The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience

Society must make wide-reaching infrastructural changes to survive a warming world, according to this unfocused treatise. Verchick (Facing Catastrophe), an environmental law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, calls for humans to mimic the smarts and adaptability of octopuses to tackle climate change, advocating for investments in technology and infrastructure, as well as healing the environment. He examines how localities across the U.S. are combating soaring temperatures, rising seas, and weather disasters, highlighting Louisiana’s plan to protect its Gulf coast with levees and West Coast initiatives to ameliorate wildfires with prescribed burns. Verchick also details programs to relocate climate refugees in Alaska; replant coral reefs off the Florida coast; and “migrate” Joshua trees, threatened by increasing heat, north of their current range to Utah. The author asserts that local experimentation is vital to devising solutions because climate change’s effects differ by region, and as such he provides few overarching takeaways besides the vague guidelines that remedies should be flexible, “forward-looking,” “fit to scale,” and fair. The result feels like a grab bag of examples that give little sense of a coherent agenda. Climate resilience is a crucial and multifarious subject, but Verchick’s treatment doesn’t do it justice. Photos. (Apr.)