Will Seattle Adapt?

I started writing about Hazel investigating crimes in Ravenna, Seattle as a way for me to get my head around climate change. I wanted to live in our climate-changed future in a story that wasn’t a dystopian nightmare. Instead I wanted to see how things could settle, how a community could adapt even if it’s just for a while before the really bad changes came home to roost.

I set it in the Pacific Northwest as it’s an area I know well, and its an area that probably won’t see the worst changes in climate in the near future. Yes, it will be hit by rising seas and storms, and will have to cope with melting glaciers, snowpack that melts earlier and earlier and of course the smoke from the wildfires. The stories are only looking into the near future, 20-25 years from now so the worst won’t have hit yet.

How would Seattle manage to cope? I wanted to work on it like a puzzle - how would Seattle work if the electricity grid became unreliable? What would happen if our running water became compromised? What if we were hit by a pandemic and the airports were shut? Would we manage to cope if the freight trains and trucks stopped delivering food?

Seattle is a city that can be pro-active, with its compost collection, rainwater-garden project and early adoption of bans of many types of single-use plastic. I could see the city bringing in a composting-toilet or victory-garden program early on, before many other places act. Would that be enough though for us to get through the tough years, the years we have to adapt quickly to cascading changes and a shrinking world? Hazel and her community and still alive, struggling but adapting to their new world.