The hurricane-ravaged city will quickly rebuild. But does that cause a false sense of security?
For retiring Boomers who are too cool and too blue for Florida or Arizona, Asheville, North Carolina, is the place to retire. Nestled on the eastern slopes of the Appalachian Mountains, Asheville promotes itself to a growing legion of retirees as the city that lets you live “any way you like.”
Left-leaning Boomers thought they had found it all: a deep blue city in the South with near-perfect weather, low taxes, and a carefully curated culture of bongo drums, craft beer, and endless “forest bathing” in the lush Appalachian mountains surrounding the city. Hurricane Helene was certainly not what these retirees signed up for.
You would think the hurricane would be an end to this Shangri-La mountain hideaway because much of that lifestyle is now under a mountain of debris. You would be wrong. Contrary to pro forma media doomsplaining, Helene will most likely lead Asheville not on a path of permanent change but — like other climate-induced disasters from Maui to Sonoma — will be more bump than disaster. What Helene’s trashing of Asheville definitely won’t do is move the dial — at a systems level — to accelerate efforts to halt rapid overheating of the Earth.
Resident sage
Or at least that is what my older, wiser brother, Dwight Griswold, told me. A sixties holdover who retired to Asheville after more than 20 years with NATO, he is not pulsed by Helene’s wrath (even though he calls from Savannah after escaping the unpleasantness of having no power or water).
What Helene’s trashing of Asheville definitely won’t do is move the dial — at a systems level — to accelerate efforts to halt rapid overheating of the Earth.
He confidently predicts that the now devastated Riverside Arts District, a focus of disaster coverage by network news, will mostly be business as usual next summer. He envisions tourists and locals returning to pregaming for a Dark Star concert in the graffiti-decorated abandoned factories now home to craft breweries and funky barbecue joints.
So why is Dwight so upbeat? Human resilience. No storm, no matter how bad, can dent the human appetite to achieve what we desire. And despite billions in damage, the stunning Appalachian mountain beauty remained untouched because one of the great truisms of the climate crisis is that extreme weather mainly damages man-made objects like roads, bridges, and breweries. It is man who destroys nature.
Human resilience has no bounds
Asheville is not alone. Hammered almost into oblivion by Category 4 Hurricane Ian in 2022, empty lots on the Florida destination island of Sanibel now have higher valuations than before the storm. Since the turn of the century, Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood has endured the devastating cancer clouds from the fallen Twin Towers of 9/11 and the surging waters of Super Storm Sandy but has only seen property prices boom. And in Beirut, Israeli air strikes have not dented the city’s thriving nightclub scene.
Human resilience is our greatest strength — and our biggest enemy. The endless rebuilding of evolving civilizations has allowed humans to make spectacular advances, but it has also created a false sense of complacency. Despite the growing inconvenience of extreme weather caused by climate change, the fate of the Earth will always be another generation’s problem.
This is an increasingly dangerous gamble, raising the question of what it will take to change human ways. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s cli-fi novel, The Ministry for the Future, heat and humidity kill millions in a few days. It’s a real threat.
The drive for short-term prosperity will always trump acknowledging long-term catastrophe. This bet has served humanity well, but humans have never faced an environmental crisis of this magnitude.
What climate crisis?
But would it change the minds of leaders like Vicki Hollub, President and CEO of Occidental Petroleum? Without a twinge of irony, she recently told David Gelles of The New York Times that climate change is “the greatest crisis the world has ever faced” but that the day Occidental stops drilling is “the day we run out of oil and gas.”
The problem is humanity is racing toward extinction but without the show-stopping finale of a thermonuclear war. So, bar the random storm, it does not feel like an existential threat in Asheville or anywhere else. It feels like it’s basically normal. This week, Boomers began to filter back to Asheville to pick up the pieces under the sharp autumn sunshine and crisp Carolina Blue skies. In a year, don’t be surprised when you see T-shirts in Asheville sporting “I survived Hurricane Helene on acid” bravado.
That is why we all live in Asheville. The drive for short-term prosperity will always trump acknowledging long-term catastrophe. This bet has served humanity well, but humans have never faced an environmental crisis of this magnitude. What has worked in the past will decidedly not work well in the future.
