish and promotes the algae growth that can kill them. Or that storms and sea level rise are damaging the beach. Seas are already rising along the coasts of Florida. The EPA predicts that if oceans and the atmosphere continue to warm, sea level is likely to rise by as much as 4 feet along the Florida coast in the next century. That prediction will double within a year, but it’s still too much to sustain civilization on this island. In its resiliency plan, the City of Satellite Beach found that 2 feet of sea level rise would be a tipping point, something that’s predicted to happen by 2050 if global warming trends persist. In between, the storm surges, tidal flooding, and the bacteria problem will continue to affect the island in worsening ways. At 2 feet, the island’s fire station will flood in some tides, along with nearby streets. At 3 feet, the city’s community center, several roads, and the city hall parking lot will be underwater. At 4 feet, city hall itself will be submerged.
Levi says native plants have been put in the dunes to help prevent erosion as water roils them in storms. He points out a trio of plants—sea grape and grasses—and says they strengthen the shore. Then he picks up a seed and shows it to me. It’s called a hamburger seed, and it looks like a burger in a bun. They’re one type of the many buoyant seeds that drop from tropical trees and vines here, many of the plants legumes. These hard-shelled seeds have air pockets and float on the water until they wash ashore, seed a plant somewhere far from where they first dropped. They can travel a long way on Atlantic currents—anywhere, really; Jamaica, the United Kingdom—which makes collecting them fun. Levi can identify many of them and is surprised when I don’t know what a sea bean is. He adds my sea bean education to the day’s tasks.
Beyond the sleeves of his blazing yellow shirt—also sewn by Leigh-Ann, who is a master seamstress—Levi’s skin is covered in the scars of youth: bug bites and scrapes and a hefty pink scab that marks his right elbow. Signs of an active life. And as we talk, his energy is obvious in the way he takes breaks to buzz around the beach, then comes back with things to show me. A piece of sea glass. A shell. Another sea bean from a Mucuna vine. He knows the names of the shells too. When he finds something he isn’t familiar with, Leigh-Ann says, he takes it home and tries to look it up in a reference book that he likes. He reads fiction too. Percy Jackson. Harry Potter. It annoys him that his co-plaintiffs talk about movies he hasn’t seen.
Being the youngest? “It stinks,” he says. “I like it because all of them are like older siblings to me and they’re all really nice. But in other ways, I don’t know. Sometimes . . .” he trails off.
Leigh-Ann jumps in. This is normal with them, Levi starting the talking and Leigh-Ann finishing.
“They talk about teenager stuff and he’s like, ‘Huh?’” she says.
“Yeah,” he concedes. “Conversations a lot of the time are boring.” Then he looks at me squarely, nearly wincing, and adds, “They had this argument about whether or not a water molecule was wet.” He says this, incredulous. As if there is no greater torture than this kind of talk. He doesn’t know what he’d rather talk about. But it isn’t this. Or legal talk. Later he’ll say that court talk is boring too.
He turns back to picking up trash, digging, running into the waves, then jogging back again, peppering the in-between with fresh details about hamburger seeds and grass. At the water’s edge, he calls out, “Can I get my shirt wet?” and I learn later this is the kind of question he asks when he knows the answer is no. He is a boy like I remember boys being before we started putting them in front of screens: dynamic. And as I learn more about him, I learn he leads a screen-free life, a kid unto nature. Which makes it easy to see, in his everyday play, what he will lose if this island is wrecked by storms or underwater in fifty years. And those outcomes, they are likely.
“The thing that I worry about the most is the fact that I might not have a future. If I have children, I might not be able to show them where I live,” Levi tells me later. “And my greatest fear is that the barrier island that I live on right now will go underwater and I won’t be able to go and visit the place where I grew up and where I’ve lived for most of my life.”
Only coordinated worldwide action to reverse warming trends, or at least action by the world’s biggest polluters, will stop this outcome. Human-induced climate change has been causing Greenland and Antarctic ice to thaw since the 1990s, when the warming atmosphere transferred heat to oceans to the extent that melting began. All this ice melt, combined with the fact that warmer water expands, is making sea levels rise steadily. If it hasn’t already, this process can spin far out of human control. Already, seas are rising faster than climate models predicted, largely because those models didn’t account for feedback loops that accelerate such things. Like the fact that oceans will hold heat for thousands of years and continue to melt polar ice, even if the world reduces greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
Other measures are only temporary. The city dumps a bunch of sand on this beach to protect it sometimes, for example. The shore used to naturally get big and small, erode and refresh year after year, and the seaweed helped to recover it. Now it only ever gets smaller. Two years ago the city put an artificial reef in the water to attract juvenile sea turtles and tropical fish from a natural reef nearer to shore, one that provides habitat to fish and birds, sea turtles and invertebrates, and also protects the island against waves in storms. The plan is to cover the natural reef with sand to claim more beach. Shift the wildlife to the artificial one.
“It’s kind of unrealistic,” Leigh-Ann says. The sand is a crowd pleaser. But she points to the high-water line above our heads in the dunes and says the water level is such that the coastline will erode no matter what. “It looks good for a little while.” But the city has spent millions on sand, twice, she says, and both times it was carried off within a year. The fact that it isn’t native only adds to complications for marine life.
Levi joined the Juliana case at the suggestion of a pastor at his Unitarian Universalist church because he is a child who is slowly losing his way of life. Which is why, despite his age, he understands these truths, and talks easily about climate change and what it will do to his world. It’s not a rote speech, a cause he can’t feel. He’s given many a talk, many a courthouse stump speech, and, more so lately, many an interview. CNN. ABC. Tampa Bay Times. Public Radio International. Soon to be NPR and others. But such practice does not curb his anxiety. He says this kind of advocacy makes him feel empowered, like people are listening to him and to what he has to say. But so far none of the reaction to this work is moving fast enough to outpace the destruction of his island. In two weeks, a red tide will cover this beach in dead fish, and Levi will be stuck in his house trying not to breathe the air, barely able to go outside without choking and feeling like he is “inhaling a fistful of powdered black pepper.”
As we leave, he shows me a stone sculpture made from coquina rock, a type of sedimentary rock that forms from shells and sand. In a sand pit at the entrance to the beach, sculptor Monty Fein—whom Levi has also debriefed—has shaped these rocks into dolphins, starfish, turtles, a crab, all of which Levi points out to me. There used to be mushrooms, he says, but not anymore.
I ask him what people say to him when they talk to him about his case. He says, “Some people are very optimistic about the lawsuit and others are very supportive. It just really depends on the person. Some people have no idea what it is about or what climate change is or why I’m suing the US government. It just really depends on”—he pauses for a minute while he finds the right words—“their views on climate change and things like that, I guess.”
I ask him if he is able to explain why he is a plaintiff to people who don’t understand climate change or believe in it. He says, “Yeah. Sometimes I do try. And other times, when I can just kind of tell that it’s a hopeless case, I just say, well, okay.”
Levi says he doesn’t mind that other people have different views. Then he points out a snail in the sculpture, tells me his last interviewer had a really cool drone to photograph it with, and is off in pursuit of a lizard.
———
As Levi and I were having this conversation, Hurricane Michael made landfall on the other side of the state with winds of 160 miles per hour, delivering exactly the kind of devastation Levi has so far been luckily spared. It hit shore at 1:30 p.m. near Tyndall Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle, ripping the roof off the elementary school and damaging the roofs of every other building on the base. It wrecked the drone runway, a training facility, and a materials research lab. It was the fourth most powerful storm to ever make landfall in the United States, and the most powerful storm to ever hit Florida.
Complicating matters, just one day before it came ashore Hurricane Michael had been rated a weak Category 3, so many people didn’t evacuate. Some didn’t have the option because they couldn’t afford it. That the situation didn’t look bad enough to leave—many a weatherman would be wrong about this—made it so a lot of young people would face the trauma Levi had just avoided.
When Hurricane Michael came ashore, it was so fierce that it blew through two states and was still the strongest hurricane to ever hit Georgia by the time it arrived. In Mexico Beach, Florida, about 15 miles south of the base, storm surges threw waves up to 14 feet, which meant the water was high enough to destroy the second story of some of the buildings. The second story of the El Governor Motel, one of the sturdiest buildings around, was swamped by ocean water even while it stood on concrete pilings. Water also wiped out a nearby RV park and carved two new inlets through a state park on a cape farther south, slicing it in thirds.
As the storm thrashed through town, wind stripped trees bare and splintered buildings. Solar panels oddly held shingles in place where roofs were otherwise stripped to plywood. Other buildings were simply flattened. Where some remained aloft, wind and water pushed debris to their feet—fractured boards and parts of what once was—and the still-standing buildings held it there in piles like impromptu barricades. Along the beach itself, the road gave way. And for a while water just stood, flowing in and out of the windows of homes.
Across the whole of Hurricane Michael’s path, the force of the wind alone damaged more than fifty thousand structures, three thousand of them for good, swiping roofs and porches off buildings, smashing some to shards, and leaving trees felled in every direction. Wind also derailed 138 railcars. People who were anywhere near the storm described the sound of the wind screaming, the hurricane like an angry train. Sailboats were thrown from a marina into a heap in Panama City, where power lines were tangled and trees covered the streets.
On its inland march, Hurricane Michael dumped massive amounts of rain and spurred several tornadoes. It also flipped a silo, collapsed the roof of a tire store, and knocked down the exterior wall of a building in Marianna, Florida. Power failed across wide swaths of the panhandle, with lights out across the Florida shore and the southern part of Georgia for nearly 200 miles.
Then there were the floods. A state road flooded, overtopping a bridge, and the Chipola River flooded, too, swamping out fishing camps. Once Hurricane Michael was about 160 miles inland, it unloaded 7 inches of rain in a few hours in Quitman County, Georgia. On inland farms, it wiped out peanuts and cotton and, everywhere, again, the trees. The Florida Forest Service and the Georgia Forestry Commission would later estimate that Hurricane Michael downed so many trees that the states’ combined timber losses hit $2 billion, and it damaged more than 5 million acres of land. State officials cited another $240 million in replanting costs for trees and fretted over the potential for wildfire while so much kindling lay on forest floors.
The Category 5 winds lasted only three hours in Bay County, a fraction of the forty hours such winds would blow when Dorian hit the Bahamas a year later. Once it stopped, those left reeling would face lives remade by the force of the hurricane. A great many of them would be children.
———
Aside from the immediate impact of such storms in tropical zones, damage can stack up when these storms are ongoing, and Levi’s barrier island is one example of a landscape that is slowly eroding as conditions worsen. Intermittent storms overwhelm the systems that are there to deal with heavy rains. And when that happens, the storms wreak havoc on everything, humans and benthos (the tiny organisms that live at the bottom of the water) alike.
Because the island is small, for example, the potable water is pumped from the mainland. When a storm is headed for the island, the water is turned off to protect the water supply. That’s one reason evacuation is standard during storms. And why during one recent hurricane, a house that caught fire in Levi’s neighborhood burned to the ground. Sewage flows the other way, in pipes back to the mainland. These pumps don’t work so well when the island is saturated or the power is off, so the sewage either backs up into homes or gets dumped into the Indian River Lagoon and circulated back to the Atlantic. The bacteria then mixes with things like lawn fertilizer and leaking septic tanks and makes for algal blooms. This is partly because as temperatures rise, “there’s no winter anymore. It doesn’t get cold. And because it doesn’t get cold, the bacteria doesn’t get a chance to die,” Leigh-Ann says.
This is obvious enough when Levi and Leigh-Ann and I make a pit stop at a canal along the Indian River Lagoon, where sewage overflows when the city’s sanitary system is besieged. It’s easy to see the problem just from looking at the water: it’s dense and dark, something I’ve seen before in static canals where sewage outflows pour human waste. Such water also tends to be plagued by the lawn fertilizer people cannot seem to resist on water-fronting acreage. Both the sewage and the fertilizer promote algae growth, which means the water is probably becoming eutrophic while the algae eats up all the oxygen. In other words, it is probably suffocating everything that lives there. Few animals can thrive in water like this. Already there’s been a significant die-off of the seagrass that used to grow, up to 100 percent in some areas, eliminating food for manatees, which otherwise like the warm water and shelter of the lagoon. And likely as the algae dies off, it will sink and stack, filling in the canal from the bottom up. A future of dredge projects and pesticides.
There’s nothing but a concrete dock to stand on as we overlook the lagoon, so Levi has only a few palm fronds from an overhanging tree to distract himself with. He promptly starts playing Tarzan. As he swings from the ledge of the canal over the dock and the water and back again, there is a minor panic on Leigh-Ann’s part about whether he will fall in. This is not because Levi can’t swim—Levi is a competitive swimmer and good enough at it that he competes against older kids. The issue is that the water is filthy. And beyond not needing a case of E. coli, Levi is wearing Leigh-Ann’s shoes. They have the same size feet, they tell me, though hers are wider. So they often trade shoes, since both wear sandals and it often doesn’t matter whose are whose. Except now.
“Do not get my shoes wet with this water,” Leigh-Ann says, stern, as Levi swings again over the canal and nearly falls.
Levi used to wade in this water as a baby, before it was so routinely polluted. Now he doesn’t, though he points out the home of his friend’s grandparents across the canal, where he sometimes plays and has fallen in. He has never liked this water, he says later. “It always freaked me out because I couldn’t see the bottom.”
This lagoon system is important to wildlife, though. Because it is sheltered, “it’s a great nursery for young sharks and small fish, and multiple different animals use it because it is a safe haven for them,” Levi says. In fact, more than three thousand species of plants and animals live here, with dozens classified as endangered or threatened, like the manatee.
Manatees and juvenile turtles are affected by this pollution, especially when seagrasses are choked out of the water. Sea level rise is already eliminating their habitat, and rising temperatures and ocean acidification strain the species too. Last year, 11 percent of the sea turtles that died or got sick or injured in Florida did so in this region. Brevard County, where Satellite Beach is located, also has the highest number of manatee mortalities in Florida, though the lagoon is a critical habitat for the threatened sea mammal, and the area’s beaches are some of most important nesting beaches for sea turtles in the world.
Levi spots a bungee cord with three tennis balls attached to it and drops out of the palm frond to claim it. Next he finds a few rectangles of duct tape, and pulls these apart until sand falls out. As temperatures rise in this region, Leigh-Ann says, the inability of cold weather to kill what bacteria lets loose brings a whole other problem, the much more serious problem of rampant bacterial growth, and Levi especially doesn’t enter this water since flesh-eating bacteria were found here.
“If you swim in this with an open wound, you could catch all kinds of who knows what,” Leigh-Ann says.
But for an eleven-year-old who’s been raised in this ecosystem, life a skinny stretch of land between the beach and a lagoon, canals in between, it doesn’t come naturally to Levi to stand aside. There are rowing boats nearby, and he says he plans to try crew when he’s old enough. He’s only in the sixth grade, and though he’s farther along academically, he has to wait until he is twelve to learn. I ask Levi if he’s a good swimmer, and he’s modest. Says he doesn’t know. But Leigh-Ann says when he competed in the rec league, he beat everyone all the time. Now he swims six days a week with the older group, two hours a day. But all that skill, it doesn’t help him here.
“Do not fall in that water,” she says. “I do not want you touching it.”
———
The devastation Hurricane Michael causes will last for years. Nine months later, Bay County, Florida, home to both Panama City and Mexico Beach, will still be struggling with how to deal with it. In the interim, the horror will be measured in numbers.
$25 billion in property damage.
$4.7 billion in damages to the Air Force base.
31 million cubic yards of debris.
72 million tons of fallen trees.
Twenty-two thousand people displaced.
Five thousand of those made long-term homeless.
Twenty-five deaths.
Two major fires.
And $1.8 billion needed to rebuild the towns. Water mains and towers. Sewage treatment plants. Internet. Roads. Bridges. Stormwater drainage. Community centers. Government buildings. Park, beach, and reef restoration and reforestation too. Even the crayfish need a safe place, their habitat now in the crosshairs of so much rebuilding.
Owing to their youth, the children who lived through the hurricane suffer in compounding ways.
Theirs is exactly the kind of outcome Lise Van Susteren, the trauma expert in the Juliana case, warned about. A psychiatrist who co-convened the first conference on the mental health effects of climate change, Van Susteren told the court that flooding and violent storms increase incidents of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress. Those disorders can be especially hard on children, whose brains are still developing and at risk of pumping unnaturally high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. Their brains can become hardwired this way, producing mental health conditions that can persist throughout life.
That the children who survived Hurricane Michael were still stressed the following summer was obvious. In the Bay County School District, 13 percent of the students were displaced to somewhere else. Of the kids that remained, five thousand of them were still homeless or in temporary housing. And at least 122 children became so mentally unstable that the state took them into protective custody for evaluation for fear they would hurt themselves or someone else. The math as to the exact number of such children was fuzzy. That figure—122—was a statistic assembled by people in a system in crisis. As that crisis slowly resolved, or at least became a new kind of normal, the system morphed into something new, so what numbers were next available arrived by new math, making it years before the number of children seen to be in crisis could be statistically verified as an anomaly. Professionals like Ken Chisholm, the clinical lead for the Bay District Schools mental health team, suspected the number of children in acute distress was higher than normal, higher even than 122. But anecdotally, the impacts were obvious.
“With younger kids, you’ll see the triggers start to occur a little quicker. If they lived through the storm and watched their roof come off—which I have had so many kids talk about that experience—anytime you get a thunderstorm, these kids are in a panic,” says Chisholm, adding that these effects emerged after the initial shock of trauma was gone, taking root as longer-term anxiety and depression. “You have lots of folks that were living in mobile homes that were knocked off their foundation while people were inside. I had plenty of folks say the window blows out in their home, and so you have glass and you have water pouring in at 150 miles an hour. Just those kinds of stories over and over again.”
After the storm, these children were at the mercy of an adult world that was quickly thrown into chaos. Adults were out of work, living in FEMA camps or in collapsing homes or alternate housing, with families stacked on top of each other. There were fewer childcare options, and many of the stressed parents who were unable to take breaks began abusing drugs and alcohol. Hurricane Michael wrecked much of their support—a detox center and a substance abuse center, AA programs that could not run for lack of buildings—and stalled programs for moms with addictions. Forty-seven churches were also damaged or destroyed, leaving the faith community and the support services it offered hobbled too. The lack of housing, doctors, and childcare soon gave way to an uptick of domestic violence, child abuse, drug abuse, and suicides—all things mental health experts have observed in communities affected by extreme weather.
Like the adults, the children had few of the old places to go to process all of this or to just hang around and find a bit of normal. The movie theater was gone and so were the bowling alleys, several parks, and a chunk of the mall. Many of the after-school programs reduced their programming or shuttered completely. The Boys and Girls Club and Girls, Inc., were running at half time and operating out of school buildings, their own facilities destroyed. Some of the sports leagues had also broken down.
This is the kind of fate Levi has always avoided as an evacuee. His home has avoided it, too, through luck and preparation, at least so far. But hurricane season arrives annually in Florida, from June through November. And as more intense hurricanes approach Levi’s home from the Atlantic, the likelihood he will experience a devastating storm only increases. Some people never recover their psychological well-being after these kinds of experiences. And each successive experience makes them more vulnerable to the next. When there isn’t enough time to recover between storms, that takes its toll too. And because climate change increases incidents of extreme weather, human suffering can only compound, or worse, lead to “pre-traumatic” anxiety—the fear that another storm is just around the corner.
“Children have less life experience than we do. When something like this happens to them, they don’t have the ability to process it as well as we do. We have the life experience to know, for example, ‘Oh, this is a once-in-a-lifetime storm,’” Chisholm says. “Let’s say they go into a place and three hours later they walk out, they don’t recognize anything. That’s traumatic. And then you have those kids who thought they might die.”
All of this made the shift back to normal rough on the children who survived Hurricane Michael. And normal was a new normal. The old life was gone. In addition to the shifting routines at home, the shifting locations of home, some elementary-aged kids were hit with school closures, too, so that many of the community’s youngest children were displaced both at school and at home. These students had new teachers, new classmates—a whole new social order to learn. Plus the teachers were as stressed as all the other adults. Many of them were displaced, too, and experiencing a kind of malaise about supporting all the other people who needed support while they faced their own impending relocations and rising rents as housing tightened. The official term for this is “compassion fatigue.” It is a tough condition for teachers whose salaries hover at $30,000 a year, a figure even a job at McDonald’s can rival.
The adult world bearing down, the kids’ own lives disrupted, many young people were turning up at school only to act out or have their minds wander. The adolescent mental health treatment center was among the places wrecked by the storm and could not help them.
No one could say for sure what would happen to these children in the long run—only time and life could really tell. But studies of youth from Katrina, from Hurricane Charley, from Superstorm Sandy, all show disaster trauma can have lasting psychological impacts for kids. There is a bell curve, it seems, of possibilities. On one end, Chisholm notes, are the youth who acclimate—like our ancestors did to frequent deaths of their children, to disease, to lack of medical care. On the other, there are those who fail to cope, end up psychotic or suicidal. And then there are all the outcomes in between.
Asked whether the Juliana plaintiffs were being harmed, and interviewing each, Van Susteren called the group of youth, with their varying experiences of climate trauma, the “Climate Cassandras,” a call back to the Greek myth of Cassandra, whose gift was to see the future but whose curse was to not be believed. Van Susteren theorized the Juliana youth and climate activists like them could grow up like the children of alcoholics, constantly repeating their alarm without result, reaction. They would learn to be grown up before they had a chance to be young. Their lives would be attended by the guilt and frustration of not being able to stop climate change. And meanwhile they would shoulder the “debilitating knowledge” that humans are the cause of it. Existential questions about species survival and mass extinction would walk through life with them. And they would bear the sadness of knowing “that we did not value them enough to bother protecting them from harm,” even though they warned us.
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Levi will join the youth leadership program at Toastmasters soon after. Go on a speaking tour of Unitarian Universalist churches in the Pacific Northwest, knock out speech after event in Florida, keep doing his media interviews. Still, he’ll face another hurricane within a year. After Dorian makes for Florida and the president adjusts its course with a Sharpie, asks whether we can just nuke these storms and be done with them, it will wipe out chunks of dune above Levi’s Pelican Beach, cover the beach with seaweed, and carve sea turtle nests in half along the sand like a real-life diorama. Afterward, we will talk on the phone and he will tell me he was amazed and depressed by this all at once. But on the day of Hurricane Michael’s landfall, Levi hasn’t seen any of this devastation yet.
In these days when he is still eleven, on our visit in October 2018, we end up at a spot where salt water flows off the Atlantic to make the Indian River and the lagoon system still one of the most diverse in the Northern Hemisphere. Levi pops out of the car wearing the tennis balls and bungee cord garland he salvaged from the canal. In the time it has taken to drive from here—five minutes, probably—he has wrapped the bungee portion around himself so that the tennis balls ride along the front of him like a very large necklace. Leigh-Ann is aghast when she turns from the driver’s seat and sees this. There is a brief debate about the probable bacterial content of this ornament. And then Levi is forced to undecorate himself.
We’re on the south end of the lagoon, where the wind is fierce, the fetch incredible, and the tide rises up. For the most part it is ocean, an inlet that peels off the Atlantic and wraps itself around the island’s western side in a series of sheltered lakes and canals. Levi walks to the end of one of three wooden piers and watches as a couple tries to launch a skiff in the rough water. There’s no pushing this boat against this surf, not from the shore, so the duo take it to the end of the dock, pulling it by a rope, and try to climb aboard from there. It works, but only on the second try, and Levi stands back as they struggle onboard and motor off, next finding a dead catfish lying at the foot of the surf. He hoists the fish on the end of a stick, looks out at the water, pondering.
“I think if you throw him in, he’s going to come back to you,” I say.
“I’m going to try that,” Levi says, and runs to the westernmost pier to fling the fish into the sea.
“We had a fish kill a couple years ago where there was a million dead fish here. Just everywhere, dead fish,” Leigh-Ann says. “Some manatees were dead. Some dolphins. Some other bigger things, birds. It was horrible.” She says the smell was terrible, too, and that all this was caused by a combination of hot weather, a storm that washed nutrients into the water, and the resulting algal bloom. Climate change just makes all of these things worse, she says, exacerbating problems that are already here.
For example, a boat is sunk about 20 yards off the pier even now. The bow is slightly nosing out of the water as if gasping for air, but the stern is done for, submerged, sunk. It’s a sport boat, and the water is rising and falling over its portside windows. Sometimes in storms, this happens, Leigh-Ann says. Not infrequently. And when boats sink, the fuel lets loose and becomes just another pollutant in the water. So, too, does everything on board. I imagine coolers of beer. Towels. Plates and silverware. A radio. This is not a huge vessel. But it’s big enough for a galley and the amenities pleasure boats often have. Refrigerators. Microwaves. Stovetop ranges.
A driver stops to ask if the boat just sank or has been there. Then a fellow enviro stops by to tell us the Coast Guard was able to get the fuel off the boat before it spilled into the water. This and details of a recent vote of the county commission to ban septic tanks next to the lagoon. Leigh-Ann invites the man to Levi’s upcoming send-off at the church. We don’t yet know that the trial will be canceled. That Levi won’t be living in Oregon this fall in the care of other parents, grandparents, and the staff of Our Children’s Trust in the stretches when his mother can’t be there.
The dead catfish washes back ashore. Levi names him Leroy, then shows me a few more sea beans and a huge snail shell. We see a crane on the pier then, and soon Levi seems to be having a kind of conversation with this bird. I remember how much this is possible for children, and when he leaves the dock for the parking lot and the crane follows, Levi reminds me how much closer children can be to nature than adults. How much they can feel the life of an inchworm, of a beetle, a bird. While Levi stands near to his mother and me, starts to imitate the body posture of the crane, first he is just turning his body toward it, somewhat subconsciously, as the crane walks around us. But then the crane takes on a funny pose, as if bracing for wind, a leg raised, and Levi starts to do the same, trying on this one-legged stance. You can hear the wonder: What is this bird doing? Levi’s head is tilted. And because Levi is small, the crane nearly as tall as him, next it is the crane’s turn to be curious: What is this yellow thing with the blowing hair? Levi moves away, back to the pier, and the bird follows. Soon they are on the pier, one pacing one way, the other following, and then the reverse. It is like this for a while. A slow back-and-forth between two same-sized creatures who don’t know much about each other but seem to want to learn. Or at least play.
Leigh-Ann gets a call: press staff from Our Children’s Trust. Can Levi do an interview on NPR? As the logistics unfold, and Levi and the crane do their thing, the bird gets too close to me and flies off to the next pier. Levi walks back toward the water, spots a dolphin and points it out.
“I’ve seen tons of manatees,” he says. “I think they’re beautiful.” He says they’re slow and lazy, “but when they want to go, they can really go.” In floods, he has seen the manatees crawl onto the banks to eat people’s lawns to avoid starving, their heads straining for the grass.
After I leave, dodging Hurricane Michael airport by airport and learning, for the first time, about the dozens of people killed, I hear Levi talk to Terri Gross, flawlessly, on NPR. Despite already having met him and knowing how eloquent he can be, I am baffled by his poise. It happens again when I speak to him for Reuters in front of the courthouse after trial is canceled, this bafflement. Though he is only eleven, Levi’s expertise at speaking in short, quotable sentences that exactly respond to the questions he is asked is well honed. I realize that because he is the youngest plaintiff, he is among the most frequently quoted, certainly the most photographed, and is rapidly becoming a highly skilled public speaker. He is growing up fast. And seeing this alongside the horrors that threaten him makes me wonder what climate change will take from him first: his innocence or his landscape.