To contemplate the meaning of home isn’t some kind of scholarly undertaking. It’s more like sifting through a cardboard box of old photos and keepsakes, riffling through memories and images. In an instant, the word conjures the most vivid associations, the most visceral pieces of personal history, thoughts that wrap around me like a warm blanket, nostalgia so bittersweet that I can taste it.
The first image that arrives in my mind is of rain tapping the windowpanes of my early childhood house while outside, intricate tongues of lightning streaked and jagged across a purple sky. Here I could watch in sheltered awe, no matter what the sky unleashed.
Then, the midwestern city where I finished high school, surrounded by fields of corn and soybeans—the summer air hot and damp, the streets near the local college foot-worn and leading to a shaggy coffee shop and a take-out restaurant that sold crab dumplings and fried rice. Rings of shopping malls and big-box stores at the outskirts. I was never comfortable here, but it became a part of my identity, like some bit of clothing you wear because someone gave it to you, pulling it on again and again until it softens and fits to your particular frame.
Then, the hundred-year-old Seattle house where I live now. The desk where I write—cluttered with books and mementos, a photograph of my grandmother, the wooden bookends that used to belong to my grandfather, a red stone I plucked from the trail on an arrestingly lovely nature walk. From here I gaze out the window at a pair of crows squabbling in the backyard magnolia tree. Above me the slant-ceilinged attic bedrooms where multiple generations of people slept before I arrived here. In the distance, the groaning undersong of the highway and the port nearby and its sounds, a train whistle, metal shipping containers cracking loudly against one another in the distance, the moan of a cargo boat, the roar of a jet plane above. The sheen of the blue estuary that circumscribes my city, not visible from here but always present.
Home is “not a house for sale or a site for ‘development’ but the place by which one is owned, year after year loved and known,” writes poet and essayist Wendell Berry. For now, my house, this city, this frayed and beautiful bit of urban ecosystem, are mine, and I am theirs—until we part ways.
Home is also a negotiation between the essentials you need, such as food and shelter, the life you construct, and the rhythms of your surroundings. More than anything, home offers safe refuge and a means to create stability, both physical and psychological. I have been privileged to always have a home with sturdy walls. I am aware—with the occasional quivering feeling of hyperalertness—that my sense of safety could rupture in an instant, perhaps if the fault line that lies beneath Seattle decides to quake.
Other invisible but insidious threats lurk just beyond my walls. Down the hill from my current house lies the industrial corridor that has lashed itself to the edge of the Duwamish River—named for the Indigenous people of this area but also known as a Superfund site, among the most toxic places in the United States. The lower river valley has some of the worst air pollution in Seattle. Not long ago, a group of high school science students collected tree moss in the valley and found it laced with arsenic, lead, and chromium. I assume that these threats do not intrude noticeably into my personal space, my air, my body, but I don’t know for certain. Safety is partly a story we tell ourselves.
And my house, like the majority of dwellings in Seattle, was built for a certain set of conditions. A maritime climate—long wet winters alternating with crisp blue summers when the thermometer’s mercury rarely used to slide above 80 degrees Fahrenheit. My city was made with mountains in mind: the water that flows through my household taps was drawn from the high-elevation meltwater that resupplies the city reservoirs all spring and summer. Mountain snows and glaciers recharge the rivers that spin the city’s hydropower turbines and keep my lights on, fire up my electric teakettle, and power the laptop computer on which I write this.
As years pass, these conditions are no longer as reliable. Some years, the snows are scant. Summers here are increasingly hotter, smokier—as wildfires in the surrounding mountain ranges encroach on the city. The air becomes more difficult to breathe. One achingly dry, hot summer could create the right conditions not just for smoke but also for a catastrophically large fire much nearer to my home, even in this damp place of cedar and Douglas fir. I am in a more precarious position than I used to be. We all are.
Everywhere, the weather, the sky, the water, even the terrain on which we have built our homes is becoming unruly. It is literally unsettling—causing the unsettlement of some places that used to be more livable. As I write this, the American West is parched, millions of acres in extreme drought or worse. From Western Canada to California, wildfires are driving people from their homes. Burning down houses and neighborhoods and communities. Destroying belongings of both physical and emotional value—old pianos and guitars, wedding dresses, furniture, knitting needles, cars, garden tools—while also devouring human shelter and livelihoods. At the same time, the first hurricanes of the season are heading toward Mexico and the Gulf, the Caribbean, the American Southeast and Mid-Atlantic. How many thousands of people will flee to escape the next round of storms? How many more will ride them out, hunker under fragile roofs while heavy winds shriek and pound? Who will dodge the blows and who will lose everything, the homes they’ve built, the lives they’ve created?
It is too easy to recite a list of ongoing calamities. In the summer of 2021, one in three Americans experienced some kind of weather disaster. Elsewhere, the Italian island of Sicily reached what may have been the hottest ever recorded temperature on the Continent—nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Villagers on the Greek island of Evia organized a brigade to try to stop wildfires from burning down their homes. At the same time, a vicious drought hung over Angola, and thousands fled their homes for nearby Namibia.
The world has always been stormy. Some of these events would have happened at any time. But each year, the likelihood of larger calamities creeps up. According to the calculations of hundreds of scientists, the whole planet is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than when the foundation of my house was laid. Because of this addition of heat energy, events that were once by definition anomalous—a catastrophic flood, a megafire, a severe drought—are becoming almost routine. The warming of the planet has also caused the level of the sea to rise about eight inches since the beginning of the twentieth century. Because of the emissions human societies have already sent into the atmosphere, over the next twenty to thirty years—as my school-age niece and half-sister journey into the middle of their lives—the planet’s temperature is guaranteed to continue climbing. And unless we choose collectively to prevent it by transforming the way we live—from our economies to our politics to the built environments of our homes and cities—the world will become hotter still, until it is perhaps too unreliable, too dangerous for people to occupy many places that once held thriving communities and histories and cultures.
But not all of this is inevitable, and I am not giving you a book of doom. I don’t want to ruminate on all the ways we might be evicted or displaced. This is a book about home. I want to consider how we settle in. I want to think about how we choose to live now, so that we may continue to have safe places in the future.
What happens when the rhythms, the seasons, the known patterns within which we have built our homes, our lives, our towns, our places, go off-kilter? How do we meet our needs? How do we negotiate the weather, the water, and the terrain when things turn hotter, stormier, and more unpredictable?
These aren’t hypothetical questions. This is now the dilemma of our time. How do we make a home on this unruly planet?
This book dwells in the particulars of personal experiences—it offers a gathering of stories about people who are facing calamities at home and the ways they confront new risks and disruptions, often with courage and insight. It is about the hope and imagination that come from a sense of connectedness to a place and a community.
But in the backdrop of each of these stories is a global crisis known far too prosaically as climate change—the alteration of the fundamental rules, seasons, temperatures, tides, and weather cycles on which we have based our lives. Before I tell you these stories of home, it’s worth spending a moment thinking about this planet we all occupy. This may seem like a pairing of opposites—a mismatch in scale. It isn’t possible to squint at the whole blue Earth out someone’s kitchen window. But that is part of the great failure of perception that has placed us all in this crisis: we haven’t recognized how the intimate spaces of our lives and the workings of the planet are tied together.
The connection between home and Earth is inherent in our language. The word ecology originates from the Greek word for home, oikos, and the suffix logia, meaning “the study of something.” The modern meaning refers to the scientific discipline that connects us to other species and to our natural surroundings. The word economy grows from the same root and nomos, meaning “to manage”—the management of home. In common parlance, we discuss ecology and economy as if they are opposites. But an economy should be a means “to organize our relationships in a place, ideally, to take care of the place and each other,” according to Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, an environmental justice organization. For decades, the environmental justice movement has been vocal about the connections between home and ecosystem and the need to defend home from pollution. But our increasingly globalized economy is becoming ever more disconnected from home, place, and planet—managing our planetary home as if the whole Earth is controllable by humans without limit.
In simple terms, coal, oil, and gas—energy sources formed from ancient fossil carbon—fuel the global economy and power most of our homes. As we have burned that carbon, we have altered the physics and chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere on a grand scale. We have known about this problem for more than three decades, since scientists first began drawing international public attention to the subject of climate change, but we have failed to reorganize ourselves in order to take care of it. As a result, the planet is becoming ever more unruly. Unruly has several meanings, including “uncontrollable”—and also “stormy, tempestuous, characterized by severe weather or rough conditions.” Climate change is fundamentally a crisis of how we relate to the world around us—it’s a crisis of home.
Nearly fifteen years ago, when I began writing about climate change, the threat felt close to the bone to me—as it did for many fellow journalists, scientists, and activists I met who were also following this crisis. In the space of my own home place, I noticed little shifts in, say, the opening of spring flowers, the first ripening of tomatoes in my summer garden, and how short and damp the cross-country ski season in the mountains was becoming. I was also aware of the massive disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, that were predicted to keep arriving on a more frequent schedule. I understood that all of these were harbingers of a much bigger crisis, which would not just affect the world at large but also disrupt even the most fundamental aspects of life at home.
It is obvious now to most people: climate change has arrived. And to make a home anywhere in this moment is to reckon with a problem that could easily blow our doors down, flood or smoke us out, or erode the ground beneath our feet. Everything that we took for granted is now in question. We have to reexamine how to live.
This book offers four tales about people who are confronting crisis at home and seeking answers. They represent four faces of twenty-first-century calamity—wildfires in a northwestern community, floods in Florida, collapsing permafrost in Alaska, and an accident in a refinery town in California. In each, the people who rise up to respond are also deeply committed to their communities. All four tales are set in my home country, the United States. I felt it was important for Americans to recognize themselves in these stories: people in this country have been slow to understand their roles in this crisis and have only just begun to realize the personal risks they face. The stories I offer here parallel crises happening all over the world. They are an invitation to consider how our own lives are changing and what we all need to be doing to prepare and respond.
In form, they are also ancient narratives. Many cultures recount stories in which heroes defend their homes against a threat—from the Greek hero Theseus, who slays the Minotaur so that Athens won’t have to keep sacrificing its youth to the monster, to blockbuster movies like Avatar or Guardians of the Galaxy, in which the protagonists rescue, in the first case, an otherworldly forest, and in the second, the entire universe. Humans have often feared that a shadow might be cast over their homeland and that they would be called to defend what they love.
In real life, climate change is forcing people to cope with unprecedented circumstances at home, and no one can yet claim a clear narrative of either triumph or tragedy. Invariably, the solutions are never individual—they often involve enormous community efforts to plan for threats in the present and future, to reengineer a place, to reshape the choices that are available, to reexamine what matters. Sometimes these efforts require conjuring aspirations that are so beautiful and optimistic they sound almost absurd—until they begin to bear fruit. They require confronting powerful institutions, swimming through a deluge of misinformation, fierce brawling over the smallest matters, stumbling and then standing up again. I have tried to render the moments of mess and misstep, grace and creativity, as honestly as possible.
This book is also a sort of quest—for a new sensibility about home and place in challenging times. Interspersed among the four narratives is a series of chapters that meditate on the nature of home and rootedness. These are structured like essays, and you could think of them as quiet spaces to take a breath—little refuges from the intense winds of calamity where we can ponder more reflective questions. I have long admired deeply rooted souls such as Wendell Berry and bell hooks, people who know their places, have stitched their identities into the fabric of a particular landscape, and can gather wisdom and insight from there. But I have wondered, in a time of climate change, in an increasingly globalized society and economy, is this kind of rootedness still even possible? Can we really find our way back to an old home or enduringly attach ourselves to a new one?
To make or remake a home is also to change your identity. What kind of people will we become on this unruly planet? Who should we strive to be?
What follows is an effort to find out.