Jennifer L. Rice

Knowing climate change, embodying climate praxis: experiential knowledge in southern Appalachia

Whether used to support or impede action, scientific knowledge is now, more than ever, the primary framework for political discourse on climate change. As a consequence, science has become a hegemonic way of knowing climate change by mainstream climate politics, which not only limits the actors and actions deemed legitimate in climate politics but also silences vulnerable communities and reinforces historical patterns of cultural and political marginalization. To combat this “post-political” condition, we seek to democratize climate knowledge and imagine the possibilities of climate praxis through an engagement with Gramscian political ecology and feminist science studies. This framework emphasizes how antihierarchical and experiential forms of knowledge can work to destabilize technocratic modes of governing. We illustrate the potential of our approach through ethnographic research with people in southern Appalachia whose knowledge of climate change is based in the perceptible effects of weather, landscape change due to exurbanization, and the potential impacts of new migrants they call “climate refugees.” Valuing this knowledge builds more diverse communities of action, resists the extraction of climate change from its complex society–nature entanglements, and reveals the intimate connections between climate justice and distinct cultural lifeways. We argue that only by opening up these new forms of climate praxis, which allow people to take action using the knowledge they already have, can more just socioecological transformations be brought into being.

Megapolitan Political Ecology and Urban Metabolism in Southern Appalachia

Drawing on megapolitan geographies, urban political ecology, and urban metabolism as theoretical frameworks, this article theoretically and empirically explores megapolitan political ecology. First, we elucidate a theoretical framework in the context of southern Appalachia and, in particular, the Piedmont megapolitan region, suggesting that the megapolitan region is a useful scale through which to understand urban metabolic connections that constitute this rapidly urbanizing area. We also push the environmental history and geography literature of the U.S. South and southern Appalachia to consider the central role urban metabolic connections play in the regions pressing social and environmental crises. Second, we empirically illuminate these human and nonhuman urban metabolisms across the Piedmont megapolitan region using data from the Coweeta Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, especially highlighting a growing “ring of asphalt” that epitomizes several developing changes to patterns of metabolism. The conclusion suggests that changing urban metabolisms indicated by Coweeta LTER data, ranging from flows of people to flows of water, pose a complicated problem for regional governance and vitality in the future.

Public Targets, Private Choices: Urban Climate Governance in the Pacific Northwest

A survey of local governments participating in two urban climate change programs is presented to determine the mechanisms used to reach emissions reduction goals and the motivations for participation. Results support previous research that shows a preference for policies that rely on changes in individual behavior, while also providing new insights into how mitigation responsibilities are distributed among the public and private sector and the relative importance of scientific consensus, economic incentives, and federal inaction on local government justification for climate-related policies. The article concludes with a discussion of urban climate governance as part of a wider system of neoliberal climate governance.

Can science writing collectives overcome barriers to more democratic communication and collaboration? Lessons from environmental communication praxis in southern Appalachia

Despite compelling reasons to involve nonscientists in the production of ecological knowledge, cultural and institutional factors often dis-incentivize engagement between scientists and nonscientists. This paper details our efforts to develop a biweekly newspaper column to increase communication between ecological scientists, social scientists, and the communities within which they work. Addressing community-generated topics and written by a collective of social and natural scientists, the column is meant to foster public dialog about socio-environmental issues and to lay the groundwork for the coproduction of environmental knowledge. Our collective approach to writing addresses some major barriers to public engagement by scientists, but the need to insert ourselves as intermediaries limits these gains. Overall, our efforts at environmental communication praxis have not generated significant public debate, but they have supported future coproduction by making scientists a more visible presence in the community and providing easy pathways for them to begin engaging the public. Finally, this research highlights an underappreciated barrier to public engagement: scientists are not merely disconnected from the public, but also connected in ways that may be functional for their research. Many field scientists, for example, seek out neutral and narrowly defined connections that permit research access but are largely incompatible with efforts to address controversial issues of environmental governance.

The Neutral State: A Genealogy of Ecosystem Service Payments in Costa Rica

Using the case of Costa Rica, this paper examines how ‘carbon’ became an identifiable problem for that state. Specifically, we consider the prominent role that payments for ecosystem services (PES) have come to play in Costa Rica’s current efforts to become ‘carbon neutral’. We trace how, during the turbulent period of the 1980s, rationalities of financialization and security arose in this country that allowed for PES to emerge as an economic and political mechanism. Our central thesis is that this period initiated a governmental project of securing a viable future for the nation’s resources through the process of linking them to global financial markets and international flows of trade. This project of achieving resource security through economic circulation introduced new financial logics into forest management, as well as new modes of calculating the value and extent of the forest. We show how these ways of framing resources ultimately found expression in the nation’s PES program that is now central to the state’s goal of remaking the nation’s territory as a climatically neutral space. We argue that such financialized practices further reinforce the territorial space of Costa Rica through the encoding of carbon within it. The result is that, today, the nation’s carbon flows have become territorialized as part of the nation’s atmosphere, biomass, people and economy. The significance of this argument is that carbon’s territorialization did not begin with a concern for the climate, nor did it occur through diffusion of global climate policy to Costa Rica. Instead, carbon’s rise can be traced to locally specific ways of coping with the problem of resource security.

From sustainable urbanism to climate urbanism

As the negative impacts of climate change become increasingly apparent, many city leaders and policymakers have begun to regard climate action as both a fiscal challenge and strategic economic opportunity. However, addressing the increasingly evident threats of climate change in the neoliberal, post-financial-crisis city raises several questions about its equitable implementation. This paper suggests that the prioritisation of a specific mode of climate resilient urban development represents a departure from the previous decades’ movement toward sustainable urbanism. We refer to this new development paradigm as ‘climate urbanism’, a policy orientation that (1) promotes cities as the most viable and appropriate sites of climate action and (2) prioritises efforts to protect the physical and digital infrastructures of urban economies from the hazards associated with climate change. We argue that the potential social justice impacts of climate urbanism have not been fully interrogated. Certainly, cities are appropriate sites for addressing climate change, but in the current neoliberal context, the transition from policy rhetoric to climate action presents a potentially problematic landscape of inequality and injustice. With that in mind, this paper offers a critical lens to evaluate the merits of climate urbanism and to interrogate its potential outcomes.