62 pages • 2-hour read
All the Water in the World
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Themes
The Social and Emotional Impacts of Climate Change
Content Warning: This section discusses death and racism.
Climate change is a central element of All the Water in the World. The novel constantly compares and juxtaposes the world before and after climate-related collapse. The novel starts in November, which is described as much warmer than is typical in the modern day, and centers strongly around collapse, both emotional and social. The climate is increasingly hostile, creating massive flooding and unpredictable storms. Society has long since fallen apart, and no central authority controls the US any longer. Trust among people has eroded; communities are small and often insular, and many are xenophobic or actively racist against any nonwhite travelers that pass through. Drifters are called “the Lost” and are regarded as a danger severe enough to discourage campfires even on cold nights. Even the archetypal bond between man and dog has collapsed: Domesticated dogs have gone feral and rove in vicious, predatory packs. However, the way people react to these various forms of collapse is what defines them in “The World As It Is.”
As climate change worsened before the novel’s present, floods submerged large swathes of the US coastline, human-built infrastructure disintegrated, and military and federal staff eventually broke up and went rogue. The Feral House is a small outpost of former US Army members who moved in when the military collapsed. They have links with some other settlements but are otherwise severely isolationist, shooting anyone who draws too close. The leader of this community, Jared, is extremely mistrustful of anyone who isn’t white. However, he’s willing to let a former Army medic, Mary (who is of Indigenous descent), live there because of her useful skills. Meanwhile, Hancock is the largest and most developed settlement. A man named Childs controls this compound. He considers it a place to rebuild after the collapse, but in reality, it’s an oppressive, coercive order based on indentured servitude. They aggressively seize resources from the surrounding area, even attacking a refugee center, overwhelming the military forces there and raiding the supplies.
Amen, the settlement on the AMNH’s roof, where Nonie lives when the novel begins, includes mainly curators, researchers, and museum staff who reacted to societal collapse in an optimistic way. They consider it temporary, believing that society will rebuild in the future. They preserve and pack away the museum’s artifacts and exhibits, keeping a record of them in a central logbook so that people in the future can rediscover and recover them. However, Amen is an extremely insular settlement, avoiding strangers and turning them away. Since the world is in a state of collapse, they act cautiously and defensively to avoid putting their preservation efforts and community at risk. Another nearby settlement, the Cloisters, has a different attitude: They’re known to take in strangers. The novel reveals that they record the story of each stranger they welcome in a record room called the scriptorium. Their attitude reflects a belief that “The World As It Is” is a new paradigm in which history, people, and stories are worth preserving. They don’t see the collapse of the US and society elsewhere as the end of history but as a part of it. Nonie, Father, Bix, and Keller stay with them after Amen collapses. The remaining residents of the Cloisters are preparing to leave since their population collapsed beyond sustainable levels.
Through these various settlements, the author reflects different aims and mindsets amid the world’s communities today: Some focus on preserving culture but remain isolated, others reach out to and accept newcomers, some only offer aid in exchange for labor, and a few won’t interact with other communities at all. Caffall depicts the myriad ways that people could react to environmental and societal collapse, which would push individuals to extremes as their lives become insecure and uncertain. Many people who may have acted normally before may have to make difficult decisions, sometimes involving harm to others, in their quest for safety. Still, the novel highlights how the decision to hoard resources rather than share them is the same mindset that helped destroy society in the first place. Much like the racism present in some settlements, the issues in the story aren’t new; rather, they’re perpetual ills of American culture or the wider world, given that extreme greed and a disregard for others’ safety partially led to the climate disaster that the novel depicts.
The Importance of Preserving Knowledge and Culture
The community of Amen formed around the preservation of knowledge. Its members work together to package and preserve the museum’s artifacts and exhibits, ensuring that they aren’t stolen or damaged. They record the details of their work in a central logbook to help people in the future find and recover these objects. Nonie’s mother took charge of the central logbook, adding reports from other community members into it while she was still alive. This impresses the importance of preservation on Nonie. After her mother dies, Nonie starts her own logbook called the Water Logbook, recording the different types of weather and states of water she senses. Additionally, Nonie takes responsibility for physically preserving the logbooks, wrapping them in waterproof sheets and storing them in her emergency go-bag, which she grabs when the hypercane destroys Amen.
Amen’s members highly value specialized knowledge. Keller’s etymological knowledge enables him to determine which insects have vanished, which are flourishing, and which are potentially harmful. Another member of the community, Oliver, knows how to flint knap, a vital skill for making arrowheads. Nonie’s mother emphasized maternal knowledge, possibly because of her awareness of her terminal kidney disease. She ensured that Nonie and Bix both had access to maternal figures who could pass down knowledge to them. Meanwhile, Nonie’s father worked in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a curator of early American architecture and thus has knowledge essential for “The World As It Is.” Based on Haudenosaunee architectural techniques he studied, he built a longhouse, where his wife convalesced. He shared this knowledge with others too: Nonie and Bix learned to use a bow and arrow and how to build a travois, a type of stretcher, which they use to carry Keller when he’s ill.
The group later arrives at the Cloister, an altruistic settlement near Amen known for taking in travelers and giving them bed and board for three days and for recording accounts from travelers and preserving them in a special room they call the scriptorium. The people in the Cloister hold this room in high regard, as it’s the only room in their settlement they’ve wired for electric lights with generators. The scriptorium reinforces the idea that various forms of knowledge and experience have value. One culture, perspective, or history isn’t necessarily more important than another. While Amen sees scientific or historical knowledge as valuable, Nonie brings her prescient abilities and experiences to the fore through her Water Logbook, which reveals another facet of useful knowledge. The Cloister’s scriptorium reveres the personal stories of travelers rather than the facets of culture that a traditional museum preserves, further underscoring the idea that individual experiences are just as important as both wider cultural movements and science.
The Importance of Building a Future
Amen is a backward-looking community in that they spend their time trying to preserve the past. Everyone there exists in a kind of holding pattern, waiting for something, though no one knows what. Father, Mother, Nonie, and Bix originally intended to stay only for a while, but they then started waiting and eventually never left. They don’t move on until a storm literally forces them to. While their aims to preserve cultural and scientific artifacts are valuable, their focus doesn’t necessarily contribute to effectively building a future, since they divert resources toward preservation. In addition, this focus encourages them to fixate on their personal troubles, since they’re all constantly grieving the world they lost in floods.
Bix spends much of her time in memories. She looks back on Amen, wishing she could return to her old life. This aligns with her character in comparison to Nonie: Bix remembers more of the old world; she thus has more to mourn and more to fear from the future. Nonie, however, lives with the future in mind. From the moment she understood that her mother was dying, she began to carry and protect the Museum Logbook and to author the Water Logbook. In it, she writes down her intuitive understanding of different kinds of water: “My Water Logbook was only for the future. I was young then and didn’t know why I was making it. Now I know it was to make the new way of knowing that might put it all right again” (7). This mindset and discovery about her own goals reveals her preoccupation with ensuring that her knowledge and that of the generation before her isn’t lost. However, building a future evokes a return to the past, which is impossible. In contrast to the settlement of Amen falling victim to the weather in its refusal to move to safer lands, Nonie recognizes that living in the past isn’t always helpful. When she arrives at the farm at the novel’s end, she puts the logbooks aside; they’ll be helpful for the future, but after everything she’s been through, they’re now part of her past. She has something new to look forward to: the arrival of the research vessel Sally Ride.
Throughout the novel, she repeatedly asserts that she hopes it’s still out there, conducting its mission to study for the future. A major turning point for her character is learning that the Sally Ride is real and continues to operate. Not only that, but it docks every three years, and a member of the crew visits Esther. This crew member offers to take Nonie with her to the Sally Ride, and Nonie reflects, “You cannot always be in Leningrad. You are allowed to hope for something that doesn’t just save, something that builds” (231). She’s referring to the museum that defended its cultural artifacts at all costs throughout the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, which directly parallels the aims of the Amen settlement. While the crew member understands the value of their work, people currently need help and require security for the future, something that can’t be immediately guaranteed through historical and cultural preservation. Nonie’s can finally fulfill her desire to help build a future rather than save a broken past through the more proactive mission of the Sally Ride.
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