The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Rethinking Flood Management: Insights from Tim Palmer on Climate Change, Conservation, and Community Resilience
Have you ever wondered how the historical floods of the past can shape our future defenses against natural disasters? In this latest episode, I chat with Tim Palmer, an award-winning author and photographer. Tim shares his profound insights on rivers, conservation, and the urgent need to rethink our approach to flood management.
Tim recounts his formative years growing up in Pennsylvania and the life-changing experience of surviving the Hurricane Agnes flood of 1972. He discusses his latest book, Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis, and why America needs to pay attention to the escalating dangers posed by climate change.
We tackle the tough questions about the economic and logistical challenges of managing flood-prone areas and what are the real costs of repeatedly repairing flood damage versus investing in levee upgrades or relocating communities. Tim shares eye-opening statistics on federal spending inefficiencies and explores the fairness of using taxpayer dollars to rebuild in high-risk areas. With examples like Sacramento's costly levee projects, we debate the complexities of flood protection funding and the broader implications of continued development in vulnerable zones.
Our conversation also highlights the overlooked plight of climate refugees, using compelling stories from events like the Thomas Fire in Ojai, California, to stress the urgent need for streamlined federal disaster relief. Drawing inspiration from pioneers like Ian McHarg and insights from experts such as Orrin H. Pilkey, Tim emphasizes the necessity of forward-thinking solutions to manage climate-induced displacements. Tim's extraordinary work in floodplain management and his passion for storytelling bring a rich, informative layer to our discussion, making this episode a must-listen for anyone concerned about the future of our environment and communities.
Tim Palmer
Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution To Our Urgent Flooding Crisis, Tim Palmer
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to episode 263.
Speaker 1:Tim Palmer is the award-winning author of 31 books on rivers, conservation and the environment. He is also an accomplished photographer, with one of the most complete collections of photos of rivers in the United States. For over 40 years, tim's writing and photography work have braided together his love of rivers and nature with his drive for creative expression and his deep commitment to conservation. In his latest book, seek Higher Ground the Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis, tim explores the legacy of flooding in America, taking a fresh look at the emerging climatic, economic and ecological realities of our rivers and communities. Global warming is forecast to sharply intensify flooding and this book urges that we reduce future damage in the most effective, efficient and equitable ways possible. Hi, tim, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Speaker 2:Well, it's wonderful to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Let's begin with learning about you. What led you to your passion for writing and photography and your interest in the flooding crisis in the United States?
Speaker 2:Well, if you don't mind me going way back when I was a kid, I grew up in the Appalachian foothills of Pennsylvania and my grandfather lived right next door and we both had gardens and when it was dry in the summertime we would irrigate the gardens with buckets of water we dipped out of a spring on our property and so at a really early age I became fascinated by this flow of water and we'd take buckets out, like 10 or 20 of them. Spring was still there, kept refilling, and then I noticed that when it overflowed it trickled down into a little stream, and as I got older I became curious where that water went and began to follow the stream down the current, eventually the whole way to the Ohio River, and later my family would go to a place called Ohio Pile, pennsylvania, which became the Yakageni River flows through there. It became one of the most popular whitewater rivers in the nation, but at that time it was a sleepy little town and I became very connected to that river, and one night in particular I was like a 12-year-old. I was sitting on the rock there, quiet Appalachian evening and water rushing by, and I realized that this place was perfect, and as I thought about it. I knew why it was perfect because it was natural. It was a natural free-flowing river. So I became fascinated with rivers and passionate about them at a very early age.
Speaker 2:And that one thing led to another. I became a landscape architect, I became a land-use planner and I was confronted with flooding issues, which, of course, are rivers at their highest, most violent and dynamic form. And I was actually a flood victim in what at the time 1972, was the most damaging flood in American history, the Hurricane Agnes flood, which affected eight states. But I happened to live at ground zero of the storm and watched the water rise and rise, and rise, and the place where my wife and I were living was very narrowly flooded, but not quite. Other neighbors suffered deeply. I helped them for some days until I could get out again and return to my job as county planner, and there my duty was not only to help in the recovery from this catastrophe but to try to figure out how to avoid having those damages occur again. And that led me to all of the issues that are addressed in this book that I have written 50 years later.
Speaker 1:And at the time of Hurricane Agnes, didn't you have twin nephews staying with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my twin nephews, 12 years old, had been visiting for a week when the storm came, and so we were all stuck there together. We actually lived on the other side of Pine Creek, which is a river-sized stream. From the road, we would canoe back and forth, but once the flood came up, you couldn't canoe, and so we were stuck there for the duration of the flood, and so it was a very memorable, intense, you know, time for all of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, my goodness. I can only imagine how scary that must have been. Now in Seek Higher Ground, you give a history of flooding in the USA. What can climate scientists and engineers tell us about our future by studying the past in relation to flooding?
Speaker 2:Well, let me start just with the broader issue of history and how we understand floods. Through that I recapped the history of flooding in America. Of course, that would take volumes in itself, but I focused on floods and events and the aftermath of those that were the most significant in American consciousness about flooding, in the policy that was adopted, in laws that were passed and, in general, our societal response to floods. I highlighted floods that were the most important in that regard, and it became very clear to me that we don't even have to consider the changing climate, which is central to your question. Even before we knew anything about that, it was evident to me that we had consistently underestimated flooding in America and we were constantly surprised by how much greater the floods were than anything anyone could ever have imagined. Going back to 1889 in California you California which is the worst flood they've ever had I mean, it was massive flooding all over the state. So I realized that our historical context and perspective were very skewed here and had not considered the real power of floods. Now, when you add to that the increasing flood dangers that climate change and global warming bring to us, the problem becomes monumental in scope and really ominous in its foreshadowing of the future here and so, after 50 years, after the Agnes flood, which was so memorable and impressive to me, I realized that you know, it's going to get a whole lot worse.
Speaker 2:The age of denial about doing something different regarding floods and our response to them is over. Denial is not going to work anymore. The floods are going to become much greater than they were in the past, even though we underestimated what those were, and we simply have to chart a different and better path toward approaching these hazards and these calamities that will only increase in the future. So climate science now brings to us new projections on the intensity of storms, on the frequency of them, on the area covered by them. They'll be much more widespread, much more intense, much more frequent, and so we've got to add that factor to what we already know about flood hazards, which is considerable.
Speaker 2:For example, a 100-year flood has the likelihood of reoccurring in any year of 1%, or you might kind of expect one of these floods every 100 years. So that has been a design standard, as they say, for establishing zoning, for establishing insurance protocols and so forth. But it turns out what we thought were 100-year floods are occurring far more frequently than that, and even 1,000-year floods, which we would certainly never expect in a lifetime, are occurring repeatedly now. Places like Ellicott City, maryland, had two 1,000-year floods in a two-year period of time, so the climate science is now illuminating a future which is far more vexed with flooding issues than the past has been, and so that, again, is what fired me up about this issue and made me want to look deeper and deeper into our response to floods and the shortcomings of that, and to inquire about what we need to do differently in the future.
Speaker 1:And that segues perfectly into my next question, because in Chapter 5, titled Broken Barriers, you describe the frustration of one engineer regarding building levies. Quote. It's almost impossible to generate the local funds to raise that levy if you don't facilitate some sort of growth behind the levy. You need the economic activity to pay for the project, end quote. Herein lies the issue to pay for levies or pay to relocate communities. I'd love your thoughts on this, tim.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wonderful, mandy. That is a perfect illustration, I think, of so many of us taking an economic view of flooding that is far too narrow in scope. Now, I can understand that guy. I get it totally, and as a county planner I heard that all the time. And sure enough, their funds to do things like reinforce the levy or even improve the levy by moving it further back from the river depend on their tax revenues. So they look at what the tax revenue and the more valuable the real estate to hire the revenue and if they sold lots and built houses, they get more tax income.
Speaker 2:Typically, that view ignores the costs of flooding because those come later, they're abstract, it's not today, it's not this month, maybe it's not in the next 10 years or even longer. But they come, the floods come. The costs come home to roost and then we have just massive expenses, not only in flood damages but damaged infrastructure, water systems, roads need to be repaired, impaired, you know emergency services are stressed, people are put in danger. You know of their lives even. You know the water is polluted afterwards, the water supply issues are vexed and so none of these costs get counted. When the local officials say, oh, we need tax income to pay for this.
Speaker 1:So we need to take a much more inclusive view of the economics of flooding, and I talk about that in some depth in my book, as well and Tim, one of my takeaways from the book was that our tax dollars will either pay for people in these flooding areas to relocate or we will build up levees or just keep rebuilding their homes every time they flood. To put my head around this and to get a grasp of how people think, I looked at someone living in a dinky old beach house in Florida on the beach. It's been in the family for years. It gets flooded every time a hurricane comes, but they always rebuild and go back. So why? I guess it's just because they love where they live. They're right on the beach in a beautiful state, and that's where they want to be. However, it's our tax dollars paying for their rebuild every time their home floods. As you were once a city planner, tim, I would love your thoughts on this.
Speaker 2:Okay, so again a very complex issue. Let me just mention one number here at the outset. Roughly 90% of our flood-prone land is not heavily developed, so it's not cities. You know where lots of people live and they're invested and all that. They're lightly developed farmlands and rural areas that may be settled, but very sparsely. So if we don't protect that area from being developed, the problem is going to get way, way worse.
Speaker 1:Theoretically, nine times worse than it already is, which is horrendous.
Speaker 2:Worse yeah, theoretically nine times worse than it already is, which is horrendous. So, number one, we should protect that open space from being developed. And we don't even encounter these issues of whole towns that are in a flood zone. What are you going to do about that? So for the other areas, we do.
Speaker 2:Many of those towns and cities have levies and they will upgrade them to modern standards at tremendous cost. Some of them will, actually, most of them won't. You know, the condition of our levies is pathetic nationwide. I go into that with details. But where people can afford, like Sacramento, for example 1986, I was living there at the time the levy was extremely inadequate. It almost failed. Half a million people almost got fled. Nobody even knew about it at the time. The levy almost failed. The Sacramento urban area has since spent nearly $4 billion upgrading their levy. Not many places can afford to do that.
Speaker 2:So all of this points to the option of relocating to get simply away from the problem. Our lives are at risk, our economies are crippled, public services are wiped out. Massive suffering and hardship result every time these places get flooded and the simplest, most effective solution much of the time is just move. Now, you're right. A lot of people don't want to move. No one wants to make them move. So let's not even talk about that. Let's talk about those people who do want to move. There are hundreds of thousands of those. Fema the Federal Emergency Management Agency annually gets something like seven times the applications to help people move, as they can fund A lot of people want to move, of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah, some like the view they're willing to take the hit. But the guys and women who manage our floodplains nationwide, what they keep telling me is you know, people think they don't want to move. Then they get flooded again and they start thinking about it. Then they get flooded again and they look at the numbers. Then they get flooded again and they've had it. They want to get out of there.
Speaker 2:That's happening more and more because the floods are becoming more and more frequent. Now here's two more numbers I just got to give you, not to geek out on numbers here, but in this issue of, do we as taxpayers help people to move and get away from the problem totally and be done with it, or do we help them stay to be flooded again? So get this. The Natural Resources Defense Council cranked the numbers with thousands and thousands of data points and they found that for every $1.70 that the federal government spends helping people move and get away from the problem and we do have programs that do that for every $1.70 we help people move, we taxpayers spend $100 helping them stay.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's a big number and a big difference.
Speaker 2:Now stay if you want. But should taxpayers be paying you for that when you have the option of how we spend the money and what really makes sense and what really pencils out economically in the long term? The ratio not that we shouldn't be helping people, maybe in both cases, you know, we can help people flood proof even though they're going to get flooded again, you know but let's say at least it should be 50-50, you know, and not like 1.7 to 100. So that's how I address this question of people want to stay. Fine, let them stay.
Speaker 2:Personally, I don't want to pay for that. I'm very willing to pay taxpayer money to help them move, but I'm not really personally willing to help them stay when I know they're only going to be flooded again. We'll have to pay again. The most costly element of the federal flood insurance program, which is heavily subsidized, is what FEMA calls repetitive flood damage. Get this 3% of the policies are repetitive flooding. They consume 30% of the outlay for flood damage. So people who stay get flooded over and over and over again, are consuming so much of the taxpayer subsidy needed to support this program and that's just not right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I also think another reason to read your book is because I was not aware of all the work that FEMA did in relocating people.
Speaker 2:There is a bright side to this. There are success stories and I really emphasize those in the book. Take, for example, nashville, tennessee, a very blue city in a very red state. You know where normally you would not get to first base talking about land use regulation or government subsidies to help people, you know, find a better place to live. Nashville has a model program of number one not allowing new development in high hazard flood zones. It's almost impossible to get a permit to build a new place when they know they're going to get flooded. Number two helping people relocate.
Speaker 2:400 homes over the last 20 years have been relocated to higher ground with great assistance from this metro area, which uses federal money for the most part, but also local money through a levy on their water bills, but also local money through a levy on their water bills. So Nashville great success story in helping they have 300 homes to go before. All of those homes that are seriously in jeopardy get relocated, but they're on the path of getting there. You know they're actually doing a great job. Knoxville, tennessee, similar thing.
Speaker 2:Tulsa, oklahoma, great program for helping people. Milwaukee, wisconsin. They've relocated something like half their vulnerable homes. So there are terrific success stories in doing this, but again I go back to that ratio, 1.7 to 100, the federal emphasis is still on figuring out ways to get people to stay and that really there's a direct line from that decision to the lobbying power of the building industries, real estate industry, the banking industry, the home builders, the National Chamber of Commerce have all been extremely active in lobbying against controls on new development and in subsidizing new development. On the flood, and you know why not subsidize development that's not going to be flooded again. It's just as easy to do that and you have a future that everyone would be grateful for instead of, you know, attaching blame for the next flood on the people who inappropriately developed where they knew they were going to be flooded.
Speaker 1:Okay, now this is probably a crazy question for you, but when you say they relocate their houses, they move the houses, are you saying they physically move the houses that are in danger of being flooded?
Speaker 2:Well, sometimes, more often, it's not economic to do that. Usually, after a flood, the homes are almost worthless, even though the Federal Flood Insurance Program will pay you or FEMA and other programs will pay you to relocate. You get paid the pre-flood value of your home, even though it's maybe worthless after the flood. So after the flood hits, most of these homes are erased and people build new ones or just move to another home on safer ground. One of the key issues here is that, even though they get paid the pre-flood value of their home, which is inflated compared to what the real market is, it's not enough to get replacement housing. So that is a big issue. People need even more help than they're getting. Here's another great number Only 7% of America is floodplain. 93% is not flooded. So there are other places to go other than that 7%, but there are other complications in getting there.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's hope in building more eco-friendly developments and moving these people to higher ground?
Speaker 2:You know that's a really interesting question, mandy, because I, you know, as a former landscape architect and planner, I'm kind of big on new community development. You know where you could start from scratch and not have the problems we have of having to drive everywhere and all these inefficiencies and your development in places where you shouldn't have it, like steep slopes and wetlands and floodplains. You can solve a lot of those problems through good design and there are new towns that do that, like Columbia, maryland. Lots of people there, new community, but typically after a flood we're talking about smaller numbers of people and we're talking about, unfortunately, unconscionable delays in getting the federal money to help people move. So even doing the minimum, like finding a house somewhere for this poor flood victim, is really a challenging job. So while, yes, in theory and in a perfect world we would be taking this flooded community and moving it into a very beautifully integrated, ecologically stable new option, usually we're just looking for a place that's high and dry that will suit their needs and their economy.
Speaker 1:Tim, I live in Ojai, california, and when the Thomas fire was on what was it four or five years ago? We had to evacuate, like many of our neighbors. We were lucky we did not lose our home. I have friends who did lose their homes and all these years later, and they are still waiting for financial support through organizations such as FEMA, and meanwhile they're living in a Winnebago on their land, hoping that one day they'll be able to rebuild. And with as many climate-related disasters we've had over the last few decades, I'm guessing this is going to be kind of the norm. I hope not, but I think it will be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I asked veteran managers, like say Roger Lindsay from Nashville, what is the single most important improvement that could be made to facilitate doing this correctly? And he says streamlining the federal processes for getting the money. It takes years and it gets bounced from the state to the feds and back again three times. If only we could do that, we'd be way ahead.
Speaker 1:Well, let's hope that happens sooner rather than later. Now, moving on to your chapter titled A New Kind of Planning, can you walk us through the work of Ian McCarg? The way you wrote about him he sounded like a real character.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he totally was. Yeah, I had a blast writing about Ian McHarg. He was head of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania for many years. He was a Scotsman, he had this incendiary brogue and you know, while others advocating for floodplain management were very conservative and guarded, you know, in their policy sort of comments and all that, ian was just totally out there, you know, and he was bombastic and he was. He had the temperament of a grizzly bear and he was riding this wave of interest in the environment in the early 70s Ian came up.
Speaker 2:This sounds very elementary today, in the age of GPS and automatic mapping and all that. But he invented this process of analyzing natural features and mapping them. And I was a student at the time. We did it all by hand, with magic markers. We'd map steep slopes, floodplains, insuitable soils, aquifers, all these natural features that pose limitations to development. Then we overlaid these maps and they illuminated where development should occur. You know the places that ended up not being mapped. So Ian came up with this process. He wrote a fabulous book called Design with Nature and he was one of the first people to really point out the hazards of flood plains and how planners needed to regard that hazard more seriously. I was in training as a young planner and landscape architect at the time, so you know this really resonated with me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed reading about him. Now, on page 196, you quote renowned Duke University professor of coastline geography, oren Pilkey, as saying quote I don't see the slightest evidence that anyone is seriously thinking about what to do with the future of climate refugees. End quote. Do you feel there's a narrative in the US that climate refugees scenarios only happen in other countries and, if so, why and what can be done to change this way of thinking?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's a whole lot to unpack there, andy. So let me just try to hit a couple of the points. In the United States we do have climate refugees and we're going to have more and more and more of them. Take Miami, Florida, for example. Sea level's going to rise. You know what's going to happen there the floodplains all over rivers across the country, the floodplains all over rivers across the country, the fire landscape and so forth.
Speaker 2:Worldwide the problem is even more severe. We're in the US, we're going to have millions of these people. Worldwide there'll be hundreds of millions and, in a way, the impression we have and our status here in America is insulated from many of these impacts simply by a robust economy and by our subsidized method of covering damage the National Flood Insurance Program. So, for example, somebody on the coast of Texas has a trophy home beach house that they mostly rent out all the year. It's worth three million bucks. There are places like this that have been flooded not once, but five, 10, 20 times, and each time they get a subsidy to fix the house, so they don't become a climate refugee. They just keep taking the money and rebuilding and, of course, the home builders will rebuild as many times, as people will pay them to do that.
Speaker 2:So the refugee status of Americans is buffered by the economy that we have and it's not in places like Bangladesh, I mean. The problems there are stark. So, yes, there is kind of a more of a feeling that this happens somewhere else, but it's going to happen more and more here. It should happen more and more because the economy, the disaster economy, is too badly skewed by federal subsidy at this point, which we cannot afford to keep doing. So we, more and more we will be facing the situation of people want to move to get away from the hazards. How are we going to help them do that is the big question and you know we and Pilkey's absolutely correct we really haven't begun to unwrap what that's all going to mean and to plan for that in the future. We have the seeds of solution in the policies of today and programs like FEMA's support and the Army Corps' support of helping people move when they can. But again, to get back to that really bad ratio, we're doing way more to help them stay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's definitely frustrating when we see our tax dollars going into helping people rebuild their homes as opposed to saving money and relocating them to a safer area.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Many people told me exactly that. Carol Thompson, perfect example. This wonderful Black woman in Charlotte, north Carolina, who took the buyout offer and moved and is extremely grateful that she did that. She was a fabulous interview. She didn't want to go and her husband wouldn't go. He passed away and then it was her choice and she got flooded again and she and her daughter and her cute little granddaughter they had to consider what are we going to do with our lives now? They took the buyout offer, moved and they're so grateful to not have to stress out every time it rains. So people are glad when they make this move. They told me so. You know there's a lot of evidence of that and there'll be more and more people like that.
Speaker 1:I think it's human nature that when new ideas come along, we're stayed in our ways and we fight them. Once we accept these changes and move forward, it becomes a normal part of our life.
Speaker 2:That's one reason I loved writing this book. Life. That's one reason I loved writing this book. I really enjoy working at that interface of what has been accepted and what is not yet accepted and that suite of issues and public policies that involve, well, changing public consciousness just a little bit. And as a writer, a journalist, a communicator, you know, I think, number one we need to know what's happening, and so I try to write that in my books. I also try to deal with the very human element of how do people cope with this problem, how do they envision the difficulties ahead and what is it that makes them shift their ground in understanding and their willingness and commitment to change or not?
Speaker 1:You know all that fascinates me and that's why you're good at what you do. We need those human stories so that we can relate to the facts. I was wondering if you could give us some more examples of floodplain management. You've talked about Nashville a little, but I was wondering if you could give us some more examples of floodplain management. You've talked about Nashville a little, but I was wondering if you could give a few more examples.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mentioned Nashville, I mentioned Knoxville and Tulsa, the Eklundburg County, north Carolina, that's the Charlotte area. But they had suffered flood after flood. Their stormwater agency, which is the responsible municipal group here for some years, just tried typical traditional approaches like channelizing streams to get the floodwater to flow away faster. None of that worked, cost a lot of money. Floods kept coming. So eventually a man named David Kinane, who was head of the agency's work, realized we've got to take a different approach here. He opened up the process to wide public participation and pretty much, you know, the citizens agreed hey, we've got to quit trying to fight floods and stop floods from occurring. It's not going to work. We've got to take responsibility for where we live. And so they developed not only good regulations regarding new development but a very robust program of helping people move. So that's a really great Milwaukee, wisconsin, milwaukee County, big flood issue. They had an official, david Fowler, who worked on this for a whole career and they have a great record of helping people to relocate.
Speaker 2:Where I worked, lycoming County, pennsylvania, the Hurricane Agnes flood occurred. Immediately after the flood, I organized a crew to map where the flood actually occurred. You could see that for weeks because there was a rack line of refuse and dead leaves and pineal at the upper bathtub ring of the flood. We plotted that was the only floodplain mapping we had for years. We did that.
Speaker 2:Then we aggressively pursued the goal of getting every local municipality to adopt a floodplain ordinance. None of them had it before the flood. Within two years we had all 52 municipalities with a floodplain zoning ordinance. Then we launched a buyout program where we went after federal money to help the county and local communities, help people to move, and they've since relocated like 200 homes and more on the way. So there are a lot of successful examples to point to here. But again, on the scale of how much of the right thing we're doing versus the wrong thing, we're still depending way too much on dams and levees that are failing and failing and failing, and way too much on flood proofing, which is only going to be insufficient with the increasing floods of the future, which is only going to be insufficient with the increasing floods of the future, and not enough on these solutions that involve individual responsibility and action.
Speaker 1:That's a lot to think about. Okay, let's talk about books. What are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, in preparation for my interview, I was reading this book. Seek Higher Ground than Natural Religion.
Speaker 1:Way to plug your own book, Tim. I think that's fabulous.
Speaker 2:Whoa? What am I going to talk about here? You know I better bone up on this subject, but I know that's not what you're looking for. You know, the book I'm actually currently in the middle of is a Bill McKibben book. Bill is one of the great journalistic heroes of our time. He was the first journalist to widely disseminate information about global warming and he has a book it's not all that new now, but I haven't read it yet, it's a couple of years old called the Flags Across in the Station Wagon and it really resonates to me because in a way his life was my life.
Speaker 2:I grew up in the 50s and the 60s and we thought things were going pretty well and in fact they were in a whole lot of ways, and then all kinds of crazy stuff has happened, you know, and I mean, how can Donald Trump be the candidate for president this year? And I mean, you know, how could a convicted sex offender be supported by so many people? Bill asks questions not that particular one, but these questions that have come up in this current era of kind of cultural craziness in our nation and you know bifurcations in the tragic kinds of conflicts that we're facing today and he applies a lot of perspective and wisdom to that change, and so it is very interesting to me.
Speaker 1:I need to get a copy of that one. It sounds terrific. Anything else you're reading?
Speaker 2:Well, that's you know. Mostly I write and don't read. These days I kind of think of. You know, the first two thirds of my life were pouring stuff in and now it's time for me to put out. And so you know, I'm working on two or three new books and I'm doing a lot of this type of work with the Flood book since it just came out last spring.
Speaker 1:I know I've said this before on the show, but I think when nonfiction books are written in a creative nonfiction style, they appeal to a broader audience and we need this right now. We need that broader audience to be reading these books. Tim, have you been to Australia?
Speaker 2:No, no, I haven't, but I suspect the Franklin River is in your you know, and I remember that as being a river threatened with hydroelectric dams 20 years ago, yes, and one of the success stories of conservation. But you know, back on your idea of stories and narrative and even fiction, mixing the art of reporting with the art of narrative and creating this alternating current of history and information, along with personal stories of the people I interviewed, and even mixing my own personal story in with that. To me, you know, creating a whole package by weaving these approaches together in narrative form was one of the great joys I had in writing this book.
Speaker 1:And it's a wonderful book, highly recommended from me. Thank you for writing it, tim, and thank you for being on the Bookshop Podcast. I've thoroughly enjoyed chatting with you and I've learned a lot.
Speaker 2:Thank you, mandy. Anytime, I'm always writing a new book. Great to be with you and I've learned a lot. Thank you, mandy. Anytime, I'm always writing a new book, great to be with you.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with author Tim Palmer about his new book Seek Higher Ground the Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy Adrian Otterhan, and graphic design by Frances Barala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time. Bye.