--- title: "Climate Past" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/55/archive" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/55/archive" issue: 55 section: "archive" description: "Learning from history's climate interventions, migrations, and transformation attempts" authors: ["Maya Jiménez","Seth D. Carrington","Wren Castellano"] published: 2026-10-26 updated: 2026-10-22 articles: 15 --- # 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 55 — Climate Past Learning from history's climate interventions, migrations, and transformation attempts ### Lead Feature - [Who France Can Find in a Heat Wave]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-10-22 · Format: Lead Feature When Parisians died in their sweltering apartments in August 2003, the people who first noticed were often neighbors, friends and building caretakers: a knock went unanswered, a phone kept ringing. ### Short Case Study - [A Dutch sea barrier turns 40, and the bay it saved still needs sand]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-10-22 In 1972, mussel farmers and fishers gathered in the harbor at Burghsluis to fight a government plan to close the Oosterschelde, a tidal bay in the southwestern Netherlands, with a solid dam. The plan came after a 1953 flood killed many people there. The protesters' slogan was "Keep the Oosterschelde open." Photos survive. Their own words, in the records I could find, mostly don't. ### Imagined Interview - [Mrs. Fillmore Stayed While Galveston Rose Beneath Her. We Asked What It Cost.]() — Published 2026-10-22 In the photographs, Galveston looks like a city that has misplaced its ground. Two-story frame houses perch on timber cribbing, bracing nailed against their walls like splints. A woman climbs a staircase to the West End Grocery, whose front door now sits about where a hayloft would. A pontoon bridge crosses a canal at Tremont Street. A row of children sits on a pipeline, watching it spit wet sand into what used to be a street. ### Paired Features - [The Paycheck the 1927 Levee Promise Left Out]() — By [Seth D. Carrington]() · Published 2026-10-22 · Format: Paired Features In April 1927 Louisiana dynamited a levee below New Orleans to lower the river past the city, and the governor's proclamation said the damage to property would be paid. Many claims were. A motor-company manager named Foret, out $75 a week while his flooded company stayed shut, asked for $2,625 in lost salary. In 1929 the state Supreme Court ruled on whether a paycheck counted as a loss. Judges kept citing the answer for years. - [The Drought a Tax Judge Called Sudden]() — By [Seth D. Carrington]() · Published 2026-10-22 · Format: Paired Features In 1977 a drought ordinance held a San Rafael family of four to 148 gallons of water a day. The hillside garden Norman and Betty Ruecker had fed through twelve irrigation systems was dead by June. They wrote it off on their taxes as a loss, and the IRS said a drought is too slow to count. In 1981 a federal judge disagreed. Behind their ration ran water trades reaching from Southern California to a pipe across the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge. ### Archives to Explore - **A Hills Resident's Own Record of the 1991 Oakland Fire, 35 Years On** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 Donald Pearman's interviews, photos and reports, 1991–97. He chose whom to interview. Viewable only in the library. - **Ten Black East Bay Residents on Losing Their Homes in the 1991 Fire** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 Taped interviews with full transcripts, some online. Recorded two to four years later; ten voices make a small sample. - **Rapid City Flood Survivors, Recorded Weeks After the 1972 Disaster** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 About 250 people interviewed the following month. Only 40 items are online, where interviewees or relatives later signed releases. - **Look Up the Dust Bowl Tree Rows Planted on a Particular Farm** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 Searchable 1935–42 maps, planting records and landowner agreements. Farmers appear only through Forest Service forms; southern states are thinly covered. - **The Official Records of Galveston Raising Its Ground After the 1900 Hurricane** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 The raising board secretary's minutes, logbooks and 538 scrapbook pages. The inventory is partial and lists no household diaries. - **French Officials Testify Before Parliament on the 2003 Heat Wave** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-22 Testimony from police, ministers, Paris's mayor and researchers. Long and in French; bereaved families don't appear among listed witnesses. ### Favorite Featured Stories - [What $14.65 Buys]() — By [Seth D. Carrington]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: Companion Features Forty years after a killing flood changed how Tulsa handles stormwater, every household pays $14.65 a month for detention basins, channel maintenance, development review, and a running list of properties that keep flooding. Seventy percent of the money goes to upkeep. The city says no compliant building has flooded. It also admits it hasn't faced a storm like the one that started all this. Both things are true, and they belong together. - [Eight Hours in May]() — By [Seth D. Carrington]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: Companion Features On Memorial Day weekend 1984, Tulsa's modest little creeks killed fourteen people in eight hours, and the Arkansas River never reached flood stage. The city had flooded before and patched things up before. This time a decade of neighborhood organizing and technical planning was waiting for an opening big enough to force real reform, and the storm handed it over. None of what followed was inevitable. - [What a Goat Was Worth]() — By [Seth D. Carrington]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: Household Story In 1934, federal officials came onto the Navajo Reservation to fix a real problem: overgrazing had stripped the ground cover and the soil was washing into the rivers. They bought goats for about a dollar apiece, killed thousands on the spot, and left carcasses to rot while the women who owned the animals stood and watched. Decades later, the Navajo Nation's own drought plan agreed the overgrazing was real. The same document calls the government's program a "nightmare." Both statements are on the same page, and what happened between them still shapes who will accept help today. - [Why Florida Kept Lighting Fires]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-09 · Format: Two Alternatives After Yellowstone 1988, the federal government pulled back from ecological fire management. Florida went the other direction and kept going, even through fire crises of its own. The state now burns over two million acres a year under a legal and institutional system built across decades. Western states are adopting pieces of it. Whether the pieces work without the whole is still an open question. ## Other sections in Issue 55 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Future Tense]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()