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0:07      Madi Minges: From the School of International Service at American University in Washington, this is Big World, where we talk about something in the world that truly matters. I'm Madi Minges.

0:16      Ken Conca: The short message of the book is "coming soon to a small town near you: this very difficult conversation." It might be about drought, it might be about wildfire, it might be about flooding, but it's coming. And you're not going to have the kind of wider attention and wider support and federal disaster relief that goes to the bigger cities. You're going to be on your own, and it's not a bad idea to start preparing now for that difficult conversation.

0:41      MM: That was SIS Professor Ken Conca. He joins us today to discuss climate resilience and his new book, "After the Floods: The Search for Resilience in Ellicott City." In late September and early October of this year, two devastating hurricanes, Hurricane Helene and Hurricane, wreaked havoc on communities in the Southern United States. The hurricanes, which hit Florida just two weeks apart, caused infrastructure damage along its coast and left millions without power in prolonged outages. The effects of Category 4 Hurricane Helene in particular, stretch beyond the state's borders, devastating mountain towns in North Carolina and killing more than 200 people living in the Southern US.

1:18      MM: These hurricanes are among the many examples of climate change-driven weather events that are on the rise around the world. Climate change is fueling more powerful storms, causing longer wildfire seasons, and changing precipitation patterns. The effects of these climate change-fueled events cast a long shadow on the communities that they impact, and they beg the question, how do we live with these climate impacts? How do we prepare for them?

1:41      MM: I'm Madi Minges, and I'm joined by Ken Conca. Ken is a professor here at SIS in the Department of Environment Development and Health. He has studied water politics for more than 30 years, and he teaches classes on environmental governance and policy and environmental peace building. His recent book, "After the Floods: The Search For Resilience in Ellicott City," discusses how the local government in Ellicott City, Maryland responded to two "1,000-year floods" in 2016 and 2018, and what other climate impacted cities can learn from it. Ken, thanks for joining Big World.

2:12      KC: Thanks, Madi, great to be here.

2:13      MM: To begin our conversation, Ken, could you tell me why did you write this book?

2:19      KC: Well, flooding is the most common disaster that we face in the United States and around the world. It's the most deadly and it's the most expensive with an annual price tag estimated at about $100 billion. And we're accumulating a lot of stories about the big floods in the big places. Everyone is familiar with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and Harvey in Houston. As you mentioned, as we're recording this, we're digging out from two recent hurricanes just this season. But there's a lot of small towns and small communities that also face this threat pretty much on their own, and I wanted to capture that.

2:53      KC: I also wrote it because this is a cautionary tale. Ellicott City is a community that has seemingly every advantage. It's an affluent community, with a progressive government. Climate change is not a dirty word. Planning is not a dirty word. It's also a very old historic mill town with a very fierce identity and a sense of its own history and of itself.

3:16      KC: So if ever there were a place that you'd think could figure out what does resilience look like, what does it mean in this four-square mile watershed? It'd be Ellicott City. And yet, in the wake of the first flood, the town launched a very ambitious watershed resilience master plan, and I started to study it because I thought we could get some lessons from it. In the wake of the second flood less than two years later, it became a very bitterly conflictive question about how to proceed with a lot of controversy, and extreme solutions coming to the front.

3:50      KC: But most of all, I wrote this book because I lived in Ellicott City for 14 years. I raised my kids less than five miles from where the death and the destruction was occurring. It's a community I know very well, and so I thought I was uniquely positioned to capture the story.

4:05      MM: Yeah. And you've spent a lot of your professional life focused on researching water and the power that it holds, whether that's disruptive power, political power, or life-sustaining power. Can you maybe help us put these floods into more context and tell us about your experience?

4:23      KC: Sure. Yeah. So I have done a lot of work around the world. I've testified in proceedings at the United Nations. I've been involved in advisory projects with governments. I've done a lot of research. I've stood in fields with farmers and talked to them about drought.

4:43      KC: This was a different experience for me because it really brought it home. I had water in my basement the night of the flood, and had no idea until the next morning what was happening. And so, originally I thought, "Well, let me try to understand this. This is my community. I'm a resident. I'm a citizen. I do have some expertise." And so, I started going to the planning meetings, and I was very struck because it's a very, very difficult challenge. The question of resilience is not really a question around engineering. We tend to think of it as we need to re-engineer our landscapes to make them safer, to make them more resilient, but it's a lot more than that.

5:27      KC: You mentioned climate change in the introduction, and we're all very sensitized, I think, to the way that climate is driving this problem. But it's not simply a question about climate change. Ellicott City was settled in a valley down by the river more than 250 years ago for very good reason. The water powered the Industrial Revolution, but it's also a community that suffers from a series of bad land use planning decisions, of overdevelopment in the watershed. And so, the path forward here is not really a technical path, it's not really an engineering path. It's really a path about what do we know? What are we trying to protect? And who speaks for the community? And those are the themes I really tried to develop in the book.

6:10      MM: Ken, through writing this book, what did you learn about the issues that communities face when they're dealing with the aftermath of a surprise natural disaster? And why do you think recovery and prevention efforts tend to become politicized or a source of contention?

6:28      KC: So one of the challenges here was simply drawing an accurate picture for people of what it is that we know and what it is that we don't know. And county government responded in the way that county governments and local governments typically do. They brought in an expert consultant. The consultant built a very ambitious and very interesting three-dimensional hydrologic model of the watershed to try to model what actually happens during flood conditions and what different interventions might do to help. And they held a series of meetings in the local community to discuss plans forward.

7:04      KC: But there were a couple of problems with that approach. One was that there's a great deal of uncertainty here, and I think the uncertainty wasn't adequately acknowledged. The county tried to make the situation sit still for governance in a sense, impose a definition and a solution. "This is the problem, this therefore is the solution."

7:27      KC: And many of the other forms of knowledge, the experiential knowledge of people who had lived in that community, were really to some extent pushed to the side. And so, as a result, there were a whole series of knowledge controversies. People didn't accept the official wisdom about what the problem was, and therefore there wasn't as much support as there might've been for the very difficult solutions.

7:50      KC: A second problem here was that the dialogue about what to do never really acknowledged the underlying conflicts. We're talking about reworking a watershed that's got 250 years of human history, of social history around it. Ellicott City is one of the best preserved historic towns on the East Coast of the United States. It's a real jewel in the crown of historic preservation. And so, when people start talking about tearing down historic buildings to make room for the water or building a $200 million pipeline under the town to carry water completely around it or about banning land development in the hills above the town, because that's part of the problem as well, those are really strong responses. Those are really controversial and contentious issues.

8:42      KC: So it wasn't really a technical question. It was a question about the community's identity. What are we trying to do here? What are we trying to protect here? What's most important about our history? If we can't protect it all, what do we care? And who gets to speak for that? Is it the people who are directly in harm's way who obviously have a very strong interest, the residents and the shopkeepers? Is it the county taxpayers? Is it some wider sense of community?

9:10      KC: And so, these are the things that I try to really thread through the book and trace through the book because I think there are a lot of lessons about having this conversation. The short message of the book is coming soon to a small town near you, this very difficult conversation. It might be about drought, it might be about wildfire, it might be about flooding, but it's coming. And you're not going to have the kind of wider attention and wider support and federal disaster relief that goes to the bigger cities. You're going to be on your own, and it's not a bad idea to start preparing now for that difficult conversation.

9:46      MM: Yeah. And I feel like what you mentioned about the loss of those historic landmarks, I feel like those are things that we don't always think about when we think about the consequences of climate change. We talk so much about these more intense weather patterns, longer wildfire seasons, these different things without really thinking what are the impacts on the ground? Oh yeah, that loss of history or the way it impacts the culture of a town, like you're saying.

10:18      MM: At the top of this episode, we'd mentioned the two recent hurricanes, Hurricane Helene and Milton, which impacted several regions in the Southern US just a few weeks ago. In the Carolinas, the damage was severe, and it was hundreds of miles away from the coast. Based on your research, do you believe that climate havens still exist?

10:40      KC: Well, if you look at what happened in Asheville, and I have great sympathy for the people of Asheville. They weren't the only ones affected. But my attention was invariably drawn there because it's a community that's a lot like Ellicott City. It's a very old town. It's an old mill town. It was built in the flood plain for very good reason because the water could power industrial development, the milling of wheat, and later really the whole process of the Industrial Revolution. So these communities are there for a good reason.

11:11      KC: But as you say, Asheville is hundreds of miles from the coast. And there's no question that climate change is driving this problem. Warmer oceans provide more energy for these storms, and they juice them more so that they do more destruction and they can cut a longer and wider swath of destruction. We also know that rainfall is being concentrated into more intense storms. Climate change is making some places wetter and other places drier. But irrespective of whether you get more rain or less rain, the rain that you do get is likely to fall in more intensive storms as we have been seeing.

11:53      KC: And so, there's no question that it's hard to identify places that are really insulated from those sorts of effects when so-called coastal flooding can push hundreds of miles inland, when a storm can still carry that much rainfall and not fade out as it enters across the interior of the continent. And as more and more of our landscape has been overbuilt in the floodplain, overpaved, can't manage the runoff from the rain, we're all facing this challenge in one way or another.

12:31      MM: Given that reality, how do we approach living in a climate-changed world? Do you have optimism? Is there room for optimism? How do we approach yeah, it feels almost like a new reality that, like you said, coming to a town near you. It's almost like nowhere in the world is immune to the consequences of climate change. How do we approach life knowing that this is kind of the situation we're dealing with?

13:07      KC: It's a great question. It really is the question. And yeah, I do have optimism. Certainly, people of Ellicott City didn't quit after the first flood. They dug out and they tried to think forward about the problem. And there have been achievements. I tell a cautionary story about conflict and about difficulty and about challenges and struggles around dialogue and around knowledge in the book. But I do retain a sense of optimism partly because of what I've seen there.

13:38      KC: It's interesting. When I did the book, I interviewed approximately 60 people in the community: shopkeepers, property owners, county officials, activists, all sorts of people. And the last question I would always ask in the interviews was, "In the last chapter of this book, I'd like to make a series of recommendations for people." And I do, and people can look at the book if they're interested in those recommendations. "If you were writing that last chapter, what would you want my readers to know?"

14:09      KC: And the people I interviewed did not have a consensus about what the town should have done, what the county should have done, what the right path forward looks like. But the one recommendation that almost every person that I interviewed, particularly residents in the community said was, "You have to be an activist. You have to get involved. You have to get organized. You have to start asking hard questions now about how are we going to deal with this when it arrives, because it's coming." And that spirit of engagement, after all the difficulties, after all the conflict, after neighbor being pitted against neighbor in many instances, the fact that people retained that of sense of spirit and that sense of commitment and that determination to look forward toward the future, that was really what gives me hope.

15:00      MM: I'm curious if you found anything, or just with your research background, is there a stark difference between how cities and towns impacted by these extreme events in the US respond to these issues versus globally? I'm assuming that there's multiple approaches to this. Is there an area that you see that is responding to these disasters or preparing for them particularly well on an international scale?

15:33      KC: It's a question I hear all the time. People are hungry for solutions, people are hungry for models. And they'll often ask me, "Well, give me an example of a place that's doing this the right way so that we can learn from that." And in some ways, I like to push back against that question because I think one of the lessons of this case and of many of the cases that we see around this, is that there really is no one size fits all solution.

15:58      KC: At the end of the day, the answer to the question, "What do we do in this four-square mile watershed?" It really comes down to what people in that community want, what people in that community hope for. Part of the story of Ellicott City is an attempt to impose those sorts of solutions from outside. There were many powerful actors circulating around this case that saw Ellicott City merely as an instance of something. And that's true of real estate markets. That's true if people have a particular touristic vision of historical preservation and economic development. And it's true of liberal problem-solving around flood resilience. And one of the things that happened in this case is that the community, in some sense, lost its voice to those larger models. And so, rather than identify things that can serve as a model, I think what I'm trying to do with this work is encourage communities to develop their own models.

16:59      MM: Ken, last question. What can communities do to better prepare for these storms and mitigate some of this damage?

17:08      KC: So in the last chapter of the book, I offer a series of very specific recommendations, and they're meant to be for just folks. These are not elite, top-down solutions that we're talking about here. These are how communities come together, get organized, and have some sort of a dialogue.

17:26      KC: And one of the things I think is really important is we need to recognize the uncertainty around these questions and tap all the forms of knowledge that we have. It's great to model a watershed. It's great to bring expert knowledge to bear. That's what we do in universities. But there are people that have lived their whole lives in the watershed and they know how the water behaves, and they know how projects don't effectively get implemented, and they know what's going to happen during a storm. That's wisdom. And we need to find ways to bring that into a broader process of social learning.

17:59      KC: And the second thing I'll highlight among the recommendations that I make in the book is this is really an exercise in conflict resolution. There's a tendency to want to paper over the conflicts, to want to deny that they exist, to try to impose an official truth, and to move forward with the projects that county government or landowners or whomever may wish to wish to implement. The irony is a lot of people say that participatory processes and conflict resolution processes, they slow you down when there's a great sense of urgency.

18:34      KC: Well, it's been more than eight years since the first flood in Ellicott City. And as I recount in the book, in many ways, the shovels are just starting to hit the ground now. The irony is if the county had slowed down a little and taken time to manage this as an exercise in conflict resolution, we might be further along today than we are. So more collaborative processes of social learning, emphasis on conflict resolution from the start, and you've got to be an activist.

19:06      MM: Ken Conca, thank you for joining Big World to talk about climate resiliency and your new book, "After the Floods: The Search for Resilience in Ellicott City." It's been great to speak with you.

19:17      KC: Thanks, great to be here.

19:18      MM: Big World is a production of the School of International Service at American University. Our podcast is available on our website, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, be sure to leave us a rating or review. Our theme music is, "It Was Just Cold" by Andrew Codeman. Until next time.