American Scientist

The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience. Rob Verchick.
288 pp. Columbia University Press, 2023. $32.00.

Climate change is no longer a distant threat: Supercharged wildfires, floods, and heat waves are already reshaping our world. Climate-related challenges that once seemed hypothetical now confront us in our own backyards. Rob Verchick’s The Octopus in the Parking Garage is a book written for exactly this moment.

The octopus in the book’s title became a social media celebrity in 2016, when one of Florida’s increasingly common coastal floods ushered it alive into the bowels of a Miami parking garage. Photographed with its tentacles splayed in the garage’s floodwaters alongside marooned SUVs, the octopus became a tweet-worthy symbol that climate change had arrived. It gave visual urgency to the warnings that researchers had been issuing for years.

In my more than two decades as a climate scientist, I have devoted my career to understanding the causes and consequences of climate change in the rapidly warming Arctic. Arguably, there is no way to study arctic climate change, watching atmospheric carbon dioxide rise unfettered all the while, without despairing at our failure to curb fossil fuel burning. Drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are needed now more than ever, but Verchick makes a strong case for urgently prioritizing something else in parallel: climate resilience. In the very practical work of climate resilience, which requires that communities work together on local solutions, we may also find a cure for some of our despair.

Climate resilience, in Verchick’s words, is “the capacity to manage and recover from a climate impact in a way that preserves a community’s central character—the parts of its history, culture and economy that nourish the soul.” Verchick, a professor of climate and environmental law who worked on climate adaptation policy for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Obama Administration, writes from a position of extensive experience. Refreshingly, he also writes as someone eager to learn from the tribal leaders, community organizers, and concerned residents who know the most about their own local climate challenges. This book incorporates a wide range of voices and attempts to grapple with the almost infinite complexity of real-world climate adaptation.

The first section of the book makes a general case for why climate resilience should be prioritized alongside urgent work to slow climate change. Verchick argues for “moonshot” level funding for climate adaptation, and he describes in general terms what climate-resilient adaptations should look like. These chapters wax philosophical but they provide an important counterpoint to a long history in which most of our public attention has been captured by the need to reduce emissions. To many scientists (at least until recently), emphasizing climate adaptation has felt like throwing in the towel. But in Verchick’s words, “Climate resilience is not about giving up or giving ground. It’s about getting real.”

The early chapters of The Octopus in the Parking Garage also help wrap readers’ minds around the complexities of climate adaptation, before the next section presents detailed examples. They provide a theoretical framework for thinking about justice, trade-offs, and the difficult decisions and inevitable losses that are to come. In the United States and globally, climate change will hit people of color and people living in poverty the hardest. A key take-home is that it is essential to center social justice in planning for climate resilience, and that historically disadvantaged groups must have strong voices and political power throughout the process if genuine, shared resilience is to be achieved.

To many scientists (at least until recently), emphasizing climate resilience has felt like throwing in the towel.

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I especially enjoyed the second, longer part of the book, which describes specific climate resilience challenges and how individuals, communities, and government agencies have attempted to meet them. Here, Verchick takes us on an expansive journey across the United States. He visits Louisiana’s coastal swamps, where epic efforts at resilience are underway but where tribal communities still face the possibility of losing the very ground they live upon to a combination of sinking local land and rising seas. We learn how the disastrous Hurricane Sandy and some very determined lawyers forced New York’s electric utility company to modernize in forward-looking preparation for even bigger future floods. Verchick dives to a coral reef and explores the complexity of wildfire management in the western United States. We visit the Mojave Desert, where it is debated what steps federal land managers should take to secure the future of the iconic Joshua tree. Verchick consults with locals who are working on the front lines of each of these challenges, and gives wide-ranging examples of the forms resilience can take—from changes in state and city governance to hands-on species conservation work to cultural change. Parts of this section are extremely detailed, but the diversity of communities, climate challenges, leaders, and solutions that Verchick features make these stories both fascinating and educational.

These chapters pinpoint diverse actions each of us can take to help the communities and landscapes we care about to maintain their best qualities in the face of climate change. Verchick shares some fresh ideas for engaging with local organizations that are already working on the front lines of climate resilience—for example, by visiting your favorite state or national parks and expressing your concerns about climate impacts to park officials, or attending city housing policy meetings and speaking up about wildfire risks. Kids can educate family members and present at local hearings.

By design, this book focuses on the United States. Verchick offers not a radical reimagining of America, so much as a vision for how Americans could work largely within existing frameworks of governance to improve resilience and—a topic I am glad to see woven throughout—to center justice for the traditionally underserved communities that will be most affected by climate change. The author fully acknowledges that communities’ abilities to adapt will be limited by funding priorities and other policy decisions of state and federal governments, which is also an acknowledgment that we must elect leaders at every level who will prioritize addressing climate change.

The Octopus in the Parking Garage brings to life how climate change is affecting people all over the United States and what coping with ongoing climate change will look like. It sparkles with colorful examples and even hope. Each of us can take practical steps to preserve the places and things

The octopus in the parking garage was telling us it was time for action, everywhere.

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we love most. From policymakers to worried parents like me, anyone concerned about climate change will find ideas here, as well as incentives to take action. Above all, this book is an urgent call to give climate resilience the monumental attention it requires in this pivotal moment.

That octopus in the parking garage was telling us it was time for action, everywhere. Seven years after the stranded cephalopod was rescued and splashed back into the sea, it is not too late to slow climate change or to make our world more resilient to the changes we have already caused—but the need to do so becomes more dire with every record-breaking fire season, heat wave, and flood we endure.