What to Expect in the Climate Crisis in the Upper Midwest

The first module in the class after the introduction to anthropology and environmental anthropology in particular was to focus in on what we can expect in climate change, using the Fourth National Climate Change Assessment (the “Black Friday” report) and other supplementary science material. While these students are aware of the climate crisis and how specific ecosystems in our region have changed over the past decades, the 4^th NCCA delineates specific risks and vulnerabilities for the region in which we now live, and where most of these students will continue to live.[1] This specificity allows us to pin down specific concerns and actions, counteract the sense of impending, impossible, inevitable disaster. 

The 4^th NCAA is a masterful depiction of the specific conditions we can expect 20-40 years in the future.[2] It also allows us to start to consider issues of equity and adaptation. We read the Overview, the Midwest, and Key Messages.

In the Midwest, we’ll see the following effects in 20-40 years:

•        Agriculture – Soil erosion, favorable conditions for pests and pathogens, degraded quality of stored grains, decreased yields due to problems with reproduction from rising extreme temperatures
•        Forestry – Increased tree mortality in part due to invasive species and pests.  We’re losing (and will lose more) culturally important tree species. Our forest systems will change (conversion), or even convert to non-forested ecosystems by the end of this century.
•        Biodiversity & ecosystems – our native species help with essential services such as water purification, flood control, resource provision, and crop pollination.  Our freshwater resources are at great risk given the combination of climate stressors along with land use change, habitat loss, pollution, nutrient inputs, invasive species.
•        Human health – worsening health conditions due to poor air quality days, extreme high temps, heavy rainfalls and spread of waterborne illnesses through flooding, especially if our sewage systems are overloaded; extended pollen seasons; and, of course, modified distribution of pest and insects that carry disease. We’re expecting substantial loss of life and worsened health conditions by the mid-century.
•        Transportation & infrastructure – difficulties in transportation of goods and people due to destruction of infrastructure in extreme weather events; this is made all the worse by the US’s continued refusal to invest in infrastructure
•        Community vulnerability & adaptation – at-risk communities in the Midwest, especially due to flooding, drought, and urban heat islands. Tribal nations dependent on natural resources are deeply threatened. Given many tribal nations’ cultural emphasis on sustainability and local ecological knowledge, their capacity to build adaptive capacity and increase resilience would be a huge loss to ecosystems (NCA 4, p. 25).

The NCCA goes on to specify key points for adaptation or mitigation in each region. These became points of discussion in following classes.

These changes are in our near future. As residents in a wealthy country with a huge resource base (the entire globe), we have both contributed to more rapid deterioration in other parts of the world and been able to alleviate or mitigate our own experience of climate change. We simply don’t feel it, except in hot and cold days and occasional storms.  What can anthropology contribute to this?

Many of the peoples that anthropologists study have already experienced climate disaster. Regions of the US have already suffered climate crisis impacts, unlike most of the Upper Midwest. Anthropologists have worked with peoples who are experiencing climate disaster for over a decade – in Siberia, Alaska, Bangladesh, and the Pacific Islands, for instance. This is not the future, this is now. As Environmental Studies majors, too many of these students were unaware of the fact that around the world are already adapting to the climate crisis.

Climate crisis adaptation already an everyday occurrence. What can we learn about this through anthropology?

A key point I start to make here is that the effects of climate change will not be distributed equally. “People who are already vulnerable, including lower-income and other marginalized communities, have lower capacity to prepare for and cope with extreme weather and climate-related events …” (NCCA 2018, p. 25). Mitigation efforts will be unaffordable for the poor or actually place more burden on them than on other parts of the Earth’s population. There will be huge costs in attempting to maintain infrastructure such as roads and electrical transmission lines. The costs of disaster relief will skyrocket and (as we have already seen), some groups will not be allocated relief for political and cultural reasons (cf., the lack of timely or sufficient relief to Puerto Rico, Florida, lower Midwest).  People at greater risk from the effects of the climate crisis include those who cannot afford to move away from a disaster – the urban poor, the rural poor – but also those who depend directly production – farmers, fishers, hunters.

Discussing this allows me to introduce another key theme of this class – imagining a more equitable future.

We discussed the effect of cascading impacts, which make it hard to specifically plan for the future.  These effects will span across regional or national boundaries. As I’ve noted elsewhere, assessment of sustainable futures cannot be limited to the political boundaries of nation-states (Gillogly 2014). What we experience is local, but mitigation and adaptation must be global.

Take, for instance, water (one of my favorite topics). Rising air and water temperatures and changes in precipitation reduce snowpack, intensify droughts, increase heavy downpours, and declining surface water quality. Clearly, these events will have varying impacts across regions. Here in SE Wisconsin, we’re likely to flood. Rapid runoff is likely to pollute our drinking water sources (Lake Michigan). This is far different from what dry regions will experience. But all of this will add to the stress on water supplies – both quality and quantity. This will also have national economic effects, since so much industry (think of power plants!) rely on a steady supply of water for cooling – that’s why industry was often located in places such as SE Wisconsin and the Calumet Region of NE Illinois / NW Indiana.  Clean water won’t be reliable anymore, and we will be competing with large companies for access to that water.

All of this is exacerbated by our failure to maintain and upgrade water infrastructure – lead in pipes, leaking pipes. Do we have the funds or the political will to upgrade water infrastructure now? A poor city like Flint not only doesn’t have the funds, they were punished for being poor by giving the residents dangerous water when the city’s management was taken over by the State of Michigan.  Yes, a municipality can upgrade water infrastructure, but that’s often funded through bonds (and how often are those voted down by the people in new subdivisions or in semi-rural areas with their own private wells who don’t see why they should bear these expenses for ‘urban’ people they fled from?) or through surcharges to property taxes, which will adversely affect poor people.

With rising temperatures and uneven rainfall resulting in periods of drought interspersed with extreme rainstorms, we will see more soil erosion. The rise in average temperature will result in declines in crop yields. And since so much of our food comes from other parts of the world, we’re dependent both on conditions and adaptations in those places, as well as the reliability of transportation infrastructure. Clearly, rising costs of food would affect the poor more than the wealthy.

In this way, we make the social effects of the climate crisis tangible and immediate, while setting the stage for politically just responses to the new world in which my students will live. 

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[1] Most of these students are working their way through college, living with parents, siblings, cousins, or grandparents to control costs. There is a very strong sense of attachment to place and to social networks in this region of Wisconsin. I doubt many will leave in the future, as they do not leave now.

[2] It is, to my mind, also a political act to read this, given the state’s attempt to bury the report. I encourage students to download the entire report, in case it is later removed from government web sites. The web site is also beautifully designed.

The fundamental principles of "Environmental Anthropology: Living in the Anthropocene"

Global climate change is an impending catastrophe. It is real, and it is right here, and it will profoundly shape the lives of all living within a mere 20 years. 

Many of us working in environmental activism have long wondered how humans have avoided recognizing this. For the past 15 years, this was what worried at me. What were the underlying generative principles of ignoring or denigrating the evidence of the coming catastrophe? In the end, there’s lots of answers (political bases, self-interest, corporate control, elite control of the government, and human psychology, among others) – and it doesn’t really matter why.  We might care about the ‘why’ in the future, but now is the time for action. Studies show that even people who don’t ‘believe’ there’s climate change recognize that they, themselves, are experiencing it. Given that shared worldview of massive, alarming, change we need to leverage that to bring about change.[1] But can we change this behemoth? Is climate change gone too far? In the Yale Program’s “Six Americas” quiz, I turn out as “Alarmed,” certain that the climate catastrophe is real, supportive of climate policies, “but often do not know what they or society can do.”

This was the “first,” the basic principle for the entire class. Change is coming (or here). It is inalterable and inevitable. Given that, what do we do next?  I can’t say that I like that principle. I’d like to be able to forestall climate catastrophe. But, like my students, the endless stories of extinction and wild storms and more hurricanes and devastating flooding and so on cannot be denied. It is irrefutable, as well, that in the face of this potential destruction, we all feel hopeless. We “do not know what they or society can do.”

I read a lot of (too much) dystopian science fiction – as do a lot of my students. Environmental dystopian science fiction has long resonated with me – think Bacigalupi’s “The Water Knife” or “The Windup Girl.” Are we facing a “Mad Max” world in which we are all reduced to “tribal” groups endless fighting one another over a scarce resource? Is “The Walking Dead” simply a metaphor for what our future lives will be like, each group against each other? Is it going to be the “Hunger Games”? It’s too horrible to contemplate, and we all shut down.

The second principle, therefore, was hope. This is fueled by my years of anthropological fieldwork in which I see that humans adapt, imagine different worlds and innovate, struggle against the odds, and strategize. I was also inspired by works that imagine a recreated post-apocalyptic future, such as Robinson’s “New York 2140” and Mandel’s “Station Eleven.” I constructed the class to imagine a radically transformed but not completely and inherently disastrous future. It would be different – but how? What knowledge do we need to survive in this future?

As an older anthropologist, I have lived in many different worlds. I have a tremendous mental archive of knowledge about ways that humans have lived and could live in this world. We are all, as humans, embedded within an all-encompassing worldview. This is our culture, and we are poorly equipped to see beyond the boundaries of our ‘known’ (imagined, really) universe. All of my anthropology classes ask students to recognize that the way we live in this time and place is not a given, is not the norm for all of humanity. The constant pedagogical struggle is how to shock people out of their sense of normalcy. This class started from there and sought to show students the diversity of human adaptations. It’s planting a seed of knowledge that might be useful to them in the future. Because it’s their world, they will have to live in it, to adapt or not. 

The intellectual basis of this was Lund’s concept of “rupture,” introduced to me by the New Mandala page on “Rupture: Structural Reconfigurations of Nature & Society in the Mekong Region & Beyond” (https://www.newmandala.org/rupture/). In addition, I made use of Sing Chew’s book “Ecological Futures.”

I asked students not to envision collapse, but rupture. All are familiar with the concept of ‘lost’ civilizations, which loom large in popular culture. A corollary of ‘lost civilizations’ is the idea of ‘dark ages’ ensuing upon collapse – the loss of civilization as the loss of culture. To cultural anthropologists, this has long seemed silly. Yes, the Mayan empire collapsed but there’s still Mayans! Yes, the Kingdom of Angkor collapsed, but there’s still Khmer people who still carry out rituals at the site of Angkor Wat! Angkor Wat was certainly not lost to the Khmer people. It’s not loss or collapse, it’s transformation. We must understand the terms of that transformation – what changed, and how.[2]

This is long enough for a blog post. I'll start again with a more careful discussion of concepts of rupture. 

And, heavens, I really need to move off of this platform, it's too ugly and hard to read. That will be a project for later this week. 

Kate, 5 June 2019

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[1] See, for instance, Gustafsen et al. 2019, “Americans are increasingly ‘alarmed’ about global warming.” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 12 February.

[2] I could go on at great length about how and why concepts of ‘loss’ and ‘civilization’ dominate and what they tell us about the cultures that are obsessed with them. It’s colonialism, it’s “Europe and the people without history,” it’s Orientalism, and it’s also an underlying fear of our own culture that our civilization is an ephemeral thing that must be constantly protected from weakness – and that we would all be the worse for it because our nation, our culture, our time and place, is the epitome of what is great and wonderful. How often have students in my Introduction to Anthropology class written about “how far we have progressed and aren’t we grateful we get to live in wonderful America today?” despite consistent evidence that others live well as well.