Welcome to the Age of Adaptation, when a growing number of people are coming to realize that the Big, Bad Climate Wolf isn’t going away — and is only getting stronger.
As the children’s story warns, many homeowners will learn the hard way that their shelter is no match for the huffs and puffs, or floods and fires of an overheating planet, so we must take inspiration from the Third Little Pig, who built a house so strong, it became shelter for the others — and a base of wolf eradication.
When my little boy was born in 2020, that old story took on new relevance every time I’d kiss him goodbye to go cover another unnatural disaster. I wondered: Where should he live? What kind of building? What about air and water? What kind of community has the best chance to survive and thrive, come what may?
The result is “Adaptation Nation: A Climate Crisis Survival Guide,” my global search for the most promising solutions and most resilient communities.
Outside Amsterdam, I strolled the floating Schoonschip neighborhood, which is pioneering innovative ways to live on top of water as sea levels rise. In Florida, I met the NFL wife and mom who was so shaken by her first hurricane, she started an innovative construction company to build disaster-proof domiciles on the Gulf Coast.
As urban wildfires ravaged Los Angeles County, I focused on the homes that didn’t burn. I called up the architect for design tips, and we kept going back to Paradise, California, to learn from survivors five years after the Camp Fire turned most of their mountain town to ash.
And in Babcock Ranch, Florida, I leaned what it took to build America’s first solar-powered town and how it has survived two major hurricanes without flooding or losing power.
On journeys from London to Silicon Valley, I met dozens of brilliant innovators devoted to rebuilding healthier, wealthier and happier communities from every sector, like the “fix-a-flat” for leaky homes that can cut heating bills in half and the van-size drones that could move supply chains from the roads to the sky.
Since solar and wind energy now cost less than oil and gas, some Democrats think the way to beat Big Oil is by building better, faster, cheaper alternatives, which just happen to be cleaner and stronger.
“What if we made it so that the thing that had the best unit economics was also best for the planet?” inventor and climate investor Tom Chi asked me.
But just as the Inflation Reduction Act was drawing hundreds of billions of dollars of private investment into clean tech, resilience and Earth repair, America re-elected President Donald Trump — a leader likely to tell our metaphorical pigs that the climate wolf is a myth and straw houses are terrific. Amid protests from Republican districts enjoying the IRA’s manufacturing boom, Trump is vowing to kill many of these ideas in the cradle.
Can blue cities and states, nonprofits and good-hearted corporations keep up the fight without any federal help? It’s too soon to tell, and before we know it, my son’s Generation Alpha will be old enough to tally what’s left and wonder what could have been.
The survivors will be the fortunate ones, surrounded by helpers with the wisdom and freedom to adapt and the planning of a Third Little Pig.