The links below provide an outline of the material for this lesson. Be sure to carefully read through the entire lesson before returning to Canvas to submit your assignments.
The first seven weeks of the course have given us an overview of schools of thought on Nature, what it is, and how we should use it. Now that we've thought critically about how we understand the environment, we will use these broad ideas to ask deeper, more specific questions about inequality: Who gets to make decisions about human use of the environment? Who benefits from these decisions? Who bears the negative impacts?
Assignments Due During Week 8:
You are expected to include the full citations for these materials in your assignments, as detailed in our Quick Guide [1]. You should look up the missing information not provided with the materials, which, if it is not to be found in the document or opening film credits, can easily be located through a quick online search.
It is important to pay close attention to how each author/speaker is defining racism, as this is an important concept in environmental justice, and their definitions may be very different from popular uses of the term that you are more familiar with. All three of the authors are analyzing racial and class inequality at a structural level, instead of at the level of individual people. This means that they are NOT focused on the kind of racism that manifests as one individual hating and intentionally discriminating against another person because of her race. So, read carefully: how do these authors define environmental racism?
Struggles over unequal exposure to environmental hazards have been taking place for a very long time in societies all around the world, but the origins of environmental injustice as a concept can be traced back to 1982, when the State of North Carolina needed to clean up highly toxic waste (Polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, which is so dangerous to the environment and human health that the US banned it in 1979) that a company had been illegally dumping along highways across the state. After sending the perpetrators to jail, North Carolina decided to clean the highways and to relocate the toxic PCB-laden soil to a landfill, which they sited in the African American community of Afton, Warren County. The landfill was not a safe way to contain PCBs, and it represented a severe threat to the health of this community. However, African Americans have historically had very little political power in North Carolina, and it took over twenty years of lawsuits, protests, and public appeals for the state to take responsibility. In 2003, state and federal agencies detoxified the 81,500 tons of PCB-laden soil by burning it in a kiln that reached over 800 degrees. The residents' struggle in Warren County remains a powerful symbol for the environmental justice movement.
In response to this experience, and others around the country, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice commissioned a study of the geography of hazardous waste sites, landfills, incinerators, and other polluting industries around the country. This study, published in 1987, found that race is the primary determining factor in the location of these hazards and that economic class is also highly significant. Polluting industries and waste disposal sites are placed in communities of African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, farm workers and the working poor, because these communities are perceived as politically weak and less able to resist these unwanted impositions.
If you are unfamiliar with the Environmental Justice Movement in the United States, you can find a summary of key historical moments, as well as detailed data and analysis on race and class as deciding factors in exposure to environmental hazards, in the report "Toxic Waste and Race at Twenty, 1987-2007" [2] prepared by the Justice and Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ, a leader in the environmental justice movement.
You can also read a very short piece containing the "Principles of Environmental Justice" [3] drafted and adopted by the delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on October 24-27, 1991, in Washington DC. These principles continue to serve as a guiding framework for the growing grassroots environmental justice to this day.
These documents are not mandatory, and you will not be tested on them, but they may be helpful to you and are rich resources on a very important issue!
The Environmental Justice movement in the United States has become a powerful force influencing human use of the environment in recent decades, and it resonates with struggles over natural resource rights and waste disposal around the world. The readings for this week will introduce you to the central concepts of environmental justice and demonstrate the implications of environmental justice for people and environments at a local and global scale.
At the end of this week, you should be able to:
Let's dive in!
Majora Carter grew up in the South Bronx, and in this TedTalk, she details her struggle for environmental justice where she lives. Her talk describes how marginalized neighborhoods suffer the most from flawed urban policy, and delivers some of her ideas for a way forward.
Pay close attention to the causes and consequences of environmental injustice that Carter identifies. Two important concepts that you may not be familiar with are white flight [4]and redlining. Click on the link for an article describing the process of white flight in the United States. Then, take a look at how Fair Housing Center of Greater Boston [5] describes redlining:
Redlining is the practice of denying or limiting financial services to certain neighborhoods based on racial or ethnic composition without regard to the residents' qualifications or credit worthiness. The term "redlining" refers to the practice of using a red line on a map to delineate the area where financial institutions would not invest.
In the United States, from the 1930s through the 1960s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which insured private mortgages and helped encourage home ownership, commonly used redlining in urban areas as a way to maintain segregation. The practice also served to concentrate economic resources in white neighborhoods and to concentrate harmful sources of pollution in black neighborhoods. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in the recent Atlantic article "The Case for Reparations" [6]:
The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated “A,” indicated “in demand” neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked “a single foreigner or Negro.” These neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods, where black people lived, were rated “D” and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion. Redlining went beyond FHA-backed loans and spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage.
Today, redlining is illegal, but the wealth gap that it created remains and continues to exert a huge influence on the geography of financial investment and toxic waste sitting in the United States.
If you're here today -- and I'm very happy that you are -- you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. However, when we're not at TED, we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible, especially in large urban areas like New York City. And that's because most people with decision-making powers, in both the public and the private sector, really don't feel as though they're in danger.
The reason why I'm here today, in part, is because of a dog -- an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain, back in 1998. She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I'd anticipated. When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food-distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. The area also has one of the lowest ratios of parks to people in the city.
So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a $10,000 seed-grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects, I thought they were really well-meaning, but a bit naive. I'd lived in this area all my life, and you could not get to the river, because of all the lovely facilities that I mentioned earlier. Then, while jogging with my dog one morning, she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me, and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river. I knew that this forgotten little street-end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving. And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx.
And just like my new dog, it was an idea that got bigger than I'd imagined. We garnered much support along the way, and the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years. We leveraged that $10,000 seed grant more than 300 times, into a $3 million park.
And in the fall, I'm going to exchange marriage vows with my beloved.
(Audience whistles)
Thank you very much.
That's him pressing my buttons back there, which he does all the time.
But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coal mine. We feel the problems right now and have for some time. Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do. These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity, diabetes, and asthma. Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood? Our 27 percent obesity rate is high even for this country, and diabetes comes with it. One out of four South Bronx children has asthma. Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average. These impacts are coming everyone's way. And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. Fifty percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line; 25 percent of us are unemployed. Low-income citizens often use emergency-room visits as primary care. This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits. Poor people are not only still poor, they are still unhealthy.
Fortunately, there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term and won't destroy us all in the long term. None of us want that, and we all have that in common. So what else do we have in common?
Well, first of all, we're all incredibly good-looking.
Graduated high school, college, post-graduate degrees, traveled to interesting places, didn't have kids in your early teens, financially stable, never been imprisoned. OK. Good.
But, besides being a black woman, I am different from most of you in some other ways. I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down. My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam, only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home. Jesus. I grew up with a crack house across the street. Yeah, I'm a poor black child from the ghetto. These things make me different from you. But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community, and I am in between these two worlds with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other.
So how did things get so different for us? In the late '40s, my dad -- a Pullman porter, son of a slave -- bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later, he married my mom. At the time, the community was a mostly white, working-class neighborhood. My dad was not alone. And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream, white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country. Red-lining was used by banks, wherein certain sections of the city, including ours, were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment. Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions -- dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding.
Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community, but now residents had neither work nor home to walk to. A national highway construction boom was added to our problems. In New York State, Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway-expansion campaign. One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan. The South Bronx, which lies in between, did not stand a chance. Residents were often given less than a month's notice before their buildings were razed. 600,000 people were displaced. The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx. And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it's bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? So now, my family's property was worthless, save for that it was our home and all we had. And luckily for me, that home and the love inside of it, along with help from teachers, mentors, and friends along the way, was enough.
Now, why is this story important? Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come. Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided? What costs are associated with these decisions? And who pays? Who profits? Does anything justify what the local community goes through? This was "planning" -- in quotes -- that did not have our best interests in mind.
Once we realized that, we decided it was time to do our own planning. That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a Greenway movement in the South Bronx. I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million dollar federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths. Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety, the placement of the waste and other facilities, which, if done properly, don't compromise a community's quality of life. They provide opportunities to be more physically active, as well as local economic development. Think bike shops, juice stands. We secured 20 million dollars to build first-phase projects. This is Lafayette Avenue -- and that's redesigned by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. And once this path is constructed, it'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall's Island Park. Right now we're separated by about 25 feet of water, but this link will change that.
As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. We run a project called the Bronx [Environmental] Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restoration so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs. Little by little, we're seeding the area with green-collar jobs -- and with people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment. The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era, built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it. Even during rush hour, it goes virtually unused. The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway. We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland, affordable housing, and local economic development.
We also built New York City's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices.Cool roofs are highly-reflective surfaces that don't absorb solar heat, and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. Green roofs are soil and living plants. Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban "heat island" effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe. Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions -- which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. And they provide habitats for our little friends!
[Butterfly]
So cool!
Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx.
[Green is the new black ...]
I like that, too.
Anyway, I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here, but since I have all of your attention: We need investors. End of pitch. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway --
OK. Katrina.
Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another. In the post-Katrina era, we have still more in common. We're at best ignored, and maligned and abused, at worst, by negligent regulatory agencies, pernicious zoning, and lax governmental accountability. Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable. But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out. We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and go. Now, will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two like the South Bronx did? Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine?
Now listen, I do not expect individuals, corporations, or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. This presentation today only represents some of what I've been through. Like a tiny little bit. You've no clue. But I'll tell you later if you want to know.
But -- I know it's the bottom line, or one's perception of it, that motivates people in the end. I'm interested in what I like to call the "triple bottom line" that sustainable development can produce. Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government, and the community where these projects go up.
At present, that's not happening in New York City. And we are operating with a comprehensive urban-planning deficit. A parade of government subsidies is going to propose big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste, and the impacts on open space. And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it's not even funny. Because on top of that, the world's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks. Now, we'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier. And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars, these projects include thousands of new parking spaces, yet zip in terms of mass public transit. Now, what's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy, environmentally-challenged community, versus incorporating structural, sustainable changes. My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues.
Now let's get this straight: I am not anti-development. Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. And I've embraced my inner capitalist. And, but I don't have --
You probably all have, and if you haven't, you need to.
So I don't have a problem with developers making money. There's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins -- both heroes of mine by the way -- have shown that you can actually do that. I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities is to learn from visionaries in other cities. This is my version of globalization.
Let's take Bogota. Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking; a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx. However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly-influential mayor named Enrique Peñalosa. He looked at the demographics. Few Bogotanos own cars, yet a huge portion of the city's resources was dedicated to serving them. If you're a mayor, you can do something about that. His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three, outlawed parking on those streets, expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, created public plazas, created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world. For his brilliant efforts, he was nearly impeached. But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives, incredible things happened. People stopped littering. Crime rates dropped because the streets were alive with people. His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time, and on a third-world budget, at that. We have no excuse in this country, I'm sorry. But the bottom line is: their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars, but rather, to provide opportunities for all Bogotanos to participate in the city's resurgence. That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the U.S. But Bogota's example has the power to change that.
You, however, are blessed with the gift of influence. That's why you're here and why you value the information we exchange. Use your influence in support of comprehensive, sustainable change everywhere. Don't just talk about it at TED. This is a nationwide policy agenda I'm trying to build, and as you all know, politics are personal. Help me make green the new black. Help me make sustainability sexy. Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations. Help me fight for environmental and economic justice. Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return. Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table, and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. Oh good, glad I have a little more time!
Listen -- when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. His response was a grant program. I don't think he understood that I wasn't asking for funding. I was making him an offer.
What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. Now, don't get me wrong, we need money.
But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don't add wasting our energy, intelligence, and hard-earned experience to that count.
I have come from so far to meet you like this. Please don't waste me. By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly-growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world. We might have come to this conference from very, very different stations in life, but believe me, we all share one incredibly powerful thing. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Ciao, Bellos!
As you watch the video, consider the following questions:
Michele Morrone and Geoffrey Buckley. (2011). Introduction: Environmental Justice and Appalachia. Mountains of Injustice. Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press. Pp. xi-xix.
Your second reading is the introduction to a book by Michele Morrone and Geoffrey Buckley called Mountains of Injustice. Research on environmental justice reveals that urban neighborhoods where people of color and low-income residents live are often the preferred sites for landfills, power plants, and polluting factories. Those who live in these "sacrifice zones" are forced to shoulder the burden of harmful environmental effects so that others can prosper. Mountains of Injustice broadens the discussion from the city to the country by focusing on the legacy of disproportionate environmental health impacts on communities in the Appalachian region, where the costs of cheap energy and cheap goods are actually quite high.
Pay close attention to how the authors define environmental justice and environmental racism. From the epigraph that begins the chapter, the authors highlight how important the concept of environmental racism is to understanding what's happening in the white communities of rural Appalachia (that quote is from Robert Bullard [7], who is known as the father of the environmental justice movement in this country). Clearly, a simplistic understanding of racism is not sufficient here, because being white has not protected these communities from, in Bullard's words, "being dumped on" (Morrone and Buckley 2011: xi).
These authors are arguing that race and class are intersecting forms of inequality. Environmental justice and economic justice are deeply connected to one another. Both the poor black residents of the South Bronx and the poor white communities are "environmental justice communities." In order to fix environmental injustice, we must fully appreciate the value of these places and the people who live in them, and recognize the routine violence experienced by communities that have less political power.
A few questions to consider as you read and reflect:
Laura Pulido. (2000). Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 90(1): 12-40.
What do you think when you hear the word racism?
That is "what bad people do because they are bad"?
If so, this article calls for a change of perspective and introduces a concept of structural racism.
The article, our final reading for this week, is an article that has had a transformative impact on how geographers approach the spatial dimensions of inequality and injustice. This article, published in the flagship academic journal in American geography, explores different ways of understanding environmental racism, and emphasizes "white privilege" as a particularly influential form of racism that has shaped urban and suburban development in the United States.
Pulido's groundbreaking contribution to geography (and environmental justice studies) in this article is that she combines the mapping of racial demographics and siting of toxic facilities with spatial renderings of suburbanization and white flight to produce a more complex understanding of environmental racism as an ongoing process.
Those of you who have not read a lot of geographic scholarship before may need to work through this reading with extra care. Please take the time to look up terms with which you are unfamiliar, and read to find Pulido's central arguments about how racism works.
The following terms are particularly important. Remember, your first job is to understand how Pulido is defining these concepts and using them in her analysis, and your second job is to think about how her arguments differ or agree with the other assigned materials, popular media, and your own perspective.
The key difference between the two pictures is the presence/absence of "the bad guy" as we would typically think.
It seems unfair to label the able-bodied person in the right picture as "the bad guy" in the right-hand side picture. But it is also clear that the right-hand side picture is not a desirable situation and a struggle is clearly present for the handicapped person that he wouldn't have to undergo if he were without the handicap.
It can be helpful that Pulido's concept of racism does NOT seek to label the able-bodied person (the white) bad and start a blame game, but it seeks to address and correct a situation or structure where a specific group(e.g. black people, the handicapped) of people are receiving disadvantage that other people don't. In short, the point of Pulido's argument is to address and eradicate "racism without racist".
As you read, consider the following questions:
Your last Current Event Essay will be on one of the real-life impacts of Climate Change. As always, this is just the prompt. The submission is due Thursday of Week 9 at 11:59PM.
Since 2014 or earlier there has been a steady flow of news stories about the impact of sea leave rise on island communities in the Pacific and more recently on coastal communities around the world, including in America. The uneven impacts of climate change forms the basis of the concept of climate justice. This topic is an ideal topic for you to engage with for you last Current Event Essay as it allows you to link to many of the topics we have covered thought out the course so far, including some of the more complicated issues such as discourse and environmental justice. It will also help you think about some of the topics coming up in our last few weeks. For example, do you remember what the film “Before the Flood” said about the predicted impact of Climate Change on coral reefs?
Below is a set of articles for you to draw on and introduced the concept of climate justice. In addition to these articles, feel free to do your own research on the topic. Remember to include at least one additional academic source.
In response to these articles and drawing on content we have covered throughout the course, consider the following questions in your response:
For this essay, you will write a 750-1000 word response to the questions.
Remember: we are looking to see you demonstrate that you are thinking critically about what you have learned throughout the course. This means that you can and should be looking for discrepancies between various approaches and authors and questioning the material. You should be supporting your ideas and questions with credible sources (peer-reviewed, published in a scientific venue, available of google scholar). For this essay, in particular, we will be looking SYNTHESIS, to see that you can bring together and ideas from across the course and from other sources as well.
Make sure to:
Avoid common mistakes:
Good luck on your last Current Event Essay!
We've covered a lot of concepts this week, and hopefully you feel that you now have the tools to approach environmental justice analysis in a rigorous and grounded manner. Work diligently to apply the concepts that you've encountered here and in past weeks into your essays throughout the rest of the semester, and it will raise the level of conversation and benefit us all. The more we have a shared language, the more we will understand each other and be able to move our own thinking about human-environment relationships forward!
All assignments will be submitted in Canvas, check the calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
Great Job!
Links
[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog430/node/280
[2] http://www.ejnet.org/ej/twart.pdf
[3] http://www.ejnet.org/ej/principles.html
[4] http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8043.pdf
[5] http://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1934-1968-FHA-Redlining.html
[6] http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
[7] http://drrobertbullard.com/
[8] http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Social_structure
[9] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/06/29/climate-change-in-the-u-s-could-help-the-rich-and-hurt-the-poor/?utm_term=.d2ea3f9f302f
[10] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/11/climate-change-refugees-grapple-with-effects-of-rising-seas.html
[11] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/resettling-the-first-american-climate-refugees.html?_r=0
[12] http://www.theroot.com/color-of-climate-is-climate-change-gentrifying-miami-s-1797516942
[13] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2015/mar/17/pacific-islands-losing-way-of-life-to-climate-change-in-pictures
[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/world/asia/climate-change-kiribati.html