When Hurricane Maria neared Puerto Rico in September 2017, coffee farmer Carlos Bonilla Rodríguez sheltered with a neighbor living just uphill from the concrete house he had built with his wife, Miriam. The pair wanted to keep an eye on their home of 25 years, where their children, and later their grandchildren, had played. As the storm worsened, Bonilla Rodríguez watched high winds claw at his zinc roof, tugging its edges until the whole thing lifted off in one piece.

"I could hear the explosions as the cables that held the roof were ripped apart," Bonilla Rodríguez said. He had shared his story as part of a collection of oral histories of the storm compiled by professor Ricia Anne Chansky, director of the Oral History Lab at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. The refrigerator door blew open, scattering food everywhere; framed family photos took flight from the walls. "When everything was taken by the wind, all blown away, and I knew we had nothing, the only thing to do was cry," Bonilla Rodríguez recalled.

In the months following the hurricane, Chansky's students crisscrossed the island to document a disaster supercharged by an overheated climate. The resulting interviews—of farmers like Bonilla Rodríguez, of a factory worker, a dental technician, a community organizer—became Mi María: Surviving the Storm, a 2021 book that joins a wealth of such projects produced in recent years. The new oral histories of climate change range from crowd-sourced DIY storytelling efforts to more formal academic undertakings. Whether collected by amateur historians or gathered by professional academics, climate change oral histories accomplish something important: They evoke empathy, and in doing so imbue a sense of humanity into a crisis more often absorbed with statistics than stories.

Few readers could encounter Bonilla Rodríguez's remembered grief without conjuring some of their own. "That's a story that so many people can identify with," Chansky said. "What if my home was broken in half? What if all our food was gone, and I didn't have money to get more? What if every photograph of every family member that I ever had was destroyed?"

While the work of scientists details our environmental predicament degree by fractional degree, oral history reveals what disaster means to the people living within that predicament.

Oral historians like Chansky are rushing to fill vast lacunae left open by more traditional history writing. For too long, too many voices have been excluded from conventional histories, the sort disinclined to afford whole chapters to the plight of poor coffee farmers in Puerto Rico. Broad social changes spurred a blossoming of oral history in the 1960s, and since then the field has continued to flourish as historians use this methodology to focus on the experiences of Indigenous communities, people of color, laborers, and women. Such perspectives are especially crucial to understanding the past, present, and future of the climate crisis: Already, impoverished countries and marginalized people bear the brunt of each passing disaster, and will continue to do so. The expertise of those communities is essential to us all, because their oral histories can open a vital lens into the myriad ways that people see, and tend to, this changing planet.

"As folks have embraced more oral history work, they've [understood] the value of environmental knowledge that exists, and kind of a lived experience of the land," said Stephen Sloan, the executive director of the Oral History Association and an associate professor of history at Baylor University in Texas. This environmental knowledge might include Indigenous conceptions of a landscape, deep relationships with place, or traditions passed between generations of a farming family. The intelligence of hands skilled at working the land, of seasons spent tilling the earth, recurs in the 2022 book Oral History and the Environment, a collection of oral histories from across the globe that Sloan coedited. The book is full of intergenerational memories—such as long-ago droughts and nights spent praying for the heat to break—that upwell into narratives.

One chapter in the book excerpts the Mallee Climate Oral History Collection by researcher Deb Anderson, who documented a drought-stricken region of the Australian outback. "If you get a drink at the bar or anything like that, the men are all around. And the whole conversation is just about rain, or lack of rain," said Mallee farmer Lynne Healy, whose interview reveals a rural community grappling with a dire climate future. "'Yeah, bit of rain'd be alright. Oh, the crops aren't goin' real well. Oh well, I dunno how long they're gonna last.'"

When placed on the page, such transcriptions slow readers to a conversational pace. There are no facts to scan. Excerpts from interviews retain intimate tics: I mean, I dunno, oooooh. Paging through the book delivers a front-porch feeling of passing time together, of encountering a person irreducible to data. One passage evokes Healy's relief when rain finally returns to the Mallee. "The feeling I had when it rained that night, it's just like this glow. It's like a glow," she said. A few pages later, the female elders of Tanzania's Mara Region recount tales of famine, remembering the twinned loss and ingenuity that accompanied the hardest times. "My grandmother said there was a big hunger when all the food was finished. They burned livestock hides and boiled them in water to get some nutrition," said Priscilla Philemon Ageke, of a 19th-century famine. "If you are starving, you do what you need to do."

While the work of scientists details our environmental predicament degree by fractional degree, oral history reveals what disaster means to the people living within that predicament. When news of what was then called the "greenhouse effect" first made headlines, it drew on graphs tracking atmospheric carbon dioxide high on the Mauna Loa volcano. While the history-making measurement may have seemed abstract then, recent years have sharpened the crisis into granular detail. You don't need special equipment to feel climate change's impact anymore. Today we flush red in its heat waves and wake up in sheets perfumed by burning trees. The climate crisis is now a sensory experience, and oral histories can illuminate the ways we taste, smell, and listen to this world in flux.

"You could hear their footsteps outside; you can hear the crunch real easy on the snow," said Inupiat elder John Sinnok, an artist in Shishmaref, Alaska, recalling the sound of his childhood winters in a recording preserved by the Climate Stories Project. When someone walked by, each step rang out crisp and clean on the cold-hardened snowpack. "Nowadays it doesn't get that hard anymore, where you can hear people walking past. The snow doesn't get that hard, dry anymore like it used to." The tactile nature of such stories dissolves borders and draws on shared experiences. Any reader familiar with the crunch-creak of snow on winter's coldest days might feel a pang at the thought of a season absent the sound.

Storytelling is an ancient art, one nimble enough to serve every generation's needs. In some Inupiat communities, like the one where Sinnok lives, the technique of traditional storytelling is now being used to reinforce long-standing bonds to an environment that has been destabilized by climate change. The Climate Stories Project shows how new tools like cheap and accessible audio recording have democratized the process of preserving and sharing stories. The project's website serves as a forum for oral histories, many recorded on cellphones, that have been submitted from places as disparate as Malawi, Kiribati, and Nunavut. Its Climate Stories Ambassadors program offers free seminars to train would-be oral historians, teaching them how to elicit stories from friends and relatives, then encouraging them to conduct interviews within their local communities.

Not all the stories from the project are about loss. Many draw on the joy that lies in the subtle bonds between people and place. In one history gathered by the Climate Stories Project, Canadian park guide Guy Côté recalled a childhood in eastern Quebec that was closely attuned to the rhythms of hunting and harvesting in the surrounding landscape. "It was the right time to pick apples; it was the right time to pick blueberries; it was the right time to hunt moose," Côté said of the seasonal cycles. Within the Mingan Archipelago of eastern Quebec, where Côté now works, he has observed once-regular tempos gone awry: The colorful wildflowers that adorn Quebec's island forests now bloom in June, not July.

These oral histories of climate change invite us to bear witness—to our own lives, to the voices of others, to biomes near and far. In their telling, all stories become acts of ecological preservation, though their endings remain provisional. We are the authors of the climate crisis, and we will tell its future one story at a time.