When Hurricane Maria neared Puerto Rico in September 2017, coffee farmer Carlos Bonilla Rodriguez sheltered with a neighbor living just uphill from the concrete house he had built with his wife, Miriam. The pair wanted to keep an eye on their home of 25 years, where their children, and later their grandchildren, had played. As the storm worsened, Bonilla Rodriguez watched high winds claw at his zinc roof, tugging its edges until the whole thing lifted off in one piece. "I could hear the explosions as the cables that held the roof were ripped apart," Bonilla Rodriguez said. He had shared his story as part of a collection of oral histories of the storm compiled by professor Ricia Anne Chansky, director of the Oral History Lab at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagiiez. The refrigerator door blew open, scattering food everywhere; framed family photos took flight from the walls. "When everything was taken by the wind, all blown away, and I knew we had nothing, the only thing to do was cry," Bonilla Rodriguez recalled. In the months following the hurricane, Chansky's students crisscrossed the island to document a disaster supercharged by an overheated climate. The resulting interviews-of farmers like Bonilla Rodriguez, of a factory worker, a dental technician, a community organizer-became Mi Maria: Surviving the Storm, a 2021 book that joins a wealth of such projects produced in recent years. The new oral histories of climate change range from crowd-sourced DIY storytelling efforts to more formal academic undertakings. Whether collected by amateur historians or gathered by professional academics, climate change oral histories accomplish something important: They evoke empathy, and in doing so imbue a sense of humanity into a crisis more often absorbed with statistics than stories.
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