Jim Morrison

An exhaustively reported story outlining the need to begin discussing managed retreat from threatened areas including the coasts and inland floodplains.

The city doesn’t use that politically explosive term, the Voldemort of climate adaptation. Planners here and elsewhere refer to it as the “r-word.” They’re happy to talk about the other r-word — resilience, which includes projects like sea walls, retention ponds, rebuilding wetlands and improved storm-water capacity. Retreat signals surrender, while resilience screams reassurance: Don’t worry. Stay. We’ll protect you. That medicine goes down easier. It has been embraced by dozens of cities an...

"There is no other place on Earth like this," Angie Carl says. Her voice carries across the swamp of North Carolina's Black River as we sit floating in kayaks at the knees of our elders, an ancient stand of bald cypress trees.
Following markers of neon-pink ribbons tied to branches, we've paddled to this remote stand to recreate a journey that Carl took eight years ago guiding David W. Stahle, a University of Arkansas scientist. Carl is the fire and coastal restoration manager for The Nature ...

For 10,000 years, the Swinomish tribe has fished the waters of northwestern Washington, relying on the bounty of salmon and shellfish not only as a staple of its diet but as a centerpiece of its culture. At the beginning of the fishing season, the tribe gathers on the beach for a First Salmon ceremony, a feast honoring the return of the migratory fish that binds the generations of a tribe that calls itself the People of the Salmon.
At the ceremony’s conclusion, single salmon are ferried by bo...

The high-altitude tree is vital to its ecosystem, but it’s being decimated by a fungus. Its admirers are fusing old and new methods to bring it back.
Melissa Jenkins usually doesn't take pictures on hikes in Montana's Whitefish Range. Here, the whitebark pine that she works to restore has been so decimated by a fungus that gray skeletal ghost forests reign, haunting symbols of a once widespread species. But last summer, she paused to snap a shot of survivors flanking the trail, ragged but def...

NORFOLK — Kim Sudderth went to a meeting of community leaders from the city’s low-income, largely Black Southside last week to hear about the $2.6 billion plan to protect Norfolk from storms and hurricanes.
She left seeing red.
A representative of Norfolk’s Office of Resilience explained that the neighborhood on the south side of the Elizabeth River would be protected by natural shorel...

A 2015 corps study targeted Norfolk because waters are rising faster here than elsewhere in the country, putting the city at risk sooner. The corps later identified cities including Miami and Charleston, S.C., as facing existential threats. Those cities, pioneers in addressing the urban climate threat, are finding that protecting themselves from storm surges is more than a design and engineering problem. It is a complicated and evolving mix of science, social justice, urban planning and finance.

For a century, Jordan Creek cut across downtown Springfield, Missouri. As in so many other 19th-century cities, the waterway was a founding centerpiece of the town. But over the decades, the creek regularly unleashed a tantrum of flooding into the city’s commercial heart. By 1927, residents had tired of rebounding from one watery attack after another. They created tall concrete banks to cage the creek. When that wasn’t enough and the area flooded again five years later, the city entombed the ...

Public discussion over the largest infrastructure project in Norfolk’s history has left residents and business leaders with more questions than answers. Have officials told the whole story?
By Jim Morrison
Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO
The meetings to discuss Norfolk’s $2.7 billion storm risk plan were on opposite sides of the Elizabeth River, a month apart in March and April 2023.
The first gathered leaders of some of the city’s poorest Black neighborhoods on the south...

Norfolk officials sat down for an interview last week to discuss a sensitive subject: a request by Virginia Beach developer Bruce Thompson to alter the proposed alignment of a floodwall so his firm could move forward with a “transformative” waterfront development of hotels, residences, restaurants and an innovation corridor in concert with Sentara and the Eastern Virginia Medical School.
But City Manager Pat Roberts wanted to first address the weightier issue of how the city viewed its partne...

As Norfolk’s $2.66 billion storm risk plan moved toward approval by the City Council last spring, residents of the city’s poorer, Black neighborhoods on the Southside grew heated when they learned wealthier neighborhoods would get protective floodwalls, but they would only get natural solutions like grasses and oyster reefs.
The reason was simple: The analysis done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers showed their homes weren’t worth protecting with the more expensive concrete walls. For decad...

When it comes to protecting against flooding, the National Flood Insurance Program is increasingly underwater in Virginia, especially in Hampton Roads.
A new analysis and online tool created by the Natural Resources Defense Council reveals that nearly 7,000 Virginia properties had repeated claims for flood damage over 10 years. And the program, administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will keep paying out. Only 554 of those properties mitigated their flood risk through methods...

Council may entertain other developers, while pressure grows from state lawmaker
By Jim Morrison
Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO
A scaled-down Norfolk waterfront casino proposal is facing choppy waters from city leaders who have lost patience with the much-delayed project.
Norfolk City Council members in a recent closed session discussed options for scuttling the city’s agreement with the Pamunkey tribe, which submitted an application for a phased development with a $150 ...

Elisha Barnes leaned over the steering wheel of his blue 1961 Ford tractor as workers from the local food bank trudged through a muddy field and dumped baskets of sweet corn into the bucket. “The rain and the heat is pushing this corn real hard,” he said.

When he planted during the second week of May, Barnes worried that it was too late. Now, some of the corn was ready days before the ...

A groundbreaking project in Norfolk, Virginia, multiplies the impact of a $112 million federal grant by making social vulnerability and environmental justice, not just property values, major factors in its calculations.