My nightmare about the waves began the night our building flooded.
When Hurricane Sandy hit, I was living in a commercial loft in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a squat, two-story cinderblock warehouse across from the cruise ship terminal, and none of us took the mandatory evacuation orders seriously.
The year before, during Hurricane Irene, we laughed as we waded through a huge puddle on the corner of our house, remembering how scared we were and how hard it was to remove the masking tape from the window where we had carefully applied the giant star.
I felt safe in a big city. Natural disasters are something you experience in the countryside or in other countries. This was New York City. We were protected.
That night, within a few hours, eight feet of water surrounded our house. It crept in around the edge of our glass door. For a moment the street lights were on, but the water on the other side of the door glowed like an eerie fish tank and grew higher and higher. Then the power went out, and we anxiously peered around the corner into the now-flooded mezzanine landing. Would the water reach the second floor? At what point should we escape across the neighboring roof?
Eventually, as night fell and the waves stopped coming in so quickly, we tried to sleep. But all night I had nightmares about giant waves from the harbor crashing against the cinderblock buildings. Even now, the sound of waves or running water keeps me up. I try to convince myself, but I can’t forget the destructive power of the ocean.
The morning after Sandy, we awoke to the smell of floodwaters, a foul mix of seawater and gasoline from submerged cars that flooded everything: the drywall of our buildings, the belongings of everyone in our first-floor and basement apartments, piles of clothes and furniture, and old photos and books that had been dragged out of our destroyed apartments and piled on the sidewalk.
I try to convince myself, but I can’t forget the destructive power of the ocean.
In my work with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), I was asked to interview members whose homes had been destroyed and to raise funds for rebuilding. In Staten Island, I spoke with a woman whose one-story house was flooded up to the ceiling. She pointed overhead to a line of dirt on the blue wall of her living room. Luckily, she was able to get out, but her neighbors were not.
As I traveled to the edges of New York City to document these stories, it was easy to see that the worst flooding and hardest hit were in working-class, poor, and black neighborhoods. In affluent Park Slope, life remained largely unchanged, with Halloween trick-or-treaters filling the streets. Flood zones in Red Hook were without power for weeks, and in one of the largest public housing complexes in the country, boilers were destroyed, leaving residents without heat or hot water all winter.
These unequal impacts are repeated with each climate-change-driven disaster: In Washington state, the fear of wildfire smoke hits every summer with bated breath, but it’s livable for the wealthy with storm-proof homes and air-purifying systems.
For everyone else, breathing unhealthy air for weeks can be fatal depending on your lung or heart health. Power outages and wildfire evacuations can be deadly for people with disabilities, especially those who can’t drive and don’t have access to cooling centers or evacuation shelters.
In the United States, nearly one-third of people cannot drive or cannot afford to drive because of age, income, or disability. Yet instead of interventions to shift away from car dependency—like better transportation, safer and more comfortable walking, cycling, and wheelchair access, and denser, more inclusive communities—much climate change funding focuses on replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles.
Just as the public health impacts of climate change are experienced more acutely by poor, disabled, and Black and Brown communities, the public health impacts of car dependency fall on the same populations with less power, less resources, and less secure access to transportation. People who live near highways and busy roads are more exposed to air pollution and noise, lack of pedestrian access and connectivity, and increased risk of being hit by a car. Maintaining car dependency will continue to perpetuate serious disparities in public health and access. Those who cannot or cannot afford to drive will continue to bear these large public health burdens, thus maintaining the status quo of ease of car-based transportation for those it serves.
This week I am at a conference in northern Idaho, surrounded by forests of half-dead, dried-out trees. The Canadian wildfires last summer were massive, but it’s hard to imagine how much forest there is still in the West. It would take a lightning strike or a cigarette butt to cause a major conflagration. As I walked through the woods, I noticed that every large stump had burn marks from previous fires. If this area burns again, the smoke will blow eastward. Those who live in airtight homes with newer air conditioning systems will be fine to hunker down, but many apartments will have windows left ajar. I would rather breathe dirty air than burn without air conditioning.
Our reliance on driving means transportation is the leading source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. Addressing this problem is urgent, but rather than making us even more car-dependent by promoting personal electric vehicle ownership, now is the time to shift climate investments away from a driving-centric mobility system. For those for whom driving is accessible and affordable, a life with less driving may seem unimaginable and inconvenient. But for those of us who cannot or cannot afford to drive, we are demonstrating that it is possible. Relying on public transit, walking, trains, and cycling may not yet be safe or convenient, but it should be much easier given the scale of investments we are making in climate action.
With the right housing, land use, and transportation incentives, we can retrofit our communities so that people can get anywhere without using their cars. Whether we value that inclusivity over maintaining the status quo is an open question.
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