'All the Water in the World' Follows a Settlement on the Roof of the AMNH

Summary

Podcast Summary: "All the Water in the World" on All Of It by WNYC

Episode Title: All the Water in the World
Host: Alison Stewart
Guest: Erin Caffel, Author of All the Water in the World
Release Date: January 31, 2025
Duration Covered: 00:37 – 18:42

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1. Introduction to the Episode and Guest

In this episode of All Of It, Alison Stewart introduces Erin Caffel, the debut author of the novel All the Water in the World. The novel envisions a dystopian Lower Manhattan submerged underwater due to climate change, focusing on a community that forms atop the American Museum of Natural History.

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2. Fiction vs. Non-Fiction in Conveying the Climate Crisis

Alison Stewart opens the discussion by inquiring about the unique capabilities of fiction in addressing the climate crisis compared to non-fiction. Erin Caffel responds:

“[01:56] I think that fiction can take us to places where we can access the facts and the information that's available to anyone in the science, but give us an imaginational window into it so that we can kind of practice what we feel in a safe world that can, maybe be a little bit less real. And terrifying than the day to day. Statistics that we're reading.”

Caffel emphasizes that fiction allows readers to emotionally engage with climate issues in a more profound and personal way than statistics alone can convey.

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3. Erin Caffel’s Background and Its Influence on Her Novel

Alison Stewart explores how Erin’s experience as a science journalist and nature writer informs her fiction writing. Erin shares:

“[02:29] Oh my goodness, incredibly helpful. I mean, I was raised by scientists. I spent many years and still do, working as a, as a science journalist, doing a lot of research and having a lot of conversations with activists and scientists and doing just huge deep dives into papers about ocean acidification and global warming and climate collapse and ecosystemic change.”

Caffel credits her scientific background with providing the rigorous research foundation essential for crafting a believable and scientifically accurate narrative.

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4. Research on Museum Curators and Historical Preservation

Alison asks about Erin’s research into the efforts of museum curators during crises, specifically referencing historical events like World War II and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Erin responds:

“[04:24] …this idea of people staying because they felt a duty to the collections, that they had been part of curating was absolutely true. And that in Leningrad, the curators stayed. For the entirety of the siege, the full three years of starvation.”

Caffel highlights the extraordinary dedication of curators who preserved cultural and scientific treasures amidst overwhelming adversity, drawing parallels to her novel’s premise.

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5. The Significance of the American Museum of Natural History in the Novel

Alison prompts Erin to explain why she chose the American Museum of Natural History as the novel’s sanctuary. Erin reflects:

“[10:18] …for me, especially as the daughter of a scientist, as the granddaughter of a scientist… these places as, you know, palaces to understanding, as evolving collections, as the home of really deep science research. Really, it matters to me.”

The museum symbolizes a bastion of knowledge and culture, serving as a critical refuge and center for preservation in the face of environmental catastrophe.

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6. Depiction of Manhattan Flooding

When discussing the novel’s portrayal of a flooded Manhattan, Erin delves into her meticulous research:

“[14:38] …I had a great website that I was using throughout the writing of the book where you could flood the entire planet to whatever degree of sea level rise you wanted to play with.”

She combined scientific tools and expert consultations to create a realistic and detailed vision of a submerged Manhattan, ensuring that the environmental changes depicted were both plausible and vividly imagined.

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7. Themes of Hope and Community in the Face of Disaster

Alison inquires about the emotional journey of the novel’s characters as they navigate disaster. Erin explains:

“[16:39] …they feel hope for the future because they feel hope in each other and also because they have this discipline of imagining a world to come that they may never see.”

The novel underscores the resilience of community and the sustaining power of hope, illustrating how collective effort and mutual support enable individuals to endure and aspire even in dire circumstances.

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8. Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the conversation wraps up, Erin reflects on the personal and universal aspects of her work:

“[17:49] …if you begin to believe that it's all settled and set and over and that there's no hope, you make your decisions so differently.”

Erin emphasizes the importance of maintaining hope and agency, both for personal well-being and for societal progress in addressing global challenges.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Erin Caffel on Fiction’s Role:
  “[01:56] I think that fiction can take us to places where we can access the facts and the information that's available to anyone in the science…”

• Erin Caffel on Scientific Background:
  “[02:29] …incredibly helpful. I was raised by scientists…”

• Erin Caffel on Curators’ Dedication:
  “[04:25] …people would stay because they felt a duty to the collections…”

• Erin Caffel on the Museum’s Significance:
  “[10:18] …palaces to understanding, as evolving collections, as the home of really deep science research.”

• Erin Caffel on Hope and Community:
  “[16:39] …they feel hope for the future because they feel hope in each other…”

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Final Notes

Erin Caffel's All the Water in the World is a poignant exploration of climate catastrophe, preservation of culture, and the enduring human spirit. Through meticulous research and emotional storytelling, the novel invites readers to envision both the fragility and resilience of our world in the face of environmental upheaval.

Transcript

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[Erin Caffel]

Listener Supported WNYC Studios.

[Alison Stewart]

You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. In the new novel all the Water in the World, Lower Manhattan is underwater. Much of the city is unlivable thanks to climate change. Luckily for a girl named Noni, she and her family have found a safe place, the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. Noni's mother used to work there before everything collapsed. Now a group of former employees and their loved ones have formed a settlement they call Amen. That community is dedicated to the survival of the museum. They spend their days cataloging the treasures of the collections. But when a massive hurricane hits a hypercane, the museum finally floods. Noni and her family flee in a canoe they've taken from the museum's collection and head into the unknown with the logbook in Tower. All the Water in the World is the debut from writer Erin Caffel. She was inspired by the real life stories of museum curators going to great lengths to protect their collections in the midst of World War II and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Erin is also a science journalist and a nature writer who draws on her years of experience for this novel. She joins me now. Hi, Erin.

[Erin Caffel]

Hi, Alison.

[Alison Stewart]

So you're a science journalist and a nature writer. What do you think fiction can convey about the climate crisis that nonfiction can't?

[Erin Caffel]

I think that fiction can take us to places where we can access the facts and the information that's available to anyone in the science, but give us an imaginational window into it so that we can kind of practice what we feel in a safe world that can.

Maybe be a little bit less real.

And terrifying than the day to day.

Statistics that we're reading. At least that's how it worked out.

For me as a writer working in a different genre.

[Alison Stewart]

Well, it's your first novel and how is your background as a science writer helpful to you?

[Erin Caffel]

Oh my goodness, incredibly helpful. I mean, I was raised by scientists. I spent many years and still do, working as a, as a science journalist, doing a lot of research and having a lot of conversations with activists and scientists and doing just huge deep dives into papers about ocean acidification and global warming and climate collapse and ecosystemic Change. And I was. During the writing of this book, which took me 11 years, I was kind of going back and forth between the memoir I was working on, which was very much based in the present, and also this imagination of what would happen if the worst case scenarios that I was reading about came to pass. And so I created. My first draft of the book, actually was twice as long as the book that you can get now.

[Alison Stewart]

I'm sure you had all that research. Right, right.

[Erin Caffel]

It was huge. It was just deep with all this research because I really wanted to make sure that you.

[Alison Stewart]

My mom.

[Erin Caffel]

My mom and I used to, for fun, watch all of the movies where.

The scientists are the heroes.

And so I really wanted to make sure that what happened to us whenever somebody got the geology wrong and my mom couldn't. Couldn't concentrate on the movie, it would not happen to somebody reading the book, that if a scientist picked it up, or a curator or somebody who wanted to go to the museum or somebody who grew up in New Jersey picked it up, they would be able to recognize a world that felt real, even if I was positing a future. That is pretty horrific.

[Alison Stewart]

I know you did some research into what museum curators in Stalingrad and in Iraq did to help save their collections. What did you learn about the work they did, and how did that help you with this novel?

[Erin Caffel]

Yeah, I mean, I kind of knew.

About it a little bit in the.

Periphery from, you know, reading that I'd done before I started the research on the book.

But I read Anna Reid's fantastic book Leningrad.

And of course I read Monuments Men. And, you know, one of the things that I found to be so fantastic.

Was that this idea that I had.

That, you know, people would stay because they felt a duty to the collections, that they had been part of curating was absolutely true. And that in Leningrad, the curators stayed.

For the entirety of the siege, the full three years of starvation.

And they made a makeshift community in the basement of the hermitage, and they chipped the ice off of the masterpieces and they ate restorer's paste and they slept on palace furniture and buried their dead. And they did that because the people who had chosen to stay behind didn't just feel that it was a job, it was a calling, and that they.

Were protecting something for a future that.

They were trying to imagine on the other side of the siege.

And that every story I read about.

That kind of dedication to scientific knowledge, to curation, to preservation of the past, to being an archivist or a librarian, every time I read a Story. It reminded me that, you know, the work that even someone like my mom was doing to preserve information, information and scientific knowledge was, was part of the same drive of. This isn't just about that. I like to go to work in the museum. This is, this is my duty, this is my calling.

[Alison Stewart]

Yeah. In war they say destroy the culture first.

[Erin Caffel]

Yes, exactly. And we've seen that over and over again. I mean, there's ongoing work in the Ukraine right now to try to restore sites that have been bombed. Obviously we've seen incredible devastation in Gaza and it's part of sustained attacks on information and also the future of science. I mean, I think it's significant that preserved bird skins from 18th century, 19th century trips to collect information about bird populations worldwide were moved from London into the country during the blitz because there's this sense of if you can hold on to that information. I'm so sorry, my cat has decided to go hunting.

That's ok.

If you can preserve this information that you also are preserving the possibility of restoring the culture that the conflict is trying to destroy. And I think of that even, you know, right now I've. I've been following a lot of the scientists who are downloading and preserving scientific data from federal websites as they go dark because they are trying to make sure that that's there for. For future generations, for future scientists, future years.

[Alison Stewart]

Did your cat bring you a present?

[Erin Caffel]

She did.

She loves to hunt. It's probably a stuffed lamb. It's not real. We have no mysity.

[Alison Stewart]

Okay. I'm speaking to Erin Caffel, author of the new novel all the Water in the World. It's about a group's attempt to save the American Museum of Natural History amidst a climate disaster. I'm gonna ask you to read a little bit from the book. This passage tells us how things in the city begin to deteriorate just before the flood sent the family to the museum. Could you read those two pages for us?

[Erin Caffel]

Yeah, absolutely. This is chapter seven. The world as it was. Storms always came. They took things. They took things. Before I was born, mother and father told me that bits of the coastline, Glaciers, reefs, whole islands, cities.

San Juan, Miami, the Azores.

Shenzhen, Mumbai, the Philippines. Bangkok.

Abidjan, Nagoya, New Zealand.

They took water from the inland and gave it to the sea. Crops failed. Forests caught fire. Tall mountain ranges burned with the trees along their ridgelines. People moved to places where the food was. Countries filled and emptied until the people themselves were the floods and the droughts. Mother and father watched it happen on.

Their laptops, reading articles Looking at pictures of lost side by side on the.

Couch on 10th Street. The electric off and on. Mother told me it was slow at first, the way the world changed. You could forget about it. People talked like you could fix it. A storm would pass and they'd put things back together. Or one day there was no gas and you learned to live without your car. You learned to live without bananas, without airplanes. That's how Mother said it. She said it like losing. Taught you lessons you needed until you were happy to have a day with fresh water in your apartment and a bath. It was slow enough. You might have babies like mother and father them, wondering if that was smart. Bix first born in a hospital with power and lights before martial law. Me three years later, born at home in the dark. Things fell in slow motion. Rolling blackouts. Waves of refugees heading north and west. Army everywhere, Gas rationed, food scarce. The President in a huge ship Offshore in the old city, they built floodgates that kept the sea outside, blocked the ocean getting up the river made the city an island. We lived inside a bowl that flooded up from the sewers when the storms came. In the old city, weather was a gamble. It was hot nearly all year, dry when you needed water, flooding so it couldn't be managed, cold snaps would come and plunge you into ice, then melt and flood again. All the time, everyone hoping it might.

Turn around until they knew it wouldn't.

Until the world warmed up so fast you couldn't catch your breath. Every year the storms were bigger, moving the ocean up into the streets. But there was electric. Sometimes there were people in the city none of us ever imagined.

Amen.

There were jobs and grocery stores.

We had a ration card.

We drove places. And you could just take a car.

Out on the road like that, like it was nothing.

[Alison Stewart]

That's Erin Caffel reading from her new book, all the Water in the World. The family finds refuge at the American Museum of Natural History. Why did you pick that particular museum?

[Erin Caffel]

Oh, because I was obsessed with it as a child. Completely obsessed.

I was born in New York City.

But my parents went kind of quote unquote, back to the land, although both of them were from the city. My mom was from the Upper west side and my dad was from Jersey City, so they really didn't have an experience of being. But I grew up in this very rural place with family in the city. And so we went back a couple of times a year to visit. And it was just the biggest, most important palace in my life as a child. And like many people, I Was obsessed with the idea of, like, what would happen if I could be here after everyone else was gone. And then, you know, as a young mother, while I was writing this, this book, while I was a single parent and I had a really little kid, we lived a bus ride away from the Field Museum of Natural History here in Chicago.

And we were there a couple of.

Times a week until kindergarten. We knew the place inside and out in the way that I had when I was younger and was obsessed with the museum. And I think, you know, for me, especially as the daughter of a scientist, as the granddaughter of a scientist, as.

A person who's always been interested in.

Writing about nature, even though I was an English major through and through from the first, the idea of these places as, you know, palaces to understanding, as evolving collections, as the home of really deep science research. Really, it matters to me. Me, it's a place that, you know, even yet when I go to the Field Museum member night and get to go behind the scenes, we call it Nerd Christmas. It's like my favorite thing in the world to be able to go and see how people work. And I couldn't avoid writing about it if I wanted to, because when I think about what happens to my home in the worst case scenario, I think about all the people, but I also think about what happens to these incredible institutions that represent so much of what the riches of our culture are.

[Alison Stewart]

The settlement at the museum, they call themselves. Amen. How did you arrive on that name?

[Erin Caffel]

I mean, it just came to me when I started writing this character. She sort of showed up, which I always find to be a really pretentious thing that writers say, but they all say it things.

[Alison Stewart]

Characters just show up.

[Erin Caffel]

They do.

I had gotten off the phone with my godfather, who lives in Crown Heights.

And he was just coming back from trying to pump seawater out of his daughter's house in Red Hook after Superstorm Sandy. And he was telling me these really.

Specific details about, like, the way that.

The water had combined with sewage and oil and created this glass, like, surface on the sidewalks and the knee nearly fell. And, you know, I was. I was really not able to sleep because the other thing that my mother would do would be to send me articles about how everything was falling apart. So I have this tiny child. I'm a, you know, single parent. I have an. I have an incurable genetic disease. I'm thinking, God, we're so vulnerable. And I couldn't sleep. And she showed up. And when she showed up, she showed up with the full, like this is where we live. This is what we call. And it made sense to me because obviously we call it AMNH or, you know, people shorten their workplaces all the time. And I thought if you lived there for long enough, you would. It would slur into something. And also, you know, I think that it's. It's part of what I wanted to investigate is what do we hold onto in terms of our feeling about the future? And that really is a question in some ways of faith, not necessarily of Christianity, but of, like, what do we. What kind of anchor points do we find for the future when we think about it? And how do we form those communities of practice around that? My father was also a cabinet maker for my entire life, and he made Shaker furniture. And so he was completely obsessed with utopian communities. I grew up with a huge library about them and going to them every weekend. And, you know, I took my first steps in the Shaker, a Shaker museum in western Massachusetts. And so that idea of, like, how do we form communities in the face of things that feel overwhelming?

What do we do?

I mean, he always said, famously said, utopias fail. So I certainly wasn't trying to find a version of this that was permanent. I wanted to talk about how we cling to each other and create spaces for each other that are safe when things are overwhelming, and what happens when we have to evolve them and change.

[Alison Stewart]

Well, about 70 pages into the book, this. This hypercane hits and Manhattan is flooded.

[Erin Caffel]

Yeah.

[Alison Stewart]

What decisions did you make about what it would look like if Manhattan flooded?

[Erin Caffel]

Well, I mean, this is a very nerdy answer, but I had a great website that I was using throughout the.

Writing of the book where you could.

Flood the entire planet to whatever degree.

Of sea level rise you wanted to.

Kind of play with. It sounds really morbid, but as a science writer, I loved it.

And I had that tab open on.

My computer alongside maps of New York. I had a great canoeing map of the entire Hudson that I had laid out on my desk while I was writing. So whenever I would go to put my characters in a part of the world that had been overwhelmed by sea level rise, I would compare and contrast to both of those resources to try and create a picture of, like, well, how much of the trees would be standing up, or when they have to go past the Brooklyn or the George Washington Bridge, are they going to have to go under? Are they going to have to portage? Is it going to be underwater? Will they have to duck? And my godfather, the same one I mentioned before, is A city planning professor now retired at St. John's and I would call him up and say, okay, so how exactly high is the undercarriage of the George Washington Bridge? Can you help me figure it out? So it was very detailed and then it was this imaginative investigation into. I mean, I write about water all the time. It's very much a muse of all of the creative work that I've done.

Up to this point.

So trying to picture what it would look like looking down into a space. And then, you know, I also read some really great writers on what happens in huge floods. There's a fantastic book called Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson, who wrote Devil in the White City about the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. And I think he's just brilliant in terms of evoking what it looks like when a low lying city is overwhelmed by an incredible tidal surge. So I kind of. It was a blend of all of those things.

[Alison Stewart]

This family sets out in a canoe after Manhattan is flooded. Do they feel hope for the future?

[Erin Caffel]

Yeah, I think they do, but I think they feel hope for the future.

Because they feel hope in each other and also because they have this discipline of imagining a world to come that they may never see. Right. That. That's part of the discipline of the work that they do in the museum. And part of their calling is we may not get to it, we may not know what it looks like. Maybe not all of us will make it there, but we are going to behave in such a way that we reinforce the possibilities of what will come. And you know, when I'm. When I'm asked about this often, what I think about is the fact that I do have an incurable genetic disease. I'm 150 years deep into that story in my family. And I can't separate that sense of the baton passing of generation to generation, hope for what might come from my own story. It was very much how I was raised. You never know what thing will arrive to change the trajectory or the fate of your own life. And if you begin to believe that it's all settled and set and over and that there's no hope, you make your decisions so differently.

[Alison Stewart]

You have to believe it. You have to believe in hope. The name of the book is all the Water in the World. It is by Aaron Caffel. Erin, thank you so much for being with us.

[Erin Caffel]

Thank you so much for having me. It was a total joy.

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[Erin Caffel]

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[Erin Caffel]

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