This, she says, is the original sin of recovery — that we don’t recognize what the disaster itself is telling us. A true thousand-year flood doesn’t reveal much about what new resilience must be built over the next decade, since you only expect to see something like it again 10 centuries from now. That it might come again before the next census or town council election is such an unnerving prospect that we resist it almost magnetically, preferring to believe our suffering was freakish and improbable. And in the immediate aftermath of disaster, public attention and collective ambition are pulled perversely backward, toward restoration, as much as pushed forward, toward adaptation.

For years, one promise of rapid decarbonization was that it might allow us to secure a stable climate, familiar and comfortable by the standards of the past, into which we might innovate and adapt to build a more hospitable world. Today the green transition is proceeding at inspiring speed and we have flattened the curve of global carbon emissions. But warming isn’t slowing, at least not yet. Instead it’s accelerating, drawing the world quickly past temperature thresholds we once called the dividing line between livable futures and a much darker world.

Perhaps that bright line was a projection of hyperbole and panic, since ecosystems are not ruled by neat binaries and humans will find ways to adapt to the jaggedness of warming, often by normalizing its recurring brutality. But it is no longer possible to dream of a world unperturbed by what was once called catastrophic global temperature rise. And it is no longer sufficient to see disasters only as tragedies, or policy failures, or even a shameful form of carbon comeuppance. They are opportunities, too: not simply to defiantly restore what was damaged or destroyed but to better prepare for, and protect against, a world we once hoped to avoid even imagining.

Just think of a recent disaster — the Palisades fire; Hurricane Helene. The immediate playbook of recovery is familiar, even for those watching from afar: search-and-rescue, clearing debris, restoring some basic public services and temporarily standing up others. “But when Anderson Cooper leaves town, it’s not as sexy,” Kayyem says. “It’s not all the madness, with the cops and the firefighters, and it’s not the child reunited with the mother or the dog reunited with the senior citizen. It’s just the really difficult stuff, which we didn’t take seriously before, because we all figured disasters were random and rare. We figure we’ll just throw a lot of money at the problem, get the community back on its feet and move on.”

Perhaps some local group will rally for new flood barriers, or a county official will press a weather-hardening initiative for local homes. But once you’re out of immediate danger, the recovery often grows rudderless against an ocean of contrary currents. Insurance payments frequently reward rebuilding in precisely the same spot, and for homeowners the highest priority is typically to return as quickly as possible — even if that means not waiting for new codes and building guidelines, let alone paying more to implement them. The tax base has a status quo bias, too, since localities expect certain revenue to stream from certain places, which happens only if the community returns to form. Local transportation and social services, too, were designed to serve the needs of the old community.