Race & Environment in America

Transcript for Student Voices

Elizabeth Fussell and Danielle Falzon

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You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.

Danielle Falzon: Hi, I'm Danielle Falzon, a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department, and I'm speaking with Dr. Elizabeth Fussell, Professor of Population Studies and Environment and Society about the recent panel discussion on Race & Environment in America. So I really enjoyed this discussion, in which you and Professor Mark Cladis brought together insights on the intersection of racial and environmental issues, which are often very clear to advocates for environmental justice inside and outside the academy, but often go overlooked, especially in policy spaces. And you gave an especially thought-provoking presentation on the concept of “social vulnerability,” specifically drawing upon your work on the racial disparities in how groups are impacted by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. So I wanted to start off with this concept of social vulnerability: one of the things you pointed out during your talk is something that I often think of as the “it's racism, not race” insight, where you showed the various factors that the CDC uses to characterize social vulnerability, which map onto low-income, low-education, potentially non-English speaking, Black and brown communities. But you demonstrated that these characteristics lead to greater vulnerability to hazards because of historical and modern practices of racism and discrimination that make marginalized groups less resilient. And I'm wondering if you could say a bit more about the utility of the CDC’s criteria, and I'm wondering if you think there's another way we can talk about social vulnerability that foregrounds these historical roots, rather than thinking of them as inherent traits of certain populations?

Elizabeth Fussell: Yeah, thank you Danielle, I really appreciate your questions. And so, I want to build on this insight that “it's racism, not race”—and that's why, in my talk, I used the social vulnerability measures that CDC produced, but I sort of alluded to the fact that, you know, these really—I mean, I explicitly said these flatten the history of how these people came to live in these places, and the spatial distribution of different levels of resilience across space. I think that the term “vulnerability” is problematic, because we do tend to think of people as being vulnerable, and that it's a characteristic of that person, and there might be times when, you know, for example, we think of, during the life course, there are ages where we might be more vulnerable to a disaster, like when we're children or when we're very old and perhaps have some disabilities. But then there are other characteristics, like gender and race and ethnicity, that really don't map on to any sort of reason for people being less able to protect themselves, or to recover from a disaster. And so, I think that it's preferable to think about people as being marginalized, and that places the onus of the, sort of, condition on a system, a system that actually marginalized people by treating them unfairly; by, you know—and when I say “treating them unfairly,” that's really invoking the whole history of, not only their own life, but their parents and grandparents and generations before them, where they simply were not endowed with the same kinds of resources that would enable them to be resilient in the face of an environmental hazard.

So, you know, the Social Vulnerability Index that the CDC produces collapses that idea to the income categories, you know, I don't have the exact names of the categories with me, but you know, some of the other dimensions in the Social Vulnerability Index refer to housing, occupation, income: these are also characteristics that might be correlated with race and ethnicity and gender, but they are not—they are correlated, but they're really qualitatively different, right? Because race and ethnicity and gender are characteristics of an individual that are stable and unchanging through life, but it's those other demographic or social and economic indicators that are correlated with demographic characteristics that are really, truly what make people less resilient, or marginalized from the resources that they would need to be resilient. So, you know, what I would say, when I look at the CDC Social Vulnerability Index is that, in some ways, I would prefer it more if it didn't include race and ethnicity and gender at all, because I don't think that those are truly characteristics that make people vulnerable, rather than simply correlated with those characteristics.

DF: That's fascinating, interesting. So, another question I wanted to ask is a topic that came up at the end of the talk: climate change. So, sort of scaling up what you saw in what you studied in New Orleans, I'm wondering if you could say a bit more about how historical racism—and I’ll also add colonialism here, too, because we're scaling up, then, across the nation, of course settler colonialism in the US, and colonialism generally across the Global South—how we can think a bit more about these marginalized groups in relation to their social vulnerability to climate change impacts? So beyond just individual hazards; kind of the broader climate change context of the future?

EF: Yeah, for sure, when we think about the United States, and social vulnerability to climate change in the United States, we're really talking about vulnerability in a fairly privileged environment. You know, in the United States, we have a lot of resources that make us more resilient as a nation, and those would include things like, you know, 200 years of infrastructure investments in water management that have hardened the environment and protect settlements and people from these extreme precipitation events or coastal storms that would—are potentially harmful and destructive of property and life. Similarly, we, in terms of temperature threats from climate change, know throughout the United States, air conditioning is widely available, and in colder climates the built environment does keep people warm enough so that these temperature extremes don't—we're fairly protected from them. Having said that, we are reaching extremes, even in the United States, as we saw in Texas with that extreme freeze where people just weren't prepared for that kind of temperature, and it became very harmful to life and property there. So, nevertheless, the point holds that in a place that has had a lot of wealth and accumulated investments in managing these environmental hazards, people are fairly protected.

But across the globe, and even within the United States, you can think of lots of ways in which those protective conditions break down. In the United States, there are also places where those investments are not enough to deal with the environmental changes that we're seeing as a result of climate change. So, for example, in parts of Alaska where Indigenous people live on the coast, permafrost thawing is causing the settlement—the land on which people have built their homes, to turn to mud, and they can't, you know, it's becoming unsustainable and hazardous to live there. And so likewise, in Louisiana, coastal erosion and land subsidence are causing people to lose their land. Those are really important but unusual cases, in the sense that the loss of land is really something that isn't happening in most places; but where it is happening, it's an absolute loss, and you can't really protect against it. And then, extending out from the United States to the Global South and places like Bangladesh, or small island developing states, or small island states, it doesn't matter whether or not—those are places where sea level rise is threatening human settlements and also, not just the land, but the quality of the water, the arability of the land, the access to clean water: these are real, very real threats to human habitation and human life. And in those places, where the, kind of, the wealth, the accumulated wealth from capitalism and from, you know, years of investment in hardening the environment against these environmental hazards, those simply don't exist to the same extent in those places, meaning that when environmental hazards are experienced, people and places will be more susceptible to the damaging effects of events. So the inequality—spatial inequality—across the globe becomes even broader compared to what we might see in the United States.

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DF: Alright, great, so, last, I just wanted to pick up on something you mentioned in the Q&A, referring also to Professor Cladis’s presentation that discussed Du Bois’s writings on the swamp. So, you had said that the swamp was an important part of New Orleans culture and society as it absorbed the impacts of hurricanes in the region for many, many years, protecting the people who lived in those coastal areas. And I've seen a very similar thing in my own research in Bangladesh, where the Sunderbans mangrove forest on the southern coast of the country has protected people from cyclones for decades. But in both cases, there's an abuse and taming of nature, and the destruction of those barriers has led to more impactful disasters for the people living there. So, I'm wondering if you could say a bit more about that, and how social relationships with the environment, or social uses of the environment, impact disaster and contribute to vulnerabilities; and then how we might rethink or change those practices going forward?

EF: Yeah. New Orleans is really a unique environment in the United States, because it is a city that is surrounded on three sides by the river and then by a lake on the fourth side. It's not a square: they call it “crescent city” for a reason, because of the shape of the river around it. So, it's not an island, but there's so much water around it, it's really part of this ecosystem that is largely a swampland…and that swamp and the bayous and sort of marshes that are all along coastal Louisiana have been absorbing the shock of hurricanes since—forever. And in recent years, there's been some anthropogenic—or, I should say, in the last century—there’ve been anthropogenic and natural forces that have combined to cause a great deal of erosion of that land, where they're losing what they call—they always refer to “football fields” of land, are just falling into the Gulf of Mexico every day. And I’ll just, you know, talk about a few of the—you know, the biggest drivers of land erosion are the taming of the Mississippi River by channelizing it into—within the levees, so it can't move as it naturally would like to move, it can’t distribute that silt that comes down through the heartland of the—North America, and it, you know, that flows down through what they call the “Big Muddy” and out into the Gulf of Mexico. Normally, that silt would be distributed all through the Mississippi River Delta, but now it's being channeled and sent out into, just into, the Gulf of Mexico, and so that means that this very silty land is sinking, and it's not being replenished by the river, and so that's one cause of, that’s an anthropogenic cause of, this land subsidence. Another has to do with the oil companies that, in order to access the oil wells out in the Gulf of Mexico, they built channels that cut through the marshlands and allow the pipes to go from the refineries out to the wells. And when they do that, they allow the saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico to come into the swamps, which are brackish (or have a combination of, you know, fresh and saltwater); that allows for the species of trees, the plants that live there, to survive; you know, they're attuned, they're naturally accustomed to this brackish water, but when the saltwater comes in through this these canals, it kills the trees, and when the trees die, the land goes away. And so, this is where the land is being lost due to human activity. Sea level rise, which is happening, again, because of climate change, which is also due to human activity, that's occurring simultaneously. But because you have both sea level rise and land subsidence happening in coastal Louisiana, what you have going on there is really a sort of a pre—it's a canary in a coal mine; it's telling us what will, what sea level rise will look like in other places in the future, because it's happening so much faster in Louisiana.

So, who lives in the swamps? You know, earlier in response to one of your questions, I talked about marginalized people, and the populations who live in coastal Louisiana are people who settled there over generations, and who learned to make their living off of the land: they learned how to make their living by shrimping and oystering and raising crops that are appropriate for the that region, and so while some of them are white and some of them are Black, they are also, you know, marginalized because of their occupations and the way they earn their livelihoods. You know that in the United States, right now, those sorts of occupations are not the most lucrative: they aren't the occupations where you earn enough money that you invest in your childrens’ education, and you can invest in a home that will be protective against the elements. And so these are—it's a rough life there, and it's made rougher by all of the environmental change that's happening so quickly there.

Having said that about, you know, coastal Louisiana, I'll say that as well, within New Orleans, areas that, as I discussed in my talk, some of the parts of the city are also reclaimed swampland that were filled in historic—a long time ago, like in the, you know, 19th and 20th centuries, in order to become habitable, but because they're filled-in swampland, they do carry a sort of stigma, and maybe even a vulnerability to flooding, and so the the value of that land is not as high as the land that's on the natural levees. And we can see that after Hurricane Katrina, you know, that led to the kinds of inequalities in both its closure to the flooding but also in access to recovery resources, and if the value of your land and your home was lower because pre-disaster, the property value was lower, that meant you got a lower insurance payment.

So, this relationship to land persists in the way in which we recover from disasters, the way social institutions treat people on the basis of the value of their property, or whether or not they even own property, and so that's one of the ways that the relationship to land still matters, and we have to consider it when we think about how we manage disaster policy, but we should also be thinking about it in terms of where we build housing in the future. And right now, in the United States, we're in a housing crisis and we're just simply not building sufficient affordable housing, and when we do build affordable housing, it is often in these sort of low value, you know, areas where the land values are less, often because they're more vulnerable to environmental hazards. And that's the kind of logic of capitalism that's perpetuating social vulnerability, unequal vulnerability to natural hazards and other types of environmental exposures. So until we incorporate climate change and issues of fairness into the way we build housing, we're not going to solve that problem. That's a huge problem that needs to be tackled, but I don't see anybody taking it on quite yet. Hopefully they will.

DF: Well, thank you for talking about it now, and that about wraps us up. And I want to just thank you so much again, Professor Fussell, for taking the time to talk more in this really interesting conversation!

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