On the Sea Islands, climate change isn’t a hypothetical or something in the distant future. It’s an everyday reality, with rising seas and more frequent, violent storms.
One local leader trying to preserve her land and her people is Marquetta “Queen Quet” Goodwine, the first elected chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, descendants of formerly enslaved people who have lived on the islands for generations. She’s coming to Charlotte and spoke with WFAE executive editor Ely Portillo, whom she’ll join again for a talk at WFAE’s Climate Summit. Here’s their conversation.
Ely Portillo: Tell me about the Sea Islands and what effects you're seeing already as the climate warms?
Queen Quet: Yeti, we say the water to bring me, the water gonna take me back. So with the Gullah Geechee proverb, the water brought us and the water will take us back, the water is rising. There's consistent flooding. And so I live on historic St. Helena Island, which is the epicenter of Gullah Geechee culture. And there, we have been telling people for decades that changes were happening, but people weren't ready to put in yeti, it didn't need it, it was a thing like that. And so now, when I say to them, I literally live on the front shoreline of climate change, I kind of get people's attention. So we're seeing everything for more intense flood impacts, even on sunny days. I tell people cotton used to be king, now the tide is. And so for those who don't believe that the climate is changing, I'll tell you what, it's already changed.
Portillo: What does climate change look like, sound like, smell like, feel like on your land?
Queen Quet: The smell has changed, just like the smell changes in the air if it's going to rain, if a storms are approaching, there's a unique fresh smell in the air. We started smelling an odor. At many of our shorelines, that's not the pluff mud odor. This is a more rotten odor, a toxic odor. Our seafood industry is in jeopardy. So now what it looks like is that my plate has less crab on it each season because our bivalves, our shelled creatures, can't survive as the oceans acidify. They can't survive as our salt marshes are eroded away.
Portillo: How do you talk to people who, living in a place like Charlotte, think of climate change as something more distant, something that's happening over there, and not really something that they need to think about in their current life?
Queen Quet: So as soon as someone's from an urban environment, my approach, and especially if they're an inland urban environment, then I parallel it to our coastal urban environments.
So our major cities, both of the Jacksonvilles, Savannah, Charleston, all of these are urban environments that are now experiencing not only flooding, they are experiencing intense heat island effect. that we are all literally suffering under the heat of 100-plus degree days. I grew up on the Sea Islands, where 90-degree days in the summer were normal, but having weeks of 100-plus days where every day of the week is over, that is not normal.
Now you have them where they want a dialogue. And so now you can connect once again to getting them to see that, hey, you need to come down and see what we're working on. And then maybe we can help y'all kind of retrofit some of your environments. Maybe you need more natural parts. Maybe when someone is building something, when they rebuild it, they tear down a building, make more permeable surfaces there.
There's other new systems that we can use that will air condition the buildings better and then use solar power. So there's a connection, again, that we can have so that people don't feel we're just off in the distance away from each other and that we're not sharing all in this same global existential issue. So it's important that no matter where we are, we're one globe. And so we all need to come together and deal with this issue.
