Jillian Donadio

In reading the reviews for “Rising,” I expected Rush’s writing to be overly poetic and draw metaphors to nature which come across as cheesy and forced. I was pleasantly surprised by the first part of this work to subvert these tropes. Rush presents a style of writing that is accessible yet layered. The reader can feel her presence, which lends to a consistent grounded tone. The figurative language she inserts is not flowery or cringe-inducing; rather, the metaphors and descriptive details amplify her environmental and scientific explanations. I tend to regard scientific books as boring and challenging to create an immersive narrative. Rush achieved a new genre with “Rising,” presenting a narrative that is immediate and intriguing.

The most obvious element Rush employs is by sharing her personal story in relation to each place she addresses. She accomplishes this in an almost reflective way; she sets a specific scene in a place, then offers her memories and personal feelings surrounding it. In the first chapter, she discusses the morphing shoreline and dying tupelos at Jacob’s Point, Rhode Island. As a result of warming temperatures, the ice sheets have melted and the sea level has risen. Rush precedes this description by providing a soliloquy as she rides her bike through the town, seventy-five miles North of her hometown:

“The trees’ bare limbs twine and reach, a testimony to the energy once spent searching for light. I picture the shade they used to cast and the bank swallows awash in that balm, diving like synchronized swimmers, one after another, from the lowest branches.”

This passage demonstrates the life that used to inhabit the trees. Her descriptions include active verbs such as “twine and reach,” “cast”, “swallows,” and “diving.” The trees are personified as active beings, in stark contrast to the scene she witnesses now of their “ghostly silhouettes.” Her recollection of trees in New England full of life parallels her feelings about the region. She mentions that returning to the region does not feel like a homecoming, because “the New England of my childhood is not the New England I encounter now.”  This sentiment shows that the physicality of a place strongly shapes people’s emotional relationship to it.

Rush’s personal relativity to the environmental woes she addresses influenced me as a reader. Although I am concerned about climate change and the impacts it has on the world at large, I failed to see the ways in which it affects me personally. I assume that because the environmental eventualities will not occur in my lifetime, then they will not gravely affect my life. Part 1 of Rising helped me realize there is far more at stake for me than my own life: there are the lives of my children and descendants. Now, I view it as an immediate problem that requires swift action. By recounting her past, present, and future, she paints a picture of a world that humans are knowingly destroying, and consequently are only harming themselves and their future families. Examining sea level rise through a human lens supports the assertion that global warming is not a theoretical problem to be solved by academics; it is a human problem for all to contribute to solving, for their own sake and the sake of the planet.

In addition to her own personalization with the environmental calamities, Rush uses characterization of those around her to highlight the damage of human actions. In “The Marsh at the End of the World” in Maine, she recounts field work with fellow scientists, all of whom have individual quirks. Rush characterizes them by using humorous dialogue and detailing her interactions with them. The Bates geology professor Beverly Johnson is quoted as saying “welcome to our rotten marsh.”  When the spectrometer to the methane malfunctions, Beverly jokes “Science…winging it every day.”  In response to the land “sucking” at their boots when sampling an area for methane emissions, another researcher Dana quips “An alternative name for my thesis might be ‘Measuring Marsh Farts.”  

I sometimes struggle to understand scientific explanations of climate change, but “Rising” kept me engaged through the characterization and humorous scenes. I was able to follow their scientific dialogue because I felt connected with them as real people, rather than a textbook dryly reciting facts to me. Rush brought a realness to her counterparts because of the levity they brought to a morose topic. As she mentions earlier in the chapter:

“ “You have to laugh to keep from crying,” a geologist in the Everglades once told me.”

Another area in the text where I noticed Rush commenting on people’s character was in the scene at the University of Miami conference. As the head of the geology department, Hal, is speaking about the entrapment of greenhouse gases, Rush inserts observations of her surroundings. Such observations highlight the irony of his words against the attendees’ actions:

“A woman wearing a sequined teal top opens her Five Star notebook and starts writing things down…Hal’s three sons are perched in the next row back…The one with the ponytail brought a water bottle; the other two sip Starbucks.”

Rush points out these seemingly mundane actions to further her larger theme in “Rising.” Just as humans have caused the elevated amounts of greenhouse gases resulting in global warming and climate change, they are also charged with reversing these causations. The scene at the conference reiterates that even those of us who are aware of the science around global warming and care about saving the planet engage in activities that are harming to the planet. We may not even be aware of the impact everyday routines may have, such as the plastic in the sequins of the top or the water bottle we buy at the convenience store. By pointing out these automatic responses from humans, Rush is imploring for heightened awareness and individual action to combat the menacing environmental trends.