Buxton Books is honored to host Susan Crawford in the bookstore for a conversation on her book - Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm. She’ll be joined by Rev. Joseph P. Darby. This is a free, in-store event. Please email rsvp@buxtonbooks.com to reserve your spot!
On Friday, April 21, we are so excited to welcome Susan Crawford, previously Obama’s special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy and currently a professor at Harvard Law School, to the bookstore to talk about her upcoming book - Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm. This book explores the intersection of race and climate change through the lens of Charleston and its increasingly frequent floods.
Susan will be joined in conversation by Rev. Joseph P. Darby, Senior Pastor at Nichols Chapel AME Church, who is interviewed in the book and is an outspoken voice in Charleston, and across the region, on the topic of race and water.
We can’t wait for Susan and Rev. Darby to bring their insight and expertise to the bookstore to guide us through this vital conversation. Please join us and be ready to engage with questions and insights of your own!
This is a free, in-store event. Please email rsvp@buxtonbooks.com to reserve your spot!
About Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm:
New York, Washington, Boston, Miami. London, Cairo, Tokyo, and Shanghai. As climate change inexorably pushes sea levels higher round the world, the future of countless coastal cities is foreshadowed by the flooding increasingly engulfing Charleston, South Carolina. At least thirteen million Americans will have to move away from the U.S. coasts over the next few decades, as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms put lives at risk and cause billions of dollars in damages. “Rising seas are sinking futures,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres remarked recently, adding that “one out of ten people on earth” live in coastal zones at dangerously low elevations.
Now, in her deeply reported, revelatory new book, CHARLESTON: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm (Pegasus Books│April 4, 2023), Harvard Law School professor and author Susan Crawford details how Charleston’s streets now find themselves underwater one day out of five with much higher sea levels and chronic inundation inevitable in the years ahead. Yet like many of their counterparts globally, government and business leaders in Charleston prefer denial or wildly inadequate counter measures, even as they make the problem worse with a growth-at-any-cost philosophy that prizes real estate development above all else.
Charleston is betting its survival on a sea wall that will be obsolete before it is finished. NOAA forecasts at least five feet of sea level rise by 2100. But the sea wall that the US Army Corps of Engineers proposes to build assumes only two feet of sea level rise — because anything more than that, the Corps explains, would interfere with highways — and will protect just ten percent of Charleston's residents.
Not grappling honestly with the certainty of rising seas and the urgent need for long-term planning also risks far-reaching economic disaster. Rising seas are already making vast swaths of coastal real estate costly if not impossible to insure. Property that cannot be insured cannot be sold without taking a massive loss. Homes are the greatest source of wealth for most American households, so an inability to insure them both invites misery for countless homeowners who can not afford on their own to move elsewhere and may trigger a national economic crisis. And as with most environmental disasters, it is the poor and people of color who will pay the heaviest price. As befits a city that hosted one of the largest slave markets in the US and where the Civil War began, Charleston’s refusal to face the reality of rising seas is already disproportionately hurting its Black residents. National leadership is needed to set coastal residents in Charleston — and elsewhere — on a dignified path to safety through gradual withdrawal from shorelines.
In CHARLESTON we meet Rev. Joseph Darby, a Black minister with a powerful voice across the city and region who has an acute sense of the city's shortcomings when it comes to matters of race and water. Michelle Mapp, one of the city's most promising Black leaders, left her nonprofit leadership post to attend law school at the Charleston School of Law and sees clearly how the systems around her must change. A charismatic young Black entrepreneur with Gullah-Geechee roots named Quinetha Frasier fears her people will be displaced by developers if they aren't first wiped out by chronic flooding. And Jacob Lindsey, a young white city planner charged with running the city’s ten-year “comprehensive plan” efforts, ends up working for a private developer bent on turning what was once part of a river running next to the city into a giant commercial development. These and others reveal the extraordinary risks the city is facing.
Weaving science, narrative history, and the family stories of Black Charlestonians, CHARLESTON chronicles the tumultuous recent past in the life of the city while illuminating the escalating riskiness of its future. A bellwether for other towns and cities along global coastlines, Charleston’s vulnerability is emblematic of vast portions of the American coast.
Illuminating, critically important, and vividly rendered, CHARLESTON sounds a clarion call. We would do well to listen.
About Susan Crawford:
Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She previously was Obama’s special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy and co-led the FCC transition team between his and the Bush administrations. Earlier in her career, Crawford was a partner at Wilmer, Cutler &Pickering. As an academic, she teaches courses about climate adaptation and public leadership. Crawford is the author of several books, including Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age and Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It.