Why Clean Air AND Good Jobs

This week in North Philly Notes, Todd E. Vachon, author of Clean Air and Good Jobs, writes about the double whammy of climate change and income inequality.

In 1989, at the age of 13, I learned two valuable lessons. The first was the importance of unions for building and supporting the middle class, and the second was that burning fossil fuels was warming the planet and would one day have serious consequences for life on Earth. The first was learned through personal experience, the second in a classroom.  

At the time, my family owned a small business—a general store and gas station—in a small town in Eastern Connecticut. Due to market forces, including the rise of corporate chain stores, my parent’s business was struggling. By 1989 we were facing bankruptcy. Fortuitously, there was a rising demand for skilled construction workers at the time. Through his friend network in the volunteer fire department, my father was able to join the local carpenter’s union and immediately began working in the industry—including at several local power plants. Within a year of his becoming a union carpenter, our family experienced a transition from being working poor to being middle class. We had health insurance, I got glasses and braces, and my dad built our family home—the home I now bring my children to visit as he enjoys his retirement thanks to the union pension. 

Around the same time that we were experiencing that economic hardship in the late 1980s, NASA climate scientist James Hansen explained to Congress, and the world, that the heat-trapping gases emitted by the burning of fossil fuels were pushing global temperatures higher. Hansen’s remarks marked the official opening of “the age of climate change.” The following school year I learned about “The Greenhouse Effect” in science class and my mind was opened to the possibility that human activity was changing the planet, and not in a good way. In the 34 years since Hansen’s testimony, the scientific community has affirmed that climate change is a serious cause for concern. Extreme weather events, including hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts have become more frequent, more intense, and longer in duration. Yet, annual greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow and are 44% higher in 2022 than they were in 1989. 

During the same period, private sector unionization in the United States declined from 14% of workers in 1989 to just 6% in 2022. As a result, income inequality has soared as much as greenhouse gas emissions, with the top 1% now taking home 16% of all income while the middle class share of income has declined from 62% to 43% in the past four decades. Major causes of union decline include outsourcing of manufacturing, eroding employment in highly unionized industries, and rabid anti-unionism on the part of employers taking advantage of weak labor law protections for workers. Today, many of the remaining good private sector union jobs are in the energy sector—especially fossil fuels—while many of the new renewable energy and green economy jobs are not unionized and attempts to do so face an uphill battle against hostile employers. This has led many blue-collar unionized workers in the U.S. to adopt a “jobs vs the environment” perspective, fighting to save good jobs in fossil fuel-related industries by resisting measures to decarbonize the economy that threaten to replace the existing good jobs with new lower wage jobs that offer few benefits.  

As the son of a union carpenter and a former carpenter myself, but also the father of three young children growing up in a steadily warming world, I struggled with this dilemma: How can we ensure our kids, and their generation can afford to make a living with good jobs and benefits, like my father did, and also have a planet that will support that living? Grappling with this question led to my spending 10 years participating in the nascent labor-climate movement as an activist and a researcher. It is those experiences and the findings from that research that make up Clean Air and Good Jobs. 

One thing I learned doing this work is that the zero-sum mindset of having to choose between good jobs or having a livable climate is rooted in the deeply ingrained ideology of neoliberalism—the dominant governing philosophy of our time. At the core of neoliberalism is the belief that unregulated free markets create the best outcomes for all and that there should be little to no role for government in the economy. The narrative that addressing climate change must inevitably lead to a further decline in good jobs does not consider the vast array of public policy instruments which could be used to ensure that a green economy is also an equitable economy. It instead only benefits those that would profit from the exploitation of both workers and the environment. Overcoming this barrier, I contend, will require a powerful alliance of labor and communities working together, demanding clean air and good jobs.

Clean Air and Good Jobs documents the efforts of some of the organizations and activists that are working to build such a movement to ensure a fair and just transition away from fossil fuels and toward a more sustainable and equitable future. This, I believe, is the struggle of our time, and the whole of future humanity is counting on us to do the right thing.  

Celebrating Earth Day

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate Earth Day with a handful of recent Temple University Press titles about nature and the environment.

In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer, by Steven Davis
Debates continue to rage over the merits or flaws of public land and whether or not it should be privatized—or at least radically reconfigured in some way. In Defense of Public Lands offers a comprehensive refutation of the market-oriented arguments. Steven Davis passionately advocates that public land ought to remain firmly in the public’s hands. He briefly lays out the history and characteristics of public lands at the local, state, and federal levels while examining the numerous policy prescriptions for their privatization or, in the case of federal lands, transfer. He considers the dimensions of environmental health; markets and valuation of public land, the tensions between collective values and individual preferences, the nature and performance of bureaucratic management, and the legitimacy of interest groups and community decision-making. Offering a fair, good faith overview of the privatizers’ best arguments before refuting them, this timely book contemplates both the immediate and long-term future of our public lands.

Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment, by Harold L. Platt
In Sinking Chicago, Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period. During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality. Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage. Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland. They organized a grassroots movement to protect the six river watersheds in the semi-sacred forest preserves from being turned into open sewers, like the Chicago River. The politics of outdoor recreation clashed with the politics of water management. Platt charts a growing constituency of citizens who fought a corrupt political machine to reclaim the region’s waterways and Lake Michigan as a single eco-system. Environmentalists contested policymakers’ heroic, big-technology approaches with small-scale solutions for a flood-prone environment. Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes.

Gone Goose: The Remaking of an American Town in the Age of Climate Change, by Braden T. Leap

Sumner, MO, pop. 102, near the Swan Lake National Wildlife Refuge, proclaims itself “The Wild Goose Capital of the World.” It even displays Maxie, the World’s largest goose: a 40-foot tall fiberglass statue with a wingspan stretching more than 60 feet. But while the 200,000 Canada geese that spent their falls and winters at Swan Lake helped generate millions of dollars for the local economy—with hunting and the annual Goose Festival—climate change, as well as environmental and land use issues, have caused the birds to disappear. The economic loss of the geese and the activities they inspired served as key building blocks in the rural identities residents had developed and treasured. In his timely and topical book, Gone Goose, Braden Leap observes how members of this rural town adapted, reorganized, and reinvented themselves in the wake of climate change—and how they continued to cultivate respect and belonging in their community. Leap conducted interviews with residents and participated in various community events to explore how they reimagine their relationships with each other as well as their community’s relationship with the environment, even as they wish the geese would return.

Ecohumanism and the Ecological Culture: The Educational Legacy of Lewis Mumford and Ian McHarg, by William J. Cohen

Lewis Mumford, one of the most respected public intellectuals of the twentieth century, speaking at a conference on the future environments of North America, said, “In order to secure human survival we must transition from a technological culture to an ecological culture.” In Ecohumanism and the Ecological Culture, William Cohen shows how Mumford’s conception of an educational philosophy was enacted by Mumford’s mentee, Ian McHarg, the renowned landscape architect and regional planner at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg advanced a new way to achieve an ecological culture―through an educational curriculum based on fusing ecohumanism to the planning and design disciplines. Cohen explores Mumford’s important vision of ecohumanism—a synthesis of natural systems ecology with the myriad dimensions of human systems, or human ecology―and how McHarg actually formulated and made that vision happen. He considers the emergence of alternative energy systems and new approaches to planning and community development to achieve these goals.

Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial, Edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray.
The whiteness of mainstream environmentalism often fails to account for the richness and variety of Latinx environmental thought. Building on insights of environmental justice scholarship as well as critical race and ethnic studies, the editors and contributors to Latinx Environmentalisms map the ways Latinx cultural texts integrate environmental concerns with questions of social and political justice. Original interviews with creative writers, including Cherríe Moraga, Helena María Viramontes, and Héctor Tobar, as well as new essays by noted scholars of Latinx literature and culture, show how Latinx authors and cultural producers express environmental concerns in their work. These chapters, which focus on film, visual art, and literature—and engage in fields such as disability studies, animal studies, and queer studies—emphasize the role of racial capitalism in shaping human relationships to the more-than-human world and reveal a vibrant tradition of Latinx decolonial environmentalism. Latinx Environmentalisms accounts for the ways Latinx cultures are environmental, but often do not assume the mantle of “environmentalism.”

The Winterthur Garden Guide: Color for Every Season, by Linda Eirhart
Intended as a guide for the everyday gardener, The Winterthur Garden Guide offers practical advice—season by season—for achieving the succession of bloom developed by Henry Francis du Pont in his garden. This handy book highlights the design principles that guided du Pont and introduces practical flowers, shrubs, and trees that have stood the test of time—native and non-native, common as well as unusual. Lavishly illustrated, with new color photography, this handbook features close-ups of individual plants as well as sweeping vistas throughout. Whether addressing the early color combinations of the March Bank, the splendor of Azalea Woods, or the more intimate confines of the Quarry Garden, The Winterthur Garden Guide presents the essential elements of each plant, including common and botanical names; family origins and associations; size, soil, and light needs; bloom times; and zone preferences—everything the gardener needs to know for planning and replicating the “Winterthur look” on any scale.

University Press Week Blog Tour: How to be an environmental steward

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is Read. Think. Act. Today’s theme is: How to be an environmental steward.

University of Pittsburgh Press @UPittPress

Patricia Demarco, author of Pathways to Our Sustainable Future, will write about global and local sustainability.

Duke University Press @DukePress

A roundtable of authors and editors answering the question, “What is one thing that more people need to understand about the current global climate crisis?”

Columbia University Press @Columbia.edu

Guest post from the author of Live Sustainably Now, about tips to decreasing your carbon footprint.

University of California Press  @ucpress

An excerpt from Humboldt State University Assoc. Professor of Environmental Studies Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet, coming April 2020.

Yale University Press @yalepress

A post from authors connected with A Better Planet with actionable steps on helping the environment.

University of South Carolina Press @uscpress

A post including photos from authors of Carolina Bays about preservation of these unique ecological systems.

Bucknell University Press @BucknellUPress

Guest post by Tim Wenzell, editor of Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Writing on why ecocriticism makes us better stewards of nature.

Oregon State University Press 

Guest blogger Marcy Cottrell Houle on the genesis of her new book, A Generous Nature: Lives Transformed by Oregon, about 20 conservationists and activists who have been instrumental in preserving Oregon’s natural treasures for future generations.

University Press of Mississippi  @upmiss

Jessica H. Schexnayder, author of Fragile Grounds: Louisiana’s Endangered Cemeteries, on documenting the dying histories of coastal communities.

Harvard University Press @harvard_Press

 

Changing Climate, Changing Communities

This week in North Philly Notes, Braden Leap, author of Gone Goose, writes about how the population of Sumner, MO, the Wild Goose Capital of the World, responded to climate change and the lack of geese.

Communities being disrupted by disasters related to climate change have become a semi-regular fixture on the nightly news. One night, a reporter walks through the scorched remains of a neighborhood following a deadly forest fire. The next, they’re boating down the flooded main street of a small town following another major hurricane. But how do communities respond to climate related disruptions that range from catastrophic fires and floods, to warmer winters, to the shifting geographic ranges of an array of plants and animals? This is an especially urgent question because climate related transformations are taking place across the U.S. and around the world, and they aren’t likely to stop any time soon.

Climate catastrophe gets a lot of attention, and rightly so, but if we hope to sustain communities as they are disrupted by climate change, we need to know far more about how people work together—or why they don’t—to effectively respond when their lives are disrupted by shifting climatological conditions. Accordingly, in my recently published book, Gone Goose: The Remaking of an American Town in the Age of Climate Change, I consider how members of a rural Missouri town were reconfiguring their community in response to climate change. Although Sumner, Missouri claims the title of Wild Goose Capital of the World, the nearly 200,000 Canada geese that used to migrate there no longer come to Sumner because of a combination of land use changes and shifting climatological conditions. For a town whose culture and economy were intimately tied to geese and goose hunting, this has been a dramatic transformation.

While we often hear stories of small Midwestern towns fading away, that’s not exactly what was happening in Sumner. The population may have been dwindling, but after talking and working with residents for nearly two years, I found that community members were effectively rearranging the social and ecological complexities comprising their town to respond to the lack of geese. Men were dramatically transforming the landscape to make it more amenable to duck hunting. Women reorganized the town’s annual festival to cater to families instead of goose hunters. Both were working with staff at the National Wildlife Refuge adjacent to the community to make it suitable for public uses other than goose hunting. In all three instances, they were strategically leveraging the social and ecological complexities of Sumner to rearrange and sustain their ties to the people and places they valued.

Although Sumner is undoubtedly unique, I argue it provides some important lessons for other communities disrupted by climate change. Most notably, it is sometimes possible for communities to be sustained and even improved. For this to happen, people must effectively utilize and rearrange the social and ecological beings and things comprising their communities. This is a somewhat hopeful lesson, but one that must be tempered by the realities of communities and climate change. Not all places will have the social and ecological inputs to adapt. The effects of climate change can also be so catastrophic that it can be impossible to adjust. Communities being inundated with saltwater because of rising sea levels provide a clear example. The environments in which our communities are entangled will continue to present both opportunities and challenges over the coming decades and centuries, but it seems clear that in some cases there can be more to climate change than catastrophe.

 

Temple University Press Titles the Organization of American Historians Conference

This week in North Philly Notes, we highlight the books and authors at the Organization for American Historians Conference, April 12-14 in Sacramento, CA.

Visit us at Booth #210!
Titles on Display include:

Healing Our Divided Society: Investing in America Fifty Years after the Kerner Report, edited by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis.

This timely volume unites the interests of minorities and white working- and middle-class Americans to propose a strategy to reduce poverty, inequality, and racial injustice. Reflecting on America’s urban climate today, this new report sets forth evidence-based policies concerning employment, education, housing, neighborhood development, and criminal justice based on what has been proven to work-and not work.

“A Road to Peace and Freedom”:  The International Workers Order and the Struggle for Economic Justice and Civil Rights, 1930-1954, by Robert M. Zecker

Mining extensive primary sources, Robert Zecker gives voice to the workers in “A Road to Peace and Freedom.” He describes the International Workers Order’s economic goals, commitment to racial justice, and activism, from lobbying to end segregation and lynching in America to defeating fascism abroad. Zecker also illustrates the panoply of entertainment, sports, and educational activities designed to cultivate the minds and bodies of members.

Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century, by Rachel Ida Buff

Despite being characterized as a “nation of immigrants,” the United States has seen a long history of immigrant rights struggles. In her timely book Against the Deportation Terror, Rachel Ida Buff uncovers this multiracial history. She traces the story of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB) from its origins in the 1930s through repression during the early Cold War, to engagement with “new” Latinx and Caribbean immigrants in the 1970s and early 1980s. By tracing the work of the ACPFB and its allies over half a century, Against the Deportation Terror provides important historical precedent for contemporary immigrant rights organizing. Its lessons continue to resonate today.

On the Stump: Campaign Oratory and Democracy in the United States, Britain, and Australia, by Sean Scalmer

“Stumping,” or making political speeches in favor of a candidate, cause, or campaign has been around since before the 1800s, when speechmaking was frequently portrayed as delivered from the base of a tree. The practice, which has been strongly associated with the American frontier, British agitators, and colonial Australia, remains an effective component of contemporary democratic politics. In his engaging book On the Stump, Sean Scalmer provides the first comprehensive, transnational history of the “stump speech.” He traces the development and transformation of campaign oratory, as well as how national elections and public life and culture have been shaped by debate over the past century.

Sinking Chicago: Climate Change and the Remaking of a Flood-Prone Environment, by Harold L. Platt

In Sinking Chicago, Harold Platt shows how people responded to climate change in one American city over a hundred-and-fifty-year period. During a long dry spell before 1945, city residents lost sight of the connections between land use, flood control, and water quality. Then, a combination of suburban sprawl and a wet period of extreme weather events created damaging runoff surges that sank Chicago and contaminated drinking supplies with raw sewage. Chicagoans had to learn how to remake a city built on a prairie wetland. Sinking Chicago lays out a roadmap to future planning outcomes.

Believing in Cleveland: Managing Decline in “The Best Location in the Nation,” by J. Mark Souther

Souther explores Cleveland’s downtown revitalization efforts, its neighborhood renewal and restoration projects, and its fight against deindustrialization. He shows how the city reshaped its image when it was bolstered by sports team victories. But Cleveland was not always on the upswing. Souther places the city’s history in the postwar context when the city and metropolitan area were divided by uneven growth. In the 1970s, the city-suburb division was wider than ever.  Believing in Cleveland recounts the long, difficult history of a city that entered the postwar period as America’s sixth largest, then lost ground during a period of robust national growth.

Constructing the Patriarchal City: Gender and the Built Environments of London, Dublin, Toronto and Chicago, 1870s into the 1940s, by Maureen A. Flanagan

Constructing the Patriarchal City compares the ideas and activities of men and women in four English-speaking cities that shared similar ideological, professional, and political contexts. Historian Maureen Flanagan investigates how ideas about gender shaped the patriarchal city as men used their expertise in architecture, engineering, and planning to fashion a built environment for male economic enterprise and to confine women in the private home. Women consistently challenged men to produce a more equitable social infrastructure that included housing that would keep people inside the city, public toilets for women as well as men, housing for single, working women, and public spaces that were open and safe for all residents.

Email us at tempress@temple.edu to subscribe to our monthly newsletter for info about new books and website content!