I want to amplify some of my students from my Sociology 441: Public Sociology class. They undertook a semester long look at the state of Chico’s bike infrastructure in the context of usability, accessibility, and equity. They found the bike infrastructure to be quite lacking. Check out their website here.
My Appearance on Sociology Ruins Podcast
I made an appearance on Matt Sedlar’s excellent Sociology Ruins Everything podcast. I discuss and critique the film Don’t Look Up.
As a sociologist of disaster and an urban geographer I had lots to say about how the film Don’t Look Up is a pretty good disaster film, but it is a lousy climate change film. It is a film in search of a problem. What do I mean by this? Well, for one, there is no clear diagnosis of the causes of disaster and catastrophe nor does it even pretend to explore what it means for climate to be a “wicked problem.” The latter would require a completely different narrative and film.
Instead, what they gave us was a hot mess in which the viewer is asked to all the heavy lifting. I identified at least 11 diagnoses found in the film: traditional media, social media, bad culture, failure of science communication, political corruption, technological solutionism, plutocracy, extractivism, capitalism, greed, and plain old shitty humans. [exhale] The problem is that the filmmakers’ narrative does little to explore the nuances of any of these nor the systemic connections between some of them.
The result is a grab bag of liberal to left wing critiques of contemporary social life—critiques of course that are often spot on but as a form of climate or environmental propaganda quite lacking.
Oozing from the narrative soup is the film’s biggest miss: the analogy. Analogies and metaphors are important linguistic devices that are super important for the communication of science and of social theory. The film asks us to imagine climate change as a comet. But is climate change a comet?
Listen to the podcast to hear the answer and hear my full critique. Listen here.
Governing fires and climate change
The outbreak of large fires, some of the largest in history, in California and Oregon in August and September 2020 have renewed calls to make climate change the primary focus of political conversation and climate change mitigation more urgent. Lost or ignored in these calls for climate urgency are more immediate and pragmatic steps that Western states, the federal government, and inhabitants can implement to decrease the severity and destruction of fires next year, the year after, and so on. Pitting “it’s climate change!” against “it’s forrest governance” is a false dichotomy. It’s both/and; it reflects two different timescales that need to be address simultaneously.
That said, the chorus of voices on social media, Democratic politicians, from Biden to Gov. Newsom (CA), and climate change leaders have run into a discursive paradox, what I’ll call the “this is climate change” paradox. You’ve seen this in memes that depict burning forests, houses, bridges, cars, etc with the tagline: “Its climate change” or some equivalent message. The paradox goes as follows:
If in fact the climate has changed by 1°, as the best science indicates, then the old politics and slogan of “we need to do X to avert climate change” is outdated.
Therefore, the slogan “we need to do X about climate change” to fix crises such as fire and hurricanes doesn’t work in the near time horizon and the proximal spaces of crisis.
In the near term and proximal space we need to better govern fire ecology or hurricane ecology, for example, to ameliorate the suffering and destruction.
Climate mitigation or the non-carbon energy transition won’t work to lessen the death, destruction, and upending of life next year, the year after, or the next.
Climate mitigation and the non-carbon energy transitions are to prevent even worse futures of 2° or 3° or even more degrees of warming.
Indigenous people, inhabitants, disaster researchers, and policy makers have ready made ideas that could alter how we govern the socionature we now have, regardless of climate change.
Hurricane Katrina is a great case. It really doesn’t matter if climate change made Katrina worse, what matters are that the social vulnerabilities caused by racial and class inequality, Army Corp’s death levees, urbanization and industrialization of wetlands, and a non-existent evacuation plan. These are the temporal, historical, and location specific conjunctures that gave way to the drowning of New Orleans.
It feels good to say “this is climate change” or “if we don’t build climate solution X” we’ll have more fires and hurricanes. It settles scores. But it won’t further efforts to live with fire and water and to build more just and democratic socionatures for humans and more than human nature.
It’s partly amplification, over and over, that X proves climate change or shows we are in a climate crisis BUT under amplifies that crisis mitigation in the near term and proximal spaces can be addressed with tools distinct from climate or energy politics. Of course, we need both tracts: new and bold forest and fire governance practices AND rapid decarbonization and other climate mitigation and adaptation measures.
See these three articles on how we can build new forest-urban fire governance practices in the here and now.
Elizabeth Weil, “They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?,” ProPublica,
Brad Plumer and John Schwartz, “These Changes Are Needed Amid Worsening Wildfires, Experts Say,” NY Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/climate/wildfires-climate-policy.html
Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash, “West Coast Wildfires Reveal Massive Governance Failures,” Forbes,
Valerie Trouet, “What turned California forests into a tinderbox? Fire suppression, paradoxically,” The Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/14/california-fire-suppression-forests-tinderbox
After a $14-billion Upgrade, New Orleans' Levees Are Sinking
Thomas Frank, writing in Scientific America:
The agency’s projection that the system will “no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023” illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana.
A slow moving disaster in the making. Let’s hope the Army Corp. and the residents and decision-makers in all levels of government start addressing this now.
Here's How Paradise Ignored Warnings and Became a Deathtrap
More outstanding work by the Los Angeles Times, who has had some of the best Camp Fire reporting by any news organization. The LA Times Paige St. John, Joseph Serna, and Rong-Gong Lin II conclude
In truth, the destruction was utterly predictable, and the community's struggles to deal with the fire were the result of lessons forgotten and warnings ignored. The miracle of the tragedy, local officials now concede, is how many people escaped.
This is a brutally frank assessment of the socianatural origins of the Camp Fire, and how policy and human decisions factored into creating the highly vulnerable conditions. File this story in the “there is no such things as a natural disaster” bin.
Left to Louisiana's tides, a village fights for time
Stunning and informative piece in the NY Times on Louisiana's disappearing coastline, and its causes and consequences.
“Jean Lafitte may be just a pinprick on the map, but it is also a harbinger of an uncertain future. As climate change contributes to rising sea levels, threatening to submerge land from Miami to Bangladesh, the question for Lafitte, as for many coastal areas across the globe, is less whether it will succumb than when — and to what degree scarce public resources should be invested in artificially extending its life.”
Don't Blame Climate Change for the Hurricane Harvey Disaster, Blame Society
There is an old adage in disaster studies: "there is no such thing as a natural disaster." This article explains that idea clearly by arguing that nature and climate change are not driving causes of crises like Harvey, but instead the causes originate from social and political structures and human decisions. Kelman writes:
A disaster involving a hurricane cannot happen unless people, infrastructure and communities are vulnerable to it. People become vulnerable if they end up lacking knowledge, wisdom, capabilities, social connections, support or finances to deal with a standard environmental event such as a hurricane.
The socionatural disaster in Houston, as well as in New Orleans during Katrina, were largely caused by uncontrolled sub/urbanization, unregulated development of industry and housing, and as Michael Grunwald, writing in Poltico outlines, by Federal flood insurance policy. However, in Katrina we witnessed the failure of the structural, technological mitigation system and the failed political evacuation, rescue, and rebuilding, which all took its heavies toll on African Americans and the poorest residents of New Orleans and surrounding Parishes. We have yet to see the uneven toll that our social order has taken on the people of Southeast Texas. This will become more clear in the days, weeks, and months, and honestly years.
What America Looked Like Before the EPA Stepped In
Excellent photo essay depicting how the United States looked before the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clear Air Act and Clean Water Act. To quote an environmental radical, former President Richard Nixon:
Shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?
The Media Loves Doomsday Stories About the West's Water Crisis
Brad Plummer interviews John Fleck on the politics and empirics of the Western water crisis. Rather than doom and gloom, Fleck argues that when you look behind the headlines you find communities, users, and governments working to solve the problems. Fleck argues:
And the reason is that all across the West, when people are confronted with the fact that there’s not enough water, they’ve been really successful at using less. So rather than the catastrophe I’d been led to expect, what I found instead was people working hard to figure out how to adapt.
Water crises and their variability, Fleck argues, are not natural but rather:
the difference has a lot to do with the socioeconomics of land use planning and infrastructure in poor communities.
Check out Fleck's new book Water is For Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West.
Flint's Water Crisis Is A Blatant Example of Environmental Injustice
Sociologist Robert Bullard in an interview about the Flint water crisis:
In studying the history of environmental justice, you see over and over that it generally takes longer for poor communities to be heard when they make complaints. Government officials received complaints in April 2014 expressing that something was wrong with the water in Flint. If regulators at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality had had to drink that water, or serve it to their children, their response would have been different.
Flint, Michigan's water crisis: what the national media got wrong
Connor Coyne, writing for Vox.com, on the unfolding of the Flint poisoned water crisis:
In October 2015, the state finally confirmed the worst of our fears: There was lead in the water after all. The city switched back to Detroit water, but the damage had already been done. We, and our children, were being poisoned.
The whole article is worth a read. It's part first person narrative and part sociological overview of the crisis.
Immaculate Conception Theory of Your Neighborhood's Origins
I've long maintained that just about all (sub)urban development is at one point pejorative from someone's view point. The work of time, history, and change makes older neighborhoods appear more authentic, just, valued, and/or sustainable. Yet, all (sub)urban development under capitalism was produced for its exchange value and profit, not just its pretty use values and authentic qualities (in the eye of the beholder of course). Moreover, population shifts and exchange value shift can make a neighborhood once deemed "bad" (i.e., black, immigrant, working class, etc) into the prized authentic sustainable neighborhood of a gentrifying population. The reverse works too (white flight from some suburbs has left areas of poverty and spatial inequality).
Many people in the central or older areas of towns and cities often feel secure in their idea that their neighborhood wasn't created within the conditions of class and racial inequality. Yet, most were. The old looking houses and the mature trees hide the fact that when the neighborhood was build, say 100 years ago, it looked just as brand new as the shiniest new suburb today. Daniel Hertz pokes a hole in these representations of space and calls these ideas the "immaculate conception theory" of neighborhood creation. He writes:
These assumptions mostly revolve around the idea that older housing was built the right way: ethically, modestly, with an eye to community rather than profit. These older values, in turn, highlight the faults of modern buildings: gaudy and wasteful, disruptive to existing communities, and motivated only by money.
US solar power is still growing fast — but it's about to hit a speed bump
Solar only accounts for a small 0.6% of U.S. electricity but since the mid-2000s, thanks mostly to Federal tax credits and cheaper (Chinese) panels, solar instillation radically increased (mostly in California). In 2017, the Federal tax credits expire and as Brad Plumer explains, U.S. solar photovoltaic growth might hit a serious speed bump, particularly for residential installation.
Image via vox.com
Will the solar boom be another false start–like the 1970s–or will the Federal government reinstate the subsidies before they expire in 2017? Will panels prices continue to fall, making unsubsidized or lower subsidies panels affordable? Will Obama's Clean Power Plan make the States pick up the slack? Question to be determined in the coming years.
Apple's Real Carbon Footprint Is In Manufacturing and It's Dirty
Apple Inc. released its 2015 Environmental Responsibility Report this week. In the report, Apple proudly claims that their data centers are running on 100% renewable energy and that their new headquarters in Cupertino will run entirely on renewables (solar plant in nearby Monterey County). Apple is proud to claim that building operations in the USA are moving to 100% renewable. That's great. However, Apple's real carbon footprint is in the vast, vast amount of energy used and CO2 released in manufacturing all of its physical products, mostly in China.
For example, of the 34 million metric tons of CO2 Apple claims responsibility for in fiscal year 2014, 24.8 million metric tons are in manufacturing and only 0.4 million tons are in facilities. Put another way, 73% of Apple's carbon footprint is in manufacturing, whereas only 1.1% is in facilities. Sorry Apple, switching facilities to renewables is great optics (and still worthwhile) but it is a drop in the bucket of their CO2 footprint. For Apple to meaningfully contribute to reducing global warming they will need to begin to transition their manufacturing partners to renewables. It seems they are now just taking small steps in that direction.
For now, Apple and other manufacturers, and consumers, are contributing both to the localized pollution crisis in China as well as global CO2 emissions. If Apple wants to be a leading corporate environmental steward, as statements by CEO Tim Cook and Lisa Jackson, Vice President of Environmental Initiatives indicate, then it needs to more fully and quickly address the source of their real carbon footprint: the manufacturing of physical products.
Portland Now Generating Hydro Power in Its Water Pipes
A cool new way to get hydro power right under our cities, and they don't require dams.
The Lucid system taps the power of gravity in the city’s water system. Water flowing through the Portland Water Bureau pipe at 147th and Powell will now flow through four small turbines as well, generating enough electricity to power 150 homes along the way. The turbines are 3.5 feet wide – just big enough to span the diameter of the city’s water pipe.
Can Louisiana Hold Oil Companies Accountable for its Vanishing Coastline?
A great photo essay series would be "The Political Ecologies of the Age of Oil." A great place to start would be coastal Louisiana. The next place to go would be the tar sands of Alberta, Canada.
Image via thinkprogress.org
Most Disaster Prone Places in the United States
Below are some great maps with types of crises. It appears simply geographical, but we must also remember the social factors that produce different and unequal experiences before, during, and after socio-natural crisis. The full article has a mouse over feature so you can look up each county of the United States for more fine grain detail.
Image via Washington Post
CSU Chico Commits to Full Divestment of Fossil Fuel Holdings
Right before the Fall 2014 semester ended big news on the fight against fossil fuels came out of CSU Chico, where I teach:
Chico State University showed immense leadership as one of the first public universities in the nation to commit to fully divesting from the top 200 coal, oil and gas companies within four years. The resolution, authored by members of Fossil Free California State University, was passed 8 – 4 by the CSU Chico University Foundation.
United States and China Enter Into Bilateral Energy Transition Agreement
An historic deal. We'll have to monitor closely to see what actually happens. Here is the gist as reported by Jeff Spross at ThinkProgress:
The pledge commits the U.S. to cut its emissions 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels by 2025. This builds on the current target of a 17 percent reduction below that baseline by 2020, and could actually double the pace of emission cuts set by that initial goal — from 1.2 percent a year to as high as 2.8 percent per year. The White House has actually been looking into the possibility of expanding beyond the 2020 target since 2013, and has been involved in occasional interagency meetings to that effect.
For its part, China is committing to get 20 percent of its energy from non-fossil-fuel sources by 2030, and to peak its overall carbon dioxide emissions that same year. China’s construction of renewable energy capacity is already proceeding at a furious pace, and this deal will require the country to deploy an additional 800 to 1,000 gigawatts of zero-carbon energy by 2030. For comparison, 800 to 1,000 gigawatts is close to the amount of electricity the U.S. current generates from all sources combined.
In the US, with virtually no solid Congressional support, it will be interesting to see how such a commitment will fair in the short-term, let alone spanning multiple Congressional and Presidential terms. China, on the other hand, with a centralized one-party rule might be able to enable a more consistent and coherent energy transition strategy. It's also important to remember that most of the carbon in the atmosphere now was put there by Europe and the United States over the past 150 years or so.
Is This Truly a Wild Life? Emma Marris on the Grand Canyon "wolf"
Emma Marris, writing on her Beacon wolf project, about the recently spotted "wolf like animal" in the Grand Canyon. What is the animal's potential fate?
The first is that his or her fate will entirely depend on human values, human categories and human laws. Whether it is allowed to roam free, moved to a refuge or shipped south will depend on its genome—not whether it attacks livestock or not or any other fact about its actual behavior. This is despite the fact that it neither knows nor cares which category it falls into, and that it is highly likely that its individual personality is more predictive of its behavior than its species assignment. The only thing it can count on is being darted and tranquilized, because even if it is determined to be a gray wolf, agency officials will want to re-collar it. Is this truly a wild life?
Consider pledging and following Marris' wolf project. It's great stuff.