Tag Archives: climate justice

The American Lawn: A Harmful Invention

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While I sat on my front porch impatiently waiting for my coffee to cool, our nextdoor neighbor turned on his lawnmower. Then, like clockwork, the neighbor across the street also brought out a lawnmower. Soon after, I watched as two men got out of a van labeled “Mike’s Lawns” and began mowing someone else’s lawn. 

But the problem with lawns is far more than just noisy lawnmowers. Subject to a third of all residential water use in the U.S., lawns strike me as impractical, unused spaces that carry no productive value. The non-native grass saturated in herbicides pollutes our air and water. Lawns are bad for the environment; this we know to be true. 

But the problem with lawns runs deeper yet. Even these boxes of seemingly harmless, perfectly manicured, velvet green boxes sitting purposeless in front of homes, carry legacies that cannot be de-historicized nor depoliticized. 

Rooted in colonialism, racism, and classism, lawns serve as status symbols. Like theatre, lawns are meticulously crafted to create a designed, controlled, and safe experience that mimics—in this case—nature, or so we think. The harmful association between grass and healthy, beneficial “nature” ignores all that is wrong with lawns (including sprinklers, lawn mowers, pesticides, etc), especially from an ecological perspective. 

To Andrew Jackson Downing’s 1841 landscape-gardening book, a town over from mine, Hartford, CT, might feel foreign from Downing’s home with a nursery in New York, (which, by the way is a state the same size as all of the lawns in the U.S.) but climate change “carries no passport and knows no borders.” 

The effects of front lawns in America have and will continue to have global impacts that exist beyond your white picket fence. In Hartford, CT, where the white picket fences and manicured lawns of the suburbs give way to unkept public parks and parking lots, signs of climate change are ever-present.  Continue reading →

Disaster justice: how social networks and organizational support create resilience

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In Miami, coastal resilience efforts involve more than just fortifying buildings and creating evacuation plans. Jane Gilbert, chief resilience officer for Miami, Florida, recognizes that coastal resilience is “really about how do we look at the underlying social, physical, [and] technological infrastructure.” Her holistic vision of coastal resilience will be critical in the coming decades. Fostering resilient communities that can rebound from disaster becomes ever more important as sea levels rise and storms become stronger and larger.

A recent article by Hyun Kim, David Marcouiller, and Kyle Woosman, helps flesh out the connection between climate justice and vulnerability to climate change. They used data from 1600 counties in the Mississippi River basin to analyze the relationships between climate justice and community resilience to disaster, especially flooding.

So what makes coastal communities more resilient to climate change?

More often than not, increasing resilience is a matter of climate justice. Decreasing inequality, improving housing access, and fostering communities with strong social and organizational ties will be key in the years to come.

A tiled mural doubles as a street sign in Little Havana, Miami. Resilient 305 is a Miami-based organization working to protect and preserve communities such as these. Creating and maintaining strong communities is essential to resilience.

The study found that higher income inequality was associated with more vulnerability and risk. Major flooding events hit the poorest the hardest, compounding poverty that already exists. For example, without expendable income, it’s almost impossible to follow recommendations to stock up on supplies in preparation for disaster. Going somewhere else to escape the storm becomes difficult as well. Following Katrina, almost a third of those who didn’t evacuate said limited means prevented them from doing so. Not having a car was one of the biggest barriers.

Critically, the study found that communities with stronger social networks and relationships are more resilient to flooding. For example, higher presence of civic organizations was associated with less flood risk. Civic organizations like non-profits and advocacy groups provide citizens with resources, support, and footing to build relationships. In contrast, organizational incapacity to reach certain areas represents a climate injustice and makes unassisted communities more vulnerable.

Small organizations can fill in during times of disaster where larger organization have failed to reach, thus increasing resilience. In preparation for Hurricane Irma, Miami-based social justice group Miami Dream Defenders did just that. A member of the group, James Valsaint, explains, “We knew what communities would be hit the hardest yet nobody did anything to prepare for it in any real concrete ways; basically the poorest communities that were already vulnerable.” So the group sent volunteers to the most vulnerable communities following the storm.

Communities with longer-term residents are more equipped to bounce back from climate disasters by taking advantage of established social connections. The study found longer residency length contributed to higher resilience, while areas with newer residents were at higher climate risk because they had weaker social networks to fall back on when disaster struck. People with low incomes often find themselves at the mercy of the increasing expense of housing. Moving means losing social links or not even having the time to establish meaningful connections in the first place. Post Katrina, 71% of those that didn’t evacuate due to limited means cited “not having anywhere to go” as a barrier. For people with few financial means, finding somewhere to stay often depends on having widespread, deep social connections throughout a city or region. Moving often and being segregated to insular areas vulnerable to flooding means forging these relationships is next to impossible.

Homeowner status, which requires financial means and produces social stability, brought lower climate risk. Homeowners are often eligible for assistance to rebuild that renters don’t receive. After Hurricane Sandy, for example, 40% of homes affected in New Jersey were renter occupied, yet tenants only received 25% percent of financial assistance by the state.

The study also found that those living in older housing were more vulnerable. Not only is older housing more susceptible to damage, relief programs reinforce inequality by distributing money based on property value rather than costs borne as a result of disaster. In Louisiana, the $9.7 billion federal and state-funded Road Home program did just that. Henry L. Irvin Senior, a Katrina survivor, explains, “The dollar value on our property was so low back in them days you couldn’t really build nothing with what they gave.” Poor, predominantly black communities lost out while upscale areas received ample funds to rebuild—a clear example of governmental failure and injustice.

Climate justice is an essential component of bringing about resilient coastal communities with extensive and meaningful social connections. Kim, Marcouiller, and Woosman’s recent study suggests the future of resilience planning doesn’t just include constructing floodwalls and dykes. It must also incorporate climate justice measures like making housing affordable and ensuring organizational assistance reaches the people that need it most.

Coastal Resilience and Climate Change: Sustaining Ecological Integrity and Sense of Place

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This past week, Hurricane Florence pummeled the Carolinas, dumping more than 8 trillion gallons of rain on North Carolina. Floodwaters surged, submerging cars and inundating homes. More than a million people were left without power, and forty-three lost their lives.

People survey the damage caused by Hurricane Florence on Front Street in downtown New Bern, N.C., on Friday, Sept. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Chris Seward)

Our coastlines and the people who populate them face an evermore daunting issue: planning for sea level rise and stronger storms while minimizing the degradation of coastal environments. Climate change is causing sea levels to rise and storms to become larger and more intense, even as more and more people are calling the coast their home. The elevated human pressure on our coastal environment, coupled with the dangers of climate change, create the momentous challenge of making our coastlines more resilient.

A decade of powerful storms like Florence has made clear what’s at stake. In 2004, Hurricane Katrina showed us how poor disaster response and racially motivated urban planning results in catastrophe and loss. Hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City and the Mid-Atlantic seaboard in 2012, with disastrous impacts on infrastructure. More recently, the 2017 hurricane season brought tragedy and destruction to millions along the Texan Gulf Coast, the Virgin Islands, the Florida Keys, and Puerto Rico.

Across the US, coastal communities, municipalities, and cities are scrambling to make their coastlines more resilient. Careful flood plain management can lead to controlled flooding. Resilient building standards mitigate damage. Dissipation of wave energy through built features like levees or natural features like coral reefs is another option.

As these examples suggest, resilience is multifaceted and depends on both the built environment and the integrity of natural features. Resilient coastlines will never be completely immune to the impacts of climate change. But a combination of strategies can reduce negative impacts and allow communities to bounce back from destruction that does occur.

Despite the urgency to make and implement coastal resilience plans, politics and funding pose barriers to progress. In New York City, for example, revising flood maps poses political and economic challenges, as including more area in the flood zone means millions of dollars more spent.

But just as coastal resilience planning is a game of politics and funding, it’s also a matter of life and death, security and loss, and equity and inequality. Every extreme storm has shown us that social and economic factors make some people more vulnerable to extreme weather than others – a form of environmental injustice that could easily be exacerbated by climate change if there isn’t significant action. Fighting climate injustice is key to coastal resilience.

Through my beat, I plan to explore coastal resilience strategies that integrate structural engineering, environmental protection, and climate justice. How are communities, towns, and cities creating innovative and comprehensive resilience plans? What barriers do they face? To what extent is environmental justice incorporated in coastal resilience efforts? In what ways can promoting environmental justice improve resilience? Coastal resilience is as much an engineering problem as it is a justice problem. For millions, their economic security and sense of place and home is at stake.