Gens to the grain vulnerable our cities to the weather extremes brought on by climate change to what extent are rising sea levels from what's called the heat island effect threaten urban areas and what does adaptation to global warming on the urban level look like and need to look like I'm c Yes song well represented a conversation with Ashley Dawson about his book Extreme city the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change after these news headlines with I mean. President Donald Trump today that the u.s. Would not become a migrant camp as he addressed the mounting outrage over his administration's policy of separating immigrant children and parents the United States will not be a migrant camp. And it will not be a refugee holding facility big you look at what's happening in Europe you look at what's happening in other places we can't allow that to happen to the United States not on my watch referred to say only separation as he called u.s. Immigration laws horrible and tough and the worst in the world but said it's the Democrats' fault Trump repeated his call to change u.s. Immigration laws so they favor skilled immigrants over the current policies that give preference to family reunification he'll meet with congressional Republicans tomorrow to discuss immigration legislation likely to come up for a vote later this week the outgoing United Nations human rights chief said Rod Hussein assailed the u.s. Policy of family separation the. United States armed deeply concerned by recently adopted policies which punish children for the parents' actions in the past 6 weeks nearly 2000 children have been forcibly separated from their parents the American their son Association of Pediatrics has called this cruel practice government sanctioned child abuse Corps repairable harm with my phone consequences on Father's Day Democratic lawmakers visited immigrant detention centers and denounced the trumpet ministration policy California Sen Komla Harris today called on Department of Homeland Security secretary Kirsten IOs and to resign Harris said Nielsen has refused repeated requests to clarify administration policies and provide key information about them the Northern California immigrant mother of 4 has a bond hearing in San Francisco immigration court this afternoon 33 year old cloudy or deal was born in El Salvador but has lived in this country since she was 7 most recently in Arcadia and Humboldt County her 4 children were all born in the u.s. Her supporters say that during a routine check an appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement last November agents unexpectedly detained and imprisoned her at a privately owned Mesa Verde ice processing facility and Bakersfield more than 500 miles away from her children a convoy of supporters from Humboldt del Norte counties was to rally at this hour outside San Francisco ice headquarters before her 1 pm hearing German Chancellor Angela Merkel has bowed to demands from a conservative party in her coalition government to reduce the number of refugees the country except Merkel's governing coalition was threatened with collapse over the issue her remarks appeared on all Jazeera pointed us to 0 if we are off the all . Pinioned the c.d.u. At c.s.u. Has to try to better direct migration and country and we do so number of people driving in the country so that we do not have a situation like we had 2000 and. Merkel said she would hold talks with other European Union countries on immigrants and refugees and report back on July 1st the country's interior minister has been demanding that Germany refuse entry to some immigrants at the border a new study says climate change will put more than $20000.00 homes along the California coast at risk of chronic and disruptive flooding within the next 30 years the Union of Concerned Scientists says the homes have been assessed value of more than $15000000000.00 although their market value is considerably higher by the year 2100 the number of California homes at risk from rising seas skyrockets to $100000.00 the California counties with the most homes at risk of chronic inundation by 2045 our Marine with 4400 San Mateo 4100 and Orange County with 3700 Californians will say Swiss likely to be a hard for rent control measure on the November ballot secretary of state Alex Vidia and down supporters surpass the number of valid signatures needed to qualify for the ballot tenants rights advocates decided to put the measure on the ballot after California state lawmakers repeated lete defeated similar measures despite a Democratic majority in both chambers at the ballot proposal would give California cities and other local jurisdictions the authority to set local rent control laws it would repeal a $995.00 state law the cost to Hawkins Act It prohibits California communities from limiting renting creases on single family homes condos and buildings built after 1905 I'm Eileen out in Derry News returns at 4 with headlines at 6 the Pacifica evening news. From the studios of the p.f.a. In Berkeley California this is against to the green on Pacifica Radio My name is c.s. Song. To monumental trends are converging one is the movement the massive migration of people to urban areas and the other is increasingly extreme forms of weather unleashed by climate change this convergence of an urbanizing humanity with intense climate disruptions is what spurred Ashley Dawson to write his new book Extreme cities in it he describes both the unique vulnerabilities of cities in both the global north and the global south and also how grassroots movements are acting to protect their communities and to remake their cities in a more just and equitable way actually Dawson is a visiting professor at the Princeton Environmental Institute and then English professor at the City University of New York his new book is extreme cities the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change when Ashley joined me recently from New York City he said this about the overall project of his book What I'm really trying to get at is the way in which cities are a real kind of key point for climate change and that's what the title is really gesturing towards the kind of conjunction of increasingly extreme forms of weather that are caused by climate change through burgeoning carbon emissions and then social extremes in contemporary cities which make them more vulnerable to climate change related natural disasters. So that you know thinking about that conjunction is at the center of what I try to do throughout the book so urban dwellers like me we like to think that you know we're in cities so we're kind of protected right we have a built environment around us so in some ways we're we're kind of protected from extremes I take it you you disagree with that yeah I really want to challenge that in my work so I want to talk about the ways in which actually through the creation of a huge amount of kind of elaborated infrastructure we've made ourselves far more vulnerable to natural disasters you know if you if you live in a rural area and you're used to having to get water from the local river or something like that a natural disaster could be decimating But nonetheless you have a sort of element of self provision in a lot of l. Parts of your life which in a city you don't you know when you turn the tap and no water comes out when you flick on the light switch and you don't have electricity you're suddenly incredibly vulnerable in the city so while there are aspects of urban life that I think can increase our ability to cope with natural disasters and that includes the people we find around us and I think it's important to talk about sort of social resiliency in cities and the way in which we can depend on our fellow urbanites in moments of disaster nonetheless Yeah I want to talk about the ways in which cities actually are highly vulnerable the Ses cities are as you point out in your book are vulnerable to sea level rise is what has the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the i.p.c.c. Projected in terms of sea level rise over the course of the 21st century Well it's projections are a fairly low ball you know they're telling us that it's going to be about 6 feet more or less but what I try and do in the book is talk about some of the problems in these projections I mean the. P.c.c. As its name suggests Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a kind of political body and so while the scientists who are part of it are you know a crack scientists doing great work nonetheless their publications have to be vetted and approved by government officials and so there's a lot of political pressure on them to get things right and one of the things I try and talk about in the book is the way in which projections about sea level rise that scientists have made when they're giving them to official bodies like the i.p.c.c. Haven't incorporated potential big changes like the melting of the glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland in the in past publications because of the uncertainty about not rates you know so scientists wanting to make sure they don't get criticized for their science being inaccurate have basically just in the past not included melting of Antarctica and Greenland in their projections and of course we know that those places are melting we just don't know exactly how fast although we're getting better and better science tells us understand that all the time how quickly could the glaciers melt such that we have what might be considered catastrophic sea level rise well one of the most alarming predictions came from James Hansen where he talked about really significant melting happening and it happening in a fairly quick order right so Hansen talked about melting over the course of 5250 years that is really really significant several several meters he described which you know this over 10 feet or so this is all. Been debated and he's been criticized by some but what I think is particularly interesting that I found as I spoke to scientists and read some of the debates going on in scientific circles about this is the idea that sea level rise isn't going to happen in some kind of smooth upward change like a kind of hockey stick graph or something like that but instead is going to happen through these kinds of fits and starts or punctuated rises followed by periods of relative equilibrium and the reason that that's significant is that in our contemporary world we tend to talk about risk based on projections into the future that come from experience in the past but what we're entering is this new world where the past is no gauge for the future and where these kinds of really rapid shifts in climate can take place that find us totally unprepared and that's one reason that it's so hard for scientists to really find any kind of agreement about exact predictions concerning sea level rise really i.p.c.c. In making predictions about greenhouse gas emissions what do they believe in terms of how quickly or determinedly economies will move toward a post carbon economy Well Mike Davis has a wonderful article where he talks about the Urban Future and a sniff section of that article which I cite in my book discusses the way in which I p c c s projections for medication of carbon emissions in other words cut the amount of carbon we're going to be a knitting really assume that we're going to be putting whatever kind of capital we generate back into. Green infrastructure rather than into luxury high rises and condominiums for the one percent and if you look at the way in which urban real estate has been going for the last 3040 years it's a huge economic sink for the elites and in fact we have this kind of irrational process of urbanization where we continue to develop coastal areas take Miami Beach for instance because they're great places for the wealthy to park their capital but of course they're absolutely insane places to be building houses to what extent Ashley is humanity urbanizing toward extend our people converging on cities around the globe this is been one of the huge shifts of the last half century in fact on air cops born the great materialist Psystar in in his history of the 20th century says that this is one is the huge transformations of human history which is all too little acknowledged you know we talk a lot about the fall of the Berlin Wall and that kind of triumph of the us is the sole superpower but we don't talk enough detail about the urbanization of humanity so from roughly the beginning of the 21st century and I think the official point was in 2750 percent of humanity was living in cities and as Mike Davis talks about wonderfully in his book Planet of slums it's important to keep in mind that a lot of the urbanization that has happened over the last 50 years and increasingly almost all of the urbanization that will happen in the future in the rest of this century is happening in developing countries in other words in the global south so that the kind of paradigms that we have in our mind and those of us living in cities like New York or Berkeley for what cities should look like. Are really not up to speed for the ways in which global urbanization planetary urbanization is playing out now and in the future and we've talked to various guests on this program about why people are moving to cities but can you share with us some of the factors maybe some of the major factors that inclined people or force people to move to urban areas Yeah well in my book I talk about the recent wave of urbanist who have celebrated the transformative power of the city and you know that's an old story the kind of idea of Bright Lights Big City of economic mobility of the kind of attraction of cultural connection and social propinquity which comes with living in cities you know there's there's nothing like the kind of bubble of urban life and you know I think that that's important and I think that it is true that people can to a certain extent Mealer at their economic circumstances by moving to cities but what often gets ignored in those kinds of celebrations of cities are the factors that are pushing people to move to cities often against their will and that to really talk about that adequately means one has to talk about the history of globalization and the a liberalism in other words one has to talk about the ways in which countries which had fought hard to achieve their independence from colonial powers and to begin to develop their economies in the period after World War 2 and from 1960 on increasingly when more and more countries became independent the way that countries had tariff barriers and the sort of mechanisms of internal development that they'd put in place battered down by free trade agreements and various other forms of neoliberal globalization and of course in. In the global south above all that means the ways in which the barriers that protected peasants who are based in the countryside where destroyed and demolished in various different ways I mean the classic instance of course is is NAFTA NAFTA was responsible for cutting the barriers that protected farmers in Mexico and that led to a huge influx of cheap corn produced in the United States and of course it was produced by farmers using intensive fossil fueled agriculture rather than small peasant agriculture and that led to a shift of about 2000000 people from Mexico's rural areas to cities like Mexico City in other regional cities and you know a certain number of those people also came to the United States and went to other developed economies so there's a whole history of urbanization which involves big mechanisms of contemporary capitalism and the kind of inequalities of contemporary capitalism that need to be taken into account when one talks about the contemporary city Ashley Dawson is a visiting professor in the environment in the humanities and a visiting professor of English at the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University He's also professor of English at the City University of New York we are talking about his new book it's called Extreme cities the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change it's published by verse so I'm c.s. Song and this is against a big grin on Pacifica Radio. So what proportion of urban residents around the globe live in low elevation coastal zones I don't have the exact proportion on the tip of my tongue of people who live in coastal areas in the global south but 2 thirds of world cities are in. Coastal zones that are prone to floods so that's kind of across the global north club well south divide. And what I think reflects is some of the dynamics of globalization that we're talking about and in the developing world and developed world it also reflects the importance of port cities we often don't think about port cities and their importance to globalization you know we think about globalization in terms of airplanes often but. Without the container ship we wouldn't have the massive quantities of consumer goods being shipped from one part of the global economy to another and what that has meant is that massive port cities have grown up above all in East Asia which of course is the center for global commodity production but also in many other parts of the world and many of those cities are in low lying coastal zones that are highly prone to flooding What about in the u.s. Same thing in the u.s. All of the u.s. Is major cities lie in coastal zones New York all the way around cities on the West Coast and of course New Orleans which strikes us very much when we think about climate change others as a result of Hurricane Katrina so our wealthiest cities are in coastal areas that's not to say that there aren't threats which cities and other areas face you know the u.s. Is seeing a massive development of cities in the south and southwest of the country over the post-war period and particularly speeding up from 1960 onward and cities like Phoenix are very much very much threatened by drought and forms of heat that are coming with climate change so I think it's important to talk about phenomena not just flooding but also the forms of mortality related to the heat heat island effect in cities Reisa. These basically are about 30 percent warmer than the surrounding countryside and with that comes very elevated levels of mortality when the weather is extremely hot as well as you know quite spectacular disasters like brown outs and blackouts as a result of the grid not being able to handle all the electric consumption when people turn on their air conditioners trying to cope with elevated temperatures in the summer why are cities on average 30 percent hotter than the countryside and also to climate scientists pay enough attention to urban heat island phenomenon cities are a lot hotter because they have a lot more tarmac and you know bricks and other things in them that absorb heat and then radiate it into the surroundings related to that is the fact that when there is suburban sprawl it often means that a lot of. The natural greenery that was in the urban surroundings gets chopped down and that can lead to much higher temperatures and it can also lead to problems with flooding I mean that's very much what we saw when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston you know the city had spiraled massively as people moved to the ex-urban fringed looking for cheaper real estate you know in the absence of any kind of affordable housing policies in the city and in doing that developers kind of cut down a lot of the wetlands and that then led to led to massive flooding and you know in the book I point out that cities are in some strange way invisible to science because of the fact that our our measurements of temperatures tend to be adjusted to global norms so you know when we think about climate change we we talk about global statistics. And that's also reflected in terms of our accounting for increase. Sing heat as a result of climate change and other elements related to sort of data measurements and so when weather stations records do their recordings in urban areas scientists tend to statistically a chest down in order to get a kind of you know mean temperatures across the rural urban divide but of course what that does is to make cities and they're. Often in perilous apparently hot conditions invisible statistically you mention or you recall several terrifying heat waves that have afflicted Europe and India and New York City what happened in northern India in late July 2012. I want to talk about what happened in India in order to you know make the point that these kinds of hazards are occurring in multiple different places in the world and that in particular people in the global south are especially imperiled by these crashes and natural disasters so in 2012 there was a heat wave across all of northern India it impacted particularly strongly in New Delhi where there was a kind of cascading power outage and it had to do with problems in the grid in India India has huge problem with inefficiency and its grid all those the United States does too but in India it's even worse. And also since the majority of people in India still live in rural areas there are problems when you know farmers try and compensate for droughts by using a lot of electricity to prompt border it means that people living in urban areas have less access to electricity and so what happened in 2012 was that there are these series of cascading power outages and that kind of thing is really life imperiling because in cities as I pointed out at the outset access to Mordor in many cases depends on access to electricity you know when electricity stops working the pumps that pump water in urban systems often don't flow this is a was you know a potential huge threat in India and it is in the United States too I mean in New York during Hurricane Sandy when the power went out in much of Lower Manhattan people living in buildings that were higher than 5 stories lost access to water because the border just wouldn't naturally flow above 5 stories you know has to be pumped and then when the electricity goes out suddenly people living in high rises . Are in really grave life threatening conditions you referred earlier to slums in urban areas in the global south in particular you're right that one 3rd to a half for a very urban population I think this is in the global south well live lives in informal settlements what needs to be said about the vulnerability to environmental catastrophe of informal settlements in urban slums informal settlements are usually on land which urban elites have not taken over for one reason or another so almost by definition that land is imperiled in various different ways whether it's by toxicity in the land itself or by landslides in the event of some kind of natural disaster or by flooding and we could go on with all the different kinds of threats but the point is that there's a kind of what Mike Davis calls a slum ecology which is highly dangerous to the people who live in those areas. So that the massive numbers of people throughout the global south who are forced to live on that land and of course there their ability to stay there is often precarious since they often get rousted out by the government without any notice but adding to that precariousness of course is the increasing number of natural disasters whether they're sort of slow moving like drought or spectacular like hurricanes and to. Which are affecting those areas just recently I read that Cape Town the city where I was born in South Africa is likely to become the 1st city to have to start mass rationing of water to people who live there that's likely to happen in April. What the article talking about that I didn't talk about of course is that it's far going to be far harder for people. Living in the townships where there isn't adequate transportation to get access to the ration of water than people who have cars and other forms of public transportation towards the center of the city who tend to be more affluent and white as a result of the history of apartheid in South Africa and those kinds of inequalities play out throughout cities in the global south what can the impact of floodwaters be in some of these informal settlements given the lack of adequate sanitary infrastructure you know there's a also a whole component of Unfortunately you know diseases which which come when flood water comes to it can bring all sorts of diseases in the event of the flooding and then of course afterwards when the water itself is polluted in various different ways I mean given given all of that and the importance to underline that as the most important thing to think about Nonetheless I think that there are also elements of struggling and improvising with everyday life which people in formal settlements are quite adept at so that I think we have to temper the stories of the kind of menace which they stream city represents to people in informal settlements with people's capacity for resilience and for kind of human infrastructure for social connection in those places right and I say all of that because remember earlier I was talking about the way in which pundits Cherry urbanization as it's playing out really is happening in a way that's very different from the kind of urban templates we have from the last 200 years of urbanization in Europe and North America and because of that I think there's often a tendency to look at the cities of the global south and purely negative terms you know just the spaces of kind of a lack of. Structure or lack of development lack of industrialization and that's obviously a problem you know it's a very kind of racist way of looking at things so while it's important to acknowledge the challenge and extreme vulnerability that people face I think it's also important to talk about capacities for improvising and coping that people have developed and how that might help them whether that storms that are bearing down on people increasingly and then to think about how that might be ramped up with help I mean with adequate funding from the global north as it you know should be given to people on the global south for some time just transition actually Dawson joins us talking about his new book Extreme cities he's are visiting professor at Princeton a professor at the City University of New York will take a short break and speak more with Ashley Dawson about his really interesting and timely book please stay with us. And this is against the grain on Pacifica Radio My name is c. S. Song Ashley Dawson is a visiting professor in the environment and humanities and visiting professor of English at the Princeton Environmental Institute he has written books like extinction a radical history and in his more literary van I guess the Rutledge concise history of 20th century British literature and he has a new book out from 1st so it's called Extreme cities the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change you write that one 4th of the Netherlands lies below sea level and half of the country is threatened by storm surges and flooding rivers. What kind of praise have planners in that nation attracted for their efforts to adapt to climate change Holland has attracted a huge amount of attention for its history of dealing with water through its famous system of dikes and then for its contemporary efforts to come up with new ways of living less water so Dutch engineers and water technicians have become consultants all around the world I mean I interviewed architects who'd been working in which human city as well as people working in Florida and of course one of the most famous examples is the head of the Dutch water agency who became the adviser to Obama as head of Housing and Urban Development and the chief of the resilience the resiliency forming project here in New York City of code Rebuild by Design so Rotterdam a major port I think you mention that it's like the biggest seaport one of the biggest seaports in the world. You indicate that it's surrounded on all 4 sides by water so you can't simply flush water away when it appears or when it rolls in what has wrought or been praised for Rotterdam is really interesting because of the ways in which it has taken the Dutch system of creating massive barriers against storms and innovated on it so that it can also deal with surging rivers as climate change intensifies it's going to mean more moisture in the atmosphere and consequently heavier precipitation So not only more intense storms coming in off the North Sea in the Dutch case but also rivers coming in to Holland like the Rhine River from the European heartland which are going to be running higher and more likely to overflow their banks and so Rotterdam has attracted quite a lot of attention because of its efforts to make room for the river or to to live with water and to create so-called living infrastructure perhaps one of the most famous examples of this is a so-called water park the Dutch name for it is the Benton blend park it's become well known because of the way in which it serves a kind of Jewel purpose so in times of normal weather it's a public amenity place where people can enjoy themselves and be in public but then when the city is hit by a particularly strong rainfall the park can be flooded. And can serve as a kind of cistern for massive water so that it doesn't flood surrounding buildings so that effort to use public space in a kind of jewel. Purpose to absorb some of the flooding I think has gotten rather tem a lot of attention in 1953 a huge storm surge did tremendous damage in the Netherlands killing almost 2000 people and 30000 animals to prevent this from happening again the Dutch built what's called the Delta works describe the Delta works for us the Delta works are set of massive storm surge barriers that the Dutch put up in the north east and sort of the northwest and southwest part of the country and what's interesting about them is of course there are these huge structures which prevent storm surge like the one that was kill so many people in 1953 coming in off the North Sea and flooding just cities and countryside but they're also quite notable because the flexibility with which they were constructed so in particular the one in the southwest of the country is built with kind of sluice gates within the structure so that essentially parts of the barrier can be elevated so that when a storm surge isn't coming in off the sea. Can come and go as it normally would or at least as close as possible to the way it normally would and what that does is to keep the tidal zones behind the barrier alive and to keep the natural environment intact while also having the capacity to protect farmland and cities and other parts of the human world when necessary so. This innovation these sort of sluice gates and the ability to open and close them came as a result of pressure from both environmentalists and fisherfolk in the area that would have been affected had the barrier just been a pure barrier and so what it's sort of revealed was the ways in which the Dutch were able to marry both you know massive infrastructure which was supported by the state with the kind of democratic input and flexibility in engineering that was really quite notable and what does that indicate to you about the validity of some of the books in other publications that have come out by people kind of celebrating planetary urbanization and specifically saying that innovation is driven by free markets and their creativity and least by those free markets are what make cities great throughout the book I talk about the ways in which capitalist markets particularly ones that are based in cities are quite dysfunctional I mean I already alluded to the ways in which shrill estate development is taking place in coastal regions in cities all around the world and how that might be a good place to sink capital in other words to take over accumulated capital and make some money on it but it doesn't make any sense in human and ecological terms as more and more people get put in harm's way and their property to all. But the example that we're talking about now the Dutch example I think shows that a lot of the really quite radical free market celebrations of cities as the solution to climate change don't make sense so the thinking here specifically of Matthew Kahn who has a book about cities and climate change where he says basically he's echoing the arguments made by many other contemporary urbanist if he says that cities create this kind of ferment this kind of space of entrepreneurial ism and that they're going to in and of themselves consequently generate solutions to climate change right so I'm gathering people together giving them access to markets and putting them in harm's way in extreme cities Khan thinks will lead to solutions to climate change and I think that just makes absolutely no sense I mean for one thing cities are responsible for that the lion's share of carbon emissions you know they're responsible for about 70 percent of carbon emissions so they're a huge problem and that has to be fixed on the free market is not doing it adequately so we need to have massive regulation and that means state intervention and it has to be intervention which is guided by grassroots movements you know it has to come from grassroots mobilization and I think the the Dutch example is a good example of that right you have these huge engineering works really some of the greatest feats of human engineering in the 20th century but they were carried out by really remarkably Democratic Dutch state and one that was quite responsive as I was pointing out earlier to the criticism of Engineers and you know local workers fisherfolk who would have been impacted if it had been a just a. Pure pure barrier and of course we've you know we've seen just recently how mobilization a grassroots level can change the direction of cities really want to mention that quite recently the mayor of New York Bill de Blasio announced that the city was going to be divesting its pension funds from fossil fuels and also suing the 5 biggest fossil fuel companies for willfully imperiling in New York City this is obviously a huge step in a quite historic event but it's one that grassroots movements for divestment really fought for for a long long time so it's another example of how the kind of massive regulation that we need and also you know feats of engineering to protect cities are only really going to happen as a result of. Social movements that push authorities to take the appropriate action m c Yes this is against the grain on Pacifica Radio actually Dawson joins us whose new book is extreme cities the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change. What if any publicly funded infrastructure project undertaken in the u.s. Undertaken in u.s. History is of a scale similar to Hollings Well I think that to really find something similar you have to look back to the New Deal and the period immediately afterwards you know the construction of the national highway system for instance is an example although of course we're kind of saddled with that now because it's created a whole culture based on sprawling cities and automobiles which is what we need to overcome in order to. Create a kind of sustainable civilization but I think it's important to look back to that period to see that we have in Gage as a society and as a nation in the kinds of massive engineering projects that are necessary for the future in order to make cities sustainable and in the course of the book I talk about some of the ones that New York City is considering for its near future I mean York has already tried to claim that proof its subway system subway system of course goes back to the late 19th and early 20th century in New York City but I think it's another example of a kind of really important feature of manufacturing which transformed social fabric and which is responsible for the relatively small per capita carbon emissions of New Yorkers in comparison with people living in most other American cities so it's a kind of pointer to a way forward for us but I think you know there's been a lot of discussion of the need for a new deal a green new deal for a kind of mobilization on the scale of World War 2 That's something I talk about Towards the end of the book and talk about what kinds of movements we would need to make that happen and what some of the objectives might be well to. How many more I mean what kind of movements what kind of initiatives need to be undertaken to generate momentum toward such a project well the recent meeting of the un climate summit revealed that no developed nation and most developing nations aren't on track to keep to their voluntary cuts in carbon emissions which is obviously very bad news but even if. Everyone was on track with their pledges we would be angling towards a rise in temperatures of 3 degrees and there were a number of articles pointing out that this would mean that hundreds of millions of people in cities around the world are going to be faced with inundation and 2 just to really bring this home that the bottom 3rd of Florida is likely to be completely underwater by 2100 so what does that mean well it means that we're going to have to undertake all sorts of different add up tension efforts these can be from very kind of micro scale like people putting solar panels on their roofs to you know mitigate the amount of carbon emissions they're creating or green roofs and green walls to absorb rainfall all of that is on a very local scale but New York City is also talking about much bigger projects like putting up a kind of elevated berm or seawall around the bottom of Manhattan which was inundated and you know putting similar kinds of protective devices and infrastructure in place in many other parts of the city in the book I talk a lot about the need to think about equity and to have a kind of just transition right so there's a problem that when disaster strikes it's affecting cities that are highly unequal and consequently the impacts are highly unequal and highly damaging to the people who are least responsible for carbon emissions and most vulnerable and that continues to be the case you know as rebuilding happens after disasters again you know tends to be disadvantaged communities that get silly stage and we saw that playing out after Hurricane Sandy as well of course as after Hurricane Katrina and we're seeing it to such brutal effect in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria last fall. So you know these are things that we see happening all the time and so my book makes the case that as we begin talking more and more about adaptation to impacts of climate change we have to make strong arguments around justice social justice and the need to create cities that are truly resilient because they're not as economically stratified So I talk about some of the kinds of proposals that have been coming out of environmental justice movements here in New York for example I talk about we act which is an environmental justice organization based in Harlem they put together a climate action manual which is very much built on the experience of Hurricane Sandy and is trying to think about how to make neighborhoods more resilient but it's also thinking about the impact of gentrification urban inequality and the many other forms of attacks on low income people of color communities in cities like New York that are taking place so yeah as we think about adaptation it's really important to fight for justice and to work with environmental justice movements and climate justice movements that are pushing that fight forward and then as my comments at the outset of this kind of indicate I think we're also going to have to think about not just adaptation but also retreat I mean if we're looking at the bottom 3rd of Florida going underwater we're not just going to have to move people around within Miami but we're going to have to deal with really large scale displacement and we have no national conversation about that right now whatsoever of course it's starting to happen within cities with the current government in place it's really a nonstarter but I have to say with the Obama administration and we didn't see much more of a converse a. I'm going on either so I feel like we're really beginning to grapple with this reality and I think it's because of some of the ways in which cities are kind of invisible and the threat still isn't taken seriously enough that we were discussing at the beginning of the interview c s actually Dawson is my guest on against the grain on Pacifica Radio I'm c.e.o.s. Song we are talking about his new book it's called Extreme cities the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change well to what extent do you think reaction is to projections of human caused climate disruption is on climate disasters are rooted in denial or disavowal I talk about denial and disavowal of a fair amount in the book there is an element of that going on and there's been quite a lot of scholarship to support that idea particularly in in developed societies you know in the global south where people are living for instance in sub-Saharan Africa the vast majority of people are dependent on rain fed agriculture and so the impacts of climate change are already quit t.v. In reality people in the more affluent societies in the global north can for a lot of the time still afford to engage in denial and disavowal I also talk about though the ways in which some of the science makes it hard to grapple with these phenomena and also the ways in which our dominant cultural representations can create a sense of disaster fatigue or powerlessness right so the way in which disasters often get represented in Hollywood films for instance is as these phenomena which are Scorchers on society where there's a kind of war of all against all unleashed and usually in most. These kinds of films that Hollywood produces a lone white male hero sort of stands out and saves the day and this is not just in natural disaster films of wisht Pollie which has produced many but also in films which I think in some indirect way register the. Coming catastrophe of climate change and social breakdown potentially and that's you know films like zombie films for instance. Which are pretty thinly veiled racial texts about the threat of the other under dire conditions and so what I talk about in the book is the way in which that imaginary of catastrophe social breakdown and a kind of violence of everyone against everyone is not really accurate to what we know happens in many disasters in other words when something like Hurricane Sandy happens what we find often is that people turn to one another and engage in mutual aid you know they engage in solidarity with their neighbors and with people in their city and do their best to help one another out there are these amazing acts of selflessness and of social networking that take place and I document how that happened with Occupy Sandy and with a lot of the other kind of grassroots mobilizations that happened following Hurricane Sandy and what do pop culture representation of for example tidal waves inundating New York City what are the ignore about the problems that can afflict urban infrastructures. Well Hollywood likes to have a spectacle that likes to give us a kind of roller coaster ride of visual phenomena and emotions to go with it and so what that means is that they have to emphasize things and amp them up to the point where they can often be completely ridiculous and in the case of the day after tomorrow you know where helicopters are freezing mid air and you know pumping out is the atmosphere as a result I mean not to say that there aren't dramatic natural disasters and we've seen a whole slew of them of the last 4 or 5 months you know wildfires over 41000000 people were displaced as a result of a very strong monsoon season of normally strong ones in season in South Asia and then of course the strong hurricane season so there are spectacular disasters that take place and often with increasing ferocity but there's also kind of attritional destruction and that's the kind of slow grinding wearing a way of our infrastructures that support urban life and that's something that happens as a result of climate change you know as temperatures increase it's harder to maintain a lot of the physical infrastructure in cities but then intertwined with that of course is the way in which neoliberal evacuation of support for the public sphere is imperiling infrastructures and making it harder to maintain things like New York famous subway system that I looted to earlier you know breaks down all the time any time there's a strong rainstorm and often even with haste and here in the subway it doesn't keep going and in addition to the imperiled physical infrastructures and cities of course is the imperiled social infrastructure in other words if we're going to talk about urban resiliency we have to talk about the ways in which physical infrastructures and social communities interact with one another and the fact that people's capacity to survive disasters. Of the spectacular kind as well as the kind of slow violence of gradual disinvestment is diminished as a result of cutbacks that take place increasing with increasing ferocity of the recent years. You cite 2 Dutch geographers saying that flood defense measures make certain areas which are now protected from flooding because of the structures that have been belt more attractive for development with what consequence Well it's called the control paradox right so you've built flood defense mechanisms of various different kinds including classically you know a levee or sea wall or something like that and that gives people the impression that everything behind those defenses is safe and you then have development in those areas and often the defenses are not adequate you know either they're permeable or the seas rise and the storm surges are higher than anticipated or there's water coming down as a result of precipitation that floods from the inside rather than from the outside you know whole number of factors can can take place and you can end up actually having greater numbers of people at risk as a result of the defenses that have been built so there's a real kind of control paradox there and the place that I think that that comes up most clearly in the United States is with the levees around Mississippi River which is essentially made New Orleans into this Atlantis surrounded by elevated water channels on every side and you know the idea was to protect the city and surrounding agricultural areas but what it's actually done is to as we saw with Hurricane Katrina and then after has has led to potential catastrophic failures Ashley Dawson currently a visiting professor in the environment and humanities and visiting professor of English up a Princeton Environmental Institute he is normally based at the City University of New York where he teaches English His new book is extreme cities of peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change it's published by verse so Ashley thanks so much for joining us today thank you so much c.s. It's been great speaking with you. And that interview was recorded on January 22nd of this year. And this is c.s. Suggesting the important thing is not to stop questioning as Albert Einstein once said and we hope you'll join us next time. Against of a grain is produced by such a lowly and c Yes song you can visit us online at against the grain argy or you'll find on demand and downloadable audio resources and more you can check us out on Facebook at against the grain radio and you can follow us on Twitter at Radio against. Do you want to help k.p.s. a Meet the needs of the community it serves If so we welcome you to join keep you a phase Community Advisory Board also known as the cab they are currently in search of talented and skilled individuals who can help gather listener feedback for k.p. If these local station board their goal is to help keep if they improve its programs in public affairs culture and music they also help in community outreach for more information about the cab please visit keep p.f.a. Dot o.-r. G.'s or you will find them at the bottom of the home page which you can also contact the cab at c a Beast dot key p.f.a. Add she mail dot com You're listening to k p f a 94 point one and k p f b 89.3 in Berkeley k.f.c. Of 88 point one in Fresno and k 248 b.r. 97.5 and Santa Cruz you can stream k.p. F.a. Online or listen to our car shows any time at k. P.f.a. Dot org. Coming up next is when is very soon stay tuned. In the midst women. I mean use this sign on it to mean nice fine you. Nestle latest in many steps beyond For me off a map t.v. 90. 5 I catchy my. Welcome to women's magazine this is your special section with Java which is called the space between us. It's been a while since I've been with you it's been awhile since you've heard the space between us so let us catch up on the purpose of the space between us the space between us as a global consciousness raising program for women and girls and the purpose of it is for us to share our various stories the space between us what keeps us aligned with one another and what keeps us apart the space between us is the tensions of at some point us whether we agree with one another or not we struggle with one another for whatever those intentions are for human evolution for women evolution to make the space on the planet safe are our development however we define that sometimes I like to share with people to think about the space between us as a riverbank where women come to get there from various cultures beliefs and circumstances with the purpose of getting water and in the gathering of that water whether it's with your hands a pail a bucket. It is fluent kitchens of to be useful life for us and that is how I'd like to think about that. I very 1st show which was a little bit over a year ago was a space between white women a black woman it was a wonderful dad log of stories that we were able to share our stories of going up in our consciousness and to learn when we became aware of our existence. We had at the stories in terms of how women relate to our bodies and what those and how we became conscious of that when we became female and all of these things are important I believe and I want to believe that you listening as well on today's show we're going to talk about sex for. And we're going to talk about the whole war but Donna and the line between to hide all the stories that exist sex work and so much happening with them and that personally. Their legislation through laws through the very practical experience of our existence. I have 3 guests today one guess we're trying to get on that on the air Her name is a Yammie hard to Nada and she did some research recently her thesis work and I wanted her to talk about that but this is work was in car so well feminism and she could better explain that than I could possibly and hopefully will get her on the air we have a some difficulties but also in a student in how studio with me is Carol Lee. Carol Lee coined the term sex worker at a conference.
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