 Kossoff is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow here at MIT, and where she's researching the social, political, cultural dimensions of urban climate change adaptation. In the spring, she's going to be teaching a course. You're not teaching this, but in the spring, you're teaching a course called Media and Climate Change. Media and Climate Change, do you remember if that's process for graduate students? I believe it is, yes. I think it is. Even if it weren't, you could always take it up for the grad students in the room as an independent study in the system that way. But anyway, I encourage you to take a look at that class if you're looking for an elective for the spring. Currently, Liz is writing her first book, which is called Retreat, Moving to Higher Ground in a Climate Change City. It's under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Congratulations, an excellent press. And one of the things I like about colloquium is that we bring in people at a lot of different stages of their career. Actually, someone recently had an undergrad from MIT, but more often, it'll be someone right out of grad school, someone mid-career, often past two speakers have been senior scholars. And so I think in addition to the specific research that Liz is presenting today, I'm sure she would be amenable to answering questions about, well, how do you change a dissertation into a book, or any kind of schoolwork into a publishable work? What are some of the issues there? So feel free to ask her questions about that. Retreat, the book that she's working on is based on field work that she did in Staten Island for four years after Hurricane Sandy, where residents elected to relocate in favor of return and return the waterfront neighborhoods to wetlands rather than rebuilding. And given her interest in climate change and hurricanes and flood maps and FEMA, this feels like a particularly urgent moment to be talking about these kinds of issues. And I suspect that she could answer questions related to the crisis moment in hurricanes and hurricane recovery and so on, in addition to speaking specifically about Hurricane Sandy. Before coming to MIT, Liz received a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, an MSc in Culture and Society from the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and a BA in Communication and Spanish and Latin American Literature from George Washington University. So join me in welcoming her to the stage. Thank you. Thank you so much, Heather. Thank you all for coming out this afternoon slash evening to hear this talk. As Heather said, I'll be presenting some research from my dissertation, but then some newer material that's also from that, but it's material I haven't presented before, and I'm still really working through. So I'm looking forward to our conversation and to hearing your thoughts and all of that. I know for those of you who have an abiding interest in climate change and hurricanes, Carrie Emanuel is giving a talk at 6.30 at MIT. So some of you might be trying to go to that. So I won't. I'll kind of dive right in. No pun intended. You don't realize until you're writing about water how much, how many water, watery metaphors there are everywhere. So I'll speak for maybe 30 to 40, 45 minutes, and then leave a lot of time for discussion and questions. OK. So on October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast of the United States, and I know. Heather was saying you remember that night vividly. Probably a number of us here remember that night vividly. In New York City, where I was living at the time, the borough of Staten Island was particularly hard hit. This is the neighborhood on the east shore. Staten Island had the highest recorded water levels in the city. It had the most deaths in the city, and it had the greatest proportion of residents affected of any borough. And neighborhoods like this one have suffered repeated flooding over the years. And my research works to understand what will happen to these neighborhoods and to others like them as climate change increases the risks that they already face. And this, in turn, requires understanding how things like risk, climate change, impacts of climate change, such as flooding, are mediated. And that will be some of what I speak about today. Now, climate change is necessarily mediated. Paul Edwards has a wonderful book called A Vast Machine, and he points out in that book that climate is the history of weather. So like other forms of history, climate can't be perceived directly. Our scientific understanding and knowledge of climate change and the global climate generally relies on what Edwards calls a climate knowledge infrastructure. And that's made up of model data, of technical systems, institutions, such as the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and so on. So this graph is one product of that infrastructure, and it likely looks familiar to many of you. It shows average global temperature increasing at an unprecedented rate, tracking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So even if the powers that be stopped burning fossil fuels right now, carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere. It continues to have a warming effect for upwards of a century after its release. So what this means is that even as we work to mitigate climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, we also have to work to adapt to the impacts that are already baked into the system. And enough, there's been enough warming locked in to ensure substantial disruption to everyday life in many places. And data, models, and technology are becoming more sophisticated, more powerful, and fine-tuned. So this has made it possible to measure climate change and its effects on more local levels as well, and to create more local level predictions. And this graph is from the latest report of the New York City Panel on Climate Change. And it shows that average annual temperatures as measured in Central Park in New York have increased 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. In this area, I was looking up trends for Boston because I realized having lived in New York for until this summer, my talk is kind of New York-centric, so I'm trying to make it more Boston and Cambridge-specific. There was a very interesting report called the Climate-Ready Boston Report that was released this past December. And it notes here summers by 2050, maybe as hot as Washington DC's summers are today. And by the end of this century, they may be hotter than Birmingham, Alabama's summers are today in Boston. This is another graph from the New York City report. And it shows that there's already been one foot of observed sea level rise as measured at the Battery in Lower Manhattan over the past century. So this is a foot of sea level rise that's already happened. And a foot doesn't sound like that much. But this extra foot of water is estimated to have added approximately $2 billion to Sandy's toll in New York City and to have flooded an extra 100,000 people in New York and New Jersey who would not have flooded without that extra foot of water. So it makes a big difference. In New York Harbor and along much of the eastern seaboard, sea levels are rising at more than double the global average rate. This is due to a number of factors, ocean currents, wind patterns, the diminishing gravitational pull of melting ice caps that right now are kind of pulling the sea up towards the poles, and also land that's also subsiding. So the land in this part of the country is sinking, too. And rates of sea level rise are increasing exponentially. And they'll continue to do so if emissions continue unabated. This is an image I took from Climate Central's Surging Seas website, which I really recommend going to and kind of playing around with it lets you set a lot of different scenarios and see what comes out. And this map shows projected inundation in Cambridge and Boston if global average temperature increases 1.5 degrees Celsius. So that's an amount that some would argue is already locked in. Now we're warming to increase to two degrees, the long-term sea level rise could change the map of this area to something like this. So this is the difference 1.5, 2. That's three degrees. And that's four degrees, which most resembles the kind of track that we're currently on in terms of our emissions. Any one of these scenarios, even the lowest emission scenario, still promises a huge amount of disruption. But what this will look like depends not only on the extent of warming and its effects, but also on the ways that those effects and their attendant risks are measured and mapped and managed. And that will be the focus of the talk. Now, practices of renapping and rezoning land based on environmental risk have been rapidly expanding worldwide. You get maps like these that visualize everything from mosquito vectors to landslide risk. And they've become prolific enough to constitute a new cartographic genre. Those are the words of map historian Mark Monmeneur. He has some great, great work on risk and hazard maps specifically. So I'll quote from him now. Acceptance of cartographic simulation and risk assessment as normal and necessary, he writes, may prove as monumental a turning point in public administration as they accept in centuries ago of boundary maps, without which land ownership, taxation, and zoning would be impossible. So the questions this raises are, what are the stakes of this emerging genre of maps? What kinds of things do they afford? How are they made? How are they used? How are they experienced? And how are people contesting them? And from my point of view, at a moment when climate change is rendering any kind of notion of a fixed or stable landscape increasingly untenable, what role can maps play in helping us navigate a profoundly uncertain and contingent future? So these are big questions. And I will only just start exploring them today. And to do that, I want to take you back to Staten Island after Sandy and tell you the story of an encounter with one very particular but very powerful set of maps. So this is a photo of a neighborhood called Oakwood Beach, also on Staten Island's east shore. For those of you familiar with New York City, up in the top left corner, you can just make out the outline of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. That connects Staten Island to Brooklyn. And then further beyond that is Lower Manhattan. So in this image, you can see houses that were swept entirely off their foundations into the surrounding wetlands by a storm surge that was more than 14 feet the night of Sandy. But Sandy was not the first time that Oakwood Beach was devastated by a storm. In 1992, a nor'easter flooded the neighborhood. And it led a group of residents there to form what they called the Oakwood Beach Flood Victims Committee. So this group of residents got together and they spent years lobbying for better coastal protection and for an end to new development in the wetlands. But little came of their efforts. And then 20 years after this nor'easter, Sandy hits. Sandy killed three people in Oakwood Beach, which is a very close-knit neighborhood. And it was the final straw for many, many residents there. One week after the storm, this letter to the editor appeared on the website of Staten Island's Daily Newspaper. And the author, Tina Downer, she was a longtime resident of Oakwood Beach. And she wrote about her years living in the neighborhood. She had been a member of this original flood victims committee. And she wrote that she deeply loved her neighborhood and loved living there. But she decided after Sandy that it was no longer a safe place to live. And not long after Tina's letter appeared, she helped organize a community meeting for her neighbors to get together and discuss their collective future. More than 200 people showed up at that meeting. And to Tina's surprise and to the surprise of others present, they voted nearly unanimously to pursue a buyout of their homes. So this meant, as Heather mentioned, that rather than stay and rebuild and keep fighting indefinitely for flood protection, that might never really come. They wanted the government to pay them enough money to relocate and then to return their neighborhood to wetlands that could provide some kind of protective buffer for their neighbors for their inland. So this is what's known as managed retreat, the relocating people and unbuilding of land in places vulnerable to flooding, sea level rise, and other effects of climate change. And after that meeting, when they realized the kind of overwhelming interest in a neighborhood buyout, some members of that original flood victims committee and some others present created a new committee that they called the Oakwood Beach Buyout Committee. And they created a plan and they started pushing it to local, city, and state officials. And so this time, they were successful. Less than three months later, New York State's governor, Andrew Cuomo, came down to Staten Island and he announced his support for a pilot buyout of that neighborhood. He said, homeowners who opted to participate in the program would be paid the pre-storm value of their damaged houses and you saw the condition of some of these houses totally, totally gone. And that the state would then return the properties to open space and prohibit any future development in those places. So when news of the Oakwood Beach Buyout broke, at first it seemed like an anomaly. Even in places with recurrent disasters and even in the kind of New York, New Jersey region after Sandy, people generally do not relocate. They decide to rebuild in place and post-disaster policies are geared towards rebuilding homes and infrastructure where they were before. But before long, I watched as residents in other neighborhoods along Staten Island's shore began organizing their own local buyout committees, pressing the state to expand its program to include them too. So this is a picture I took in the neighborhood of Ocean Breeze. That's just up the shore from Oakwood Beach. I think you can probably read the sign from there before the audio's sake. I'll read it. Governor Cuomo, Ocean Breeze needs your buyout through exclamation points. This is a picture I took at a meeting in Crescent Beach. It says, Governor Cuomo, desperate, will work for buyout. And this is in South Beach. One of the signs reads, Governor Cuomo, senior, sick, tired, broke, buy me out, please. And this is from the neighborhood of Grand Beach. Governor Cuomo, mother nature wants her land back. Buy us out and give it back. In the weeks and months after Sandy, these resident organized buyout groups formed all along Staten Island's east and south shores. You could see Oakwood Beach, that first neighborhood is right in the middle. But not everyone thought that redrawing the city's coastline in this way was a good idea. So the mayor at the time, Michael Bloomberg, came out strongly against retreat, which he described as not only futile, given the hundreds of thousands of people who live in New York City's floodplain, but also was an abandonment, effectively, of the waterfront. He said, as New Yorkers, we cannot and will not abandon our waterfront. We must protect it, not retreat from it. Rather than prohibit future development as the state plan would do, Bloomberg proposed doing the opposite. So he created this housing recovery program called Build It Back, aptly named, that offered homeowners who wanted to relocate roughly the same amount of money as a buyout, but the city would retain the right to flip the land to developers who promised to rebuild in a more flood resilient manner. So what happened is you wound up with these kind of competing government programs, competing visions of what the coast should look like in the future. And the question was, how do you determine which people get to go into which program? How do you decide which places are risky enough to warrant the permanent unbuilding that retreat entails? So an obvious solution, here's where we get to, to the maps, is to use a risk map. And indeed, officials initially proposed to use the flood maps shown here, which are produced by FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to determine who would be eligible for retreat versus redevelopment. So these maps are pretty boring to look at. They're not boring, substantively, but. Like many other official maps, they're probably intentionally boring. Their neutral appearance kind of works to convey the sense of objectivity, neutrality, and they're predominantly grayscale, as you can see. And these matterings of little polka dots, black and blue, delineate three general flood zones. So you have zones V, A, and X. And V and A are the ones shaded in blue here, and those together make up the special flood hazard area. So this is also called the 100-year flood plain, which probably is a familiar term, because it's kind of come up a lot in articles after these more recent storms, too. And it's a pretty misleading term. The 100-year flood is a very misleading term, because it actually refers to a flood that has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year. And this means, as FEMA's website kind of points out, that it has at least a 26% chance of occurring over the course of a 30-year mortgage. It's not once every 100 years at all. So it's kind of, yeah, a misleading term. And the proposal after Sandy, initially, was that homeowners in zone V, so V and A are the same risk of flooding, but V is a kind of additional risk of wind-driven storm surge. The V stands for velocity, the velocity zone. So they said homeowners in zone V, the highest risk zone, would be eligible to apply for a state buyout. But homeowners in zone A, the other part of the high-risk flood zone, would only be able to sell their land to the city for redevelopment. So probably very, not surprisingly, this was a very controversial way of bounding retreat. And as of the case with most official boundaries, the lines on FEMA's maps transgressed social boundaries. So they divided up streets. They divided up neighborhoods. They divided up, in some cases, attached houses. And they divided the buyout groups that had already started organizing and making their own maps of people in their neighborhoods who wanted to relocate. And this kind of top-down targeting of areas for retreat has a very ignominious history. This image was published shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. And it showed parts of that city that some planners and officials proposed to be returned to green space rather than rebuilt. It came to be known as the green dot map. And it incited a huge amount of debate. Infuriated people who were angry, not just at the idea that government would dictate who could and could not return to the city and rebuild. But also because this image appeared to target largely low-income black neighborhoods to the exclusion of wealthier, wider areas that were still themselves heavily flooded. So people very much took it as a continuation of discriminatory urban renewal agendas under the new guise of resiliency planning and disaster recovery. And that was kind of the story of Katrina across many aspects of New Orleans. And these histories of forced relocation and segregated development have contributed to what's now a very unequal exposure of people in places to risk in the present. So any risk map also has this social history underlying it, underlying who it maps and who it affects. And risk maps are very complicit in that history. So probably the most infamous kind of risk map is a redlining map, a neighborhood risk rating map. And obviously we're still living with the legacies of those now. And so in Staten Island, it was very different. Many of the hardest hit areas were made up largely of white working and middle-class homeowners. And residents there faulted the maps for erasing a different history. And that history was the historical production of flood risk over time. So there was a time in the living memory of some of the people who were still on the shore when the line between land and water in these neighborhoods was much less clear cut than it appears now on FEMA's maps. That was a time when the neighborhood's bungalows sat on pilings in the wetlands. It's an old photo of ocean breeze. And older residents, when you talk to them, have memories of catching eels off their docks and getting into tubes and going all the way out into the ocean. But during their lifetimes, these creeks and wetlands were filled in. And so now they say the water just has nowhere left to go. The construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which I pointed out earlier, connecting Staten Island to the rest of New York City for the first time in 1964, spurred development all along the shore. And not long after the bridge opened, the National Flood Insurance Act made flood insurance affordable and easily accessible. And that helped subsidize coastal real estate development nationwide. I'll make a note of this, because I will come back to the National Flood Insurance Program in a minute. This was true on Staten Island, where new housing started going up on what had been mainly agricultural land. Wetlands were filled in and the population of the boroughs soared exponentially. And then flooding got worse. You have more impermeable surfaces, more people and property in the way. A lot of areas don't have any kind of drainage infrastructure at all. But development kept going up. Housing was built at a really frenetic and unplanned pace. And here you can see a new house and a road built right in the wetlands. That's a pretty common site when you get to the end of a road. And then it just kind of dead ends into this huge expanse of fragmities, reeds that grow way higher than your head. It's really odd to feel like you're still in New York City, but you're there. And then there was more flooding. So now that neighborhood in the old photo, Ocean Breeze looks like this. And this is not a picture from after Sandy. This is just what it looks like after kind of a normal or now more normal, very heavy rainfall. And it's not unusual on a sunny day like this to see kind of ducks and geese swimming in the lakes that linger in the middle of these streets. So people will rename, they'll say it's Lake Kissum or something instead of Kissum Avenue. So really chronic, chronic flooding issues. And the biogrups that formed after Sandy were concentrated in these places that historically used to be wetlands. There's that map again. And these were also the deadliest places to be in the city during Sandy. This is a map from WNYC. The red dots are people who died in the storm. And it shows that the highest concentration of deaths was in this part of the shore that residents call the bowl. This includes Ocean Breeze. And they call it the bowl because now there's a waterfront boulevard that runs between these neighborhoods and divides them from the ocean. And that boulevard has raised about 10 feet above sea level. And so the streets behind it sit much lower. And what happened in Sandy is the water rose fairly slowly but then when it overtopped that boulevard it rushed into those neighborhoods and filled them up rapidly which left people very little time to escape. So of course, human caused climate change has also contributed to the production of flood risk over time. So the risk in these areas is not the same as it was when the older residents were living there when they were younger. But Biocrups in Staten Island which is the city's most conservative borough really focused on the story of the past that I just related here. They would say, it's not about kind of effects of climate change coming in the future. You need to go back and understand a story to understand why we wanna move. And they argue that these places weren't safe to live. Certainly not because of future climate change necessarily not even because of the present impacts of Sandy but because of these historic development decisions that placed blame very squarely on government and justified them pursuing this government by out of their homes. So these are a couple of quotes from people I spoke to. One says, the city allowed development. They allowed them to fill in the creeks and the wetlands. A big part of me says they did this. This is a problem that was created when people spoke of their neighbors who had been fighting for years as with the Oakwood Beach Group to get better protection. And they said, my heart breaks for someone who really fought and had the foresight to see that these things can happen but no one was listening until the storm. Now FEMA's maps by contrast, they depict flood risk as very much sort of the static and natural attribute of a place not the kind of dynamic and escalating result of human action or decisions that are made from afar. And they also reverse the relationship between citizens and government as Staten Islanders were talking about it. So government by authoring the maps, they become the ones who have the foresight and they're able to kind of predict flooding. And these maps wind up making flood prone residents themselves personally responsible, at least financially responsible for that risk. And so this is probably the most controversial aspect of these maps and this is why they're controversial not just for people who wanted buyouts but for people all across the country, including here. And that's because the maps are a product of the National Flood Insurance Program that I mentioned before and that has underwritten so much development in the flood plains and along the coast. Let me go back to this. So if you squint in the bottom corner here, you can make out firm. These maps are officially called firms that stands for flood insurance rate map. Do any of you own homes in FEMA's? Do any of you own homes? Probably not, I don't know. You do, isn't it? Do you know if it's in a flood zone? It's high up. That's great, for now. So if any of you did own homes and had mortgages and did live in one of FEMA's flood zones, you would be familiar with the intended use of these maps, so their intended use is to set flood insurance rates nationwide for the National Flood Insurance Program. And you're required if you hold a federally backed mortgage and you're in zones ARV, you're required to carry and maintain this flood insurance. So the fact that these maps are a product of the NFIP is relevant not just in terms of how they represent or misrepresent the past, but also how they're visualizing the future. Because of the congressional mandate they have to map risk specifically for insurance purposes, they represent flood risk very differently than many other kinds of flood maps that you might see. So these, this is a picture, I just got offline of flood maps in the UK, which are made by the Environment Agency. There's a great article about these maps that I'm gonna talk about now as I talk about them by James Porter and David Demerit. And so they write about how the Environment Agency makes these flood maps that are drawn on much larger scale than the ones I just showed you from FEMA. And that's intentionally so that they don't affect insurance rates for individual properties. And it also makes them a lot less expensive to maintain and to create. It's very hard to, I mean, you can't map these things perfectly accurately at all. It's a hypothetical third coastline, if you'd call it. But it's very hard to have anything approaching any kind of accuracy if you're at a smaller scale. And this has the added benefit from the Environment Agency's point of view in the UK of creating uncertainty that's enough so that when local planning authorities want to plan a development or permit a development, they're forced to go to the Environment Agency and the Environment Agency gets to have a role in consulting on the project, which they might not have otherwise. So they're created to not be that specific to read. And the UK maps too, as you can see here, they show Central London, that's Westminster. They show flood zones as they would exist without present flood defenses. So if those flood defenses that are currently in place, like the TEMS flood barrier, were to fail. And FEMA's maps do not do that. In the case of FEMA maps, FEMA certified flood defenses, such as levies constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers, change the maps. And they remove areas that the defenses purport to protect from the high-risk flood zone entirely. So that means that people behind those barriers are no longer required to carry flood insurance, even though they're still living in the same place. And the result this has is it may render the land safe from kind of escalating flood insurance rates, but it remains very vulnerable, of course, to the kind of catastrophic failure you get when those defenses fail, and they almost inevitably fail, whether because they're not adequately maintained, like most of the infrastructure in this country, or because there is an exceptionally strong event that ends up breaching them. So in the great Midwest floods in the 90s, more than a thousand levies failed along rivers. And of course, Hurricane Katrina. And FEMA's maps also do not take climate change into account. Their mandate as insurance tools is to model present-day levels of risk based on historic data. And so they're actually not allowed to incorporate the impact of climate change into the maps. And as one mapper explained this to me, he said, I have a flood insurance policy myself, and even I make the maps, and I don't wanna pay more today based on risk that someone's projecting in the future. That would not be fair. And the future, of course, is not going to look like the past. The present doesn't look like the past. And you wind up with this mismatch between past and future conditions that has become a major issue for the maps now because they're also used, they're not just used to set flood insurance rates. They're also used to set building standards, building elevation standards. So in the words of the same FEMA mapper, he said, the problem is you're using a map that shows today's risk to tell someone how to build something that's going to be around for 30 years or 50 years, and that no longer is viable. Because even present conditions are changing much faster than the maps can keep up. This is a very blurry image, but it shows that in New York City, Sandy's floodwater surged far beyond FEMA's high-risk flood zone. The orange is the Sandy Inundation Area, and the blue is the 100-year floodplain from the FEMA maps that were currently in effect, which dated actually to 1983, so not that recent. And in Sandy, more than 21 square miles of flooded land lay outside both zones, A and B. So another reason that residents who were looking for buyouts were angry about the use of FEMA's maps to set the boundaries of the program was that the maps didn't take Sandy's damage into account. Even the new maps don't take Sandy's damage into account because FEMA was actually revising its maps when the storm hit, and this created a huge number of problems that were unexpected. The revisions were taking place as part of broader reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program that were passed, kind of shockingly, with bipartisan support this summer before Sandy. And these reforms are set to dramatically increase the cost of flood insurance in FEMA's flood zones by removing subsidies on properties that predate the creation of the program and predate the creation of the maps. So when the National Flood Insurance Program was first created, the government didn't want to create a program that would displace people en masse who were already living in vulnerable areas or in the flood plain. So what they did is they built in subsidies into the program, and this also allowed more people to afford to be able to buy into the program and then spreading the risk around. But the program has gotten deeper and deeper and deeper into debt, and so there are a lot of voices now pushing to raise, to get rid of all those subsidies entirely and raise premiums to market rates, but that would be many, many thousands of dollars for some people. So suddenly any changes to the maps have much higher stakes than they even did initially. And those seeking to rebuild and stay in their homes after Sandy started arguing that the new maps were overstating their risk. They threatened to set property values plummeting and to set off a wave of displacement that would be far more destructive than anyone disaster. Not just these pictures are from New Jersey, not just in New Jersey, but all across the country. And this is a very ongoing debate. So just weeks after FEMA released its first preliminary revised maps, which it did shortly before Oakwood Beach got its buyout. Oakwood Beach's buyout, they just looked at the map that residents made. They did not look at these flood maps yet because they didn't realize how much demand there would be for the program. There wasn't the need to kind of parse who would get it and who wouldn't at that stage. But just weeks after FEMA released its first maps, it released a new version of new maps that maintained this kind of expanded 100 year flood plain but then shrank the highest risk V zone within it. So this of course is from Staten Island Daily newspaper. This was bad news for Staten Islanders that thought at the time they needed to be in the V zone in order to have a shot of getting bought out and it made the map seem even more political than people were otherwise arguing them to be. So they started making the opposite case of the people you saw in the previous slide. So they started arguing the maps were actually understating their risk because they knew that unless they could show sufficient risk, they wouldn't get the support they needed to move. And the maps were still not yet final. So they have remained in flux because New York City then proceeded to launch its own appeal of the maps. Boston also appealed its latest flood maps I learned on the internet today. So the city launched an appeal of the maps. The city said the maps are still too severe. And so here in the orange, you can see this is what the city analysis shows they believe the 1% annual chance flood plain should be and the purple is what FEMA has been saying it should be. And it was only late last year, just a few months ago that the appeal was decided in New York City's favor. So this means that FEMA is redrawing its maps yet again. And as we approach the five year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy that's next week, these maps and the reauthorization of the entire national flood insurance program are still pending. And worsening climate change means the maps are likely to just keep changing again and again and again and probably sooner. We can't have another 30 year gap until the maps will need to change again, which is how much FEMA had kind of planned to update them in order to have enough data to work with. So here this shows again, if you can't see this from the New York City panel on climate change, it shows in purple FEMA's preliminary maps that have now been appealed and will be tinier. The light green is the estimates for what sea level rise will mean in the 2020s. Very soon, in 2050s, 2080s, the red is 2100. And these are very optimistic rejections of sea level rise that they're using here. So for Sandy affected homeowners in Staten Island, the whole process resulted in this state of limbo where people were waiting to find out as the maps were changing, whether or not they'd be eligible for a buyout or if they rebuilt, how high should they rebuild? How high would they have to elevate? And how long was it until the maps changed again and they had to elevate again? And these are really high stakes questions because elevating a home in New York City can cost up to $10,000 a foot. And FEMA's maps are saying you need to elevate maybe 14 feet, 16 feet up. So it's a huge expense. And that's the way you reduce these flood insurance rates that if you don't elevate, you probably can't afford to pay. So while flood maps such as FEMA's are intended, the thought is that they're supposed to reduce uncertainty. They convert it into measurable risk that you can do something with. In this case, they've simply served to redistribute that uncertainty. And they've shifted it onto individual homeowners who have very much struggled to recover from the storm, let alone plan for the future in this context. So as it turned out, only a fraction of those who organized in favor of retreat wound up being admitted to the state's buyout program. So for them, if they're able to get out of the flood zone for now, these maps are no longer kind of dictating their future and their possibilities. But this is a small number of people and they're people who will refer to themselves now as the lucky ones because they're able to buy themselves a few more years of security, financial security, security from flooding. And I should say that the proposal to use FEMA's maps as boundaries for the buyout was very, very short-lived. It incited a lot of resistance and it became really clear that it was not a purpose for which they could even be used. It didn't make any sense. So there were a lot of other complicated factors that fed into the selection of these neighborhoods. That's entirely, that would be many other talks. But the result was still kind of the same that just a small number of people became part. This is a cartoon that one of the buyout group leaders gave me. He was one of those lucky ones. He moved out of the flood zone to high ground. And he's not the only one who's trying to buy time in this context. The city, the state, and the federal government are also doing what they can to get a few more years. In recent months, the Army Corps of Engineers has developed another vision of the potential future coastline. And this is a seawall that would go in front of all of Staten Island's east shore, so the same area where residents were trying to retreat. And the wall would not be that much higher than Sandy's storm surge. And Sandy, of course, was not even a hurricane when it actually hit land. So there's a sense among some residents that the wall is perhaps obsolete before it's even been built. The wall's design takes historic rather than future rates of sea level rise into account. And I was at one meeting with a woman where she said, it's not history, it's fantasy. And everyone sort of nodded in agreement. So it's less a wall that's gonna offer definite protection from the environmental risk. But what it will do is it's geared to protecting from the financial risk posed by the flood maps to the city. So the maps will be amended yet again once the wall is built to take these places out of the flood zone. So I was trying to fit this in somewhere. I thought it was so interesting. It's from the city's climate ready Boston report again. And it shows in yellow, the 2016, this is the current shoreline of Boston and Cambridge. And then the white is where the shoreline was in 1630. You can see just how much of the city is built on fill, which people who live here probably already know. But it was more than I realized. So we live in a world that's been shaped by the maps of the past. And with the proliferation of risk mapping, it's increasingly shaped by the maps of the future. Battles over risk maps, over how to redraw the coastline after a disaster or an anticipation of climate change are struggles over time as well as space. So that's something I wanted to convey in this talk. It's about how to represent the past, how to envision the future and then how to navigate the present. And maybe all maps now in some sense are becoming more like risk maps because even those that kind of presume a stable landscape also hold the presumption that will act with sufficient urgency to preserve that landscape in some form that bears some kind of resemblance to how it exists in the present. And it may be kind of erroneous to call this talk Mapping Climate Change because the maps I've spent most of my time discussing do not take climate change into account, as I said. But it's these existing tools and the associated kinds of theories and systems, political systems, financial systems like insurance, prediction, technical systems, social systems that are serving to mediate a climate change to reality now for which they were not created. And this is true of media studies. You can say this about probably any discipline or anything that its kind of founding theories were created with the presumption of a stable climate that doesn't exist. So we have to rethink that. And for maps it begs the question, what kinds of new maps, new ways of mapping and new ways of using maps and seeing maps are needed to navigate this new reality? What kinds of stories will they tell and whose will they erase? And these are not new questions for anyone who's in media studies and studies maps, but they're questions that appear particularly urgent at the present moment. And they are the ones that I will leave you with today, probably. Thank you. You go first. No, you can go first. Thank you guys for sharing this with us. And in the face of the super nine-disabled ways that media studies can fail, stories will have to then come to it. I really appreciate that. Thank you. Super example, take one. Oh, right over here. I wanted to ask you about, like, even your research, do you encounter collectives or are you studying movements of people doing policy that are not making? I don't know, like, I remember the humanitarian of the street maps people, you know, I think Boston and New York, San Diego, I don't know, I think I managed to, like, stable any of the parts of the country. Yeah, that's a great question. It's funny, I think, Jane and I have talked about this before, but, you know, the area I wound up doing my research in as part of Staten Island, you know, most people I spoke to are older, they don't necessarily have cell phones. It's, you know, the kind of media I wound up writing about so much is, like, the print and newspaper and the fact that it was still print really, really mattered in terms of how people organized in this place. So beyond the sort of maps that I showed you that people were drawing and that hasn't come up so much, I think it's something that, probably when I'm, you know, working on revising this into something that is publishable and looking for other sources, a lot of them are talking about kind of crisis mapping, participatory forms of mapping, counter-mapping, but that wasn't something I saw so much in my own research. I have three questions, which is totally cheating, so, do what you can. The first one is, I was just curious if there's any discussion about buyouts in Florida, and the way it gets a recent hurricane there, I was struck by how many articles that were in newspapers right afterwards, saying, basically, yeah, why do anyone think you could live in Florida? This is, everyone knows that Florida's a very dangerous place to live in terms of climate issues, even without climate change issues coming to a head. So I was just wondering if you had anything to say about that. The second question was about Staten Island and the broader issue of the sort of politics of maps because you used to wear political a number of times, but not in the sense of like, well, conservatives or liberals or Republicans or Democrats or the ways we often discuss politics and the sort of directions in which things were charged. And so when I think of Staten Island, of course, a strong reputation in New York City is that this is absolutely the most conservative burrow, and everyone immediately snaps to like, God, 90% of the cops in New York City live in Staten Island and commute in and it's known for being a conservative community. So I'm just curious, as they're pushing for the government handout of a buyout, is there any sense of, well, we are speaking for working class Americans as a, you know, what are the sort of political balances of that? And are they, are there contradictions or are there actually people identifying as not being conservatives in Staten Island to a full length of this, these buyouts? The third and final question, which may be a non-starter is, I was just thinking about Robert Moses, the infamous New York City planner who much reviled by many New Yorkers. And wondering, I mean, he retired, I believe not long before the National Flood Insurance Act of 68, maybe in 65, four. And I'm curious if the buildup on Staten Island was a culmination of things that he had been working on for 20 or 30 years or more, or whether it was the kind of thing that he would have resisted for any reason, because he generally made choices that were very detrimental to working class people and very helpful to the wealthy. That was his system for building highways and bridges and so on. So I'm just curious if there's any backstory on Moses that plays into the thinking about development of sort of unsafe areas to which to develop. I'm sorry, that was. Oh, these are such wonderful questions. I feel like we'll have to continue with them. No, they're great. So the first question in terms of buyouts in Florida, and there have been, I mean, I think especially with Harvey in Texas, there have been a huge number, because there had been, I don't know if people saw that ProPublica article that had kind of foreshadowed the damage of Harvey and showed the development really dramatically. And that was just all over Twitter and it incited. I think Harvey was very much framed as a result. This is because the city had developed so much in its floodplain. And so there's been, and also because Harris County, that Houston's in had had a buyout program before Harvey. And now there has just been a surge of interest again in being part of that buyout program. So that's something I was surprised to find in a number of places when I was doing research on buyouts that actually it's rare that people who want them get them because the amount of money for them is very limited. It usually requires a disaster declaration. It requires a local match, which means that the city or town has to chip in 25% of the cost. And usually not only do they not either want to or have funds to do that. It means that they're losing some of their tax base. And so it tends to get blocked at that local level. Right now Houston is trying to scale up its buyout program. Last I saw they'd already gotten 3,000 calls from people who wanted to participate. But it raises really, really tough questions that I think in Florida are particularly vexing because so much of the development, I mean in places like Miami Beach is very, very luxury development. And that was an issue in parts of Staten Island too where there is a neighborhood, the neighborhood all the way at the southern tip of Staten Island, Tottenville, has a number of those small bungalows still but they're kind of mixed in with very big kind of waterfront McMansions. And I think from the perspective of people in government, the optics of buying out a place where it really looks like a bailout of wealthy homeowners on the coast, that's very, very tricky. On the opposite end, it's also tricky to buy out a very, very poor place because the state officials would talk about, they didn't want this to be seen as kind of a slum clearance program or something like that. So there's kind of tough optics involved in tough choices because even in Staten Island where it's a much more kind of working class place, people were getting in some cases several hundred thousand dollars for their house and there was some debate about whether the money should be used that way and there's a lot of rhetoric now about, well, didn't people just choose to live here? And ironically, as if this kind of goes into your second question, that's very much, you would think the attitude would be in these neighborhoods because they are very right-leaning, very libertarian. And so that was something that really surprised me that this would be the place that you'd find really in my mind because of the forefront of collective action to adapt to climate change that would be a place where the voters there overwhelmingly in this part of Staten Island voted for Trump. So one way that I think the contradiction was resolved for some people is this story of government culpability for past development. So the sense was, well, the government hadn't subsidized flood insurance in the first place, these properties wouldn't have been built. So they're just kind of making amends for a lot of previous government intervention and this is a way so that the government can stop intervening in people's lives and in the coastline once and for all. I think that would be kind of the way that it's framed in terms of kind of the politics of buyouts and the situation. And it's funny because, you know, Staten Island is actually, there's a great book about Staten Island called Conservative Bastion, in a liberal city. But that book is by political scientists at the College of Staten Island and they say actually Staten Island is probably the healthiest democracy in so far and it's basically evenly split in terms of political parties. It's just overwhelmingly conservative because the rest of New York, you know, never ever left the Republican basically. So Staten Island's very evenly divided in terms of voting. This part of Staten Island is more conservative. The North Shore is very, very democratic. But even in these neighborhoods, people held really wide ranging political views and so one issue when they were organizing because they knew to have a shot at getting bought out, they had to get everyone in the neighborhood to agree. And so that was why, you know, even if you privately are concerned about climate change, you probably won't frame a buyout that way when you're persuading your neighbor to go because it's something that could cause dissensus at a time when people were trying to not sow any kind of conflict. And in neighborhoods where people would sometimes say, you know, because I would ask people in other buyout programs, there are precursors for communities moving all together. And so I would say hypothetically, if that were an option, would you want to move somewhere along with your neighbors from a sociological perspective? And that seems very important. And some people would say, you know, I hate my neighbors, I don't care. But it was tricky, you know, because I think people really didn't want to bring party politics into it when they were organizing in this way. But that kind of that whole issue is something I'm trying to write about now because it's, you know, it's something that it's gonna take a lot of thinking through. And I, since the election, I've had so many people say, oh, you're doing one of those Trump voter projects. And I was like, well, I never thought of it like that before, but now, you know. And then that's kind of also connects to Robert Moses. So Robert Moses is the one who actually built that waterfront boulevard. That was responsible in some ways for a lot of the deaths. And part of the Verrazano Bridge and the plans that he had made for coming off it is the Staten Island Expressway. And that's what divides Staten Island's North Shore from the East and South Shores. And some people on Staten Island will call it Staten Island or New York City's Mason-Dixon line because it's seen as, you know, it's always been very, there's been a huge amounts of housing discrimination, including Trump-owned properties in Staten Island. You see the South and East Shores. The East Shore, bless so now with the South Shore, like, vastly majority white and the North Shore, high, you know, much more like the rest of New York City. And so that kind of divide reflect itself in kind of the movements that emerged after Sandy, too, for rebuilding and the conversations about rebuilding in the different parts of the island. I also love to talk. I've learned a ton and it's really interesting to me because I have a family in New York. And by the way, I would love to hear people talk about like, you know, every New Orleans or Harvey or whatever. But one thing that you didn't talk about, of course your research is focused on Staten Island, is Manhattan. You know, I mean, there was obviously major flooding in Manhattan. Manhattan is a fairly, you know, densely populated area and there's a lot of development. You know, I remember, I mean, I had many friends, you know, like on the Lower East Side stuff of it, like the buildings were completely flooded. You know, we saw pictures of full subway stations and it flooded us a lot. I just wanted to, you know, hear what, if anything, you learn in your research about things changing in Manhattan and how these things apply to, you know, the sea. And I also wanted to sort of, I guess, question the way in which you kind of phrase that the maps are pushing the burden on to individuals. And you use that specific kind of term. Because I mean, my skepticism about that particular way of phrasing it would be, well, you know, we live in an environment or a world of social relationships that are, you know, I mean, structured through capitalist system, through the state, through laws, and through people's, you know, ideology about those things. And so it seems like, you know, it's not the map that's doing it. In other words, you know, like, according to like an alarm system, you would rather have an alarm go off more times than too few times, right? And so similarly, you would think that, you know, just a priori naively that the map should tell you what your risk is, like in the worst case scenario, and including climate change and including, you know, in other words, the more of these areas that would, you know, be potential risk zones that could be mapped when you reason to be mapped would be better, rather than fewer. But then we live in a place, you know, and I don't want to bang on about it, but it seems like just when you're talking about development, this kind of laissez-faire capitalism messes things up, and then, of course, you have the shock doctrine, and then we climb after the thing happens, and then it backscrews everything up, and it's just like capitalism and individualized risk is such a huge part of what, you know, creates these problems. And I guess I want to know what you think some of the solutions are, and I mean, I personally believe in, you know, more distributed wealth and, you know, all that and socializing risk. Right, get rid of private property, I think. Right, I think you put that really, really well, and I think, yeah, exactly. So it's not, right, it's not the maps, it's, right, this whole system behind, I mean, it's the system that like makes the city want to appeal to them, it's the system that makes North Carolina ban looking at sea level rise projections when you're thinking about development, because there's this huge fear that you'll have disinvestment, you'll have this kind of collapse of the entire system of the economy as it's currently constructed rests on, and local government, I mean, you see, so in other boroughs in Brooklyn right now, there's this plan to build this waterfront transit line that's right in the flood zone, but in some way, the city, you know, is dependent to fund flood protection on getting more development. That's what's gonna fund the protection. So you're in this really kind of six, like all that it's hard to break out of keeping things as they stand. And there's definitely, I mean, just in terms of buyouts, there's some discussion of thinking about how do you change kind of local governments, dependence on property taxes, that seems like it kind of has to happen. But yeah, it would require really, you know, wholesale change, but right, it's not the maps. I mean, I had talked to a friend of mine, a colleague a few years ago about this, and he was saying, well, it's not even about the flood maps at all, it's about the data, it's about the insurance rates. I mean, people are not mad about the maps, they're mad about how much money the maps are making them pay. And that's true. And then I was thinking, well, why, you know, why do the maps seem so important here? And I guess part of it is, you know, their role kind of the opposite is their role in facilitating this collective resistance, because you have seen people across the country who are now identifying as kind of flood zone communities, organizing these kind of mass movements against, against the rates. And I would notice when I would go to meetings, people will never ask you like how much insurance, how much do you pay for insurance? That's sort of one of those money questions that people did not ask. But every time I sat down at a meeting, people would say, are you zone A or B? You know, what zone are you in? And then you have this kind of shared thing. So I think the maps are important in that way, creating that sense of a collective. Yeah, I agree with everything that you said. Manhattan, yeah, so I think, you know, the thing that you'll hear over and over again is like, well, no one's gonna retreat from Manhattan. No one's gonna retreat from, it just seems unimaginable because you can imagine picking up a house in Staten Island and moving in and even elevating it. But what do you do with kind of skyscrapers and the density of lower Manhattan? And I think, you know, in some sense, like a self-fulfilling prophecy because the places that are the most economic value are the ones that there's going to be investment in protecting the wealthiest areas. So, you know, you saw after Sandy, there were proposals to do kind of seawalls built under the Verrazano Bridge that would protect lower Manhattan, maybe, but would displace water and flood out parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island. That's happening, you know, the Louisiana Coastal Master Plan. There are certain areas that are included in protections, other areas that are left out of the protections that are these kind of sacrifice zones in a different way. But Manhattan has, I was involved in the Rebuild by Design competition. I don't know if you've heard about that. It was this federally funded and Rockefeller funded initiative after Sandy to design ways of rebuilding the region that could be kind of scaled and reproduced and it tried to take a sort of innovative approach where instead of having design teams kind of come in and propose things for a place they didn't know, they had to apply to be teams with kind of community groups and they couldn't have, they had to spend months doing kind of mini ethnographies in places where they wanted to work before they even came up with any idea for a project. So, trying to kind of flip the process. So, you know, with like, I mean, now there were some very interesting projects that were selected that in the implementation stage they can't necessarily build in the way people wanted them to be built. But the one that got the most funding is this kind of sea wall to go around lower Manhattan called the Big U. I don't think it's still called the Big U because only one portion of it got funded. So it's now called the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project. And it was a big deal that they picked that part of it to be built with the funding they had because you might expect that the kind of wealthier lower West side areas would be the ones that we protected first. But there was a real desire to protect the public housing that's there. All of the concern is for people who are living there and not in public housing without some kind of rent controls in place. Those people could get priced out through this kind of gentrifying effect that any kind of protection also can have. So that's another tricky situation but that's what's happening in Manhattan. I'm just curious, in addition to the buy-ups, do the homeowners have any capacity to take legal action against the developers who built these properties? Yeah, that's like a very live question. There's the Saban Center at Columbia's Law School. It's a Saban Center on Climate Change Law. I went to a talk there and I think these are things that are not resolved. So there were a few different cities in California that have just sued fossil fuel companies, I believe, and they want them to pay for the kinds of protections they'll need to adapt to climate change. One of the Alaska native villages, Kivalina, that voted many, many, you know, I think back in 92 to relocate because of coastal erosion and melting permafrost, they haven't been able to get funding to do that and they tried suing fossil fuel companies for the cost of the relocation. They weren't successful but I think there will be more lawsuits like that. And I think at the last talk I went to at Saban they were talking about how there had been a suit maybe in Chicago or in the Midwest where I think the city had been sued for permitting development that was in a known blood plane. So that's something that I think will be the next kind of big area to look at is how is the law gonna deal with these questions. You can imagine a lot of, I just thought I wanted to talk about it in legal terms, but I just want some liability. It's like negligence law, just give me this percent of the property and yeah, I think that's something I'm interested in following more as it develops. From a, I have a much better idea of what you do now. And it made me think about how, I guess for you as a being in sort of media studies, how often do you have to like, I don't know, revise your field to explain to people why you fit into that space because it can initially seem like you're coming at it more from an environmental space as opposed to really looking at sort of textual analysis with these maps and these graphs and it helped me to see all of them because I'm like, oh, I get it, maybe you said it, but I'm like, how has that experience been for you when you're sort of operating on like a, what I would think to be like a sort of fringe space within the apartment level or can you talk a little bit about that experience and what it was like transitioning from NYU and then what you've been, what your experience here has been so far along that same line that you just dropped. Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you said you could understand why I do media studies now because I have to say that I've given a lot of talks on my work, I've never given a lot of parts of this talk because I think only once ever for 15 minutes presented to a media studies audience. Those are not the kinds of invitations and audiences I get asked to speak to. So this was really, really daunting for me to think about, wow, it's so strange because I've come out of this media studies program and have trading kind of communication, cultural studies and so rarely do I ever, am I ever asked to frame my work in that way? So, and yeah, so it's something I'm still really kind of figuring out in my dissertation chair was a sociologist, he was not in media studies so that's kind of put me very much on the edges of these disciplines and I think the sorts of, the field is very much emerging now, the sort of field that you might say, the social life of climate change or however you wanna think about it, is still kind of being pieced together, so people working in environmental media, environmental humanities, kind of eco-media, that environmental anthropology, sociology of climate change, I'm speaking into a public health, at the public health conference in like a week and then to landscape architects at Harvard next week. So every time I give a talk I feel like I'm kind of trying to, in a way, figure out what I'm doing, I just see which audiences respond and how they kind of frame the work and it's definitely an issue for the job market. That yeah, hopefully all the wise faculty in the room can only work on over the course of the next couple of years. Yeah, it's tricky, I think it's, when you come to a, I did not come into my PhD program thinking I would write about this, I mean, Sandy hadn't happened, I didn't know anything about climate change, I didn't really think about the environment. I had worked on the role of visual culture and urban redevelopment and kind of public art and I displace my activism. And so yeah, I wound up doing a very different project which I think happens when you go into even a master's or a PhD. Anybody else? Just to start, this is another question to talk briefly about sort of the sort of political age going at one of the comments of sort of like trying to avoid the climate change discussion and then you said you're working with conservative communities, but we're doing a project right now in our workshop on climate change and so I was, they're doing readings all the time. And so I'm really curious what you think about the sort of climate change denier and specifically the argument there is that this is sort of repeated image I kept seeing of like charting all the way back to like 2000 BC and then trying to say like what we're experiencing of climate change now is just like a return to something. So I was wondering if in your work, one, if you have to deal with sort of that political aspect that your work kind of sort of throws you into whether you like it or not, then two, what do you think of that argument? Have you had any specific experiences where you've had to deal with that? Like either talking directly to people or just presenting your work? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the conversations or questions kind of about like climate deniers are kind of a red herring. I mean, I think there's a super well-funded industry manufacturing doubt about this topic, but even in places where that's not the case, there's a great book called Living in Denial written by a sociologist and ethnographer called Cari Norgaard. And she went to this village in Norway that has like the highest, they're off the charts in terms of individual knowledge and belief in climate change. Like everyone knows a ton about climate change. Everyone believes deeply in climate change and is really deeply freaked out about climate change. And she went and she lived in this village during a time when, you know, they couldn't have enough snow for their kind of ski-based economy to function. They were suffering kind of huge local impacts. And she realized that no one was talking about climate change and that actually it wasn't really any different than when she was in the U.S., even though people privately believed and were concerned and knew a lot about it, it was not seen as a public issue and it was not, and essentially it didn't matter in terms of their actions that people believed in it. People were not, you know, it was not seen as a local issue. This is, she writes about the local newspaper there and the role of that. People didn't see it as something to write letters to the editor about or organize school workouts about and, you know, why did it not become kind of the focus of local action the way maybe, you know, the Iraq War where you saw similarly kind of a distant issue that you could imagine on a local level, you don't control over, but that's the focus of a lot of activism. So that's why the climate march was a big deal. But in some way, I think the denial is much more kind of systemic and in the New York case, I mean, you have Mayor Michael Bloomberg who's, you know, a huge advocate in terms of getting mitigation on the agenda and getting climate change on the agenda and really a leader in that. But then he's also really invested in waterfront development and kind of, I mean, you could argue that if you mitigate fast enough, maybe you can have, you can protect some of this waterfront development but you have different kinds of denial that are operating always. And I'm supposed to be on a panel about climate change denial at the anthropology meetings in a few weeks. So speak to me in a few weeks and I'll have like written down enough to know what I think more. But thanks for the question. All right, well, thank you very much. Thanks again. Thank you. Thanks so much.