Sitting in my Seattle office, I’m 2,300 miles away from rising flood waters brought on by monster storm Harvey. But my heart is with my home state of Texas.
I’m glued to Facebook Live as friend after friend broadcasts their dire situation on the Gulf Coast to the world. One former coworker walks down the road in front of her home, water up to her waist and an old VW bus sitting partially submerged in the driveway. “We’re trying to fix it up,” she explains. “But we just haven’t had a chance to.”
A college acquaintance goes live from her Houston neighborhood in knee-deep water; a helicopter hovers to move an elderly neighbor from her flooding home. I text and call my family frantically to ask: Is there water in the house? Not yet, they say. Our house sits on eight-foot stilts, but the water is only inches away from getting inside. That’s never happened before.
As I spend several days staring at the devastation, want to know the one thing furthest from my mind right now? Climate change. And that’s pretty strange for a guy who spends his days running social media for an environmental news website.
Harvey is officially the most extreme rain event in U.S. h... Read more
