Storming the Wall. Todd Miller

      ONE

       ON THE FRONT LINES OF CLIMATE AND BORDERS

       I think the notion of dreaming in a time where we are told that it is foolish, futile or not useful is one of the most revolutionary things we can do.

      —Harsha Walia

      On the coast of the small Philippine island of Marinduque, a man in a black shirt and blue shorts walks up the shore carrying a baby in his arms. Just as has been forecast by climate scientists across the world, littered all around him are bits and pieces of the “future.” There is a house so devastated by the rising sea and surging waves that its exposed frame looks like ribs puncturing its crumbling wall. An uprooted palm tree lies nearby like a corpse in the gravelly sand. Soon the sea will entirely claim the ruined house and, most likely, many more homes, farms, schools, and businesses farther inland. This small community, Balogo, which is on the island where my grandmother was born and raised, appears, like so many others across the globe, to be on the verge of being completely washed away.

      The father and child look out into the gray, stormy sea. Typhoon Ineng’s center is far away in the northern Philippines, but the waves still come crashing in. This storm will kill 14 people after battering communities with sustained winds of 80-plus miles per hour. The punishment includes tornadoes, flooding, and landslides that temporarily displace 34,000 people. Horrific as this may sound, by Filipino standards, this is a minor storm. Following super-typhoon Haiyan, everything is relative to that 265-mile-wide machine of wind and water that smashed the island of Leyte in November 2013, killing more than 10,000 people and uprooting hundreds of thousands more.

      When I ask Edmund Oracion, a fisherman from Balogo, if the ocean is moving in, he doesn’t hesitate: “Big time.” Oracion wears a brown tank top and talks above the sound of rushing waves, which are as gray and stormy as the sky. Children are laughing and playing in the encroaching foamy sea behind him. Oracion tells me that he has been living here for 45 years—his entire life. The slow advance of the sea, of course, doesn’t happen in one day. On the global plane, sea level reached its highest recorded level in March 2016, 3.48 inches higher than the 1993 average (with an overall trend of a 0.13-inch rise per year since 1993).¹ As of March 22, 2017, Arctic sea ice had melted down to its lowest level in recorded history.²

      The fisherman points to a buoy that is rocking 25 yards away in the waves. “The shore used to be there. The water is getting close to us,” he says. “It’s a big concern.” He says that the people of the region might have to relocate farther inland, a move that would not earn them climate-refugee status, since such a status does not yet officially exist. Behind him, as he talks, sit long fishing boats under skinny coconut palms. Like fishing, coconuts are one of the primary sources of income on this island of more than 200,000 people, 40 percent of whom live below the poverty line. According to the book Power in a Warming World, people who live in the 48 “least-developed countries” are five times more likely to die in a climate-related disaster than the rest of the world.³

      As I watch the waves consume the destroyed house, I realize that this is the first tangible casualty of sea-level rise that I have witnessed with my own eyes. And it was happening on my grandmother’s island. In just a few days climate change went from the theoretical and futuristic to real, raw, and immediate. Even the night before, when I met with Rollie Josue of the Marinduque government’s disaster management division, who explained all the potential hazards projected for the year 2050, the reality of it didn’t hit me as hard as it did seeing the house as the sea ate away at it, and that small child in his father’s arms, his black hair blowing around in the gusting wind.

      As Filipinos reminded me day after day, their island homes are on the front lines of the world’s most urgent issue. In his office, Josue told us that the projections for 2050 were dire. There will be more landslides. There will be more flooding. There will be ever-increasing possibilities for earthquakes and tsunamis. At least one Haiyan-strength typhoon is now expected to make landfall every year. The 2013 superstorm was so powerful and destructive that I thought that I must have misheard him. “One per year?” I asked. He smiled, as if that was the only thing he could do. “Yes,” he said.

      According to a survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations in March 2013, 85 percent of Filipinos already believed that they had experienced impact from climate change, this was even before the devastation of the super-typhoon. Many in the Philippines, including Greenpeace’s Amalie Obuson, credit the rapid increase in climate awareness to the devastation caused by the annual super-typhoons that have hit every year since Ondoy in 2009. The typhoon dumped more rain in Metro Manila in one day than ever before in the recorded history of the region. The capital, already used to being submerged in water, had never been so inundated. It was a “rude awakening,” said Obuson. There was Megi in 2010, Nesat in 2011, and Bopha in 2012, which leveled Obuson’s home province, Mindanao,