0083 | August 5, 2019
Climate Change: Population Displacement and Poverty
How can we think about climate change in new ways, so that we might better understand what’s at stake? If we look at the history of demographic displacement then the future of climate change comes into stark relief. And that future is darker for some than for others.
| C.T. WEBB: 00:19 | [music] Good afternoon, good morning, or good evening and welcome to The American Age podcast. This is C. Travis Webb, editor of The American Age, and I’m speaking to you once again from Cleveland, Ohio. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 00:30 | Hello, this is Steven G. Fullwood, and I’m a co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project. And I am coming to you from Harlem, USA. |
| S. RODNEY: 00:40 | And I am Seph, no middle name, Rodney. And I’m coming to you from the South Bronx, and the recent author of the book, The Personalization of the Museum Visit. And I’m a senior editor at Hyperallergic. |
| C.T. WEBB: 00:57 | This is to remind our listeners that we practice a form of what we like to call intellectual intimacy, which is giving each other the space and time to figure out things out loud and together. And we’re continuing our conversation about climate change. And as promised, we are going to talk about climate change and poverty, and just what that means. What does climate change mean in areas of extreme economic stratification? And what does climate change mean when you are not subject to the same sort of insecurities that the poor are subject to, so. Steven, Seph, you want to jump in? |
| S. RODNEY: 01:40 | So I feel a bit uncertain or out of my depth with this conversation because I don’t think that I’ve read enough. But to follow up on the anecdote that I had given in the previous broadcast, where I’d mentioned my ex-girlfriend Caroline being in India and experiencing ridiculously high temperatures at essentially when the environment should be the coolest. It was something like 11 o’clock at night anyways, in the hundreds of degrees. I think it was like 112 degrees when she was in India last year. When I talked to somebody else about it they said that part of the problem– clearly part of the problem that that indicates is that when the sun is at its hottest, right, you’re talking about 125 degrees, maybe, in the middle of the day. Essentially, at some point, there will be parts of that subcontinent which will be, I mean, essentially uninhabitable, right? I mean, how is it possible to live and work in an environment like that? So I think part of the way, to answer your question, Travis, is to say that where people are not going to be able to live in certain parts of the world. They’re just not. |
| C.T. WEBB: 03:13 | Yeah. Steven? |
| S. FULLWOOD: 03:16 | Seph, if this is over your head, it’s completely twice over mine. But I’ve been thinking about it in terms of food insecurity, displacement. And so before we began this podcast we were talking with Travis about his brief look at Cleveland. And so it took me to Toledo where I was born and raised, and I’ve lived there for 29 years and watched how neighborhoods sort of deteriorated. Not as a cause of food– as climate change, but indirectly, I guess, because of the ways in which the housing in Ohio, the culture and the climate and the economics of the city, it being in the Rust Belt essentially, but also there were only green technologies that started to come to Toledo, but it’s largely a service city. Sorry, there are two industries there, glass and Jeep. But still watching over half the population has left Toledo since the 1970s, so there’s a lot of blight, urban blight. And so there’s food insecurity, there are food deserts. It’s a car city, you don’t walk it. If you’re walking, then you’re poor. And I’m still trying to bite it down about how climate change impacts that, but I think it does. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 04:46 | So the one thing I wanted to mention, I think in our last broadcast, was that the Washington Post reported on a study by scientists in Germany that said, “If the world built all of the coal plants that were currently being planned, carbon dioxide levels would rise so much that the world would not be able to keep the temperature increase below 2-point Celsius, 36-point–” I mean, which is 36 Fahrenheit, excuse me. And so I think about the kinds of things that are happening in areas where it’s either working or poorer class where things aren’t being built, or things are being built, but they’re not for the good of that community. |
| S. RODNEY: 05:31 | Right. So that’s the– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 05:34 | So, yeah, moving around. So I’m kind of moving in that area. |
| S. RODNEY: 05:38 | No, but that’s fascinating, Steven, because that’s the dilemma, right? Long-term, if they build those coal plants, we’re talking about a rise of two degrees, worldwide, two degrees. And correct me if I’m wrong, Travis, because I think you’ve read more about this than I have. But the Paris Accords were specifically put in place to prevent that threshold from being reached. That sort of overall, sort of reach of the Climate Accords that France and the US, and the major G7 countries signed on to called the Paris Accords, was that wanted to keep below the two, the rise of two degrees– |
| C.T. WEBB: 06:26 | One and a half to two, is the goal. |
| S. RODNEY: 06:29 | Right. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 06:29 | Okay. |
| S. RODNEY: 06:30 | Right. Right, right, right. Right. So the problem with that is that short-term, these folks in communities like that in Toledo, Ohio, need jobs. And when you have the Fuhrer, who promises, the orange Fuhrer, who promises to bring back coal and then bring back jobs for people. Of course they signed on to that because they think, “Yeah, I want a job. I want to be able to buy a home and feed my family,” la, la, la. So that’s the dilemma, right? So short-term, how can we live? But long-term, how can we live? |
| C.T. WEBB: 07:09 | Yeah, I mean, I think I appreciate both of your humility around the topic about speculation, but I would argue that you don’t need to be an economist or an expert in how exactly it will affect the poor because what we’re essentially talking about is an impoverished environment. And we know exactly what impoverished environments do to people. We know exactly what that does to communities. We know exactly what that does to family ties. And we know exactly how those weaknesses in those communities are exploited by people with resources, and how those opportunities are taken. I mean, that is– I mean, in a certain way you– I mean, look at the displacement of indigenous populations in this country, in the United States, right? I mean, that was climate change for Native Americans. We took them from territory that we wanted, that were rich– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 08:07 | Thank you for saying that. |
| C.T. WEBB: 08:07 | –that were rich in opportunities and farmland. I mean, Native Americans were here for 10,000 years. They knew where to live. They had figured it out, right? They knew where to go. I mean, they had their own wars, and they had their own cultural development and clashes. They moved to the areas that could support their populations. We displaced them. We put them in the areas we didn’t want until we wanted them, and then we moved them to even less desirable areas. And so we know exactly what that does. I mean, disease will increase, malnutrition will increase, education will plummet. I mean, the things that are going to happen to the have nots are going to be exacerbated and magnified in a way that is entirely predictable. |
| S. RODNEY: 09:00 | Yeah, actually when you say that I think of Katrina. Think of how people were displaced by Hurricane Katrina, having to go all the way to the– |
| C.T. WEBB: 09:07 | Still displaced. |
| S. RODNEY: 09:08 | Right. Having to go all the way to Texas, not being able to– I know that years after people are still talking about getting in touch with relatives that they had lost, figuring out a way to reconstitute their lives because they couldn’t live where they were living before and had to figure out another way to get their children educated. All of that; all of what you’re talking about. |
| C.T. WEBB: 09:34 | And they get Brad Pitt houses, right, that they can’t afford or can’t live in because they need to be condemned because they’re not built to standards that are acceptable. I’m sorry, go ahead, Steven. You look like you were about to say something. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 09:45 | No, no, just thinking about both of you, what you’re saying. Thank you for saying climate change as a way of thinking about displacement with Native Americans. That’s really important to kind of think about for me because it breaks open the idea of climate change a little bit more. It makes it a little more touchable in a personal way. Being forced to go somewhere you don’t want to go. We’re talking about the border right now. We’re talking about people who are displaced by war and political unrest in their countries coming here and then living in cages. Or dying in cages, rather. |
| C.T. WEBB: 10:21 | Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 10:23 | And we could turn on any of the news programs, or news channels right now, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, or whatever, and see how these things are being reported. And I don’t want to get too down in the weeds about this, but that climate change is really– it’s a smart way to think about climate change, capital letters. You have to move somewhere else to live. You have to go somewhere else, and the effects on the family, the effects on education, the effects on nutrition, the effects on just well-being. I mean, again, we didn’t need climate change, capital letters, to see that. Because we’ve witnessed it, some of us have lived it, and still watch it. And maybe not a paycheck or two from it. So I think it’s really– thank you for saying that. I’m still ruminating over it because I think it’s important to kind of– for us and our listeners to think about how they’ve been displaced. Or how they’ve witnessed displacement. And how does that, like I said, factor into the larger climate change idea? Because, yeah, I was in Boston last weekend, 110. |
| C.T. WEBB: 11:36 | Was it a record, by the way? I’m actually just curious. I know– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 11:38 | That I don’t know. |
| C.T. WEBB: 11:39 | –I know it was in certain parts of the country, but it’s more just I’m just curious if it was. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 11:44 | Yeah, I just didn’t want to be outside [laughter]. And I was in a house trying to organize papers and I was trying to do it as quickly as possible to get back to the hotel room, of which I had the advantage of doing. |
| C.T. WEBB: 11:56 | I mean, so in that to kind of draw on a topic we had in our last podcast, what I, for me, the real alarm in climate change and the way that we are not dealing with it is that we will continue to decrease the number of people that can partake in the human bounty that is what civilization has produced for us. And the amount of access to leisure and comfort and medicine and nutrition, and in all of the other things that I enjoy and celebrate and want to propagate. That bounty, rather than being increased by our technological advancement, will begin to become increasingly limited. And so we had talked– you had mentioned that we had talked about New York and New Orleans, or whatever. New York’s going to be fine. There’s no way the bankers are going to let New York go under. The money will show up to take care of that city. That’s less true– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 13:02 | It depends, it depends on if they find a better place to live. Really, honestly, I think greed– |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:07 | So I think– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 13:08 | –greed will always find out where it’s going, but I can’t really predict it. |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:14 | So I understand your point. I think it’s a valid point. The only thing I would push back is that I do think history matters there, and I think that there are cultural concentrations in human history that make a place like New York, and other cities in the world, particularly resilient. I think because of just the number of centuries that humans have thought that was a place to be, and the number of centuries that people have made that home. That may be wrong, and you’re right, clearly there’s a tipping point, and a point at which that’ll break down, but it’s going to take way longer for that to break down in New York than it is in New Orleans. Or other cities that are– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 13:56 | Comparatively. Absolutely. |
| C.T. WEBB: 13:58 | –similarly endowed with financial resources, and for a variety of reasons, so. Yeah, but [crosstalk]– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 14:07 | Thank goodness for greed. |
| C.T. WEBB: 14:07 | [crosstalk] you’re about to– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 14:08 | Thank goodness we live here [laughter]. Hey, yay, we’re living. Whoo. |
| C.T. WEBB: 14:13 | Well, this is the downside of what I would suspect pissed Seph off in the last broadcast, which is being overly sanguine about it. This is the dark side of that sort of sanguinary approach to it, which is that– so, “Yeah, some people are going to be fine. Lots of other people are not going to be fine.” And the consequence of that poverty is a source of deep anxiety for me, when I think about the things that I care about and the things that I love, and the things that I champion. |
| S. RODNEY: 14:55 | I wish that one of us had a kind of personal, deeply personal story or interaction to work off of. Like I’m thinking about a conversation I had which kind of comes close, but it’s not quite where I think I want to be. But I had a conversation with an artist, Linda [Quintana?] maybe? I’m sorry, I may not be getting her name correct. But we had talked about a year ago, maybe more, maybe it was two years ago, about her being displaced by the California wildfires. She’s an artist who lost basically most of her archive, the majority of her equipment. |
| S. RODNEY: 15:39 | The way she told her story to me, she’d known that the wildfires were a ways away. She lived in the middle part of California. I forget what county. I want to say it was not too far from Sacramento. She talked about hearing on the news that the wildfires were in the area. And then hunkering down and watching out for signs of its encroaching, or encroachment. And then being told by local authorities, “You have to get in your car and get out now.” So they had like, I think it was like an hour or two notice. And then they had to pack everything up quickly, jump in the car, and get the hell out. And I think they ended up staying with relatives. But she lost most of everything. And she had a lot of– because she’s middle class and her husband, from what I could tell, had a very middle-class job. They were insured, so they could get some stuff back, but of course, losing the archives that she had, she’s a photographer, she can never get that stuff back. So that kind of comes close to what the kind of story I want to be able to tell. But even then, she’s not poor, right? She had resources– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 17:10 | [crosstalk]. |
| S. RODNEY: 17:10 | –she had some relatives to go to. She could reach out to us and tell– |
| C.T. WEBB: 17:15 | She had insurance. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 17:16 | Right. |
| S. RODNEY: 17:16 | Right. |
| C.T. WEBB: 17:16 | She had insurance, that she knew how to fight for if they don’t want to pay out the claim the way they’re supposed to. Or, yeah, I mean, the kind of precarity that we’re talking about is not a precariousness that I know intimately. It’s just, it’s not. But it is one that provokes my sympathy and my anxiety because I try to imagine and use that imagined construction to think about the kind of decisions that I want to make in my own life and what makes sense for a society. And most people, most of us, you, me, most of us do not have backstops like that. Most of us, most humans, even in this country, don’t have backstops like that. And are just one paycheck, one lost job, one dead husband or wife in a family of two-income earners, from being on the street, or having no clue what to do. And that is what is going to be accelerated and amplified as climate change becomes more of a reality– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 18:42 | That’s a good point. |
| C.T. WEBB: 18:43 | –and we cease to deal with it. Or not cease, don’t begin to deal with it is what I meant to say. Yeah, yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 18:52 | That’s a dark place we just went to [laughter]. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 18:56 | That’s a dark place that feels like it’s always there, and that we can distract ourselves with art [laughter]. |
| S. RODNEY: 19:02 | Yeah, yeah. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:03 | Captain Crunch and other things [laughter]. |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:09 | Or podcasts. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:10 | Or a podcast. [crosstalk] there. |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:14 | Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 19:15 | It’s what it is. |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:16 | So thanks for tuning in. And we’ll talk to you [laughter]– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 19:23 | Do we have any last words? Are there any last words that– are those the last words? |
| C.T. WEBB: 19:27 | I know. Are they our only last words? Yeah, yeah. |
| S. RODNEY: 19:30 | Well, this is what I want to suggest. I want to suggest that we go away and do some reading on this and figure out– because I want to actually know where the key inflection points are, regions, I mean, on the planet right now. Where is it seriously hitting the fan? I mean, is it Antarctica? Or is it southernmost parts of India? Or is it New Orleans? Actually, there is something I was– yes, I think I was reading this. I want to say it was the Washington Post, or maybe the New York Times, a long-form story on what has happened with New Orleans– maybe it was in New York, actually. And how the Army Corps of Engineers has tried to engineer solutions to what is essentially a cycle of flooding and retreat of the ocean on a seasonal basis, right? I think it’s the Mississippi River that essentially overruns its banks and floods certain parts of the– |
| S. FULLWOOD: 20:50 | Certain parts of–? |
| S. RODNEY: 20:51 | –yes, and then retreats, and then they build bulwarks against the ocean and the Mississippi, but then– anyway. I don’t know if it’s that part of the world or what parts of the world where the pointy edge of the spear, end of the spear, is actually changing the way people live right now. That’s what I want to find out. So I think we should all go away and do some reading and then talk about that. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 21:20 | I also want to mention– which you also mentioned before, Seph, is that what’s the solution, or what are solutions, or what could we do better? And how can we do better? So I want to add that too because– because, yeah. So it’s important to kind of think about. |
| C.T. WEBB: 21:40 | Those both sound like great topics of conversation. Seph and Steven, thanks very much for your time today. |
| S. FULLWOOD: 21:46 | Thank you. |
| C.T. WEBB: 21:46 | And I’ll talk to you guys soon. All right. |
| S. RODNEY: 21:47 | Yeah, thank you. [music] |
References
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