How We Survive
22 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 months ago - ★★★★★ - 912 ratingsHow do you live in a place that wasn’t meant for development? And should we even try? The climate crisis is here, and we’re looking for solutions.
Miami is one of the most vulnerable coastal cities in the world. Because of rising seas and stronger hurricanes, whole neighborhoods could be submerged by 2100. Or sooner.
Billions of dollars are pouring into the region to help it adapt to hotter temperatures, fierce storms and rising waters. But will it be enough?
Join host Amy Scott on this season of “How We Survive” as she digs into how South Florida can adapt to remain as livable as possible. The podcast explores how the insurance industry determines where people live, and the concept of “managed retreat,” which relocates entire communities from unlivable places.
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Episodes
No Place Like Home
December 14, 2022 11:00 - 33 minutes - 11.8 MBYou’ve raised your house up on stilts and your town has added higher seawalls and pumping stations, but sea level rise is relentless. Eventually, you may have to consider the ultimate solution: Leaving your home, giving the land back to nature and starting over somewhere else. There’s a jargony sounding name for this solution: Managed Retreat. In our season finale, we head to a small island community off the coast of Louisiana that has lost 98% of its land to rising seas and sinking land. N...
Swampland for Sale
December 07, 2022 11:00 - 35 minutes - 11.8 MBIn this episode, we travel back in time to the place South Florida used to be — the Everglades before it was drained, developed and transformed into the megalopolis we know today. We start with a bird’s-eye view of the ecosystem. Then we get down on the ground to look at the consequences of drainage up close. Finally we discuss why a restoration plan passed more than two decades ago is more pressing now than ever before.
Betting Against a Storm
November 30, 2022 20:49 - 30 minutes - 11.8 MBWe’ve told you the insurance industry in Florida is in crisis. Or as one industry insider put it, it’s holding on by “a piece of chewing gum.” In this episode, we explore possible solutions. We dive into the business of reinsurance, or insurance for insurers (turns out you can insure almost anything, including insurance policies); and we look at another possible solution that was born from the wreckage of Hurricane Andrew 30 years ago: the catastrophe bond, a financial instrument that allow...
Special Episode: Ask Amy Anything
November 23, 2022 11:00 - 23 minutes - 11.8 MBYou asked, we answered. Listeners wrote in wanting to know: “Who the hell loans these people money for mortgages” in risky coastal areas? Who ultimately owns the risk? Do certain investments, like REITs, drive gentrification (and what the heck is a REIT, anyway)? And finally, we tackle the age-old riddle: to rent or to buy? This episode is devoted to answering listener questions.
Risky Business
November 16, 2022 11:00 - 32 minutes - 11.8 MBThe insurance industry quietly rules our lives. It determines where and what we build. It’s also a linchpin of the housing market. Without it, homeowners can’t get mortgages. And without mortgages, most people can’t buy homes, and the whole housing market starts to collapse. In this episode, we dig into Florida’s broken insurance market and what’s at stake if we don’t fix it. And we look back at Hurricane Andrew, the 1992 storm that changed the insurance industry.
Built to Last
November 09, 2022 11:00 - 30 minutes - 11.8 MBWhat do a burning shed, a beautiful above-ground bunker and an island of misfits all have in common? They are all places we visit on our hunt for solutions. This episode, we find out what it will take to stay in the places we love. We play around at a research lab where scientists are figuring out how to make our homes and buildings more resilient to the elements. Then, we leave the lab to see what it looks like to implement safer building methods and materials in real life; first, at a pla...
Science Meets Fiction
November 02, 2022 10:00 - 33 minutes - 11.8 MBBuckle up, grab a hard hat, a tent (and maybe a snack). It’s going to be a bumpy ride! From camping on top of a glacier, right before billions of tons of ice melt off of it, to dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane that destroys Miami, this episode we’re diving head first into the realclimate predictions — and the imagined ways society will handle them. We’re unpacking why a glacier halfway around the world is causing sea levels around South Florida to rise faster, and then we’re headi...
Little River
October 26, 2022 10:00 - 33 minutes - 11.8 MBThe Little River community in Miami is known for frequent flooding during heavy rains, high tides and storms. And when the neighborhood floods, sewage can spill into the yard; toilets back up. Even though it floods, the housing market here is hot. Long-time residents face displacement. This episode looks at flooding and flipping and how the two are related.
Selling Miami
October 19, 2022 09:30 - 34 minutes - 11.8 MBWhether you live on the coast or not, sea-level rise will have profound impacts on all of us. So we packed up our bags and headed to Miami, a city that is considered one of the most vulnerable coastal cities in the world. How Miami responds will serve as a test case for how other places around the country survive the effects of climate change. Experts say seas here could rise by 5 feet or more by 2100, eventually leaving whole parts of the city underwater. So if the city is doomed, why isn’t...
Prologue: Tracking a Catastrophe
October 19, 2022 09:16 - 21 minutes - 11.8 MBA powerful hurricane was churning toward the southwest coast of Florida. It looked like it was going to be bad. So we hopped on a plane and headed first to Boston where we embedded with a team of catastrophe modelers who were tracking the disaster and calculating the potential losses. The number they came up with is staggering high: $100 billion. And only $63 billion of that is insured. We then visited Gasparilla Mobile Home Estates in Placida, Florida to see what these data points looked ...
Introducing “How We Survive Season 2: Saving Miami”
October 12, 2022 11:50 - 4 minutes - 11.8 MBThere’s the mythical version of Miami, the version that’s all about wealth and glamour and a never-ending party on the beach. And then there’s the real Miami, a deeply unequal place that could eventually be swallowed up by the Atlantic Ocean because of glaciers melting halfway around the world. Miami has been called the most vulnerable coastal city in the world because of climate change. South Florida could be one of the first places in the United States to see true devastation wrought by th...
How We Change
November 24, 2021 11:00 - 34 minutes - 11.8 MBTechnology will help us avoid the worst outcomes of the climate crisis, and it’ll help us adapt to a warming planet. But technology alone can’t save us. Humans need to make profound changes. We need to change our behavior, our consumption, our policies and our mindsets. In the final episode of the season, we talk to a climate psychologist about how our minds react to change and hear from a politician relying on Fergie and Megan Thee Stallion to get Americans excited about energy policy. We ...
The Better Battery
November 17, 2021 11:00 - 28 minutes - 11.8 MBImagine a future where all the lithium we need has already been extracted from the ground and is endlessly recycled. Or where the batteries we use to store renewable energy are made from abundantly available materials — like salt. This episode, we visit a lab where a couple of brilliant scientists are trying to build the batteries of the future. And we drop in on a company that’s extending the life cycle of lithium through something called “urban mining.”
Sci-Fi Intermission
November 10, 2021 11:00 - 20 minutes - 11.8 MBOur favorite place to look for climate solutions: Science fiction. In fact, sci-fi (and its sub-genre, cli-fi) is what got us thinking about adaptation in the first place. Cli-fi can get a little bleak — weather turns deadly; earth becomes uninhabitable; humans flee to space. And while it’s entertaining to imagine the worst-case scenarios, the best of the writing is hopeful. It allows us to dream up solutions that don’t involve billionaires, rockets or climate-changing satellite stations....
Gnarly Brine
November 03, 2021 10:00 - 33 minutes - 11.8 MBOur journey through the California desert continues. We visit the quiet front-runner in the race to extract lithium from the superhot, corrosive brine bubbling underground. And we dive into the past to look at an earlier attempt to harvest lithium from the Salton Sea. That project ended in failure, but its patents live on. And those patents could be a roadblock for the companies racing to extract the “white gold” today. With millions of dollars invested and a global supply of lithium waiting...
The resource
October 27, 2021 10:00 - 36 minutes - 11.8 MBWe’re back on the road this week, to California’s Salton Sea, a salty lake in the desert that was once marketed as “Palm Springs with water.” Today the water is receding and increasingly toxic. The community that once thrived here now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. But there is some hope. There’s a huge amount of lithium all around the Salton Sea in the bubbling hot brine deep underground. Some hopeful modern-day 49ers have big plans to get it out. If they can on...
The Resource
October 27, 2021 10:00 - 36 minutes - 11.8 MBWe’re back on the road this week, to California’s Salton Sea, a salty lake in the desert that was once marketed as “Palm Springs with water.” Today the water is receding and increasingly toxic. The community that once thrived here now has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. But there is some hope. There’s a huge amount of lithium all around the Salton Sea in the bubbling hot brine deep underground. Some hopeful modern-day 49ers have big plans to get it out. If they can on...
Electrify Everything
October 20, 2021 15:11 - 28 minutes - 11.8 MBTo survive the climate crisis, we need to electrify everything: our cars, of course, but also our appliances, homes, mass transit, entire neighborhoods and cities. Everything. That’s no small task. So to better understand why electrifying everything matters, and how we’re going to do it, we look at the aftermath of a natural disaster and talk to one man who used batteries to save lives. Then we spend a little time with an entrepreneur whose vision for an electric future includes turning ev...
The Necessary Evil
October 13, 2021 10:00 - 33 minutes - 11.8 MBMining is a complicated business. It’s destructive, it’s dangerous. But in order to get the lithium we need to power the energy transition, mining could be a necessary evil. In this episode, we go from protests in South America to a gold mine in Nevada, where we take a ride on what looks like a massive Tonka truck, all in the hopes of finding out if there’s a better way to do things while getting the metal we need to survive. After talking to mining experts, environmental justice advocates...
White Gold
October 06, 2021 10:00 - 35 minutes - 11.8 MBTo get off fossil fuels, you need a lot of batteries. To get a lot of batteries, you need to mine a lot of lithium. Welcome to Thacker Pass, Nevada, where a proposed lithium mine has sparked protests from farmers, ranchers and the native Paiute–Shoshone tribe. Some tribal members reject the idea that they should sacrifice their ancestral home for the climate fight, while others say that their history is being distorted and co-opted by protestors. And farmers and ranchers in the area who hav...
White gold
October 06, 2021 10:00 - 35 minutes - 11.8 MBTo get off fossil fuels, you need a lot of batteries. To get a lot of batteries, you need to mine a lot of lithium. Welcome to Thacker Pass, Nevada, where a proposed lithium mine has sparked protests from farmers, ranchers and the native Paiute–Shoshone tribe. Some tribal members reject the idea that they should sacrifice their ancestral home for the climate fight, while others say that their history is being distorted and co-opted by protestors. And farmers and ranchers in the area who hav...
Introducing “How We Survive”
September 21, 2021 22:25 - 3 minutes - 11.8 MBThe climate crisis is here. The Western U.S. is burning, much of the Northeast is underwater after a hurricane and towns in Europe are swept away by massive floods. Time is slipping away to stop the worst effects of a warming planet, and the world is looking for solutions. On “How We Survive,” Molly Wood explores the technology that could provide some of those solutions, the business of acclimatizing to an increasingly inhospitable planet, and the way people have to change if we’re going to...