Wow, Oregon.
Oregon has a serious history.
Do you know that free Black people
weren't allowed to be in Oregon until the late 1920s?
So you know.
I have so many people to thank.
I want to thank Hannah and Brian and Lisa, and Sarah
squared, and Gregg, and Tyler, and my wonderful docents who
drove me and took me to Rosa's Mexican yesterday
for the most delicious bowl of soup, which I really needed
because I have a bit of a cold.
And all the faculty and students who welcomed me today,
and Mathias for my dreams.
And Aisha and everyone at the Poetry Center, and, of course,
all of you.
Thank you for taking the time to come and think
about the world with me.
In the 2005 book, Living With The Changing California Coast,
authors Gary Griggs, and Kiki Patsch,
and Lauret Savoy inform us that 80% of California's 35 million
people now live within 30 miles of the shoreline.
And this number continues to increase.
They go on to tell us that in 20 years since the first edition
of the book, the state's population had grown 40%,
from 25 million to 35 million.
And many of these people have moved to coastal communities.
This population growth figure is even 10% faster
than the remarkable interpretation of data
with which I am familiar, and that data
suggests that the population of California
doubles every 50 years.
The most recent statistics recorded in 2014
show that the population of the state is 38.8 million people.
To put this in perspective, Canada,
the geographically enormous nation to our North,
boasted a population of 35 million people
in that same year.
The difference between the population of California
and the population of Canada is equal to the population
of Orange County.
Just one of California's many shore-loving regions.
Living with the change in California coast
also told me that for the bulk of the 20th century,
sea-levels rose by about 1/10 of an inch per year
or about an inch a decade.
That's about 2.5 milimeters, if you're sciency
in your way of thinking of things.
A look at climate.nasa.gov's climate/sea levels page
tells me that from May of 1993 when sea levels were
at 4.9 millimeters, their satellite sea level
observations have measured an increase
of over 80 millimeters.
The sea-level was measured in April of 2016
at 87.1 millimeters.
This equates to a sea-level rise of about 3.5 inches
in 23 years, which is a bit faster
than the rate of sea-level rise in our pre-industrial past.
But which, as you may know, is slow in comparison
to the rates of sea-level rise predicted
as melting ice caps and decreased glaciation
coupled with the expansion of warming sea waters
increases the rate of sea-level rise.
According to the book's authors--
This was like the cozy little book
I read the other night before I went to sleep--
most scientists recognize that rates of sea-level rise
are increasing.
And that acceleration beyond present rates is likely.
We are still uncertain, however, whether sea levels will
rise another nine inches or so as experienced
during the last century or three feet or more as
has been predicted by some.
Either way, the increase will mean
the inundation of low-lying coastal land
and the erosion of the shoreline processes, which
we should begin to anticipate and plan for.
I'm going to add that we are seeing what might look like--
what this all might look like in America and around the world
already.
The New York Times reported that this year in January,
the Department of Housing and Urban Development
announced grants totaling $1 billion in 13 states
to help communities adapt to climate change
by building stronger levees, dams, and drainage systems.
One of these grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, which
is located at the Southern end of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana,
is something new.
It is the first allocation of federal tax dollars
to move an entire community struggling
with the impacts of climate change.
The homes on Isle de Jean Charles
have been inundated by the effects of rising sea levels.
Off of an atoll called Kiribati, near New Zealand,
a man named Ioane Teitiota applied
to become the world's first official climate change
refugee in September of 2015.
But the courts of New Zealand denied his claim,
and sent him back to the island that at its highest point
is only 3 meters above sea-level.
A search of news articles about the threat of rising sea-levels
in places like Micronesia suggests a bleak future
for Mr.--
people like Mr Teitiota.
Scientists are telling Micronesians,
there will probably be three more feet
of sea level rise in less than 90 years,
with 6 and 1/2 more feet as an estimated upper bound,
a distinct possibility.
"Even a small rise of one meter,"
says this article I was reading, "would already
have a devastating effect."
This is from Masao Nakayama, the permanent representative
of the Federated States of Micronesia.
If it gets to a meter or higher, the islands
would get uninhabitable.
A rising water table is already turning salty
in the center of islands, killing
staple food crops like taro and many other kinds of plants.
Sea-level rise is the most scary.
You cannot put sea walls on all the islands, about 600 of them.
Five hundred are small islands, like atoll islands,
says Nakayama.
Why am I reading to you all this science at news
at what is supposed to be a poetry reading?
On Tuesday, my daughter, Callie, who is in many ways
the star of both of my forthcoming books,
told her grandparents that she wanted them to call her,
California.
She was born in California.
She told them, and her name is contained
within the state's name.
In fact, by the way, she's named after my grandmother
and my grandmother's grandmother,
but California, she wanted to be.
Her insistence made me aware of the fact that even though we
live in Colorado, my daughter's imagination center is
in many ways still set in the state of her birth
and her earliest years.
This is the same state where both her mother and father
lived for nearly 30 years of our own lives,
both separately and together.
And one about which we likely talk and think
about more frequently than we are able to recognize.
What I am saying is that in our household,
California dominates our imagination.
When I think of landscape in which to set a poem,
I usually think of California generally.
And more specifically, I think of some area within 30 miles
of the California coast.