Event video

About this event

As part of Climate Prep Week 2022, the Rice University Fondren Library Green Team and the Leventhal Map & Education Center present a conversation about the challenges of communicating climate risks and impacts in two different geographic contexts. Rice professor and Houston-based author Lacy M. Johnson will discuss her new book, More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas, and the process of working with graphic designers to produce maps that document Hurricane Harvey’s impact on Houston. Based in Boston, Zoe Davis works for the City of Boston as a Climate Resilience Project Manager on the Climate Ready Boston team, which informs local climate planning and helps residents visualize and prepare for the impacts of future climate risks. The conversation will help explore what’s at stake when communicating about climate change, whether as a historical record of a past disaster or as part of future-focused public policy.

Our speakers:

Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist and author of the essay collection The Reckonings (Scribner, 2018) and the memoir The Other Side (Tin House, 2014) — both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists — and the memoir Trespasses (U Iowa Press, 2012). She is editor, with the graphic designer Cheryl Beckett, of More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas (UT Press, 2022). She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the founding director of the Houston Flood Museum.

Zoe Davis serves as a Climate Resilience Project Manager on the Climate Ready Boston Team in the City of Boston’s Environment Department. As a project manager, she supports neighborhood climate resilience planning, the integration of climate change preparedness into municipal projects and planning, as well as the development of preparedness resources for residents and other stakeholders. Before joining the City, Zoe served as a land stewardship coordinator and TerraCorps Service Member with the Mystic River Watershed Association.