Stephen Robert Miller wants to know why people do things they know will hurt them. That question underlies his 2023 book “Over The Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought, and the Delusion of Controlling Nature” — a tight, meticulously researched debut about “maladaptations,” feats of engineering that are meant to prevent disasters but fail spectacularly.
It takes three stories to get the picture: Seawalls that betrayed Northern Japanese towns during the 2011 tsunamis get rebuilt, even though the science shows they’re not going to fare much better this time around; levees and embankments forced on the Ganges River Delta by European colonizers to create and protect farmland become the enablers of catastrophic floods; enormous systems of waterways, dams, and canals in Arizona route Colorado River flows toward industries and the wealthy, leaving a worsening drought in the wake.
Miller has since written widely on climate change — about the sudden profitability of the long-derided field of geoengineering; about a “green” startup that pivoted to selling pesticides; about the politics of geothermal energy. In his stories, people jump at the chance to solve the climate crisis. But Miller finds they often move too fast or, in some cases, are blinded by greed or ignorance.
It’s the kind of beat that can wear a person down. “I’m taking a sabbatical year,” said Miller, who arrived at MIT in August to spend the academic year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. “I needed a break from writing about climate disasters and climate change, so I decided to try something different.”
In between the philosophy and evolutionary biology classes he took in the fall semester, he sat with me to reflect on his book, disaster reporting, and what drives him to a story. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jamie Jiang: So much of your book is about the power of Indigenous knowledge and how these colonial systems are not working, and yet we’re still going forward with them. Did you know that was the ground you wanted to cover?
Stephen Robert Miller: No, I don’t think I did. I knew that was going to be a pretty substantial piece of the Bangladesh picture. I did not realize that it would be such a substantial piece of the Japanese story, or even the tie-in with the Diné people in Arizona. It’s an area that I’ve reported on quite a bit and have always been interested in.
As a writer, I’m always worried about touching on a topic like this and having it feel flippant or like I’m just checking boxes. In this case, I think it grew organically out of the material. There’s no way to look at what happened in the Ganges River Delta without recognizing the imprint of the Dutch and the British colonizers and their persistent attempts to create an environment that really just worked for their own interests at the expense of the people there.
I cannot look at a disaster today without wanting to look a hundred years in the past and think about how we got there.
JJ: What’s the reaction to the book been like?
SRM: It’s been really positive.
When I wrote it and pitched it to the publisher, I thought my audience was people like me. Since the book has come out, my audience has been city planners and developers and engineers, which is not who I expected.
I often get people who come to me and want to know if I think their watershed or embankment proposal is a maladaptive decision. I’m also often asked about how to explain the science behind some of the things that they’re working on.
Everybody asks me what the solution is. Some people have a hard time with my book because it’s not a book of solutions. It’s a book about how solutions fail.
I came out of working as a senior editor at YES! Magazine, when my job was to do solutions journalism, so I’ve been editing solution stories and writing solution stories for years. In solutions journalism, you’re trying to do a lot in a little bit of space. To do, I think, the necessary dive to understand whether it’s a really good solution — it’s hard as a writer to provide that nuance. The readers often don’t want it.
I have a lot of respect for it, and I recognize the value. But I think there are so many times where we want the solutions to work so bad we get blinded to the realities of their failures. That’s kind of where the book came from.
JJ: How do you communicate the science to a wider audience?
SRM: Stories are huge. Instead of, like, 15 chapters on some esoteric term and then an explanation, I just told three stories.
I think a lot of Americans expect disasters to happen in Bangladesh. That’s been the story of Bangladesh for generations. But I wanted to show another aspect of the story, which was the long trail of colonialism, and to show how local people had built out really ingenious ways of dealing with this problem that ultimately really heavily relied on a different way of thinking — not just doing things differently, but ultimately, thinking about flooding and rivers differently than we think about them anywhere else, almost, in the world.
In Arizona the goal was to come back home. I always say, if you’re going to go around the world and tell everybody else that they’re doing it wrong, you better be willing to come back and look at yourself and say the same thing. So that was my goal, coming back home to Arizona where I grew up, and to show the same thing happening there.
I was so thankful for the local journalists who had been reporting these stories day after day for years, especially in places like Bangladesh…
JJ: What are you interested in now? Is climate your focus?
SRM: I’m taking this semester to explore human nature. Something totally different, but it comes from the same place. There’s a fundamental aspect of the last book of people doing things that work against their own best interest. Why do we do things that don’t benefit us?
It’s part of my frustration with the climate story. I report a lot on agriculture, and I talk to farmers who feel the effects of climate change more directly than somebody in Brooklyn does, and yet they continuously vote for people and for policies that don’t do anything to address it.
I’ve been trying to, in my reporting, imagine a world in which it’s beneficial to conservative voters to support climate progress. On the other hand, the last story I did before I came here was all about conservative people squashing a solar plant that would have helped them hugely.
This is why I’m taking a break.
JJ: What keeps you writing?
SRM: Interest, curiosity. Everything I’m working on, every story I’ve ever written, it’s really just started from a place of wanting to understand something. And when it becomes hard, suddenly the idea surpasses a personal interest and becomes a public necessity.
I think that’s what journalism is, right? This is something that people need to know about, and if I wasn’t aware of it, then there’s lots of other people who aren’t aware of it. You have a platform, whether it’s big or small. You’ve got to use it.
We need to keep doing the work, so that when we come back to a time where people can use the information, the information is there. That’s something I definitely learned reporting stories out of the book. I was so thankful for the local journalists who had been reporting these stories day after day for years, especially in places like Bangladesh, where the government is notoriously corrupt and infrastructure is lacking. Reporters were still keeping a record of what was going on so that somebody like me could come along and try to understand it. I think that’s just necessary work.
Jamie Jiang is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. She writes about wildfires and other disasters.
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