The Water Will Come

Non-fiction book about the impact of ocean levels rising

I received a copy of this book courtesy of Harry Hartog.

“The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities and the Remaking of the Civilized World” by Jeff Goodell is a non-fiction book about various coastal cities and towns and the impact he predicts rising sea levels will have. Goodell has a particular interest in property, and a lot of his research, analysis and interviews centre on wealthy investors, politicians and property-owners. Goodell visits a number of places around the world to explore how rising sea levels are already impacting the enormous number of people who live on the coast.

When I read the opening chapter of this book, I thought it was a dystopian novel about a world underwater. However, Goodell only writes the first chapter about that, and the rest of the book is a non-fiction account of high profile interviews primarily about housing. Unfortunately, as a narrative, this book was not particularly compelling. This book is very America-focused, and Goodell spent two chapters talking about Miami and another talking about Alaska. Yes, he did write a bit about Nigeria and the Marshall Islands but this is primarily a Western-centric book about an issue that will disproportionately affect non-Western countries. Island nations like Indonesia, the Maldives and the many Pacific Island countries were just throwaway lines while the reader was left instead to sympathise with the fact that the insanely lucrative practice of flipping houses in Florida may not always be so lucrative.

I didn’t particularly care for the way that Goodell wrote about people of colour either. He uses colonial and outdated terminology, and refers to the “dying languages of Australian aborigines”, “a nearly extinct Aboriginal language” and the Calusa people as being “wiped out”. Even the title of the book is divisive, indicating that Goodell is only interested in the “civilized world”.

A rather one-dimensional take on a global environmental issue, I really wish it had been a dystopian novel. Perhaps a good companion book for “The Mosquito“?