--- title: "Climate Past" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/34/archive" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/34/archive" issue: 34 section: "archive" description: "Learning from history's climate interventions, migrations, and transformation attempts" authors: ["Seth D. Carrington","Maya Jiménez"] published: 2026-06-01 updated: 2026-05-27 articles: 14 --- # The Docket > The Docket is a weekly publication about the decisions climate change is already putting in front of Americans: whether to buy the generator, whether the flood insurance is enough, whether to stay in the city you love. It follows the people making those choices now. It treats climate anxiety as a reasonable response to real conditions. It won't tell you what to do, but it shows the tradeoffs clearly. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 34 — Climate Past Learning from history's climate interventions, migrations, and transformation attempts ### The Sacrifice Decision - [Thirty-Nine Tons of Dynamite and a Gentleman's Promise]() — By [Seth D. Carrington]() · Published 2026-05-27 · Format: The Sacrifice Decision In April 1927, New Orleans bankers and civic leaders persuaded the Army Corps of Engineers to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, deliberately flooding two rural parishes to protect the city. They promised full compensation to the people downstream. The compensation never came. But the Flood Control Act of 1928, passed in the political aftermath, did something more lasting than stiff anyone on a bill. It wrote the authority to sacrifice some communities for others into federal law, and immunized the government from liability when it did. ### The Repeat Flood - [Johnstown: Three Floods, Three Rebuilds, One City That Kept Shrinking]() — Published 2026-05-27 Johnstown, Pennsylvania, fills a valley where the Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek converge. Ideal for making steel. Unforgiving when it rains. The South Fork Dam collapsed on May 31, 1889, killing 2,208 people. Cambria Iron Works reopened six days later. Nobody debated whether to stay. ### The Quieter Room - ["The Marsh Came Back. I'm Still Borrowing Everything I Touch."]() — Published 2026-05-27 *Editor's note: The Docket does not, as a rule, employ time-traveling correspondents. Celestino "Tino" Serpas is an imagined composite, assembled from documented accounts of Isleño trappers in St. Bernard Parish during the winter of 1928–29. His circumstances, grievances, and the figures he cites are drawn from the historical record. His opinions, his profanity, and his feelings about the Acme Land and Fur Company are entirely his own.* — Eds. ### Two Aftermaths - [The Window]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-05-27 · Format: Two Aftermaths In Oakland after the 1991 firestorm, a physicist spent months reconstructing every drawer and shelf of his burned house from memory. In Grand Forks after the 1997 flood, two holdouts mowed the lawns of neighbors who were already gone. Both communities faced the same narrow window of high trauma and high political will. One rebuilt bigger on the same dangerous ground. The other pulled back from the river entirely. Neither path was simple. - [What Cascaded]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-05-27 · Format: Two Aftermaths Oakland's rebuilt hillside homes are 40 percent less likely to burn. They also sell for $1 to $4 million, and their owners are getting dropped by insurers. Grand Forks' greenway absorbed a major flood in 2009 without damage. The families who sold their homes to create it received $52,000. Two post-disaster decisions produced decades of consequences, and in both cities the equity record resists the celebration the engineering deserves. ### Present Tense - **True Stories of Managed Retreat From Rising Waters** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 A 140-year survey of American retreat cases. The community fractures and holdout patterns repeat with eerie precision. - **Innovations in Buyouts: Lessons From Lived and Learned Experience** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 Harris County still has 4,000-plus pending buyout applications after Harvey. The gap between need and capacity is the story. - **Catastrophic Hyperclustering and Recurrent Losses: Diagnosing U.S. Flood Insurance Insolvency Triggers** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 Hurricanes drive over half of all NFIP claims. The $22.5 billion debt traces back to how we federalized flood risk in 1928. - **Managing Extreme Weather Risk in B.C.** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 Jennifer Houghton accepted a buyout in Grand Forks, B.C., then couldn't afford to stay in town. She left in 2020. - **Nobody's Insurance Rates Are Safe From Climate Change** — [Source]() — Published 2026-05-27 Insurers lost money in 18 states in 2023. The destabilization is reaching places that assumed they were exempt. ### Past Articles - [Lifting Galveston]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-05-19 · Format: Triumph and Its Shadow After the 1900 hurricane, Galveston put 2,146 buildings on jackscrews and pumped 15 million cubic yards of sand beneath itself. When an equally powerful storm struck in 1915, eight people died instead of thousands. The engineering triumph was real, and irreversible. Once you raise a city, you cannot un-raise it. Sea level rise has already erased nearly half the elevation the engineers added on the bay side. - [There Goes Oklahoma]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-05-19 · Format: Triumph and Its Shadow Hugh Bennett stalled before the Senate until a dust storm darkened Washington's windows. The Soil Conservation Act passed without a dissenting vote. To enter the program it created, you had to own the land. Sharecroppers who worked the soil couldn't sign. Bennett preserved the ground and helped dismantle the agrarian culture standing on it. Ninety years later, dust storms still kill people on the same Kansas highways. - [The Vote That Built a Wall (and Then Changed What It Was For)]() — By [Seth D. Carrington]() · Published 2026-05-19 · Format: The Escalating Bet In March 1902, a city still finding bodies from the deadliest natural disaster in American history voted 3,119 to 22 to build a seawall. The wall was for them, for the survivors, for the community that refused to leave. Over 124 years the commitment deepened while what it protected quietly changed. Nobody announced the shift. The $31 billion system now replacing that seawall is designed, by its own description, to safeguard the petrochemical corridor. The homes and families are building west of the barrier, outside its protection. - [Forty-Nine Feet]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-05-12 · Format: Visible Success Grand Forks, North Dakota prepared for a 49-foot flood in 1997 and got 54. Afterward, FEMA bought out more than 800 properties. The city converted its floodplain into 2,200 acres of parkland and built levees to 60 feet. When the river rose again, the Greenway absorbed it as designed. A majority of the Red River's worst recorded floods have occurred since. ## Other sections in Issue 34 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Future Tense]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()