What can Charleston and other coastal cities teach South Florida about sea-level rise?

So far, the nonprofit Feed the Second Line has converted four restaurants to solar, with five more “coming soon.”

There’s also an effort to establish churches and other faith-based buildings to have power for lighting when the lights go out in an area. “Residents can see themselves in the response,” Cantrell said. “They can see that they are valued.”

Cantrell also said resiliency creates jobs. “Resilience efforts will create thousands over the next five years. We want to make sure the residents of New Orleans are connected to those jobs.”

Shellfish solutions

Peter Malinowski, executive director of the Billion Oyster Project, was another panelist. His nonprofit restores New York Harbor’s once-resplendent underwater landscape by cultivating oyster beds that filter the water and kneecap wave- and storm-surge energy.

No one is claiming oysters are going to save New York City from sea-level rise, said Malinowski, but they’re more beneficial than you might think. “There are places where oyster reefs can play a vital role in breaking the waves and protecting the shore from extreme weather events.”

He points to the award-winning Living Breakwaters Project, which uses green infrastructure that adapts to climate change to protect the south shore of Staten Island. The area was hammered, and residents died, during 2012’s Superstorm Sandy.

Unlike a typical breakwater, which amounts to a pile of rocks, the Living Breakwater has shallow tidal pools, and fingers that gradually taper into deeper water, creating multiple habitat realms for marine food chains — hatchling fish, lobsters, larger fish, seals. The Billion Oyster Project planted oysters strategically throughout, giving schoolkids and participants a sense of ownership, but also creating reefs that actually grow over time.

The oyster reefs not only filter water, they also grow, creating a larger breakwater, whereas human-made walls degrade and fall apart over time.

The panel ended with Morris noting that, “Stoics will tell you that change is the only thing that is constant in life. And what do humans resist the most? Change. The problem is, we’re going to need bad events to motivate us.”

In a following panel, novelist Jenny Offill offered up a different perspective, and quoted another writer, Paul Kingsnorth: “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.”

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