Mulch/biochar Man Part 1

When the Mountains Fell: A Wake-Up Call from Hurricane Helene

I’ve lived in North Carolina for 43 years, ever since I left Canada in 1981 to teach at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Over the decades, I’ve come to love this place. The Raleigh-Durham area is lush, green, and welcoming. The seasons are balanced, the culture is rich, and the economy is vibrant. It’s a wonderful place to raise a family—and, I thought, to retire.

That same sense of promise drew my wife and me to the Carolina mountains. We bought land in Buncombe County, near Asheville, with the idea of building a home that could serve as a haven for our children as climate change intensified elsewhere. The mountains, we believed, would offer refuge—cooler temperatures, fewer floods, and a buffer from the chaos.

That belief didn’t last long.

The Storm That Changed Everything

In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene tore through the region. It wasn’t supposed to happen—not there, not like that. But it did. The storm surged up from the Gulf, intensified by overheated waters and saturated land, and unleashed devastation across Western North Carolina.

Entire towns—Chimney Rock, Holly Springs, Marshall, Swannanoa, parts of Asheville—were washed away. Over 100,000 homes and 6,000 miles of road were damaged or destroyed. The official death toll was 101, but locals say it was far higher. The damage exceeded $50 billion.

Helene wasn’t just a storm. It was a dividing line in my thinking.

The Tidal Wave We Didn’t See Coming

For years, I had studied the four major trends reshaping our world:

• Climate change

• Demographic shifts

• A fractured global order

• Technological disruption

I wrote about them in Ten Years to Midnight, warning that time was running out. But Helene made something painfully clear: these weren’t separate forces. They had fused into a single, unrelenting tidal wave.

Like a tsunami in deep water, the trends had seemed manageable—distant, abstract. But when they hit land, they became catastrophic. Helene was the wave crashing ashore.

The Emotional Toll

The aftermath was biblical. A pastor drowned in his church. A man was swept away while watching the storm from his living room. Homes were ripped from their foundations. Our neighbors were without power or water for five weeks. Numbers painted on houses marked how many people had died inside. Furniture and bodies hung from trees. One house, torn in half, stood like a dollhouse on the roadside—its owner now living in a tent.

And Helene wasn’t an isolated event. In 2025, Los Angeles and the Pacific Palisades went up in flames. The tidal wave is everywhere.

The Intellectual Reckoning

Helene also forced a hard look at the assumptions we’d made:

• Climate Change: There are no climate havens. The mountains weren’t immune—they were just next. We failed to imagine what was possible, even when the signs were there.

• Demographic Shifts: The region’s aging population and shortage of skilled labor slowed recovery. Even rescue efforts were hampered by a lack of medical staff.

• A Fractured World: Infrastructure was fragile. Power and water systems failed. Dams were vulnerable. And rebuilding efforts stalled amid disagreement and inertia.

• Technological Disruption: Misinformation spread faster than facts. FEMA had to launch a fact-checking site just to counter conspiracy theories. Some residents, armed and misled, refused help—believing aid workers were there to seize land for lithium mining.

The Cost of Inaction

What’s the value of a life? A town? A shared truth? The tidal wave is eroding not just physical structures, but trust, cohesion, and the very fabric of society.

And yet, amid the wreckage, I felt a need to act—not with charity, not with temporary aid, but with something tangible and lasting. A business that could help address the immediate crisis, create sustainable value, and model a new way forward.

With the help of an extraordinary partner, I did just that.

More on that in Part 2.

Principle 5: Never let a crisis go to waste.