Photo: Martin Deutsch

Driving with my kids the other day, I saw a sign announcing: “Borders Books Going Out of Business: 90% Off!” We headed in with great enthusiasm, thoughts of nearly free books dancing in our heads.

The place was swarming with bargain hunters. The remaining inventory had been moved to the front; the rest of the cavernous box store was gloomily empty behind movable partitions.

Though there were still thousands of books, I quickly realized the store had been picked clean, like a carcass where all the soft parts were long gone and just the hide, hoofs, horns, and bones remained. Like those ungulate parts, the titles left behind were mostly undigestible.

Jackal-like, I joined the others sniffing among the store’s skeletal shelves for some overlooked palatable morsel. There were literally no books for kids — those sections simply didn’t exist anymore.

“Sorry, guys, I guess there’s nothing left,” I said to the dejected pair shuffling along behind me.

But just then I turned a corner and stumbled upon the “Nature/Environment” section. It had books. Lots of books. New hardcover books, including four for which I’d recently read reviews and mentally filed away as potential reads. Two were on the future of water, and two were on the climate crisis.

My elation at finding such great bargains soon waned as I realized what their presence indicated.

Here were brand-new books on some of the most important challenges facing society today — now priced to move at about $2.50 — and they’d been left behind by the swarming scavengers, lingering on the shelves in the company of the odd, obscure, and obsolete. What I found to be intriguing evidently had as much appeal to the general public as Getting to Know Your Commodore 64, Knitting with Dog Hair, and Nasal Maintenance Made Easy.

It made real for me the now ubiquitous adage that conservation must strive to be more relevant to people. But relevant in what way?

Major conservation organizations have responded to the need to increase their relevance by placing most of their money on … money. With an undercurrent suggesting that nature’s beauty, majesty, and mystery are perhaps frivolous, our dominant themes now emphasize the economic returns from nature.

Don’t misunderstand me: I think that quantifying and demonstrating the economic value of natural ecosystems have great potential to improve decisions and increase investments in conservation. While we must pursue such opportunities for progress, I question the extent to which those concepts will expand the appeal of conservation to new audiences or galvanize the broad level of support that can undergird tough political choices on climate change, for instance.

Why am I skeptical? Because of the letter D and the number 35.

The letter D is the grade given by the American Society of Civil Engineers for the condition of, and investment in, infrastructure in the United States. This grade includes a D- for both levees and water-treatment plants.

Since flood-risk reduction and clean water are two of the best horses in nature’s stable of ecosystem services, these near-failing grades offer a sobering reality check. While I believe strongly that demonstrating nature’s benefits will resonate with certain key audiences, and thus advance our mission, when it comes to expanding the relevance of nature to broader audiences, establishing nature’s bona fides as infrastructure may produce underwhelming results. “Hey, nature,” says the levee, “congratulations on joining a woefully underfunded club!”

The number 35 is the percentage of U.S. charitable dollars going to religious organizations, considerably ahead of categories such as education (14 percent), human services (9 percent), health (8 percent), and environment/animal welfare (2 percent).

Philanthropic giving flows first and foremost to something that provides people with a sense of connection, spirituality, and refuge. Giving to categories focused on advancing economic growth or material well-being for the poor and disadvantaged lag behind.

Nature as infrastructure may be important. Nature as NGO calendar scenery may be inspiring. But nature’s most essential relevance may be in its intimate connection with our daily psychological, spiritual, and physical well-being.

I just heard a speech by Martin Palmer, leader of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (a wonderful speaker, by the way). He said: “No one has ever been converted by a pie chart” — and added that, when trying to connect with people, we should only use words that are “sufficiently understood, indeed sufficiently loved, to have been used in a poem.”

I can’t imagine a sonnet that contains “green infrastructure” or “ecosystem services” — or even “nature’s benefits.” Yet nature is the etymological raw material of poetry.

Conservation organizations must find the words to convey how nature is intertwined with the things people care most deeply about: their connections to family, community, sense of place and love of country.

The next time some big bookstore goes out of business, what will be the last book on the shelf? Something about wastewater treatment plants or highways? Or books about God, yoga, food, or how to stay connected with your children?

Nature has deep relevance for everything on that second list, and we should not forget to write those books, too.

Image: Vicki & Chuck Rogers

Recommended background music as you read this post: “Black Mud” by the Black Keys.

This spring has seen record floods and a great deal of attention on what floods do. And to most people, what floods do is cause destruction.

Floods do destroy. But floods also create. In 1927, an epic flood on the Mississippi River killed hundreds and wreaked massive property damage. But in its wake of destruction, that flood created rock ‘n’ roll.

To be fair, rock ‘n’ roll, like the Mississippi, is a seriously big river, one with many tributaries that converged to form its still-shifting channel. But one of its tributaries — and perhaps the essential one, with a gritty, longing, shuffling beat still pulsing unmistakably within the bigger river — sprang forth from the black mud that covered the whole Mississippi Delta when the swollen river finally slunk back to its banks in the late summer of 1927.

The black mud was one more sheet thrown messily across a thick bed of soil that had piled up over centuries of floods. Floods destroy, but floods also create — and that thick, black flood soil was phenomenally productive. People had created a thriving economy and society on top of it. They built massive levees to keep the river at bay, and first slaves and then sharecroppers turned that black soil to the white gold of cotton. But in 1927, those levees failed, and the society that rose up on the largesse of floods now felt their wrath.

Although floods are what made the soil so rich, in the short term, the 1927 flood threw the Mississippi Delta into disarray. The flood reexposed the deep racial fissures that the Delta society had worked hard to either smooth over or wish away. In the wake of the ugliness and economic upheaval, a river of rural blacks began moving north from the Delta.

Delta blues musicians chronicled the flood and its aftermath. Consider “When the Levee Breaks,” by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. Over a traditional Delta Blues riff on an acoustic guitar, McCoy tells how blacks were forced to work in near slave-like conditions, strengthening the levees during the flood: “I works on the levee, mama both night and day, I works so hard, to keep the water away.” With the final line, he alludes to the great migration of blacks moving northward: “I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan, gonna leave my baby, and my happy home.”

Led Zeppelin recorded a cover of the song and added greater geographic specificity to that final line. In so doing, they revealed the city where the Delta blues were transformed, the setting for the alchemy that gave their version such heft: “going, going to Chicago.”

Chicago was the destination for many of the Delta migrants and, in Chicago, the Delta Blues got plugged into amps and electrified. There, Chess Records artists, like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker, provided the first DNA strands that mutated and gloriously evolved the Delta Blues into “Chicago Blues.”

With the vigor of a new species, the Chicago Blues dispersed globally and, where they touched down, continued to evolve. In London, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger bonded over their mail-order records from Chess.

As I said before, rock ‘n’ roll sprang from many sources. But stripped to its essence, its true heart may be the primal beat and yearning soul of the electrified Delta Blues. The northward migration of blacks from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago set this electro-evolution in motion, and that migration was sparked and hastened by the great flood of 1927. And although rock has continued to evolve, you can still hear the black Delta mud in its DNA.

The most climate-resilient U.S. city might surprise you.Photo: Scallop Holden

Earlier this month, 35 mayors from major cities around the world convened for the Resilient Cities 2011 Conference and released a declaration [PDF] that highlighted the recent rise in natural disasters and the imperative for cities to increase their resiliency and ability to adapt to climate change.

But what does it mean for a city to be “resilient” to climate change? Which cities are most resilient — and what makes a city vulnerable?

Grist recently ran a slideshow featuring “the top 10 climate ready U.S. cities” — which was basically a measure of steps those cities were taking to reduce carbon emissions. What that piece didn’t address is how vulnerable or resilient a city is to climate change based on the city’s environmental context. For instance: What’s a city’s risk for climate-related disasters? Is its water supply sustainable?

I haven’t seen such a ranking — so I constructed my own simple one, based on readily available and relevant information. (You can peek at the results below.) I first factored that cities’ biggest concerns from climate change include disruptions to water supplies, increased risk of natural disasters (e.g., floods and hurricanes), and the heat itself: In addition to causing general discomfort, heat is already the biggest weather-related source of mortality.

Note that my rankings are not based on forecasts of future conditions. Instead, I assumed that cities that today have low risk of heat stress, natural disaster, and water supply disruption would, all things being equal, be relatively less impacted by climate change than other cities under various climate-change scenarios. (Here’s a separate post on my methods if you want to dig into how I justify this.)

Drum roll please: The top five U.S. cities that are most resilient/least vulnerable to climate change are: Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

The bottom five (the least resilient/most vulnerable) are: Phoenix, Houston, Sacramento, Las Vegas, and Miami.

Why do Rust Belt cities do so well in my rankings? Because they have a sustainable water supply (in four of the cities, the Great Lakes); their heat stress rankings are relatively low; and they are less vulnerable to natural disasters that will be exacerbated by climate change, such as floods, landslides, and wildfires.

One obvious observation is that the most climate-vulnerable cities include some of the fastest growing regions of the country, while the most climate-resilient include several cities with flat or even declining populations. So the country’s population is shifting away from places that are better-equipped to deal with climate change and toward areas that may face the greatest disruptions from climate change. Many of the most resilient cities are former industrial giants in need of new economic drivers. Transforming our economy to one that runs on much cleaner energy will require significant expansion of “green industries” with associated job growth. So, despite the relatively lower vulnerability of the Clevelands and Milwaukees and Detroits of the world, these cities should still pursue the investments required to prevent climate change. Those investments could provide an important spark for economic revitalization.

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Although minimizing climate change must be a national and global priority, a certain amount of change may already be locked in. Cities — even those that are relatively less vulnerable — should begin preparing for changes in temperatures, water supply, and natural disaster risks (e.g., read about Chicago’s adaptation efforts).

However, Sharon Begley recently reported in Newsweek that adaptation plans are the exception, not the rule. One promising strategy is “ecosystem-based adaptation” — using the “natural infrastructure” of forests, floodplains, wetlands, and coral reefs to regulate water supplies and reduce disaster risks. For example, floodplains can hold floodwaters, reducing flood risks to cities and farms. A primary benefit of ecosystem-based adaptation strategies is that they provide a multitude of benefits, and thus can be considered “no regret” options (meaning they provide benefits even if climate change impacts don’t occur).

For example, although sea walls’ only benefit is the prevention of coastal erosion — and these expensive structures are often undermined and cause a variety of problems — mangrove forests can protect coasts while also providing critically important nurseries for fish and shellfish, habitat for birds and other animals, and absorbing carbon dioxide.

Bottom line: Each city faces different challenges from climate change. Some may have greater resilience, but they still will need to adjust to changing conditions. And all should follow the example of the innovative cities profiled in Grist’s recent slideshow — cities that are leading the way toward a lower-carbon and more sustainable future … and reaping great savings and job growth along the way.