Surviving as an 'infrastructure species'
Amid the destruction of Helene, neighbors are helping neighbors. Now we need to scale up our sense of community.
📖 A QUICK REMINDER: The first Southlands book club is next week, October 15, at 6:30 CT. We’ll be discussing Chris Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots, which I’ve found myself thinking about again and again in the weeks since reading it. Paid subscribers can sign up here!
A few days after Helene ripped through the South—first as a hurricane, then, in the mountains, as a tropical storm—a TikToker went viral with a video claiming that one-third of the Appalachian Trail had been destroyed. Outside’s hiking columnist called up locals and debunked that claim. Sure, one A.T. expert told him, there were “four miles of flood devastation like I’ve never seen before”—but on the other 700 miles, while trees are down and hiking is difficult, remain intact.1
The same can’t be said for the most-visited national park site in the country: the Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic road that winds through Appalachia. Many sections are blocked or ruined. The road will be closed indefinitely.
Yes, duh, you might be saying: Of course a dirt trail will fare better than a highway. Still, consider what that means for us humans. As scholar Jedidiah Purdy has pointed out, we are an “infrastructure species”: There are four thousand tons of infrastructural stuff for every human being, so much stuff that, as Purdy puts it, “there is scarcely any such thing as a human being apart from a shared and artificial world.” Ecosystems are being tarnished and shrunk by climate change, but the stuff we’ve built is turning out to be even more brittle.
Helene ripped a 500-mile-long zone of destruction across the Southeast. Near Asheville, nearly four feet of rain fell in three days—triple or more the typical September rainfall. With at least 200 people dead, this is the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland since Katrina, one of the deadliest disasters of any kind in decades. In a flash, a whole region was flipped back to frontier-era technologies: No clean water, no electricity, no cell service. It will be weeks before we fully grasp the extent of the carnage. For now, though, I can’t shake the images of shattered roadways. In many places, mules are the best way to deliver emergency supplies.
Helene was the eighth hurricane in eight years to hit the U.S. with windspeeds that rank as “Category 4” or above—a new record. (That’s more Cat 4 and Cat 5 hurricanes than in the 57 years prior.) Now we’ve got Milton stalking toward Florida. Scarily, the secretary of Homeland Security has already admitted that FEMA may lack sufficient funds to respond.
This storm was not entirely unprecedented. Even within the lifetime of many locals, the remnants of tropical cyclones, driven up the slopes of Appalachia, have produced devastating torrents of rain. In 1969, Hurricane Camille delivered 27 inches of rain in one county in Virginia; three years later, Agnes brought 19 inches into the Pennsylvania highlands.
Asheville itself once received nearly 30 inches of rain—though long enough ago that no one is around to tell the stories. The “Great Flood of 1916” is, despite its nominal greatness, uncatalogued by Wikipedia. I became curious about the recovery process, and googled around. No one had much to say about what happened after the destruction. These few sentences, from Our State, are the most detailed I’ve found:
Eventually, the railway was reconstructed. Many who lost their homes simply started over again. Farmers replanted crops, and industries rebuilt.
I guess that’s the American way.
Much has been made of the notion that Asheville was a “climate haven”—where Americans fleeing the storm-battered coasts and fire-ravaged Western mountains choose to settle. The glaringly obvious takeaway of Helene is that there is no refuge.2
In retrospect, perhaps we should have known this; over the past decade, the deadliest component of tropical cyclones has been not storm surge, but flooding from rainfall—which, as we’ve now learned, is all the more devastating in the narrow confines of mountainous terrain. It’s always been the case that Earth has always been a precarious place to make a life. It’s just that it’s growing even more precarious now.
Let’s assume—just for the sake of argument—that this time, unlike the last great flood, we decide to try something new. What might that even be?
Down here in the lowlands of New Orleans, we at least have a game plan—levees and pumps and floodwalls that move and constrain the water. Is it even possible to floodproof roadways? I googled around, and the solutions seem scarce.3 (When it comes to building codes, at least, there are obvious improvements—changes that North Carolina’s legislators have repeatedly declined to make, as that would displease the lobbyists for the men who build new homes.)
I know this region well; I visited twice a year during my MFA years. It’s closer to family than Louisiana, and I’ve contemplated moving north myself. I last visited two years ago, just for a few days.
Liz and I found a cabin to rent just out of town, perched atop a small mountain. The road was too steep for our car, so we had to carry our luggage the last few dozen feet up. The place was entirely the grid, equipped with a solar-charged battery and a composting toilet. It was, in short, a deeply American place—unplugged from our species’ embracing infrastructure, the myth of the mountain frontier come alive.
When Purdy called us an infrastructure species, he was talking not just about roads and utility lines. He categorizes the planet itself—its air and soil and water—as infrastructure that we both shape and depend on. One key part of the task before us is finding ways to be better stewards of that stuff—perhaps most of all reducing our emissions so we can keep the storms from growing worse. But I want to talk Purdy’s third category of infrastructure, the abstract stuff, “those immaterial systems of interconnection and cooperation” like laws and markets that, as much as a highway, serve as connectors. Community, and all the tools that shape it, are part of the skin we’ve built to hold together our lives.
One of the upshots of a disaster like Helene is the reminder it offers that most people are good. Most people care about their community. So, amid the destruction of Helene, there have been beautiful moments: pots of food cooked up to serve to neighbors; sheets of paper duct-taped outside of churches to offer guidance on which roads remain passable and what grocery stores still have supplies. As Rebecca Solnit has put it, even a terrible disaster “is sometimes a back door into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be.” America likes to think of itself as a nation of rugged individualists, shaped by the crucible that was the frontier. But the disasters remind us that none of us are alone.
But when I scan beyond the. mountains, it no longer looks like paradise: Marjorie Taylor Green rants cryptically about how “they” control the weather. There are rumors about unburied bodies and FEMA stealing money and a steady stream of fake AI disaster images. It seems almost instinctual to help the community that surrounds us. But when it comes to the wider community, the people you don’t live next to, how you act seems to depend on the stories you tell yourself about the world: Is it full of enemies, leaving you out for yourself? Or is it full of neighbors who will help you get by?
This newsletter is a search for the human place in a more-than-human world. Again, one lesson from Helene is that we humans are ensnared within—that we depend upon—a world of concrete and cables that is inherently fragile. That means we will always depend on not just our neighbors. The question of our era—the question of our species, maybe—is whether we can scale up paradise and expand our sense of neighborliness. Whether we can realize that it’s not just the folks down the road that need help, but everyone, everywhere.
When Liz and I visited that off-the-grid cabin, we were on our way to visit family for Christmas. We wanted—for the first time since our wedding, a month earlier—some time alone to ourselves. But once we arrived the weather turned frigid; the mountain roads, we knew, would soon be covered in ice. Our decision was easy: We cut our stay short and drove out of the mountains. Solitude is nice, but it can only get you so far.
While the A.T. is officially open, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which manages much of the land around that trail, has asked that hikers stay off the southernmost 865 miles during the recovery process.
Indeed, it’s a response so glaringly obvious that last week Politico published a newsletter with the title “Nowhere is safe from climate disaster”—that was sponsored by Chevron. If you want to dig into that incongruity, head over to Heated.
I didn’t want to extend an already long essay, but in case you want a summary: Despite the headline that WIRED chose to run for the one article I found addressing this topic—“Here’s how to flood-proof [roads] for next time,” it reads in part—none of the solutions included sound viable. One of the most promising answers is “pervious concrete,” which absorbs more water than the concrete typically used. Except that, oh yeah, it’s also weaker and therefore is not a good fit for major roads. That doesn’t get us very far.
Terrific post, Boyce. I love the Rebecca Solnit quote you included. After Hurricane Ida hit, I fell in love all over again with the people of New Orleans, bearing witness and participating in the mutual aid networks that seemed to form overnight.