While wildfires were burning in and around LA earlier this year, evacuation notices prompted many residents to leave their homes. Priceless artwork at the Getty Center, though, stayed put. That’s because the museum was designed and built to withstand wildfire. But that is not the case for many museums, and as climate change has led to more severe weather and storms, many people in that world are thinking about how to save what’s inside museums in the face of those kinds of threats.
That’s one of the main themes of a novel from Eiren Caffall, a Chicago-based science and nature writer and novelist, that came out earlier this year. "All the Water in the World" deals with questions of historic preservation during a climate crisis and is set, in part, on the roof of the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Caffall joined The Show to discuss what got her thinking about this kind of story.
Full conversation with Eiren Caffall
EIREN CAFFALL: Well, I've been a writer my whole life. I've wanted, that's all I've wanted to do since I was 7, and I also was raised by conservationists, and I'm the daughter of an EPA hydrogeologist. So I was raised with a lot of consciousness about climate collapse, climate change, ecosystemic crisis, and was coming at it from all sorts of different angles songwriting, journalism, science journalism.
And when I was a young mom to a small kid and I was a single parent, Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, which is where I was born and where a lot of my family still lived, and I had this new kind of fear that I don't think I had really been living with before, which was a real picture of what could happen to places that I knew and grew up in.
And it was in talking to my godfather who had spent a whole night after the storm trying to get the ocean water out of his daughter's basement that I sat down after my kid was asleep and started writing this as a way to write through my own fears.
MARK BRODIE: Wow, did it work?
CAFFALL: Yeah, absolutely.
BRODIE: It's interesting because I would imagine that this is the kind of thing that might further keep you up at night thinking about this.
CAFFALL: Yeah, well, I was already up at night, and I, as I say, I was already the kind of person that, you know, is a bummer at dinner parties because I was already immersed deeply in this world and thinking a lot about extinctions and getting, you know, newspaper clippings sent by my mom about what was further happening in the, in the realm of ocean science.
And so I was living with it already, and I didn't really have a way to answer a question which was really important to me at the time and I think was kind of important to a transition in the environmental movement of, you know, How do we feel about hope? How do we feel about what comes after? How do we feel about what is coming and what do we do in the worst case scenario?
And for me, I felt like writing a small vulnerable family with some disability issues into a catastrophe and seeing if I, as a writer, my unconscious, my creativity, believed that we would be coming out the other side. That a family like that would be working towards a future that they believed in.
And if I could believe it on the page, then I felt like I could believe it in my own life. And in the course of those years writing that book, all I did was find more and more evidence of, you know, the human drive for survival and for the retention of all that matters to people and culture and family, in each other.
BRODIE: It's kind of an interesting juxtaposition talking about how, you know, writing this book has helped you look to the future a little bit because a big part of the book is, of course, people working to save elements and pieces of history. I'm curious how you think about, you know, using the past, thinking about the past and using and thinking about the future at the same time.
CAFFALL: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that, you know, especially as somebody who's kind of obsessed with natural history museums, which are not completely value neutral places, right? There's been lots of mistakes that have been made in the curation and collection of items over time in those institutions.
But at the same time, I think of something like the story of the largest collection of the most intense scientific discovery of bird species in the world, which at the time was was in the British Museum and or one of the large museums in Britain, it might have been the Natural History Museum and during World War II, during the Blitz, that collection moved farther away from London so that it could be retained.
And the reason to retain it was not just the historical record of all of those species and that intense global diversity of bird life, but also because there's a plan for a future day when scientists may need to access the information in those bird skins to be able to understand transformations and what's happening and even restoration.
And I think you see that over and over again in the way the curators work to, yes, make a historical record within the collections in the Natural History Museum, but then they're doing that so that it can be used by a future scientist they never may meet working on a topic that they are going to be sort of handing the baton off to the next generation to find and discover, and I think that is a really interesting part to me of the way that curatorial relationships work, especially in natural history museums.
BRODIE: What kind of reaction and response has this book gotten from the scientists in your family?
CAFFALL: You know, my mother has passed away and so I don't actually have a chance to talk with her about the reception of it now, but when she did pass, what I found on her bookshelf was printer copies of all three of the previous drafts of the book that I had finished before the time of her death.
BRODIE: Oh wow.
CAFFALL: She was deeply invested in the story that I was telling, and you know, I make this joke all the time, but the thing that we like to do when we had time together was to watch big blockbuster movies where the scientists are the heroes, and I think she would have appreciated not only that, but also that, and this is something that I worked with her and a lot of other scientists on while I was writing the book, that the science and the curation and the larger questions were close enough to being right that if a scientist picked up the book, they wouldn't be taken out by bad science at the core of this thing, which is an adventure book, really it's hard.
BRODIE: I'm curious about your process of researching and writing the book because as you say, You have a scientific background, you have scientific knowledge yourself, you've spent a lot of time in museums. I wonder how like the relationship between the knowledge that you brought to this experience meshed with the knowledge that you got from people with whom you interacted and maybe ask questions of to try to get more information to write the book.
CAFFALL: Yeah, I mean, I am a research nerd and I love it. It's one of my very favorite things. And so, you know, as I was writing this book, I was also researching, you know, articles that I was writing for on other topics. I was researching the memoir, which was very invested in looking at the fastest warming marine ecosystem on the globe, which is the Gulf of Maine.
And so every interaction that I had with someone That I was looking at for those those larger goals that I have as a science writer, as a nature writer, all of those, I think showed up in the book and kind of were a breadcrumb trail.
SAM DINGMAN: Eiren Caffall is a science and nature writer and novelist and author of the book All the Water in the World.
The kinds of questions about preservation raised in the book are among those being discussed at museums and cultural institutions around the world. For the past several years, those in Northern Arizona have been working together to make plans to get important artifacts out of harm’s way if there’s some kind of emergency.
Stacey Christen, an archivist at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, joined The Show to discuss how Lowell has tried to formulate a plan without knowing what the emergency may be.
Full conversation with Stacey Christen
STACEY CHRISTEN: That's the problem. I mean, we have so many contingency plans and yeah, sometimes when I'm looking at this, I'm like, oh, what if this happens? What if this happens? So we look at a few things, obviously we're up here in the middle of the forest, so fire is gonna be a big issue with us, and then water damage, cause those two go hand in hand. So we have plans regarding everything we can think of, but obviously when there's a disaster, something happens that you haven't thought of. You know, we've had in the past really mild earthquakes up here. Could we get a big earthquake? I don't know. You know what I mean?
So what we do is we look at, we look at our collections and we here at Lowell, we have papers and artifacts, and one of our, the things we have that's unique to an observatory are glass plates that, you know, so if we get an earthquake, that's not going to be good for glass plates, but we don't really, you know, we can't worry about everything.
So we've looked at what are the most important things we house here. And so for us that would be like Percival Lowell's papers, the Pluto plates, we do have the Pluto plates in the repository here where we have everything else, the two plates that Clyde Tombaugh used to discover Pluto. You know, those are unique in the world. No one else has those.
So we've looked at things like that and said, OK. You know, if the first responders come in and they say you haven't half an hour to get out whatever you can, what are the first things we're going to take? And so I think most institutions have done that in terms of looking at their collections and saying, OK, here's what comes out first, here's what comes out next, sort of like that, just prioritizing.
BRODIE: What is that process like? I would imagine it's in some ways like asking a parent to pick their favorite kid, right? Like you have all this stuff that you would love to have and you think is super important and super interesting and cool, but as you said, you know, first responders come and say, OK, you got half an hour to get what you can get and get out. Like, how do you, how do you, how do you prioritize that?
CHRISTEN: Right, so, well, We've prioritized in a few ways. Like I said, we would want Percival Lowell's papers, you know, he started everything, but then Clyde Tombaugh, he's the one who discovered Pluto. We'd want his, you know. So what we've done personally here at Lowell is we've, we've got a red and yellow dot system. So the boxes that need to come out first have red dots on them. The ones that can come out next have yellow dots. And it was, it was just us sitting down and saying, well, what are, what are our most important papers? What are our most important artifacts?
You know, we've started trying to digitize as much as we can, but if we had the rest of our lives, we couldn't digitize everything that we have. So again, we start with our most important collections and, you know, if we have them digitized, at least we've saved the content. We want to save the actual, you know, the actual papers, the actual artifacts, just because that, you know, that's our history. Like we see ourselves as stewards of history, right? And we're trying to preserve history for everyone.
And sometimes I think about like how much of our history has been lost, you know, to things like water and fire and whatever, but we're just trying to have a plan. We have created a team of people here at Lowell that are willing to help us, you know, if we have to evacuate. And then we do have the other institutions, we have memorandums of understanding with these other institutions so if it's a localized emergency, if it's just happening at Lowell, people from Cline Library, people from the Museum of Northern Arizona, you know, they're gonna all come up here and help us. If it's happening all across the city, then we're on our own.
But we have plans. We are working with a restoration company and so they're gonna come up and we're gonna start doing drills four times a year. We've got all sorts of equipment to help us, you know, get our collections out. We've got a lot of PPEs so like, you know, maybe. Water in there, maybe there's foot and things from fire, whatever. So we have that kind of stuff. We've got wagons that have all train wheels so that if we put boxes in there and we have to pull them out through snow or water or mud or whatever, we can get things out. And it's just, you know, we're always thinking about it.
BRODIE: Yeah. I'm curious when you're trying to prioritize what you would take and what you wouldn't, how much of a consideration is how easy or difficult an object is to transport?
CHRISTEN: Absolutely. I mean, when they had the museum fire here in 2019, Pioneer Museum literally could not take some things that they would have wanted to because they were too big. They couldn't just take them and put them in someone's car and get them out And so that's what we think about too, you know, if we had a limited amount of time, there are things here that we couldn't even attempt to take.
BRODIE: Yeah, I'm thinking about like you've a lot of telescopes, some very old historic telescopes, like I can't imagine trying to transport those even if you had a lot of time.
CHRISTEN: No, I mean, when, when they do have to be transported, it is a huge ordeal.\ It's, you know, special equipment and a ton of people and people who know how to handle it in special boxes and foam all around it. It's not, it's not something that is easy to do at all.
BRODIE: Yeah. In the universe of things that concern you and that you think about, like, where does this fall about, you know, if there's some disaster, trying to get the stuff that you want to get out and how to do it, and how much of it you can get out like how I guess how much does this sort of occupy your your thoughts and your time?
CHRISTEN: I mean, look, as an archivist. I have two main parts to my job, preserving history and making it accessible to people. So preserving it, I mean, this takes up a lot of my personal thought. I also have enough anxiety that this is the kind of thing I think of all of the time. And I mean, I was a kid in the ‘70s, so I was raised on disaster movies. So, you know, I'm like, what would I do? What would I do?
But also just, you know, you look at those fires they had in LA earlier this year. No one expected what happened, right? The way the winds made everything jumping and all this stuff. So this does take up for me personally, a fair amount of my mental energy, also just because I live up here and so we're getting close to fire season and then we had a really dry winter, you know, so everybody kind of has in their mind like. What do you do?
We wouldn't even try to take anything out of our library. We don't care, that can all be replaced. But, but the unique, the unique stuff is, you know, it's not anywhere else, and I do. I worry about it sometimes, probably more than I should, but, but I do.
DINGMAN: Stacey Christen is an archivist at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to a transcription error, the story has been updated to correct the spelling of Eiren Caffall and Stacey Christen's names.
