Photograph by Alecio Ferrari / Connected Archives
WORDS BY YESSENIA FUNES
Stephen Robert Miller grew up in the Arizona desert. Here, the temperatures and rainfall patterns swing violently, peaking in sizzling heat and withering drought. To survive, wildlife has adapted by hiding from the sun, burrowing underground, and only emerging after nightfall. On the other hand, humans, whose population here has been growing for decades, have embraced desert life with one tool they know best: technology.
In the American Southwest, people have thrived by developing unique agriculture methods, diverting waterways, and depending on cooling systems. The desert was Miller’s world—and so was innovation. His father, a retired engineer, built giant telescopes for a living. His father’s work actually led the family to the University of Arizona where he managed a lab making mirrors for these telescopes. Miller, an environmental journalist, grew up hearing his father talk about the magnificence of human manipulation. He was brought up to understand that this ability is what makes people so special.
It’s fitting, then, that Miller’s debut book explores what happens when human ingenuity fails at a massive scale. Over the Seawall, out on Halloween, looks at the climate crisis through the lens of maladaptation, which the United Nations defines as “an adaptation that does not succeed in reducing vulnerability but increases it instead.” What happens when leaders test the limits of technology? When their quick fixes backfire?
“This is a book about unintended consequences,” Miller writes in the introduction, “about fixes that do more harm than good and the folly of overconfidence.”
Responding to the climate crisis requires an all-of-the-above approach. There’s the urgent need to decarbonize and cut emissions to prevent the planet from heating further, but that’s not where Miller’s book takes readers. Instead, he takes us down the rabbit hole of worst-case scenarios now that climate change is upon us.
How do we prepare for what’s to come when we haven’t even fully grasped what is coming? How do we adapt to situations that will vary from year to year and from place to place? Wildfires in Greece won’t be the same as wildfires in California. Flooding from a tsunami in Japan requires different planning than flooding from a hurricane in Louisiana. None of these disasters today will look the same in 50 years, for better or worse.
“I wrote this book now because people are finally waking up to the realization that we’re not going to escape the impacts of climate change,” Miller told me. “We’re feeling impacts so intensely now where people are suddenly rushing into decisions about how to best protect ourselves. When you start rushing into making these decisions, you start making mistakes.”
And that speaks to the heart of Miller’s argument in Over the Seawall. We can’t dig ourselves out of this mess with the same choices that got us here. We can’t afford any more mistakes. We’ve run out of time for those. Leaders can’t build a climate-resilient future determined by profit margins and investors. Miller raises questions that we should all be asking our representatives. Will a seawall actually keep us safe? Who’s getting rich off it? Who’s getting hurt?
“I want people to be aware of the stuff happening in their hometowns,” he told me. “I want to arm them with the knowledge and experience to be able to recognize this happening and push back against it because it’s going to come at them with the best of intentions. It’s going to be politicians who are trying to tell them that everything is going to be OK, and we’re going to solve this problem. It’s going to be really hard to say no to something that seems it’s going to solve all your problems.”
His argument in the book is clear: Greed can no longer guide our decision-makers. The human cost has already been too high.
Leaders can’t build a climate-resilient future determined by profit margins and investors.
***
Over the Seawall is a book about highly technical events and projects, but I rarely found myself confused or bored. That’s part of Miller’s allure. He’s been covering climate change for about 15 years and teaches journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He knows how to give the facts with ease, intention, and prose. If you haven’t read his work before, I urge you to take a look.
I met Miller when we worked together at YES! Magazine some eight years ago. He’s remained a close friend, in part, because of our shared pain for the environmental destruction our species has wrought in the name of progress. We’ve remained committed to telling stories of the people who rage against systems of oppression and who defend their homes by any means necessary.
Miller doubles down on such storytelling in Over the Seawall. The book is broken down into three sections, each highlighting a specific region in the world where maladaptation has harmed communities. The book opens in Japan and then heads to Bangladesh before ending in the Arizona desert that raised Miller. In each section, we learn of how leaders failed—and how communities pulled themselves out of the collective grief that comes with errors of such immensity.
In northeastern Japan, Miller walks us through the 2011 tsunami that unleashed a nightmare many residents still haven’t awakened from. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake rumbled off the coast. Thirty minutes later, the tsunami came. Multiple waves as tall as 130 feet roared onto shore. Nearly 20,000 people were confirmed dead after the disaster. Another 2,500 remain “missing,” a term Miller told me people throughout the region still use when they talk about their loved ones they never found.
“This one woman’s aunt had fled and gone back to the house to help somebody else evacuate and was taken away,” Miller said. “She said that she was still living with all of her aunt’s things that were leftover after the wave. It was really striking that she was living in the shadow of that. It’s something she carries around with her every day.”
Communities up and down the coast weren’t saved by the seawalls their leaders had erected. To the contrary, in fact. The book explores how the walls offered a “false sense of security” that delayed a more urgent response to the tsunami threat—complacency that likely cost lives. While the tallest seawalls offered some protection, the smaller 20-foot-tall seawalls didn’t do much. “Destruction and loss of life had peaked behind them,” Miller writes.
Today, Japan is still building seawalls.
The infrastructure has grown in popularity across the globe as climate change drives sea level rise and beach erosion. Cities like New York and Miami are considering their own seawalls. When such projects are built, the concrete industry and the politicians who take their donations profit the most, Miller argues in the book.
“I decided to focus on glitzy large-scale techno-infrastructure projects because that’s the stuff that gets the most attention among politicians,” Miller said. “Those projects are also viewed often as silver bullets that will solve our problems and never do.”
Greed can no longer guide our decision-makers. The human cost has already been too high.
A similar story plays out in the book’s second section in southwestern Bangladesh, where levees and embankments were built to tame the mighty Ganges River Delta. The system, which was adapted from similar ones in the Netherlands, afforded land to farmers that otherwise would’ve been underwater.
“A European idea of managing water was just imposed on Southeast Asia in a really brutal way,” Miller said.
When it’s dry, the land thirsts for nutrients the river once carried over. And when it storms, the embankments have breached, failing to fully control the water’s behavior. Schools have had to close. Homes have been destroyed. The saltwater that penetrated their communities ruined critical farmland as a result. Miller points to government corruption and lack of maintenance as the culprits.
These realities haven’t been lost on the Bangladeshi people. They have fought back and even cut sections of the embankments to bring the ecosystem back into sync. Activism and bravery sit at the heart of these riverside communities’ struggles. Miller is sure to pay homage to them. They marched, they revolted, and some even died. Their defiance has helped bring some semblance of equilibrium back to their lands.
Back in the U.S., Arizona is seeing the opposite. A legacy of dams and canals has altered the landscape in irreversible ways. Whereas Bangladesh’s riverside communities deal with too much water, the tribes and farmers of Arizona are suffering from the inverse: too little. Miller explores this reality through histories and industries that have and continue to exacerbate the region’s water crisis. Tech giants are building energy-intensive data centers that need water to stay cool. Families water their green lawns without worrying whether they’ll need that water tomorrow.
But Miller is sympathetic. He, too, knows the charm of the desert even if it took him a while to “fall in love,” as he writes in the book. He hasn’t been able to escape desert life entirely: He now lives in the high desert ecosystem surrounding Boulder, Colorado. Despite facing different risks like wildfires, Miller recognizes the privilege he carries. He’s there by choice. And choice “is the most powerful adaptation available to any of us,” he writes. It’s something millions around the globe don’t have.
And that lies at the root of the problem.
“This was a really hard book to write. I spent a lot of time trying to understand other people’s grief.”
***
“This was a really hard book to write,” Miller told me. Indeed, it’s a difficult book to read. “I spent a lot of time trying to understand other people’s grief.”
We could all benefit from doing the same. Over the Seawall is a rumination on the collective grief pouring out from all corners of the world at any given moment. In the Indian Himalayas, flash floods earlier this month killed at least 74 people. Just a few months ago, wildfires eviscerated the entire community of Lahaina, Hawaii. At least 97 people died.
“Around here, the only thing worse than remembering is forgetting,” Miller writes about Japan in his book. How much have we already forgotten as a public? How much suffering do we turn away from on a daily basis?
Over the Seawall serves as a call to action—a reminder that government officials and private investors aren’t the only ones who carry the torch and light fires. Confronting the climate crisis can be painful and ugly, but that confrontation is what allows our minds and hearts to open. And that is the sort of physical transformation that may actually save us, not the concrete we pour into dams or seawalls.
Though the book touches on many topics—policy, activism, climate denial, and public health—it’s ultimately about human history. It paints a terrifying portrait of what we can expect for the future should we as a public allow our leaders to forget past mistakes.
Adaptation strategies to the harms of a heating planet must center the most vulnerable. “When adaptation becomes profitable, it doesn’t necessarily serve the local people anymore,” Miller told me. “It serves the people who are standing to make a profit off it.”
His book reminds us time and time again how profit was put before people’s lives. He’s calling on us to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We all carry a responsibility—to ourselves, to one another, and especially to the next generation. Miller writes about the freedom he saw among the children of the villages in Bangladesh—a way of living made possible by the community and adults looking out for the children around them.
“In the courts of the coming adaptation, this is something we cannot afford to lose,” Miller writes.
The first-time author became a father himself for the first time earlier this year. His son deserves a future where we all carry responsibility for the world we’re creating. He deserves a sense of community. Every child out there does. Unlike his own father, Miller won’t be telling his boy tales of technological successes. He’ll be telling him the same stories he’s shared with us in his book—where nature could not be controlled, where communities fought back, and where kids ran free.
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Designing Climate Adaptations for People, Not Profit
