We often view rising tides through the prism of predictive computer models; a future for which we need to prepare. In a photo essay in Hakai Magazine, Tommy Trenchard takes you to a small (and getting smaller) island in Sierra Leone, where the rise is swallowing land in realtime. The Water Is Eating the Island. “Returning to Nyangai in 2023, a decade after my first visit, I found the place almost unrecognizable. From a satellite image, I had seen that the island had been split in half by the sea, leaving two bean-shaped patches of land separated by a wide gulf. But as my boat approached, I could see only one: in the time since Google had last updated its satellite image in 2018, an entire village of several hundred people had vanished. ‘The water is eating the island,’ says Tewoh Koroma, a mother of six who lost her home to flooding in September 2023. ‘We already fled from the water once and now we’re getting flooded again. The water is following us.'”

+ Closer to home, Abrahm Lustgarten examines how the Rust Belt could rise again as other swaths of America become less habitable over time. In short, steel cities could soon look like a steal. The Atlantic (Gift Article): America’s Climate Boomtowns Are Waiting. “As climate change brings disasters and increasingly unlivable conditions to growing swaths of the United States, it also has the potential to remake America’s economic landscape: Extreme heat, drought, and fires in the South and West could present an opportunity for much of the North. Tens of millions of Americans may move in response to these changes, fleeing coasts and the countryside for larger cities and more temperate climates. In turn, the extent to which our planet’s crisis can present an economic opportunity, or even reimagining, will largely depend on where people wind up, and the ways in which they are welcomed or scorned.” (The advantage of cool places is one of the many reasons I sit on my hill in Sausalito in my windbreaker and laugh at the notion that the Bay Area is in some endless doom loop.)