Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Grace Agnew writes about Sanctuary from Woodhall Press.

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Do you know how dangerous it is to invite me to write about my “research?” I’m not just an author, I’m a librarian. You were that close to getting a fifteen-page bibliography of peer-reviewed resources, all correctly attributed according to the Chicago Manual of Style. Whew! I think we all need a moment.

Fortunately, the assignment states that research is defined “as broadly” as I like. Climate change, the threat that makes everything else — divorce, taxes, even death — largely meaningless, demands broad and expansive research. My research started in the mid-1990s. The National Science Foundation conceived the grand idea of developing large data networks to capture, store and make available data about the health of our physical world — everything from air and water to animals and earthquakes. I was invited, as a data scientist, to participate in the selection of institutions to build these networks. This involved working with the top scientists in many fields, including climate. So I learned, long before Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth, that as we went about our daily lives, convinced we were on the solid ground of families and careers, we were really teetering over a raging hell mouth — global warming, or as we now call it, climate change.

Climate change had been somewhat on my radar, largely with respect to the plight of polar bears, who were pictured adrift on melting ice floes. The photos were depressing, so I skimmed past them, hoping that somebody, somewhere, was doing something about them. But these scientists were telling me things I couldn’t skim past, deep changes to the planet that wouldn’t magically get better. They were saying that the world would come to a literal boil before the turn of the century. I (and they) would not live to see the worst effects, but the next generations — our children and grandchildren — would confront it head on, if they even survived. I had two immediate questions: why didn’t more people know about this and why weren’t these scientists, many of whom had just passed around photos of the latest grandchild, more agitated? We didn’t know about It at the time because it wasn’t news anyone wanted to hear (and still isn’t), and because there weren’t enough visible effects yet to make it newsworthy, i.e., something we could no longer ignore. As for question two, all good scientists develop the skill of emotional distancing, so that personal bias doesn’t impact research. Unfortunately, that ability to be calm and dispassionate does not make them good heralds for the grim news. Even as they tell us that the Gulfstream, which regulates much of our weather, appears to be permanently altering its course, and the Colorado River is draining rapidly, leaving at least seven states in dire need of water, their calm demeanor still tells us that somehow it will all be okay, great minds are on it, solving the problem in the background. But I am here to tell you, great minds may be on it, but they are the first to admit they are not enough to solve the problem — to identify it, yes, but not to solve it.

I began to read, UN climate reports, news articles, peer reviewed articles written by my colleagues. I read The Uninhabitable Earth, The Sixth Extinction and Deadly Harvest, to name a few popular science books on the coming catastrophe that made an impact on me. They were remarkably unanimous in their descriptions of the consequences of our actions (and inaction), but they didn’t give me what I desperately needed. The answers they provided, stop all use of fossil fuels, move from a competitive to a cooperative global culture, were very appealing, but unlikely. I needed a Plan B, and no one seemed to have one. I needed some things I could do, and you could do, beyond the endless recycling and climate marches, to make a difference, if only to live with the guilt of what the next two generations are facing. I got to choose where I live because of good job offers; they will likely be forced to move because where they are living is uninhabitable.

So I asked at dinner after one of these meetings, are we likely to survive and what would that involve? The scientists around the table saw the question as an intellectual puzzle: the most aware and ingenious species confronting the cascading effects of climate change as it blasts away each of our defenses — water, agriculture, power created largely by fossil fuels. One possibility was to build encapsulated environments that could buy us time to deploy the technologies and strategies we needed to make some of the earth habitable again. They weren’t convinced we could alter or turn back most of the effects, but we could possibly mitigate them and keep them from getting worse. And over time, we would continue to develop and apply new strategies that might let our species survive for many centuries, if probably not eons.

This was the genesis of Sanctuary. The benefits of an encapsulated, rigidly controlled environment are many. For one, it eliminates one of the greatest individual contributors to climate change — our gasoline powered cars. If you regulate diet — eliminating the massive meat supply from factory farms — and unsustainable building materials, such as plastics, you are almost home free, where personal contributions to climate change are concerned. Human nature is harder to control, but digital personal assistants — pleasant daily gatekeepers (jailers?) can keep people on the right path. Would this be enough? Possibly, for those fortunate enough to make it to an enclosed city — geography has always been destiny, but never more so than in a period of climate disruption. But many scientists were skeptical. We have never built strongly or securely enough to keep nature permanently at bay.

I was ultimately convinced that the only answer is to work with, and not against, nature. The planet, left to its own devices, has powerful tools for healing itself and sustaining life on its surfaces. I discovered permaculture and forest gardening and learned of places where people are turning deserts into fertile oases. One book that has stayed with me for a long time is a history of the dust bowl, The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. He makes the case that we never actually solved the dust bowl, which resulted from destroying the natural grassland prairies that retained water and from employing large scale single crop farming that depleted soil nutrients, turning the rich earth into dust. We “solved” the problem by throwing water at it, through massive, unsustainable irrigation. The dust bowl is one of the many environments that climate change will gift us with, and it is one that we do know how to solve. And the solution involves working with, not against, our planet and utilizing its own natural healing practices. Practices such as no tilling and planting cover crops to sequester carbon dioxide are gaining traction in the Biden administration and elsewhere. Forest gardens create multilayered crops that sustain the soil, plants, animals, and, of course, us. And these are steps we can take in our own yards. Now my research was starting to give me the answer I need: how can I live with climate change? It is now clear that my generation isn’t escaping the ravages of climate change after all. We have no choice but to evolve a Plan B, and my novel, Sanctuary, explores this. But it looks like we will probably also need Plans C-Z. I guess I better get started on the sequel.

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