Against the Seas: Saving Civilization from Rising Waters

Soderstrom (Concrete) investigates the consequences of rising sea levels in this prosaic outing. Exploring how societies across the globe are dealing with rising water levels, she focuses on regions most threatened by climate change, describing Indonesia’s decision in 2019 to “move its capital from the climate-threatened megalopolis of Jakarta to the sparsely populated island of Borneo” and Bangladesh’s efforts to preserve the large mangrove forest that helps protect the city of Dhaka from flooding. She details China’s plans to insulate Shanghai from climate change, which include erecting a tidal barrier on the Yangtze River and reducing “population pressure” by building a new satellite city with green patches that will allow water to “easily percolate back into the earth.” She advocates for adopting “low-tech approaches and a couple of very high-tech ones,” including retreating from at-risk areas and expanding nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions. The historical material on ancient flood myths and the now-sunken land bridge that once connected Britain and the Netherlands doesn’t add much to the discussion of how contemporary humans might respond to climate change, and the case studies are serviceable if somewhat perfunctory, relying on extant research without bringing much new to the table. The result is a humdrum survey that meets its modest ambitions. (Mar.)