--- title: "Climate Past" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/56/archive" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/56/archive" issue: 56 section: "archive" description: "Learning from history's climate interventions, migrations, and transformation attempts" authors: ["Seth D. Carrington","Maya Jiménez"] published: 2026-11-02 updated: 2026-10-30 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 56 — Climate Past Learning from history's climate interventions, migrations, and transformation attempts ### Main Feature - [Soldiers Grove Asked for a Study and Got a New Downtown]() — By [Seth D. Carrington]() · Published 2026-10-30 · Format: Main Feature In the 1970s, the Army Corps of Engineers offered Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, a levee that would cost more than three times what it protected, with upkeep that would eat most of the village's taxes. So a businesswoman on the low ground passed around a petition asking for a study of moving downtown up the hill. Thirty of 39 floodplain merchants signed. ### Short History - [One Last Crop in Vermont, 1816]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-10-30 By spring 1816, the Smiths had lost two harvests on a rented farm in Norwich, Vermont, and typhoid had left them in debt. That March, the town served them a legal notice to leave. ### Imagined Interview - [A Tailgate Interview With the Man Bulldozing His Father's Windbreak]() — Published 2026-10-30 The cottonwoods along the creek have gone yellow, but on this October afternoon in 1975 the trees everyone in this corner of central Nebraska is talking about are the ones lying on their sides. Merle Hackberry has spent the week on a rented bulldozer, pushing over a mile of windbreak his father planted in the spring of 1936. It was twelve rows of red cedar, green ash, elm and a few hackberries. (Merle insists the hackberries are no relation.) ### Two Household Stories - [Caroline Henderson Kept Deciding to Stay Through the Dust Bowl]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-10-30 · Format: Two Household Stories In June 1935, on her Oklahoma Panhandle farm, Caroline Henderson pressed oiled cloths into her window frames, rubbed vaseline inside her nose before sweeping, and wrote: "We may have to leave." Then she listed six reasons they hadn't. Two were about loving the place. The rest were about what made leaving hard, starting with a farm no one would buy or rent. The following March, after a winter of kerosene-sprayed sheets, she asked in print whether staying had become "recklessness and inertia." - [On the Hottest Nights of the 1930s, New York Slept Outside Together]() — By [Maya Jiménez]() · Published 2026-10-30 · Format: Two Household Stories By sundown on July 9, 1936, New York's hottest recorded day, tenement families had already claimed Central Park's lawns. Others carried beds into Lower East Side streets or slept on Coney Island sand, rooftops, and fire escapes. They had been doing it for summers. Mayor La Guardia's order the next day told police to let them sleep. In 2024, no regular city cooling center stayed open past 11 p.m. ### Further Reading - **Oakwood Beach, a Decade After Sandy** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 Marsh grass, illegal dumping and split ownership now surround the Staten Island households who stayed. - **Houston Pays to Mow 1,200 Buyout Lots** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 The flood district spends $450,000 yearly on mowing and still draws nuisance violations. - **Columbia's Flood Lots, From Mowing to Gardens** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 Mowed every two weeks since 2018, lots emptied by the 2015 flood are becoming gardens. - **Grand Forks Memorializes a Vanished Neighborhood** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 Plaques naming former neighbors and a paved street map mark where Lincoln Drive stood. - **In Barre, a Buyout Lot Grows Tea** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 Neighbors found out about the farm on the city-owned lot only when tarps appeared. - **Clarksville's Park Plan Meets a Holdout** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-30 One owner says the buyout offer won't cover moving, and the park needs his land. ### Favorite Featured Stories - [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. - [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. - [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. - [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. ## Other sections in Issue 56 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Future Tense]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()