Discovering Marina Psaros's Atlas of Disappearing Places

February 17, 2022

Start down the path of becoming trancilient!

On this episode of Shorewords! join host Lesley Ewing in conversation with Marina Psaros about The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis, co-authored with Christina Conklin.  The Atlas tell the stories of existential climate threats and what might come next.  The Atlas uses 20 coastal communities from around the world to highlight four main threats to the global ocean ecosystem arising from chemical impacts, storms, warming water and rising tides.  Enjoy Marina’s stories about this 5-year project, steps to become transilient, her earlier efforts with the King Tides project, and those things that help her maintain a positive perspective of the coast.

Show Transcription
This transcription was generated by a computer. Please excuse any errors.
Lesley Ewing

Hello. I’m Lesley Ewing, host of Shorewords!. This podcast combines two of my favorite things – the ocean and books. I learned to swim before I could walk and looked forward each summer to my family’s vacation at Ocean City, Maryland. As a student I was interested in science and engineering and became an environmental engineer before learning that there was something called coastal engineering. Both my 1 st and 2 nd mid-life crises resulted in me going back to school – first for a Masters of Engineering at UC Berkeley and later for a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. The first crisis also moved me from DC to the SF Bay. The second crisis reminded me how much I liked to read. Getting a Ph.D. while working a 40+-hour/week job meant that my only reading was work reports, text books and technical articles. They were all important and interesting books, but as soon as school ended, I replaced my academic text books with broader literature and realized that the coast was often a character in the fiction and non-fiction that I read. I am still fascinated by every visit to the ocean and remain in awe of what others write about the coast.