Why we remember floods and forget droughts
[R]ather than planning for dry conditions that, because of climate change, are likely to become far more frequent and deadly, Americans seem incapable of even remembering them. Around the world, the landscape itself records our long history of floods. Recent inundation is easy to see in high-water marks, which trace the edges of the tide with soil and seed deposits. Sometimes people memorialize these marks, carving into stone and labeling the lines with dates, like a child’s growth chart drawn on a door frame. … As John Steinbeck wrote in the opening pages of East of Eden, “It never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”