Episode 207: Let’s Talk about Climate Resilience

Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Click on the audio player above to listen to the episode or follow BornCurious on Amazon Music, Apple, Audible, Spotify, and YouTube.

On This Episode

Heat waves, floods, droughts—catastrophes attributed to climate change seem to be happening more often. But is there reason for hope? In this episode, the climate change and disaster policy expert Rob Verchick outlines the challenges of climate change, especially when it comes to the law, along with why—despite the bad news—he remains hopeful.

This episode was recorded on December 5, 2023.
Released on April 11, 2024.

Guest

Rob Verchick is a legal scholar who specializes in climate change and disaster policy. He is the Gauthier-St. Martin Eminent Scholar and Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans, a senior fellow in disaster resilience at Tulane University, and the author, most recently, of The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience (Columbia University Press, 2023).

Credits

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial manager at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Transcript

Ivelisse Estrada:
Welcome back to BornCurious, which is, like its home, about unbounded curiosity. I’m your cohost, Ivelisse Estrada.

Heather Min:
And I am your cohost, Heather Min.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Coming to you from Harvard Radcliffe Institute, one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration, this podcast brings together scholars, students, artists, and doers. Our conversations traverse current affairs, scientific breakthroughs, cutting-edge research, art making, and storytelling. Today’s guest is here to talk with us about climate change. Some of the world’s most trusted experts believe that human-induced climate change is the largest threat that the world has ever experienced—to the natural environment and societies alike. Fortunately, people like today’s guest are on the front lines of the fight to stem climate disaster. Today, we’ve got Rob Verchick with us. Hello, Rob. Welcome to BornCurious.

Heather Min:
Welcome. We are so happy to speak with you today.

Rob Verchick:
Oh, well, thanks so much. I’m really happy to be here today.

Heather Min:
Rob Verchick is a legal scholar in climate change and disaster policy. Would you care to elaborate, Rob?

Rob Verchick:
Well, sure. My area, well, it’s about exciting things like catastrophes caused by climate change and natural disasters, and I’m, by trade, a law professor in environmental studies, but after I went through Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I kind of flipped my career in a certain way, and now I study these things. But I find a lot of hopeful bits out of it, and I think that there are things we can do to help. So it’s a great gig. I love it.

Heather Min:
Okay. There’s so many questions that we can ask about all of that. To get us started though—and pardon my phrasing—can you give us a temperature check on where we stand with the planet Earth and what we call climate change?

Rob Verchick:
Sure. We are in a climate crisis, which is to say that global warming that’s caused by carbon pollution that we’ve been producing—the world, human beings have been producing since the Industrial Revolution—that’s created a kind of an atmospheric blanket around the planet. And like most blankets, this one keeps heat in, so the planet has been warming more than the natural cycles would normally suggest. So now our planet is about 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and the scientific consensus is that we have to keep that warming under control, that it would be best to keep it from getting warmer. In other words, maybe we could allow a total of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and if we don’t stay within that so-called budget, we’re going to have catastrophes across the planet, in the United States and elsewhere, that are going to be extremely hard for us to adapt to.

The good news is that we have everything we need technologically to stay within that budget. All of the economies on the planet are moving slowly toward green energy and renewables. In the United States, we’re doing a pretty good job at that, but we are not going fast enough, and that is the problem because as the temperatures rise, we start seeing discombobulation in the system like we saw this summer—heat waves and floods and all of these kinds of things. So, we are actually recording right now in the middle of December, in the middle of the United Nations summit on climate change, and one of the things that world leaders and that others are doing now in this summit in Dubai is taking what they call a stock check, where they’re actually looking to see where are we in terms of the temperature of the planet and what needs to be done. And it’s very, very important in this particular meeting that nations all over the world, developing and industrialized, make a commitment to doing what we can to keep that temperature from rising.

Ivelisse Estrada:
One of the things that we’re doing a lot of programming around here at Radcliffe is the disproportionate impact of climate change on more disadvantaged countries. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Rob Verchick:
The dice are loaded against disadvantaged countries that are poorer. One reason is that many of these countries are near the equator and many of the changes that are happening with flooding and monsoons and things like that are closer to the equator. The other reason—and probably the more important reason—is that these economies, these countries simply don’t have the wherewithal to adjust as well to things like cyclones and floods and heat waves, and so many smaller economies also tend to be leaning toward agriculture and other sorts of economies that are based directly on weather patterns or on working outside. So, all of that is a huge problem, and we have studies today showing that just in a few years, the Global South is going to need hundreds of billions of dollars just in order to prepare for the impacts that they are starting to see today.

Heather Min:
I know that you’ve done some work and you’ve worked in India. It helps to get a specific country in mind and a specific set of challenges that our listeners can appreciate.

Rob Verchick:
Sure. Well, I love India. It’s one of my favorite places to be. And you’re right, I guess, a few years back now, I spent almost a year in India traveling to see different cities that were adapting to climate change, and many of them had received funds from the Rockefeller Foundation from a particular program. And India is one of these countries that has so much on the line when we talk about climate change because they’ve got, in parts of their country, enormous glaciers that are now melting. They are flood prone in many areas on the water, and of course their economy is based probably 60 to 70 percent on agriculture, right?

But I’ll tell you two quick stories that I thought were interesting. One story is about an area called Gorakhpur, which is near the Himalaya, and I visited it maybe 30 years ago and it was still pretty much what you would think of as a village. Today, it’s still called a village, but it’s an enormous sprawl. And most people, many people still work in agriculture, and they have small pieces of land, smaller than—we’re in a gymnasium right now making this podcast with some nice carpeting, and I would say that the parcels that people had were probably a quarter of this floor plan here.

There was a farmer I met. She must’ve been in her 40s or so, and she was very proud because she had a line of vegetables, a vegetable patch, but she had been concerned because when there was flooding, salt water or brackish water coming from the rivers would come onto the soil and just contaminate the land for many years in some cases. So, she had built essentially a pergola, a frame structure above her field, so she could grow vine vegetables about five feet or six feet above everything, so if it flooded, then she had a second crop. Right? So, I thought that was really ingenious, and it’s these sometimes very small technology solutions that can really change things.

The second story I wanted to say was a depressing story, and it sort of, I think, shows the importance of working as a global community for this effort. Most of the time that I was in India, I was living in New Delhi, and New Delhi is notorious in the early fall for having these monsoons, lots of flooding. And when there’s flooding in New Delhi, it’s not just the streets just flood with water, it’s that there’s open sewer gutters and pathways all throughout the city, even in very sort of ritzy areas of New Delhi. So, you’d walk outside in the rain and you’d literally see raw sewage just floating around, right?

And I said to one of my Indian colleagues, I said, “I know that there are water treatment plants in New Delhi, and in fact, there are many water treatment plants in New Delhi,” and I said, “Why do we have this sewage everywhere?” And he says, “Well, we have the sewage plants, but they’re shut down.” And I said, “Well, why are they shut down?” And he says, “Because we don’t have the electricity to run them because we can’t pull coal out of the ground fast enough to fire the electric plants.”

So, there are so many levels of problems there, including the fact that I’m going to come in as a Westerner, as somebody from the United States, and say, “You shouldn’t be burning coal. You shouldn’t be burning coal for electricity when you’ve got this huge sanitation issue in the middle of one of the largest cities in the country.” So, it’s that mindset where I started to think, “Well, what this really is about is a country needing more aid and technology to jump over this carbon-based industrial revolution because they don’t have a choice in some ways.” I mean, they have to provide sanitation to people, but at the same time, they know that all that pollution not only harms their own air and hurts their own people, but it hurts the rest of the world too.

Heather Min:
If we can pin that, let’s hear more about you and what it is that you do. What is disaster and climate law? It’s the first I’ve heard of it.

Rob Verchick:
Well, it’s a really good question because it wasn’t until really after Hurricane Katrina that I think the legal scholarly community started to see disaster law, and what I’ll call climate disaster law, as an area of independent study. And after Hurricane Katrina—I’ve always taught environmental law. I taught environmental law for about 30 years, and I was at Loyola New Orleans at that time and I had just moved there nine months before the storm hit.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Wow.

Rob Verchick:
Yeah.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Perfect timing.

Rob Verchick:
Moved my whole family. Here we are. Nice house in six feet of water. Yeah. We had evacuated a few days before, but I continued to keep going back to work on the house and so on, and I was still teaching my students, actually. I was teaching them in Houston because everybody had moved, and I said, “Okay. We’re going to learn environmental law, but we’re just going to study Katrina.” So, we did that and after that, I got connected with a few law professor friends of mine, and we decided to write a textbook, which became the first textbook in disaster law and policy.

Now, we didn’t invent disaster law and policy, but I think what we did was we organized the field. We basically said, “Look, there are lots of lawyers working in areas during city planning, during the response to natural disasters, Lord knows afterwards in the compensation phase when people are suing each other, trying to get their insurance groups to pay, lobbying Congress for aid, and then there’s all this recovery that takes place for decades in some cities.” And all of this is about lawyers, so much of it, finding the money and the government programs, suing people, enforcing civil rights, all kinds of things like that. So, we basically said, “Well, we’re going to try to organize that field and put out the areas of law that are really important to city planning and safety, and then we’re going to look at all of those laws about how FEMA operates, and how the state supplies people to respond and the federal government supplies people to respond, independent nonprofit organizations, and so on. How does all that work?”

There are lots of civil rights and discrimination issues actually that come up almost always in responding to disasters and in compensating people, so we put all of that together and created a field, and now disaster law is a course. I’m happy to say that’s taught in many law schools, and it’s a real service because students don’t know that this kind of law actually exists, and when they do, they find out that the need is huge.

Heather Min:
So, there’s a good chunk of it that has to do with preparation because we acknowledge that disasters are inevitable. You mentioned, also, there’s a good chunk that is in reaction to disasters having had occurred, which is where FEMA and nonprofit organizations, I imagine, who are providing relief for those who have undergone disasters.

Rob Verchick:
That’s right.

Heather Min:
Yeah.

Ivelisse Estrada:
And these disasters are increasing. They’re happening more and more all around the world.

Rob Verchick:
Yes, they are, and this summer is the poster child for that in the United States, to just pick the country we’re in. There were several record-breaking heat waves. I’m from Las Vegas, so I grew up in the summertime with triple degrees, but we had a triple degree day or two, and then it went down to double degrees. And my family, when I talk to them in Las Vegas, I mean they had weeks and weeks of triple-degree heat and the same in Arizona. One thing that I’ll just point out, because I think it’s really brings out an interesting example about why we need to make changes in the way we think about disasters: Most people don’t know that heat waves are the largest killer of, if I can say it, natural disasters in the United States. Seven times more people die in heat waves than die in floods, and the disproportionate number of the victims are people of color, are the poor, people who work outdoors, who work in agriculture, construction, these kinds of things.

We know all of this. All right? Yet our federal law, which we call the Stafford Act—it’s the act that the president uses when a president declares a major disaster, and that unlocks all kinds of federal money that can immediately go to aid cities and communities—that law does not list heat wave as a disaster that can be declared. So, actually as a lawyer, I can think of ways maybe we could declare one anyway and defend it, but it’s not there in paper. Now, why isn’t it? The reason is that when the Stafford Act was originally passed, Congress was mainly concerned with property loss, and despite all the human tragedy that follows a heat wave, property loss is usually not one of those things.

Recovery doesn’t mean rebuilding things back. So if you need cooling stations, if you need to run your bus lines more often so people don’t pass out in the heat while they’re waiting, if you need to redo your playgrounds so that you have a canopy over them, all of these often very simple things to relieve problems with heat waves, if you wanted to do all that, it’s on your own dime if you’re a city or a state because you can’t get money from the Stafford Act to do those kinds of things. It’s not someone intentionally wanted to do anything wrong. It’s just that we weren’t thinking about it in that way, and that default idea about disaster being related to property damage, the way of thinking leads to, I would say, well, certainly a disparate impact against disadvantaged people. Right? We just weren’t thinking of it that way, but now we know and we can change it.

Heather Min:
Do you teach your students to highlight areas where we need new laws?

Rob Verchick:
I do, yes, and I teach them too. This is true in the disaster setting and in the climate setting is that often the things that will help are not labeled climate law or disaster law. I know this from living in Nevada. In fact, when I wrote my last book on climate resilience, called Octopus in the Parking Garage, I interview a number of people doing real-world work, and one of them is a woman named Cinthia Moore Zermeño, and she’s an activist in Las Vegas. When I last contacted her, she was lobbying for a law in Nevada that would, for the very first time, guarantee outdoor workers water, shade, and rest during high heat. Okay. Southern Nevada, no law about that. In Arizona, no guarantee of those things. In Texas, there’s a state law prohibiting municipalities from guaranteeing those things for outdoor workers. So, I say to my students, “Look, you might not have thought of yourself as involved in worker safety law or labor law, but that’s how you’re going to solve this problem because there are people working on construction sites who are not guaranteed access to water.

Ivelisse Estrada:
So, that’s one big challenge to solving this problem. What are some of the other challenges?

Heather Min:
Since we’re now talking about within the United States, what are the challenges, especially mindful of those who are poorer, who are people of color?

Rob Verchick:
One of the things I teach my students is that so many of the issues that we face in these areas have to do with land use and with planning. For instance, when we decide where we’re going to have residential developments, that bakes in an entire set of risks. For instance, we talk about redlining in my class, which is sort of a history we have in the United States, a discriminatory house mortgage lending, and that has resulted in some communities within cities as being mostly black or mostly Latino or mostly white and wealthy—whatever it is. In the United States, in a hundred cities, we can trace heat wave vulnerability to redlining because the communities in which many people of color live in cities is not as heavily treed or it’s in industrial areas or there’s a lot of asphalt and concrete around, not a lot of fountains and pools. All of that can make areas much hotter—5 to 10 degrees hotter, Fahrenheit. So, that’s something that you might not have thought about, that this idea about land use is actually connected to that, when you have folks who are living in poorer areas.

Ivelisse Estrada:
What might be some other challenges to land use?

Rob Verchick:
Well, one that I’ve been looking at a lot that bothers me is climate migration. We know in the United States that people will be moving on account of climate change, and there will also be people who want to move, but for whatever reasons can’t. We’re a highly mobile society as it is in the United States, so people do, compared to other countries, move a lot. And one of the reasons people move is actually weather and safety and these kinds of things. So, the federal government predicts that in the next 30, 40 years, we’re going to see probably 12 million people moving in the United States on account of sea level rise because so many people live near coasts. And we know the cities. I mean, one of them is New Orleans. Another one of them is Houston; Miami; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Norfolk, Virginia. So, we’ve seen this already.

What we didn’t know before, but we do now because of research is where those people are going to be moving to. So, you could actually do some extrapolations by looking at previous housing patterns and where people tend to move when they leave a place. They tend to go where they have family or historic connections or whatever it is, cultural identity. So, as it turns out, the cities that are going to be taking in those 12 million people over the next few decades are going to be places like Austin, Texas; and Denver, Colorado; and Las Vegas and Orlando and some of these other cities that are really growing anyway—and, let’s just say, some of these cities that really probably can’t bear more people, like Las Vegas, which is already prone to water scarcity.

Heather Min:
And they’re also really hot.

Rob Verchick:
Some of the—of course, yes. Right. Orlando, right? So, what’s interesting about that is that these cities are not talking to one another. Most people will probably relocate within their state. Florida might be a good example of something like that. Orlando was already off the charts in terms of bringing in new people, new schools, new hospitals, all of those services that are needed, and they’re not thinking about climate change as another driver. So, I think that in terms of land use, one of the things we need to do is think more broadly in regional chunks of the country and say, “Hey, Orlando, did you know the people in Miami are going to be knocking on your door in 10 years? Did you know, Las Vegas, that people in San Francisco and LA are going to be knocking on your door in 10 years? What’s your plan?”

Ivelisse Estrada:
One of the most shocking things I’ve ever heard was my cousin was visiting with his family, and his seven-year-old daughter mentioned to me that when she’s a grown-up, she will no longer live in Miami because it will be underwater, and I was like, “Oh, you’re already thinking about this. Good on you for planning.”

Rob Verchick:
Well, it’s not all going to be underwater, and this is another theme about wealth and advantage because some areas are going to be more protected and other areas are not. My book, Octopus in the Parking Garage, actually comes from a story that happened in Miami in 2016. There’s a really fancy condominium complex right on Biscayne Bay. It’s beautiful. I was just there last spring. There’s a guy named Richard Conlin who walked out of his condominium unit into his parking garage—it’s one of those layered parking structures right on the water. And he saw a giant pool of water where his car was and this enormous octopus twice the size of a large pizza, flopping around in the water. It was a climate change story. This octopus had been at the bottom in Biscayne Bay at the end of a stormwater drain, and because of a high tide exaggerated by climate change, it got swept up and pushed into the parking garage. Now, they got it out, and I guess it was living a fine life after that, from what I understand.

Ivelisse Estrada:
[Laughs] We checked in on him afterward.

Rob Verchick:
[Laughs] They did actually. But the deal, what I say in my book, is I said, “If we can’t keep cephalopods out of our parking garages, what else can’t we do?” So, we need to go back to basics and just think about all of the things that are going to be changing and how we can prepare for those.

Heather Min:
This is the perfect segue for us to hear more about why you focus on what you call climate resilience. I just finished your lovely book. Oh, so well written.

Rob Verchick:
Oh, thank you.

Heather Min:
Yeah. It was really enjoyable, which was surprising actually.

Rob Verchick:
That’s what my friends say too, right?

All:
[Laughter]

Heather Min:
You make the point early on that when Al Gore’s movie, which I saw when it came out, what? 20 years ago?

Rob Verchick:
Yeah. Yeah.

Heather Min:
That all the focus was on making sure that we keep carbon levels at a certain set point because otherwise when we surpass that, it’s all over, and people were rather resistant in talking about how we have to adapt and accept that perhaps this is the new reality. Could you talk about that and why your work seems to be driven by the call for what you call climate resilience?

Rob Verchick:
Yes. First of all, it is absolutely job one to lower carbon pollution, right? There’s no question about that. But it is also job one to adapt to climate change and become more resilient. And the reason for that is that the global warming that we’re experiencing now, these heat waves and floods and things that we’ve talked about, these are being triggered by CO₂ or carbon pollution that was put in the atmosphere in many cases in the 1950s and ’60s, which is to say that we could shut off all the lights today and we would be waiting another 50 or a hundred years for this planet to cool down. There’s a lot of scientific reasons for that, but basically, the ocean just holds a lot of heat, and it doesn’t let go of that heat immediately. It’s a big water bottle. So, what that means is for anybody in the generations that we’re living among, their welfare depends on our being able to adapt, and our ability to adapt also allows us more time to get that carbon pollution down.

That’s basically why, but I think you’re right that early on, particularly as an academic in this field, a lot of people criticized me for emphasizing adapting to climate change because they thought that what I was doing was distracting people from the mission of reducing carbon pollution. Al Gore used to share that view. He no longer does, I’m happy to say. And these UN negotiations that I mentioned earlier, a lot of it is about climate adaptation because, morally, we can’t defend not helping people survive this. We have to do that.

Ivelisse Estrada:
What about the people who are resistant to the idea of climate change to begin with? How do we change their minds?

Rob Verchick:
Well, that is a very interesting question because climate change like COVID and maybe gun safety, other things like this, are very politically polarizing. And we have lots of communications evidence which shows that just shoveling more information into people’s heads is not going to change anything. There are very sophisticated science-minded people who don’t appreciate the risks of climate change, and it’s not because they don’t understand. It’s because I think that their values are different from many of the values that climate action folk have.

I worked at the EPA in the Obama administration on climate adaptation, and we worked in blue states and red states helping to do these sorts of things, and I did a certain amount of work in Iowa, trying to provide climate information to towns in Iowa, so that they could better survive floods. And walking in with a scientist from MIT and talking to them about how they needed wind turbines was dead on arrival as a strategy, right? But if you went in with a scientist from Iowa State and said, “Look, you’re having more riverine floods,” and, “Aren’t your fields flooding more,” and, “Wasn’t your crop output lower than you had hoped,” you’d get the nodding heads, and then you could start talking at least about how you might be able to solve that problem. Forget about climate change. Let’s just try to solve this problem about flooding or to think about how we might use a different variety of a crop that might survive better. So then you get a conversation.

Now, I can’t convince you of anything in 15 minutes that you don’t already believe, but if I have you for six months or a year and we’re continually talking back and forth and I’m asking you about your farming techniques and you’re asking me about flood control, then we develop a relationship and we have some trust. So, one of the things I say in my book, which I really believe and I tell my students, I said, “The problem we have is not lack of technology. We don’t talk. Even people who really care about climate change don’t talk to other people in their family or in their friend groups about it.” That’s devastating. We have to be able to share stories, and we have to be able to meet people where they are. So, I’ll just say something about this octopus in the book, and you make this comment, which I appreciate and people tell me all the time, is you sound like you’re smiling when you’re talking or you sound like you can see maybe some humor in the octopus.

Heather Min:
It just sounds hopeful. Why are you hopeful?

Rob Verchick:
Well, this is the thing. Okay. First of all, there’s always hope, okay? It doesn’t mean that there’s a 51 percent chance that everything’s going to work out, but it means that there’s a possibility. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know that if I give up, then it doesn’t matter. I have to work as long as I think that there’s a plausible space to go.

The other thing though is that you have to be able to face issues, and you can’t just turn off. I write this book, and I start with this octopus in the parking garage. Why do I do that? It’s because if I’ve started out the book with the story of someone’s house burning down in the Paradise fire—there are books like that, and they’re really valuable books, but a lot of people might look at a book like that and say, “You know what? It’s not the day for me to learn about fires in California.” But I’ve given talks to middle school kids about the octopus in the parking garage, and they don’t get scared about climate change. They want to know how an octopus goes in reverse up a storm drain. That’s physics, right? That’s cool. And then, we can talk about, “Oh, how would we keep an octopus from going up a storm drain? Oh, well, maybe we need an octopus filter.”

There are all these ways of getting people involved that aren’t immediately threatening, and then gradually, we can say, “Well, you know what? It actually is really tough. It’s really hard. We have to do something about it, but climate change is not a pass-fail test. Just because we can’t get an A, doesn’t mean we get an F. We can get a B, right? We can shoot for a B, and maybe that’s what we should be doing.” So, that’s why I don’t like this idea about windows. It’s like, “Oh, we moved. We passed that window, and now it’s going to be hell on earth.” It going to be worse, but it’s going to be better than it would be if we didn’t do anything. That’s how I see it.

Heather Min:
I’m going to dare to quote Rob Verchick to Rob Verchick.

All:
[Laughter]

Heather Min:
You say, “the antidote to anxiety is action,” and what I loved about your book is that you were giving stories after stories of regular people—just citizens who are not lawyers, did not go to law school, don’t work for the government—yet they’re taking action because of, as you cited earlier, that farmer with a plot of land in India, she needed to elevate her crops, so that it didn’t get flooded. You give examples of how people here in the United States running the gamut in terms of race, class, and age are taking actions starting with what they see as impacting them in their environment because we’re all seeing it. Can you share some of those stories with us?

Rob Verchick:
Oh, sure. That was the best part, and I have to just give a shout-out to—I have a podcast called Connect the Dots, and what I love about doing the podcast was that many of the people that I feature in the book, I met on the podcast, so I learned their stories. One of the wonderful stories is a woman named Kara Norman. When I first met her, she was 15 years old, a high school student then, in Key West. And she took up scuba diving because she had seen the Disney movies—Finding Nemo and so on—and thought it would be really cool at that time as a middle school girl. So, she did this after-school activity. It was mainly girls in middle school who were in this activity. And their instructor who she had previously studied marine science, she’s like, “Well, if you’re going to learn how to scuba dive, you’re going to learn to do something useful in the water.” So automatically then, they were down there and they were learning about the health of coral, which is endangered because of climate change and heating.

So they began doing that, and that led to doing some research which was used in scientific studies. That led to their developing and getting involved in these volunteer groups that actually transplant healthy coral onto unhealthy reefs, in order for the coral to grow back, and these are types of coral that do better perhaps in higher heat. So here she is at 15 years old and she’s part of this large movement that is replacing or replanting 50,000 corals a year, volunteers. And what I love about Kara—of course, she’s older now—she wants to be a marine scientist. Most of the girls in that group want to go into sciences, and they were bored out of their minds in the school system. They said that they didn’t see a place for science for them, but now they do. So she’s just amazing. I said, “Well, you’re so politically involved.” She says, “I’m not politically involved at all,” but she is.

This is the other point. It’s not just about, oh, just doing something for yourself, just buying the right car or buying the right organic food at the market. You have to be involved in a collective. Maybe we can call that political. Maybe we can call it something else. But you have to get involved with other people in other organizations. Kara talks in town council meetings. She shows up at protests against cruise ships in Key West. She does all of these things, and she doesn’t see herself as political at all. She just sees herself as protecting something she loves, and that’s I think how we need to see this. We are protecting things we love, and that’s hopeful and beautiful.

Ivelisse Estrada:
You talk about meeting people where they are in order to change their outlook. This is America. People love money.

Rob Verchick:
Sure.

Ivelisse Estrada:
And you’ve pointed out in your book that making our communities more resilient will save a lot of money. Is this another way that we can reach people on this issue?

Rob Verchick:
Absolutely. I speak to business groups, and when I do, one of the first slides I show them is a slide that says that if we don’t start adapting to climate change and build resilience, the US economy in just a few years will start losing half a trillion dollars every year. Now, half a trillion dollars is the amount that our economy basically grows a year. So, if you want to take all of your economic growth and pay a climate tax, that’s what this is if you do nothing. Right. So, that’s where I start out, and then I also say, “And by the way, every dollar you spend on protecting yourself from climate is $7 that you save down the road,” which is a statistic from the federal government, $6 to $7.

Ivelisse Estrada:
That much.

Rob Verchick:
Yeah. So, it’s leaving money on the table if you don’t invest. But it is the kind of thing, and I get it and I say this to people too, I’m like, “I get it. I mean, I have an old house and I would much rather redo the bathroom than fix the roof.” Anybody would, right? Because you never see the roof.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Instant gratification.

Rob Verchick:
Exactly, but sometimes that’s what government, I think, is for sometimes, is to push people to do the logical thing when they would rather not to.

Heather Min:
Can we switch gears now and ask you about what you’re doing here—

Rob Verchick:
Yes.

Heather Min:
At Radcliffe?

Rob Verchick:
This is an extraordinary program, and while I’m here at the Radcliffe Institute, I’m actually working on a sequel to Octopus in the Parking Garage. The next book is going to be about climate resilience and oceans, in particular, and it’s because of Kara Norman, whom I mentioned. She got me so interested in coral. I went diving in many of the same nurseries that she did. I’ve now spent almost a year in French Polynesia at a couple of marine stations there and learning about coral and other sorts of ocean issues. And what I realized is that we need a whole program just for thinking about how to keep the ocean healthy during climate change.

Heather Min:
Because you had mentioned earlier that that is where a lot of the carbon is stored, that’s going to continue to impact our progeny, but also, it has an abundance of life that we would love to preserve. As a side note, I loved the question within your book—is coral an animal, a mineral, or a vegetable?

Rob Verchick:
Well, you know what? [Laughs] Now, we know it’s an animal, but I have plenty of people that I talk to and audiences don’t know, right?

Heather Min:
Yeah.

Rob Verchick:
That’s fine because Aristotle didn’t know either, right? [Laughs]

Ivelisse Estrada:
Yeah.

Rob Verchick:
He thought it was a plant-like rock. Coral is an animal and it’s a hugely important animal because those coral reefs, they protect communities from storms in real life-saving ways, and they also provide food. About 25 percent of all the food we get from the ocean is somehow connected to the health of coral, and we’re losing coral at alarming rates. If we don’t keep the heat from going above 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius, we might lose all coral in the world, which, I mean, would be absolutely tragic.

Now, we can do things about that, and the thing about why the ocean is so important, we don’t always see the ocean. Many people see it rarely, but it is one of the most important machines on this planet. The ocean controls our heating system and our climate system by storing the heat and storing the carbon, most of it, that we have coming onto the planet. It propels the currents which make our global trade economy possible, and it provides most of the oxygen that anyone in the world breathes, and it feeds us: 90 percent of people in poverty in the world rely on food from the ocean.

So it is a machine that we need to keep going, and heat is a huge stressor to it. It is doing us a favor by storing about 80 up to 90 percent of all the heat that comes in from climate change, but it’s absorbing all of that heat and it’s hurting our fisheries. It’s hurting our coral. It has the potential of changing the ocean currents, and it has the potential of hurting the vegetation, the plant life, which supplies oxygen. So these are really big issues, and I don’t think enough people know about that and the ways that we can help.

Ivelisse Estrada:
I just remembered something from the book, which I found really interesting, which is that as these poor countries near the equator, as climate change impacts them, they’re becoming more poor, and at the same time, some of the countries that are in areas farther north are more protected, and they’re becoming richer. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Rob Verchick:
Well, sure. The reason that the countries near the equator are getting poorer are they’re having less success with agricultural harvests that are related to weather, and they’re also having larger public health problems related to disease and insects and a variety of things like that. So that might not be hard to imagine. The other thing I’ll just point out is that we, the Global North, I’ll say, spend an enormous amount of money every year to help countries build their economies and to recover from previous disasters, and when you have a cyclone that comes through, you can wipe out 10 years of aid that you’ve given to a country like that. So this is a way of protecting our own investments really.

Now, why is it that northern climates or rather northern countries might be doing better? Part of it is because service economies are just less affected by climate change in that way, and also because a lot of the technologies that are being developed in renewable areas and so on, much of it is coming from the Global North. And it’s another story about unfairness really because all of these imbalances go back historically to colonialism and so on, but these things have to, I think first of all, be recognized and then rectified.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Could the ocean currents have—could that make it worse if the currents change?

Rob Verchick:
Oh, yes. One of the reasons you have such good wine coming out of France is because of the relatively warmer weather there. One of the reasons that London is bearable in the wintertime is that we’ve got this Gulf Stream that comes right from where I am in New Orleans. I mean, it comes right from the Gulf of Mexico, where there’s a current that flies right up and then dips down and warms Europe. And there is some speculation and some evidence to show that as the water heats in the ocean that that current could break down, and if that current breaks down, ironically, it’s going to cool parts of Europe, which is going to increase the need for heating and other kinds of things.

So, it’s hard really to predict exactly what might happen when currents shut down or when they get more disrupted. The currents of air do the same thing, so we’ve had some really bad storms in some past winters in the United States, and one of the reasons is because you’ve actually got a current of air that circles around the North Pole, and it gets a little wobbly when there’s heat in that, and when it gets wobbly, that means all that cold air comes down to pass Canada into the northern United States. So, it’s a very complicated puzzle, which makes it very hard to explain to people, other than to say that we’re in a future that’s going to be hotter, wetter, drier, and weirder, and we’re going to have to get flexible and used to that.

Ivelisse Estrada:
And if you love your French wine.

Rob Verchick:
If you love your French wine, guess what? Winemaking techniques are already changing in places like France and in California, and those workers who are tending the vineyards are in some cases getting out into the fields at 4:30 or 5 in the morning when it’s still cool enough to do the work, so all of these things are related.

Heather Min:
And I hear that the UK now makes passable wine.

Rob Verchick:
You know what? [Laughs] Anything is possible.

Heather Min:
Adaptation. People who are skeptical about climate change, isn’t it natural for there to be fluctuations, so that some winters are warmer than others? What is your response to that? How do we know that we are progressively getting warmer?

Rob Verchick:
Yeah. That is a really good question, and students ask me this all the time because it’s not obvious, for sure. The climate is always changing in cycles, and it has since pre-humans and humans have been on the planet, so there are natural cycles, and scientists acknowledge them and understand them very well. What scientists are not able to do when they look at these records is to explain what’s happening. Since essentially the late 1800s, they cannot explain what’s happening with all of the cycles that we’ve seen in the past. And the truth is our climate globally is changing so much faster than any human or pre-human has ever seen. There has never been a time when the climate is changing this rapidly, and it essentially started when the Industrial Revolution started. So one of the ways you can do it is just track industrial pollution as it accumulated in the atmosphere, and then you can see a very tight line between that and the temperatures that we’re now seeing.

Heather Min:
Listening to you is such a pleasure because here we are at a place of interdisciplinary pursuits, and it’s clear that you don’t just sit in a law library and read a bunch of books about legal codes. You engage with people out in the world and can write your book on the ocean with firsthand experience. You are able to explain to us meteorology in an engaging way. You keep on top of what political current events. So, is your everyday day-to-day work comparable to being a Radcliffe fellow for this one year?

Rob Verchick:
What’s been really wonderful about the Harvard experience is that the Radcliffe Institute, as you know, brings in people from all different disciplines, and that to me is just terrifically exciting. I’m writing about oceans. You know that. I’m going to have a couple chapters on whales for a variety of reasons, and it turns out that Eddie Mercado, who is a fellow this year, is an expert in whale language and has been studying humpback whales and other whales and their response to changing environments for years. So I found Eddie weeks ago and I said, “Can I just buy you a beer and ask you everything you know about whales? Could you just teach me everything?” But he said, “Sure.” So we spent just this wonderful night just over beers at a bar, learning about how to talk to whales, and I just thought that was amazing.

I’ve had similar experiences talking to Laura, who I know that you have interviewed on this podcast, who is interested in what seems to me abstract mathematics, geometrical mathematics. I was talking to her one day, and I said, “Well, what do you do?” And she says, “Well, in a nutshell, I think about how mathematical systems can be stable or unstable, and whether patterns can be found in things that look chaotic.” And I said, “Oh, my God, that’s what I do. Not with math, but I’m always trying to see, ‘Okay, we’re heading into a new future that looks chaotic. Are there ways that we can prepare for it? Are there patterns? Can we build laws that are not static but that are dynamic? Can a community be dynamic? When can we tell whether a community is at a point where it will break or fall out of its stability?’”

And we got in this wonderful conversation about that because she’s doing that with numbers and formulas, and I’m doing that with law and advocacy. But to me, it was just tremendously exciting and I’m sure there’s going to be something that I learned from her that’s going to influence my writing, and whales have already showed up more prominently in my writing because of Eddie.

Heather Min:
Laura DeMarco is a professor of mathematics here at Harvard, and we had the pleasure of learning from her about the field of abstract mathematics that she works on, and I am thrilled that you find a point of connection. She loves to say, “Oh, I do pure math, not applied math,” but clearly, you’re finding applications or the connections between what you do and what she does.

Rob Verchick:
Yeah, it’s wonderful. I say as a law professor, I work in applied philosophy.

All:

[Laughter]

Rob Verchick:
We decide what we think would make people’s lives better, and then we figure out, well, how do we orchestrate a situation in which people decide what helps them and how are they able to implement that?

Ivelisse Estrada:
So, this climate mitigation work that you do in a legal way, do you have collaborators in that?

Rob Verchick:
Yeah. Collaboration is the way you solve all big problems. So, for many years now, I’ve chaired the board of an organization called Center for Progressive Reform, which is based in Washington, DC. We work on issues of policy advocacy for communities around the United States that are interested in building climate resilience and climate justice and worker safety. Things like worker safety rules in heat waves, for instance. But what makes this organization really important to me is that it was started by really, four law professors about 20 years ago, and we now have an active membership of about 60 law professors in the United States and now some other academics. And what they do is they help translate their academic work into actionable solutions to problems that communities themselves identify that are related to the environment.

In this age, as we were talking about how important it is to take pure research or sometimes theoretical research and put it into a format in which it can actually change people’s lives, I think that translation is really, really important, and it’s one of the things that I’ve spent the latter half of my career on. So, I just think it’s wonderful to be able to take research and then work with communities and find out, from their point of view, what needs fixing and how it can be fixed. Sometimes we are able to help, and I think that that’s a real chance for the academic community at Harvard, where I am at Loyola or Tulane, I think it’s a really important part of this puzzle. We have to be about solving problems at this point.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Before we close, I think it’d be great to maybe hear an extra hopeful story, a little ray of sunshine to leave our listeners.

Rob Verchick:
Okay. Let me think about a ray of sunshine for a moment. Well, I have a great story. Earlier this fall, I was invited to give a talk at Louisiana State University. They had actually chosen Octopus in the Parking Garage as a required read for their honors program, which is about a thousand undergraduates. So I got a chance to meet with these undergraduates in very small groups, and it was lovely because I could ask them, what did you like about the book, what are you doing in your lives, and so on. I was so struck by how so many of those students wanted to get involved in solving real-world problems related to climate. And this was a time, actually, this was earlier in the fall of ’23, when we had wildfires going on in our marshes in southern Louisiana—which is not something you see every day, I have to say.

So they were asking me all kinds of questions like, “Well, how could we organize? What do we have to know?” And I would always say, “I want you to think about anything that you care about. Maybe you care about wine. Maybe you care about children. Maybe you care about hunting.” A lot of students there hunt and fish. And I say, “What you should do is you should say, ‘Anything that I care about, I’m going to learn more about how climate’s going to affect that.’” So if burning in the marsh is going to affect my hunting or my fishing, I want to learn about that. And then I’m going to talk to other people that hunt and fish. And I said, “You can really get...” The hunting community and the fishing community in Louisiana does enormously good work in trying to, for instance, preserve many wild spaces in Louisiana.

I had one gentleman in the back of one of the larger rooms, and he said, “Look, I’m just a freshman. I don’t have any money, and I don’t know anything about climate change. What can I do?” He says, “Because I don’t think I can do anything.” I thought about that, and I said, “When I was proposing this book to publishers, everybody asked me who the audience was, and I said one group in the audience for my readership, I wanted it to be young adults. I wanted it to be people 18 years old to 30 years old. So I said to this gentleman, “Look, I didn’t spend all this time to write this book to people without power. I wrote this book because I wanted to talk to people with power because I don’t have a lot of time to help fix this problem.” And I said, “So you are the person. You are the person with power that I have identified, but you have to do the work to figure out what it is that you care about and how you can protect that thing.”

I just saw so many students doing that at LSU, and frankly, here at Harvard, I’m working with undergraduates as research partners, research assistants, and there’s just enormous amounts of energy and commitment. That’s what we need, so I think that we have lots of slivers of hope, and we just need to activate them.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you, and you know, I do feel a little more hopeful.

Heather Min:
I’ve learned so much from you.

Rob Verchick:
Well, thank you so much. I have really enjoyed my time here today.

Ivelisse Estrada:
BornCurious is brought to you by Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Our producer is Alan Grazioso. Jeff Hayash is the man behind the microphone.

Heather Min:
Anna Soong and Kevin Grady provided editing and production support.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Many thanks to Jane Huber for editorial support. And we are your cohosts. I’m Ivelisse Estrada.

Heather Min:
And I’m Heather Min.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Our website where you can listen to all our episodes is radcliffe.harvard.edu/borncurious.

Heather Min:
If you have feedback, you can email us at info@radcliffe.harvard.edu.

Ivelisse Estrada:
You can follow Harvard Radcliffe Institute on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X. And as always, you can find BornCurious wherever you listen to podcasts.

Heather Min:
Thanks for learning with us, and join us next time.