Week 12 Reflections

Climate Justice, Digital Activism, and Gender, Prof. Frances Roberts-Gregory
By Cormac Madden, 4/5/2019

This week's articles focused on the policies and problems involved in resilience and disaster planning. The guiding example for our class' exploration of this topic is the state of Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan. This Master Plan is laid out in its executive summary, which outlines the many facets of the plan, including sediment diversion, structural protection, barrier island restoration, and many more projects. The plan is massive, calling for fifty billion dollars in funding to achieve its goals. The Coastal Master Plan's Orleans Parish Fact Sheet describes the local projects that the plan would include, among them marsh creation, shoreline protection, and structural and nonstructural protection. 

However, critiques of mainstream resilience plans abound. In "Adaptation to Resilience Planning," Woodruff et al. argue that resilience plans will not be sufficient on their own in fighting climate change, given that they aim to tackle its effects rather than its causes. However, they argue that resilience plans could be viable components of larger efforts to tackle climate change, given that they create fora in which the climate may be discussed and legislated. Other critiques deal with more specific aspects of resilience planning. In "Racial Coastal Formation," Hardy et al. present a geographic, race-based analysis that demonstrates how adaptation plans that ignore racial dimensions will only perpetuate environmental racism by ignoring the systemic practices and differential vulnerabilities that create our coastal geographies and demographies. And in "Black feminism and radical planning," Fayola Jacobs argues that even vulnerability studies often scrapes only the surface, highlighting systemic issues but missing the perspectives and knowledges of those affected by the differential vulnerabilities of disasters.  

Until this week, I had never heard a negative word said about Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan. In one sense, this makes sense: the plan is an ambitious, massive proposal to protect an incredibly endangered ecosystem and the people who live within it. What I had never heard about, however, was how the plan does not equally protect all those who live within it and how systemic biases can still exist within its framework. This reality is not surprising; instead, it is stunningly obvious and highlights the naivety and ignorance of the way that I had previously learned about and understood the plan. 

One example of how this ignorance can be incredibly destructive can be found outside of Louisiana, with the Gullah Geechee of Georgia. As described in Hardy et al. (2017), the Gullah Geechee are coastal African Americans whose properties on Georgia's coast are threatened not only by climate change, but also by societal factors such as the lack of employment near their homes and increasing real estate interest from outside buyers. Even though the Hardy article was heavy with statistics and academic sources, the narrative it presented was still incredibly touching and devastating, presenting the Gullah Geechee as marginalized people with a long history without agency, a state that continues today with their disproportionate underrepresentation in local climate change and resilience policy. 

Key Terms

Louisiana Coastal Master Plan: A long-term, expensive, multi-faceted plan that aims to protect Louisiana's Gulf Coast.

Gullah Geechee: A nation of African Americans who live on Georgia's coast and speak a Gullah creole language. 

Sediment Diversion: As it pertains to the Mississippi, the manmade rerouting of some of the Mississippi River so that its sediment can rebuild wetlands as it once did. 

References

CMR. 2017. Coastal Master Plan Executive Summary. 

CMR. 2017. Orleans Parish Fact Sheet. 

Hardy, R. Dean, Richard A. Milligan, and Nik Heynen. 2017. "Racial coastal formation: The environmental injustice of colorblind adaptation planning for sea level rise." Geoforum 87:62-72.

Jacobs, Fayola. 2018. "Black Feminism and radical planning: New directions for disaster planning research." Planning Theory 0(0):1-16. 

Woodruff, Sierra C., Sara Meerow, Missy Stults, and Chandler Wilkins. 2018. "Adaptation to Resilience Planning: Alternative Pathways to Prepare for Climate Change." Journal of Planning Education and Research 0(0):1-12.