Climate Change Versus Public Health and Contaminated Communities as Local Social Problems

• In Event: 046 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Environmental Movements

Abstract

As entities that organize much of our physical, economic, and cultural lives in the United States, municipalities will detect and manage most of the direct effects of climate change on people and will bear many of its costs. This paper considers why would-be municipal climate leaders in the United States face unusual barriers as they attempt to mobilize for climate adaptation. Advocates who are pressing towns and cities to adapt to climate change see such actions as naturally extending municipalities’ historical provision for the public good. Past municipal social movements should therefore tell us a good deal about municipalities’ abilities to mobilize concern and action about climate change. I compare the circumstances for emerging local climate change movements to circumstances during the early days of local movements about public health and contaminated sites. Residents, business owners, and officials were able to perceive through their own sense experiences many of the problems that became targeted by the public health and contaminated sites movements. By contrast, climate change was first perceived through scientific data collection and computer modeling of the global climate, not from sense experience of local conditions. The lack of the immediate sense experience of climate change robs the climate movement of the early contribution of municipal advocates that was so important in the public health and contaminated community movements. Early efforts by municipal advocates defined these as primarily urban problems, and they positioned local governments and other local actors to become important players in subsequent policies.

Author

• Karen O'Neill, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers