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...

After residents of Norfolk’s historic Freemason neighborhood objected to proposed floodwalls snaking through their community, blocking river views, potentially depressing property values and leaving condominium buildings exposed, staff members from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers walked the planned path with local leaders in January.
Jack Kavanaugh, a retired admiral who heads the neighborhood civic league, said he was encouraged when an Army Corps official assured residents that “we’re not ...

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...

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.

For Marjorie Mayfield-Jackson of Norfolk’s Elizabeth River Project, signing a groundbreaking agreement to tear down the organization’s new $9 million headquarters when waters rise too high was bittersweet.
“It’s hard to not even have had the grand opening yet and we’re talking about celebrating taking it down,” she said.
When, decades from now, time and tide can no longer be denied, the nonprofit will surrender the 6,500-square-foot Pru and Louis Ryan Resilience Lab in a final act of adaptati...

Hampton Roads Ventures, created by the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, is headquartered in this office building in Norfolk. (Jim Morrison/ For the Virginia Mercury)
NORFOLK — When they posed for a picture in an empty field 18 years ago, Robert K. Jenkins and other Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority officials were confident that a new subsidiary would bring a much-needed shopping center to Norfolk’s Berkley neighborhood by pioneering the use of a fledgling federal tax cre...

Hampton Roads Ventures, a subsidiary of the Norfolk housing authority, has been under a microscope over out-of-state projects
After months of scrutiny of the out-of-state deals financed by Hampton Roads Ventures, Norfolk Mayor Kenneth Alexander said the city will draft a resolution requiring the housing authority’s subsidiary to focus on Norfolk.
The comments by Alexander came after a meeting with representatives of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority and Hampton Roads Ventures du...

The controversy over Armed Forces Brewing mirrors increasingly divisive national battles about free speech and the ways in which businesses appeal to politicized niches of the public
NORFOLK — Alan Beal, the chief executive of the fledgling Armed Forces Brewing Company, was scouting locations in Florida to buy a brewery in January when he got a call from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
“The governor let me know that Virginia would love to have us relocate and open a brewing facility and employ ...

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 ...

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...