Green Series: Emily Raboteau on “Lessons in Survival”

For the January Green Series, author Emily Raboteau discusses her recent piece in The New York Review of Books on surviving climate change catastrophes. Discussing two recent books on sea level rise, Raboteau argues the case for managed retreat as our best defense, given the scale of the problem. This approach calls for withdrawing rather than rebuilding after disasters, and would include government buyout programs to finance the resettlement of homeowners from vulnerable areas.

American Book Award winning writer Emily Raboteau is a professor of creative writing at CUNY and a longform essayist, most recently on the subjects of climate change and social justice. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.  She is a member of Writers Rebel, a group of writers deeply concerned about the climate crisis.