What Will You Save When the Climate Crisis Comes For You?

It started with a phone call from my godfather. A few days after Superstorm Sandy, he called me from Brooklyn after he’d spent all night in the basement of his daughter’s building in Red Hook, using a sump pump to get salt water out of the basement.

“When I left the house,” he told me, “I almost broke my neck. The sidewalk was covered in oil that got mixed with the seawater and made it like ice.”

The detail of it made me catch my breath; the specificity, the thing I hadn’t yet imagined about collapse. That’s what’s coming, I thought, that’s what’s already here. Climate collapse is coming for the city where I was born. Water and sewage and oil will rise and one day the sump pump won’t be enough. And my first thought after that shocked me: What will happen to the museums?

Perhaps I thought about museums first because thinking about everything else was too large. As a nature writer and science journalist, I spend my workdays writing about the impacts of collapse on vulnerable human and more-than-human populations—the marginalized, the sick, the poor, the refugee, the right whale, the plankton. But when I thought about my home city being lost, I imagined both the catastrophic loss of life that collapse brings, but also the way collapse takes something larger from humanity—the bridge that links our understanding of our past to our possibilities for the future.

Even with the history of cultural crimes, of eugenics and racism and theft, that some museums have committed down the centuries—and they are myriad—museums are also the repositories of our collective understandings, evidence of discoveries, warehouses of materials that will fuel discoveries in the future. They hold the past in trust for the future. They house DNA labs, drawers of the skins of birds lost in nature, cultural artifacts stolen from Indigenous lives which must be sent home, artworks that show the growth of human creativity, insects that teach us about the evolution of pollination. For a future of human survival and thriving, we need what is kept in them. They have become for me a touchstone, like the Library of Alexandria, a symbol of what must survive the burning of climate collapse.

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I’ve loved museums my whole life, since I took my first steps on the grounds of the Hancock Shaker Museum where my father—whose reproduction Shaker furniture was once sold by the Met—worked and researched. When my child was little, we lived a bus ride away from one of the most spectacular museums in the United States, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. It was the first museum he ever went to, swaddled in a baby sling, a striped hat on, only two weeks old.

I thought of museums when my godfather called that night. I was a young mother, recovering from a punishing divorce, unable to sleep, terrified about the science I was reading about climate collapse. I lived in the future I wanted with my son on every trip to the Field. That was the museum of my child’s childhood. The museums of my childhood—the small country museums of the Berkshires, where I grew up, New York’s magisterial American Museum of Natural History, where I begged to go on trips into the city, The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art—were in full threat from the rising Atlantic. In the hours when my child slept, the question of what we save in times of collapse in my mind, I wrote my way into my novel, All the Water in the World, about saving the world through saving museum collections.

I knew that people have come together during historical crises to protect cultural treasures. In advance of the siege of Leningrad, nearly 1.2 million items of the 2 million piece collection were sent away for safekeeping. In her book Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941-44, Anna Reid describes the manuscripts of the Academy of Sciences being sent on the last bus with Hermitage treasures. Georgi Knyazev, the director of the Academy and a wheelchair user, wrote, “It was like seeing off someone near and dear—a son, a daughter, a wife….Orphaned, I returned to the Archives.” The remaining Hermitage masterpieces were protected by the curators and their families, almost 2,000 people, who moved into the basement air raid shelters to sleep on beds made of planks with ancient Turkmen rugs and gilded palace furniture.

There was little in the way of time for the removal of treasures from the National Museum of Iraq before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The staff was able to store 8,366 items before the invasion, but starting on April 10, 2003, two days after the staff had fled, looting began that lasted 36 hours. In the end, 15,000 objects were stolen—despite the return of curators to the collections while the war was still ongoing—out of which only 7,000 had been recovered by 2018. The looting of the museum is still considered one of the most destructive wartime acts of cultural terrorism in the history of modern warfare.

Now, people have come together to protect Haitian treasures post-earthquake. Ukrainians worked to remove treasures from their museums in the face of Russian invasion and are continuing to attempt to preserve items in the face of destruction. Most recently, in Gaza, we have witnessed in real time a wholesale cultural genocide of museums, archives, and sites of cultural and spiritual heritage. Museum staff and advocates understand how essential it is to save what we can. So many of them already work at the intersection of conflict and climate collapse as our wars become increasingly fueled by resource scarcity and climate migration.

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After the first two drafts of my novel, struggling with pacing, I went to New York to walk through Central Park and see where my characters would have gardened or foraged for apples or wild plants. I wandered to the American Museum of Natural History to see the blue whale again, noting what was in the collection, the museum’s layout and its access. I even talked my way into a meeting with museum librarians. As I described my project, one leaned across the conference table and told me, shyly, “If things fall apart, this is the first place I’d come.” At least I knew I was getting something right. The people who do the work of protecting human knowledge don’t lose their sense of duty in the face of collapse. If anything, it increases.

Writing about climate disasters has given me a keen understanding of the crises that are coming, as well as an understanding of just how underprepared we are to create protections for those crises. We don’t think of climate disaster as requiring that kind of insulation for the history of humanity, its artworks, its scientific discoveries. Unlike a war, limited in duration and location, there is no safety around a climate emergency. It is unpredictable and random. The timelines of its arrival accelerate yearly as data comes in.

But those timelines are hard to communicate, even, famously, to people who have personally experienced consequences of climate disasters. But we will have to think about the protection of all we hold dear in the face of what’s coming. Even if we escape the worst-case-scenarios of climate collapse that I used to write my new novel, All the Water in the World, we will need to decide what to save.

When we talk about climate collapse, we talk most frequently about destruction, emotional impacts, grief and loss, despair, whether we’re entitled to hope or not. What we don’t talking about is the world to come that our children will inherit, what the future will look like after. What we aren’t talking about is what we are committed to saving. The curators in All the Water in the World want to save the glory of human and more-than-human experience: the knowledge, the joy, the creativity, the innovation, and understanding. They want to save it for a future that they believe will come, a time after the worst of the shocks and alterations, a time when things stabilize and begin to heal. It may be easier to imagine that after war, but it is crucial to imagine that in climate collapse too. What do we want to save in the world to come? Whatever it is, we must start saving it now.

I wrote my novel to help myself remember that we will save things in collapse. I wrote to remind readers that we have the power to save them, even if the worst comes. Things have been saved before, by Indigenous elders in the face of invasion, by monks in the Middle Ages, by curators in Leningrad, by librarians even now. I know that there will be people saving things in the world to come, and they will do it not because of the objects or the data or the fossils themselves, but because those people are holding tight to the future they want. My godfather still lives in Brooklyn, even after the Superstorm. So does his daughter and so do his grandchildren. He’s trying to hold onto something, too.

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All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall is available from St. Martin’s Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc.