The Shanklin Park pool was one of the few dry things left in Goshen, Indiana. The Elkhart River’s tiny span – totaling 48 miles in length – had swollen so large that it bisected the city. Residents kayaked across grocery store parking lots, rescue workers pulled people from their houses into boats, public officials declared the city a disaster area and limited travel to first responders and hospital staff.
About 20 people were evacuated from their homes in neighboring Elkhart through the early morning hours, even if they didn’t want to leave.
“It’s our home. Everything is in there,” Elkhart resident Kimberly Rose told the South Bend Tribune.
It had only taken two hours for the river to rise high enough that rescuers needed rafts to get to them. Gas and electric were shut off, and the water was still rising.
“It was scary. My kids didn’t really know what was going on,” Jennifer Snider, another resident and mother of four, told the Tribune. She and her children were crying as responders loaded them into the boat.
Shelters were set up in places like Grace Community Church in Goshen and Central Christian Church in Elkhart, which was filled to capacity. American Red Cross volunteers waded through crowds of evacuees, offering them dry clothes, towels, and food packages while they got things sorted.
On the other side of the state, flood waters covered the small town of Utica along the Ohio River. Evansville, Aurora and dozens of other towns, big and small, met the same fate. Horseshoe Southern Indiana, a riverboat casino in Elizabeth, shut down for the fifth time in 20 years because the Ohio River had forced the closure of its access roads. In the end, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb declared more than 30 of the state’s 92 counties disaster areas.
It was late February 2018.
Winter.
In 2008, federal disaster declarations were issued for more than two-thirds of Indiana’s counties over a six-month period. Central and northern Indiana were inundated by heavy rainfall in January and February, while central and southern Indiana were soaked from late May into June. Single-day rainfall records were set in Spencer, Terre Haute, Greensburg, and Bowling Green. Some isolated areas may have gotten as much as 2 feet of rain that June.
In Martinsville, twice as much rain fell that month as ever recorded for June – 20.11 inches – and almost 7 inches more than its record for any month. The levee on the west fork of the White River threatened to breach at the bypass linking Ind. 37 to Ind. 67, where it protected the bulk of Martinsville’s west side. The lower-middle and working-class neighborhood called Bucktown was notable for the county jail, city baseball diamonds, and a municipal water pump that was often the source of boil water orders. Shielded, the westside didn’t suffer more than a few inches of water anywhere. The big event there was a mudslide that ran from the hills near the former North Elementary School on Main Street to Bucktown’s cluster of Habitat for Humanity houses several blocks west.
Meanwhile, on the east side near Ind. 37, the water ranged from knee-high to chest-high. In some places, cars could only be seen by their antennae. The asphalt on residential roads curled and cratered. Several inches of water covered the floors in every room of the 55,000-square-foot South Elementary School, and the ceiling sagged under the weight of pooled rain. Storage units filled with water. Wind made white caps in the Kroger parking lot. WCBK deejays continued broadcasting flood reports even as the water rose outside their studios. No one could get to or leave the city. All the entrances and exits were washed out or flooded over. It wasn’t the river that engulfed Martinsville, but a trio of tiny streams: Indian Creek, Sartor Ditch and Nutter Ditch.
The Great Flood of June 2008, as the Indiana Department of Natural Resources came to call it, caused more than $1 billion in damage and affected more than 25,000 people. It was the most devastating agricultural catastrophe the state had ever experienced – drowning more than 9% of Hoosier farmland – and the costliest weather event overall in Indiana history.
Both South Bend, in 2018, and Martinsville, in 2008, suffered 500-year floods. In other words, the rain events were so big over a 24-hour period that scientists would expect them to occur about once in half a millennium. But Martinsville was hit with similar floods in 1875, 1913, and 1993. For its part, South Bend also endured a 1,000-year flood in 2016 and another 500-year flood in 2008.
As the St. Joseph River ravaged South Bend in 2016, Mayor Pete Buttigieg sent out a tweet calling the event a “once in a lifetime rainfall.”
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A year before the Great Flood of June 2008, Jim Poyser began to worry about the world.
The European Space Agency announced that sea ice in the Arctic had melted enough that ships could travel from Europe to Asia using a route north of Canada for the first time in thousands of years. The passage sparked a contentious effort from all five countries with land in the Arctic to claim the region as their own, anticipating the wealth they could generate from the fossil fuels that would soon become accessible.
“The huge irony is that we are only talking about this because humanity has burned so much oil and gas that the ice is melting,” Michael Byers, an expert on international law and the Arctic at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told the Washington Post. “It could be a vicious cycle: Climate change is opening up the Arctic to oil and gas drilling, which almost certainly will cause more climate change.”
The finding was alarming to scientists and frightened Poyser, who was then managing editor at NUVO in Indianapolis, Indiana. He began to turn more attention toward environmental coverage in the alternative newspaper, but that wasn’t enough. After awakening to the issue, he found himself living in a kind of nightmare he needed to dedicate himself to fixing. Even after NUVO publisher Kevin McKinney bought a statewide publication dedicated to environmental issues for which Poyser became editor, his need for more wasn’t satiated.
“I’m not a dark person by nature,” Poyser said in the documentary Little Warriors. “I’m a happy person. And by paying attention way too much to one particular subject – climate change – I was turning dark and unhappy and frustrated and hopeless.”
In 2013, after more than 25 years in the news business, Poyser left his station at NUVO to become the first paid executive director of Earth Charter Indiana, a statewide nonprofit that works to “inspire and advance sustainable, just and peaceful living in Indiana by promoting the values and principles of the Earth Charter.”
The Earth Charter is a global document written by hundreds of people in dozens of countries during the ’90s in response to challenges the world faces in the climate crisis. It outlines four pillars to guide decision-makers: climate, democratic transparency, racism and poverty. Poyser said he liked to think of climate change as the lens through which to view the others.
“Cheap electricity, for example, is deeply embedded into our culture,” he explained.
The true cost of using fossil fuels isn’t accounted for because it doesn’t consider the externalities – costs not directly borne by the company in the production and transport of goods. The environmental and public health damage done at each step and the cost to other entities to mitigate, clean up and adapt to it aren’t part of the equation for “cheap” electricity.
“We just dump our emissions into the sewer of the sky thinking they’ll go away into space, I guess, but, unfortunately, they do not,” he said.
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One recent study found that the occurrence of downpours and floods worldwide has increased by 50% this decade and is four times more likely than in 1980. The same study submitted that insurance payouts because of climate change-related incidents have increased by 92%. In 2011, the U.S. Global Change Research Program reported that 11 of the 14 billion-dollar weather catastrophes that hit the U.S. affected the Midwest. Researchers at the University of Iowa found that floods have become more frequent in the Midwest since 1962.
Gabriele Villarini, a hydrologist and one of the authors of the University of Iowa study, told Mother Jones he was surprised by the “very homogenous pattern” his team found throughout the region’s flood data.
“It’s not that big floods are getting bigger but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods,” he said in a University of Iowa press release.
Though that study didn’t look at how climate change may be driving increased flooding, a new report released by Purdue University’s Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment team found that Indiana should expect more extreme rainfall events, more flooding and more intense droughts – a drought in 2012 sparked a disaster declaration in all 92 Indiana counties.
The average temperature in Indiana has risen 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895 and is expected to rise 5 to 6 degrees by 2080, extending the length of growing and pollen seasons, increasing the intensity of droughts, creating a more welcoming environment for ticks and mosquitoes and decreasing the likelihood of snow in winter. The number of extremely hot days – 95 degrees Fahrenheit or higher – will increase to around 38 to 51 days per year from about seven. High temperatures will create hazardous conditions for the elderly and young children and reduce crop yields. Extreme cold days – below 5 degrees Fahrenheit – will drop to six from about 13 per year. Annual precipitation – which has already increased by nearly 6 inches since 1895 – will continue to increase and more will fall in heavy downpours. Winters and springs will become wetter, increasing flooding, water pollution and stress on crops and water supplies.
The average temperature throughout the Midwest increased 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit from 1900 to 2010, but the rate of increase is more disconcerting. From 1950 to 2010, the temperature rose twice as fast as the overall pace. From 1980 to 2010, it rose three times as fast. To make projections, Purdue’s team used greenhouse gas emissions scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international research group led by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme. Using the IPCC’s medium emissions scenario, the Purdue team projected a 5.6 degree Fahrenheit increase in Indiana’s average temperature by the end of the century. On the high-emissions end, it could rise as much as 9 degrees.
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“When I grow up, I want to be a photographer,” a young girl wearing a dark blue shirt with “Kids for Climate” in bright green letters across the front told the Indianapolis Public Works Committee from behind a podium. “I want to take pictures of the nature around us. And that’s the problem, because we don’t know if there’s going to be any nature at all.”
She and many other middle and high school-aged children stood confidently before the nine-person committee, part of the Indianapolis City-County Council, and implored them to act to mitigate climate change, to make Indianapolis a resilient city and to ensure nature stays in the picture. The presentation was the culmination of years of work – educating themselves; getting students in their schools to sign petitions; meeting with engineers, mayors and other experts to understand what was already being done and what could be done; and preparing a climate action plan.
It’s all part of Earth Charter Indiana’s Youth Power Initiative, which empowers young people to work with the movers and shakers in their cities to get something done on the issue. The program was inspired by an effort in Eugene, Oregon. Two teenagers sued the state in 2011 for violating the public trust – the land and air within its borders – by not protecting its natural resources from the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. While they didn’t win their case in the state, one of the teens went on to sue the federal government with 20 other plaintiffs on the same grounds in 2015 – a lawsuit that is still progressing through the courts. Similar youth-led efforts have taken place across the country since the first in Eugene gained traction, including in South Bend. Both Poyser and Rosemary Spalding, board president of Earth Charter Indiana, were observing these youth-led efforts when they were introduced by a mutual friend. That’s how Poyser got the job, but it isn’t possible to sue the governor in the Crossroads of America.
The organization tried something else. It approached the Environmental Rules Board, part of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, “to convince them that creating a climate action plan for Indiana was a good idea, but that was a dead end,” Poyser said. “They were not willing to do that, especially in the Pence administration, when climate was being denied.”
That experience led Earth Charter Indiana to cities. If not at the state level, it reasoned, then it could move the needle by getting cities to act on their own.
“It would’ve been awesome if we could’ve figured this out 50 years ago. We wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation,” a young boy with scruffy hair, blue eyes, and a long necklace with a peace pendant, said in Little Warriors. “But it’s never too late.”
Since Indianapolis became the largest city in the country to pass a climate action resolution on Feb. 27, 2017, Carmel and Lawrence have followed suit.
The resolutions on their own don’t matter. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for more than a century, so carbon neutrality by 2050, while achievable, is too late to make a difference. Instead, the pledge provides an excuse for mayors and their governments to act. If the city is going to meet the goals it laid out, it must figure out where to begin.
Indianapolis has already hired a consultant to help assess what the city is doing now and construct reasonable goals to move forward in collaboration with its stakeholders – residents, businesses and the like.
Other cities haven’t passed climate action plans or pledged to become carbon neutral by a certain date but are moving toward a more sustainable future. A Youth Power Initiative group in Columbus has presented to the city council twice. The council hasn’t taken a vote on a resolution, but it has recently begun to engage its residents on climate change.
“Columbus isn’t a success story if you say, ‘Did they pass the resolution?'” Poyser said. “But I think it’s a success story as much as even the other cities because you have young people regularly civically engaged with their city and the city is listening.”
Other cities, where Earth Charter Indiana hasn’t yet been active, have taken action on their own. North Vernon, a small town southwest of Columbus, announced last year that all city functions would be converted to solar power. The conversion was 75% done at the end of December 2017. Other large-scale solar operations are popping up around the state. Whiting has achieved a 100% recycling rate and Fort Wayne is over 70%. Indianapolis’s recent DigIndy project – the construction of a huge underground tunnel to hold stormwater and sewage overflow during heavy rain events – will help keep the city’s water supply safe and protect the White River in the Circle City and downstream. But there’s still a lot of room for improvement. U.S. News recently ranked Indiana 46th in the country for the health of its natural environment, using drinking water quality, low industrial toxins, low pollution health risk and urban air quality as its key indicators. And southwestern Indiana remains home to four of the worst polluters in the country.
“Our activism isn’t over,” one youth activist said in Little Warriors. “That was just Indianapolis. We still have the rest of the United States.”