Before It’s Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America

CBS News correspondent Vigliotti debuts with a vivid report on how climate change is ravaging communities across the country. Vigliotti pairs profiles of ordinary people whose lives have been affected by severe weather with scientific context. For instance, the author describes the devastation felt by a Louisiana couple after Hurricane Laura knocked a tree into their home, fatally crushing their 14-year-old daughter, and explains that melting arctic ice sheets are reducing the salinity of the ocean, causing water to evaporate more quickly and enhancing storms’ intensity. Vigliotti’s other subjects include an elementary school teacher who fled Paradise, Calif., after the 2018 Camp Fire destroyed her home, and the operator of a suicide helpline for farmers, who are increasingly driven to despair by feeble harvests diminished by drought. There are some glimmers of hope amid the gloom, as when Vigliotti details how conservationists’ efforts to bolster the beaver population are helping ecosystems around the animals’ dams become more fire resistant. The prose is transportive (“Through a strip of lush vegetation and vapor that curtained the coast, we discovered a miles-long field of smoldering ash and twisted metal,” Vigliotti writes about arriving in Lahaina to report on Maui’s 2023 wildfires), and the stirring portraits ground the climate science. Disquieting and thoroughly reported, this unsettles. Agent: David Black, David Black Agency. (Apr.)