Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean - Hardcover

by Christina Gerhardt (Author)

"A stunning atlas of the present and future."--Rebecca Solnit, author of several books including Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases--San Francisco, New Orleans, New York

"An impassioned plea to save what remains of these remarkable island communities."--Booklist, starred review

One of the Best Science Books of 2023, New Scientist

This immersive portal to islands around the world highlights the impacts of sea level rise and shimmers with hopeful solutions to combat it.

Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does an island see when the sea rises? Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean weaves together essays, maps, art, and poetry to show us--and make us see--island nations in a warming world.

Low-lying islands are least responsible for global warming, but they are suffering the brunt of it. This transportive atlas reorients our vantage point to place islands at the center of the story, highlighting Indigenous and Black voices and the work of communities taking action for local and global climate justice. At once serious and playful, well-researched and lavishly designed, Sea Change is a stunning exploration of the climate and our world's coastlines. Full of immersive storytelling, scientific expertise, and rallying cries from island populations that shout with hope--"We are not drowning! We are fighting!"--this atlas will galvanize readers in the fight against climate change and the choices we all face.

Back Jacket

Sea level rise will make all current atlases obsolete as it encroaches on coastlines and erases whole islands from the Arctic to the South Pacific. In Christina Gerhardt's stunning atlas of the present and future, we not only see these living places disappear in stages, but hear from their inhabitants in this mix of cartography, science, history, and urgent outcry about the climate crisis. This book makes tangible and visible both the physical changes and their cultural, emotional, and social impact.--Rebecca Solnit, author of several books including Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases--San Francisco, New Orleans, New York

"This book presents islands as more than just geographic locations, as places of resilience replete with history and culture laced with the fiber that underscores the interface of planet, people, and other beings in the time of looming catastrophic climate change. Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean maps hopes and histories and offers cautionary tales and wake-up calls couched in sensitive yet expansive poetics of life. This is a rare gift."--Nnimmo Bassey, author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa

"Islands are extraordinarily rich--in history, culture, and biodiversity. In an age of climate change, they're also incredibly vulnerable. At once lyrical and clear-sighted, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean invites us to rethink our relationship to these magical, threatened places."--Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

"A vital guide to understanding and navigating this time of rising oceans. A love song to island peoples and civilizations facing unimaginable loss. A paean of resistance and re-visioning, towards livable futures."--Shailja Patel, author of Migritude

"In this engaging and timely work, Gerhardt maps how islands have and will continue to change due to rising sea levels. She invites us to see these changes, not only through the form and genre of the atlas, but also through the eyes, voices, and perspectives of islanders themselves."--Craig Santos Perez, author of Navigating CHamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization

"Christina Gerhardt's Sea Change is an urgent resource for an urgent moment of social and climatological upheaval. Islands--reproduced in a colonial imagination as bounded, isolated geographies--are dynamic sites of political imagination and ecological worldmaking. Gerhardt provides us with a grammar to make sense of our shared predicaments and unsung solidarities as island-dwelling communities."--Ryan Jobson, University of Chicago

Author Biography

Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Barron Professor of Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. Her environmental journalism has been published by Grist.org, The Nation, The Progressive, and the Washington Monthly.