Right after Helene (like truly, the Sunday after, I think), a fellow Ashevillian put up a lengthy Instagram post recounting their experience living through the storm. As someone who watched Helene batter Asheville from afar, I was a rapt audience. However, something jumped out at me. This person wrote something to the effect of, “I came to Asheville because it’s long been known as a climate haven for us climate change refugees; I didn’t think I’d have to worry about the effects of global warming here in the mountains of North Carolina, and am not sure where is safe anymore.”
It jumped out at me because I’d run into this person at a bar the weekend prior, and we ended up chatting about what brought us to Asheville, something we’d never discussed, despite knowing each other for a little while. For those unaware, I initially came to Asheville in early 2020 for a job. This person came a year later. They’d shared that they were a digital nomad during the Pandemic, spending time in several artistic, outdoorsy cities, hoping that one would make enough of an impression for them to relocate from their big-city existence. Asheville won them over, so after the road trip was over, they started looking for a place. Asheville being a climate haven didn’t come up, which makes sense since this person came south from NYC, not really somewhere famous for being battered by global-warming-induced weather disasters.
While this acquaintance’s Instagram post was the first time I saw an Ashevillian describe themselves as a “climate change refugee,” it wasn’t the last. Soon, it felt like many Western North Carolinians shared the same narrative: they came to Asheville because it was a climate haven and described themselves as “climate change refugees.”
Now, Western North Carolina does indeed have pretty ideal weather. Its southern locale means that it never gets super cold or has blizzards. The altitude ensures we get all four seasons and that the warm weather in the summer isn’t marred by the same humidity that plagues the rest of the South. Comparatively, weather disasters don’t occur here with the same frequency as they occur in some other spots—like, Florida, for example, where many folks here move from—, but they aren’t exactly unheard of, which…we’ll get to momentarily.
Maybe it’s because I moved here for work (a really great professional opportunity at the time), and so wasn’t looking up reasons to move to Asheville, that I missed the climate change memo, but I think that’s me being generous—when Helene hit I’d been in Asheville five years, and I’d never heard anyone call it a climate haven or use the term “climate change refugee.”
However, that became a very popular narrative post-Helene, not just on social media but also in headlines from numerous publications. While I absolutely believe in climate change and agree that global warming is an increasingly scary issue, if I’m being completely honest, I found this particular narrative a little bit irritating. I even think it flirts with being an example of unnecessarily politicizing everything, because while the devastation Helene wrought was certainly unexpected (had I been in Asheville, I can guarantee you I would’ve done zero prepping and been trapped in an apartment with no extra water, very little food, and only lanterns with dead batteries), I don’t know if you could exactly entirely blame global warming for a devastating hurricane pummeling Western North Carolina. It definitely exacerbated Helene’s fury, but historically, heavy rains and flooding visit here from time to time.
One of Western North Carolina’s most popular hiking spots, Graveyard Fields, got its name due to a devastating windstorm (probably hurricane-spawned tornadoes) that devastated the area in the 1800s. Per the National Park Service website, “Many years ago, a windstorm uprooted the forest, leaving behind stumps that gave the area the appearance of a graveyard” (said stumps have since burned in a long-ago forest fire.”
Then, of course, there is the hurricane that essentially created Asheville’s River Arts District. In the early 1900s, the area was Asheville’s industrial hub, filled with factories, warehouses, textile mills, stockyards, tanneries, and meat processing plants. In 1916, a devastating flood occurred. According to the Asheville city government website, “When two tropical storms converged on the mountains in tandem that summer — one from the Gulf in June followed by another from the Atlantic in July — the water that thundered in its wake wasn’t just “high;” it carved away the ground under mountain railroad passes, leaving tracks looking like sky-high trapeze rigs hanging 20 to 60 feet in the air.”
Feels familiar, no? Industry never returned to the devastated river area, and those plants, stockyards, warehouses, and cotton mills sat largely abandoned till artists started the gentrification process in the 80s. The aforementioned city government article details how Western North Carolina continued to be the victim of deadly flooding, noting that in 2004, two tropical storms once again converged, unleashing torrents of water. Eleven people died. One hundred forty homes were destroyed. There was $7 million in damage spread over seven counties. Deadly floods hit Western North Carolina again during my tenure here, as I documented in an earlier post.
I just think that nature doesn’t always need a narrative. Yes, again, global warming and climate change are real and dangerous, but nature has always been good at reminding us when we least expect it that it’s a scary beast and could really mess things up when it wants to.
I think trying to tie everything to something in the zeitgeist—to something that makes one pick a side—is frankly, lazy and lacking in critical thinking, and to end this whole screed, I think it also takes some of the onus off say, the city itself, whose infrastructure—plumbing, wifi, electricity—was woefully ill equipped to handle inclimate weather that historically plagues the area not often, but isn’t out of the realm of possibility, but that’s a whole other rant/article for another time :).
AshevilleExplorer 