Last week, when I flew from the Gulf Coast to NYC Climate Week, I checked the weather for an update on the disturbance that would become Hurricane Helene and called my partner to go over our evacuation plan. As I hung up, the man next to me, a evangelist from Alabama, asked if I knew anything about the storm. I told him I was working on climate change, and he ignored me: “Yes, it’s the Bible.”
The storm didn’t come for me and my partner this time, but it destroyed my hometown in the mountains of North Carolina. I have spent 20 years working on climate and I live between Los Angeles and the Gulf Coast of Alabama, where I think I will lose my home. I have also accepted that worsening fires, droughts and heat waves could make Southern California unviable. But Asheville is considered a heavenly climate. I always tell my family members that we can’t sell the house there. There is no telling if it will be destroyed first by one of the worst climate disasters in US history. Helene shows us that nothing is safe.
I work with screenwriters to portray the climate crisis on TV and film, and what’s happening in western North Carolina is more like a dystopian movie than real life. My sister lives in Black Mountain, where I also lived in my 20s and outside of Asheville. They are safe, but the flood destroys them city. There was a friend with his son at a farm-to-table restaurant he owned there. The water rose from inches to chest-deep in the river, raging so fast that they literally had to swim for their lives to get to the top. The pigs drowned.
Two neighboring cities – Swannanoa and Chimney stone — has disappeared. A friend woke up at 4 a.m. at her boyfriend’s place in Asheville and saw the water rising rapidly. They narrowly escaped. His third-floor apartment flooded and he lost everything. Neighbors lost their lives. His sister’s friend had to jump from the window to a tree with two cats and was stranded there, above the flood, for eight hours. At least two friends’ houses were swept away. My brother’s community art studio, along with most River Art Areadestroyed. People are trapped with little food and no access to water, hundreds of impassable roads, helicopter and mules it’s the only way to get supplies to many areas, and rescuers can’t find survivors because people don’t have reliable cell service or power. On Wednesday night my friend there texted me: “I’m crying. They found the bodies in the trees.”
More than 200 people have been confirmed dead. Hundreds of them lost. PTSD, suicide, substance abuse and depression spike significantly after the climate disaster. The pillars of western North Carolina’s economy — tourism, the arts and agriculture — are closed for the foreseeable future. Cleanup and rebuilding efforts are well on their way tens of billions of dollars and many years. Some places will never come back.
Scientists think that climate change is increasing rain from Hurricane Helene up to 50% in parts of the Carolinas and Georgia, spending more than 40 trillion gallons of water. At NYC Climate Week, an annual awareness event held in conjunction with the UN General Assembly, this disconnect from dire reality is stark. There are beautiful parties, happy pictures of sunsets and giant signs that read “HOPE”. The dominant themes are: We can handle this! We need to tell a hopeful climate story! But there was no “fix” to the hurricane that devastated western North Carolina, hundreds of miles from the ocean. Just focusing on optimism is like telling a cancer patient that everything will be OK if they stay positive. At best, it comes off as out of touch; at worst, it feels callous. Yes, we can still prevent the worst impacts and need to demand a government-scale solution and act quickly, but we cannot minimize the horrors that are happening now, or they will get worse in the years to come.
Fossil fuel executives already know that since the 1970s those who burn oil, coal and gas will cause increasing climate disasters and suffering around the world. But they are liesacrificing our salvation for greed and only releasing revelations in my hometown. These actions will condemn today’s children to a planet more hellish than Earth by the end of this century if we don’t stop it. It’s not just a tragedy; it is a crime against humanity.
What happened in North Carolina doesn’t feel real. I had no emotional framework for this, no story to help me. Now, what I want is an original story that helps us understand how to be human in this changing world, to face this extraordinary crisis with courage. Stories that help us navigate fear, anxiety, sadness, despair, uncertainty and anger in a way we can feel. Stories that make us laugh – not ignoring reality, but in the midst of it – and stories that remind us there is still so much beauty here to fight for. It captures how, in the nightmare of a climate disaster, people show extraordinary kindness and creativity, as they are doing in Asheville and Black Mountain today. And we need stories that expose the mistakes of the fossil fuel industry.
I need help making sense of all this, and stories have always been the way humans make sense of the world. But when I’m grieving an unimaginable loss, the last thing I want is an optimistic story about hope. As a climate scientist Kate Marvel said: “We need courage, not hope, to face climate change.”
Anna Jane Joyner is the founder and chief executive of the non-profit story Good energy.