Archive for the ‘race and class’ Category
|Haiti’s story
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days. There’s a deep social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.
I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on. Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:
- Doctors Without Borders USA
- AmeriCares
- An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.
Tags: Haiti
Posted in conflict, energy, food and agriculture, health, nature and culture, population, race and class, risk analysis, social science | 2 Comments »
Extreme climate and the vulnerability of least-developed countries
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Happy New Year, everyone. Sorry for the lag in posts, but there wasn’t a lot happening in the news or journals over the past week.
A few years ago, I saw a talk by Thomas Schelling (Nobel laureate in economics) who argued that we need to accelerate the economic development of poor countries so that they are able to cope with climate change. This analysis is interesting, if not fraught with additional challenges, such as development in a carbon-based energy world hastening the very problem to which these nations are attempting to adapt.
In an article1 in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access), Anthony Patt and colleagues argued that the need for assistance by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) is dependent on vulnerability, which, in turn, depends on both exposure to climate change and how socioeconomic factors affect the sensitivity of LDCs to climate change.
To assess this hypothesis, they first examined how deaths caused by disasters (floods, droughts, and storms) varied across the level of development in several LDCs. They used the UN Human Development Index—HDI, a composite metric of income, education, and life expectancy—as a proxy for development.
Here’s what they found…
Posted in climate adaptation, climate economics, policy, race and class, risk analysis, social science, sustainable development | No Comments »
Sustainable food: Who’s it for? Uniting ecological sustainability and social justice
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Think of all the reasons why people advocate sustainable food, and the following things probably come to mind:
- Eat organic—to reduce pesticides and nutrient pollution.
- Eat locally—to reducing carbon emissions.
- Eat free-range animal products—to reduce nutrient pollution, energy use, and animal cruelty.
- Eat vegetarian or vegan— to reduce carbon footprints further and eliminate animal cruelty altogether.
- Eat hormone and antibiotic-free animal products— to improve human health.
How about this one?
- Make sure farm workers who grow all of this food and other poor people have access to cheap, healthy, sustainable food.
Not so much.
And that’s probably why Caitlin Donohue wrote the story, “Out of reach: How the sustainable local food movement neglects poor workers and eaters” in today’s San Francisco Bay Guardian Online.
There’s a lot more that can be written on this topic, and there are a growing number of success stories, including
- the urban gardening movement (here, here, here);
- the increasing acceptance of food stamps (now called SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) at farmers’ markets;
- the movement to feed kids healthy school lunches.
The introduction to Donohue’s article frames the cultural disconnect:
On a sunny afternoon in Civic Center Plaza, a remarkable bounty covered a buffet table: coconut quinoa, organic mushroom tabouli, homemade vegan desserts, and an assortment of other yummy treats. The food and event were meant to raise awareness about public school lunches, although it was hard to imagine these dishes, brought by well-heeled food advocates, sitting under the fluorescent lights of a San Francisco public school cafeteria.
The spread was for the Slow Food USA Labor Day “eat-in,” a public potluck meant to publicize the proposed reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, national legislation that regulates the food in public schools. The crowd was in a festive, light-hearted mood. There was a full program of speeches by sustainability experts and a plant-your-own-vegetable-seeds table set up in one corner of the plaza.
A bedraggled couple who appeared homeless made their way through the jovial crowd and started scooping up the food in a way that suggested it had been a long time since their last roasted local lamb shish kebob.
Their presence shouldn’t have been a surprise; most events involving free trips down a food table are geared toward a different demographic in this park, which borders the Tenderloin.
In a flash, an event volunteer was on the case, nervous in an endearingly liberal manner. “Sir,” she began. “This food is for the Child Nutrition Act.” And then she paused, searching for what to say next. I imagined her thinking: “Sir, this food is to raise awareness about the availability of sustainable food to the lower classes, not to be eaten by them,” or, “Sir, this good, healthy, local food is not for you.”
Continue reading here…
_____
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/77043400@N00/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Posted in environmental justice, food and agriculture, organic, race and class | 1 Comment »
David Orr ends his column at Conservation Biology with some final thoughts about nature and culture
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
After 21 years of writing a column for the journal Conservation Biology, here are a few excerpts from Orr’s final piece—a retrospective1:
- I believe that all of us working for a habitable planet should have focused more clearly on politics and on the question of how good ideas move across the chasm from being right to being effective in the conduct of our public and international business.
- I think we should have learned to be more adept, personable, and creative in talking to the public and the guys down at the truck stop and the women working two jobs to make ends meet. I think we might have gone to fewer scientific conferences in exotic places and to more Rotary meetings and tedious city council sessions. We should have talked less often to ourselves in a scientific jargon and more often to the public and in the common tongue. And we should have mastered the art of persuasion on radio and television the way some others have. We in the “environmental movement” are sometimes accused of being effete, overly intellectual snobs more concerned about nature than people, and there is some truth to that.
- [W]e know enough right now to make far better decisions than we typically do about wildlife, ecosystems, and landscapes….What ails us, rather, is fundamentally political and is the result of the yawning chasm between the world of science (and intellect generally) and that of public affairs.
- [T]he worldwide conversation about sustainability and the human future is larger than just the issues of biodiversity, pollution, climate change, land use, and resource scarcity.
- [W]e are rapidly becoming an indoor species with fewer people spending time outdoors and with fewer experiential connections with nonhuman nature.
- Finally, 21 years ago it would have been difficult to plausibly imagine the scope, scale, and rising intensity of the global movement to build a decent, fair, and sustainable world. The resilience of the human spirit in difficult times is the news of our age.
1Orr, D. (2009) retrospect and prospect: The unbearable lightness of conservation. Conservation Biology23, No. 6, 1349–1351
Tags: David Orr
Posted in communication and framing, environmental studies, environmentalism, nature and culture, race and class | No Comments »
American environmentalism: Distinct flavors, porous borders, and effective action
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
Earth First. Greenpeace. Sierra Club. Apollo Alliance. The Nature Conservancy. The Wilderness Society. National Resources Defense Council. Sustainable South Bronx. 350.org— Organizations that share a common interest in the environment but with fundamental philosophical differences.
In an earlier post, Can’t we all just get along?, we looked at a paper by Clare Saunders, who suggested that social movements like environmentalism are comprised of many different organizations, each fostering a collective identity that is often incompatible with other organizations in the same movement. Ordinarily, we think of the overall movement goals as having a binding effect among these subgroups. Apparently not. Her work suggested that people form identities with other individuals cut from the same ideological cloth rather than the identity of the social movement itself.
In a recent issue1,2 of Organization and Environment, Debra Salazar designed a study that lets us look at this problem in more detail. Specifically, to what extent are environmentalists identifying with different flavors of environmentalism, and to what extent are beliefs shared across individuals? Where disputes arise, what’s driving them? How can coalitions be built, and why might certain groups be better positioned to lead, given the circumstances of particular environmental problems?
Here’s how she approached this challenge and what she found…
Posted in environmentalism, nature and culture, race and class, social movements | 1 Comment »
Are rural kids overweight because of a lack of access to healthy food?
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Rural and urban areas have in common an increasing problem of grocery store consolidation and flight to suburbia, which has a more-profitable mix of cheap land for big box stores and greater densities of affluent consumers.
As the source of healthy foods goes away, the resulting communities are often described as “food deserts.” When we think of food insecurity in the world, we often think of famines in developing countries. Unfortunately, food insecurity is also an issue here at home for America’s poor. When grocery stores are far away, people may rely more on smaller grocery and convenience stores, thereby consuming more high-calorie junk foods and other processed foods.
In a recent issue1,2 of Rural Sociology (subscription required), Kai Schafft and colleagues examined populations across Pennsylvania where 50% of people lived farther than 10 miles from large grocery stores (8 miles is deemed an average trip to the store) and compared them to populations where people lived closer to big stores.
What did they find?
Posted in environmental justice, food and agriculture, race and class | No Comments »
Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 3: Personal perception, values, and behavior
Friday, November 6th, 2009
Prerequisite posts:
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Overview
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 2: Communication
In earlier posts, we examined climate change engagement as problems of environmental literacy and communication. There is no doubt we can do better with both of these. But as we will see, proponents of environmental literacy and communication make a mistake if they believe engagement is simply a matter of getting more information to people. Science, it is believed, will speak for itself.
Unfortunately, it often doesn’t.
A political scientist recently told me that before the age of 25, people use information to shape their value system and perceptions of the world. After 25, they start cherry picking information that simply reinforces these beliefs (hence the world of cable news).
Although this is is a rough generalization, it suggests that a person’s values development may have a shelf life. It also reveals why issues like climate change may not resonate with people cut from certain ideological cloths—no matter how much information they encounter.
The psychology, sociology, and ethics literature has a lot to say about this problem. For simplicity, I want to pull out four challenges I think are among the most common and important with respect to climate change…
Posted in behavior, climate skeptics deniers and contrarians, communication and framing, environmentalism, gender, nature and culture, race and class, religion, social science, sustainability | 5 Comments »
Chicago 1995: How social disparities lead to environmental disasters
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
As I mentioned in the last post, heat waves have the potential to harm or kill a lot of people. Who are the people most likely to suffer first? The experiences from the Chicago 1995 heat wave offer some insights for urban America. Eric Klinenberg’s 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago is as relevant as ever to the current conversation about climate change.
Some excerpts from a U. Chicago Press interview with Klinenberg.
The heat made the city’s roads buckle. Train rails warped, causing long commuter and freight delays. City workers watered bridges to prevent them from locking when the plates expanded. Children riding in school buses became so dehydrated and nauseous that they had to be hosed down by the Fire Department. Hundreds of young people were hospitalized with heat-related illnesses. But the elderly, and especially the elderly who lived alone, were most vulnerable to the heat wave.
“It’s hot,” the mayor told the media. “But let’s not blow it out of proportion. . . . Every day people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days dies of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat.” Many local journalists shared Daley’s skepticism, and before long the city was mired in a callous debate over whether the so-called heat deaths were—to use the term that recurred at the time—”really real.”
[T]he black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1.
Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths…Chicago’s Latinos tend to live in neighborhoods with high population density, busy commercial life in the streets, and vibrant public spaces. Most of the African American neighborhoods with high heat wave death rates had been abandoned—by employers, stores, and residents—in recent decades. The social ecology of abandonment, dispersion, and decay makes systems of social support exceedingly difficult to sustain.
The heat wave was a particle accelerator for the city: It sped up and made visible the hazardous social conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. Yes, the weather was extreme. But the deep sources of the tragedy were the everyday disasters that the city tolerates, takes for granted, or has officially forgotten.
Related Post: Say so long to your furnace and hello to a new air conditioner
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paraflyer/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Posted in climate adaptation, environmental justice, race and class, social science, urban | 2 Comments »
Defining the good life in Baltimore
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
Defining and describing what constitutes “the good life” for individuals and communities has been a vexing challenge for social scholars…
So begins a recent article1,2 in Environment and Behavior (subscription required)
…[T]he term “life satisfaction”, which comes from the psychological literature, refers to the cognitive evaluation of one’s happiness or subjective wellbeing and involves comparing the fulfillment of individual needs, goals, and aspirations to a meaningful standard.
One unique aspect of this study was that the team used surveys to assess people’s life satisfaction at two different scales: (1) their own lives and (2) their neighborhoods.
Bottom line:
- Income and home ownership mattered more to individual satisfaction compared to satisfaction with neighborhoods.
- In contrast, neighborhood satisfaction was more strongly correlated with social capital (shared knowledge, norms, rules, and networks that facilitate collective experience) and satisfaction with the natural environment in the neighborhood.
- These results corroborate a large body of prior research indicating that wealth alone is not the only explanation for life satisfaction–our communities and environments matter as well.
- Given that more people now live in urban environments than at any point in human history, this speaks to the need for (re)developing cities to promote green spaces and social networks.
1Vemuri, A., et al. (2009) A Tale of Two Scales: Evaluating the Relationship Among Life Satisfaction, Social Capital, Income, and the Natural Environment at Individual and Neighborhood Levels in Metropolitan Baltimore. Environment and Behavior, (Online First edition).
2Bowdoin people can link to the article here.
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinl8888/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Tags: Baltimore, happiness, urban
Posted in race and class, social science, urban | No Comments »
Subscribe & Share
