Adrienne Kennedy, a climate activist and organizer from south Lumberton, North Carolina, talks about what environmental justice looks like for her after Hurricane Matthew destroyed her home. Dr. Joseph Campana, director of the Center for Environmental Studies at Rice University, explores ways the humanities can help us process relentless patterns of climate catastrophe.
Find out how to support disaster relief and recovery in Lumberton and watch Robeson Rises, the film featuring Adrienne Kennedy’s story. Read more about the North Carolina Humanities Watershed Moments initiative that screened the film as part of a touring discussion series.
Learn more about the Center for Environmental Studies, the Investing in Futures project, and Dr. Joseph Campana’s work on the relationship between the humanities and the environment.
Read more about this episode’s topic and guests at our website.
Sydney Boyd: Hello and welcome to making meaning a podcast that explores how and why the humanities are an essential part of our everyday lives. And this series, we hear stories from our nations, humanities, councils, and leaders across the greater United States about the role the humanities have played during the pandemic and are playing in our recovery. I'm Sydney Boyd from the Federation of state humanities councils. Today, I'm worried about climate disasters that feel relentless. And I'm wondering how the humanities can help us process what's happening and imagine an equitable future. Adrian Kennedy, as a climate activist and organizer from south Lumberton, North Carolina. She told her story on Robinson rises. It's a documentary that was part of a collaborative film screening series and discussion tour from working films and North Carolina humanities. Robinson rises is about the Atlantic coast pipeline at proposed methane pipeline running through the east coast and through North Carolina. The film looks at its potential environmental impact and the organizers from that state challenging its construction. Adrian became one of those organizers.
Adrienne Kennedy: In terms of the environmental battle in our community it's going to take a lot of patience and discipline attention to what we as individuals have to do to sing one collective song of justice. If you will.
Boyd: When I talked to her, Adrian shared that her idea of environmental justice started even before the pipeline back in 2016, when hurricane Matthew destroyed her home.
Kennedy: So hurricane Matthew comes and the water started coming in and we went into panic mode and I told my uncle, "go to everybody's house and knock on their doors and tell them to shut down their breakers, get a pillowcase or a bag and put clothes and medicine in the bag. And we're going to search for high ground." At that time I didn't know what high ground was. We were just trying to get away from the water. We could see fish, debris, everything just slide going right past my hips. And we were just trying to figure out what would we do with the elderly people? I guy from South Carolina came and he had a boat. And then I said, "can we use your boat? We need to be getting these people." And that's how we started rescuing people, that guy used his boat and we would wade through the water, knock on the door, pull them out. And we stayed up for about 48 hours until FEMA came.
Boyd: Adrian says she hopes recovery aid would be distributed quickly and equitably, but that didn't happen. After sleeping in her grandmother's car and other people's homes for several weeks. She and her three children moved to a hotel. That's where they lived for the next six months. When FEMA stopped paying for the room, they moved into a community relief center called the Home Store. It would be another three months before Adrian found permanent housing. Before the storm Adrian and the people she helped rescue lived in south Lumberton. She says that they're part of the city received less government aid and resources than other parts of Lumberton.
Kennedy: And I was just naive. I thought if north Lumberton has something that south Lumberton needed, the government or the community response would be, let's work towards making these things equal. It wasn't until hurricane Matthew came about and we started learning it's not going to go like that. North Lumberton just has a different expectation, a different cycle, a different economics, a different pathway trajectory of recovery than south Lumberton did. And that's when the shock began.
Boyd: Nearly a third of people in Lumberton Live in poverty. According to the U.S. Census bureau, south Lumberton, where Adrian lived is where the majority of the city's affordable housing is located and is less affluent than north Lumberton, which was built on higher ground.
Kennedy: We're having these recovery meetings and we had to sit there and listen to people, go "we've already received money to place a certain amount of families and housing." And we would sit there and raise our hands and go, "Hey, what about us? The ones in south Lumberton. What about us?" These are people that we meet every day in the government. We see them when we go pay our light bills, we have conversations with them over the phone about food stamps or food resources, Medicaid for elderly. And these are the same people that are telling us. We don't know how you're going to get your house back. We don't know how you're going to get your children to school, how you're going to feed them. We don't know.
Boyd: Adrian and her neighbors were frustrated by the pace and the lack of recovery programs. So they organize their own community response.
Kennedy: We ended up opening a store, the church sponsored a store for a few months, a 5,000 square foot store. And I would see people from all races come in that store barefoot. They lost their clothes. They lost family heirlooms, everything in the home. We can't choose who we're going to help. So we got to be emitting in ourselves. Are you here to help people that look like you? Are you here to help everybody that's in need? Because see the water doesn't discriminate.
Boyd: Before hurricane Matthew, Adrian had never participated in community organizing, but she says the experience changed her.
Kennedy: I totally feel like i was in a cocoon or a shell. And some type of metamorphosis happened.
Boyd: She realized that it's not just the natural disaster that hits people. There's also the government and community specific disaster of unequal treatment.
Kennedy: I wouldn't wish these types of disasters on nobody. I hope that we can to a better promotion of human welfare because that's what this is about. Is the disregard and the neglect of the promoting of human welfare, the value of human life, that's what it is.
Boyd: As her worldview expanded, Adrian started to learn more about environmental concerns in her community. Like the plans for the Atlantic coast pipeline designed to run 600 miles from West Virginia to North Carolina, it would ultimately come to a resting spot in Lumberton. One day she was invited to a meeting hosted by Eco Robinson, a grassroots environmental justice group that had just formed. People gathered to talk about the environmental effects the pipeline would have. One of the people she met there was Robbie Goins.
Kennedy: So Robbie is a member of the Lumbee tribe in Robinson county. He's also one of the founding members of Eco Robinson and the Lumbee tribe was affected by the decision for the pipeline to go through their community, which is mainly farm land community land, families land and they were going through the decision to try and meet with the tribal elders to determine the benefits or the disadvantages of this pipeline. I had asked Robbie one day about the pipeline. And I said, "can you help me understand what is going to happen?" And he said, "yeah, come to my house. I show you."
Boyd: Through Adrian's conversation with Robbie, she learned that the pipeline had the potential to cause significant damage to her county's waterways. And that the pathway of the project would have been through traditional and contemporary areas of three native American tribes. The Lumbee, Coharie, and Haliwa-Saponi. The thought of another environmental disaster pushed Adrian to join the protests against the pipelines construction. Together with eco Robinson, she spoke out at town halls, canvass door to door, met with state representatives and sought legal support.
Kennedy: Nelson Mandela once said, "Overcoming poverty is not an act of charity, but it's an act of justice," right? So let's just substitute the word poverty for environmental equity. So overcoming environmental equity is not an act of charity, it's an act of justice, right? And I believe that what corporations and government and communities need to understand is that, a higher source like mother nature gave us this air, this land, and it's our right to treat it with respect. It's just a blatant dishonor to do the opposite.
Boyd: July, 2020 pipeline construction was canceled. The companies behind the project pointed to challenges from environmentalist's as reasons for not proceeding. Adrian is proud of that victory, but she doesn't want that success to lull people into complacency.
Kennedy: At the present moment, I'm grateful and I'm honored to be in the position that I am in now, which is, over time has built a lot of information, a lot of observations and just things I had no idea that were going on in the world and in the community that I lived in. I'm just now getting my house rebuild. I'm just now getting my house rebuilt. I'm still paying rent. And here we are again in the midst of another hurricane season, it's a pattern that keeps going on and on and on. I believe my story is just a warning, a warning before the destruction. We need a way of rethinking how we respond to environmental issues.
Boyd: There's a field of study for what Adrian's talking about here. A focus on coming together, thinking about and responding to relentless patterns of climate catastrophe and other ecological threats. It's called environmental humanities. And it brings disciplines like history, philosophy, and literature together with architecture and anthropology. Dr. Joseph Campana is the director of Rice University center for environmental studies. He's also a poet, a Shakespeare scholar and an arts critic. Based in Houston Texas, he spoke with the 2021 winter power crisis fresh in his mind and hurricane Harvey and hurricane Ike not too far behind. This year in particular, we find ourselves in an unbelievably complex moment. How as that changed the work that the center does?
Dr. Joseph Campana: We've tried to work more closely with our colleagues in medical humanities, to try to think through what it is humanists can bring to conversations about how people live and how people survive and try to thrive amidst really difficult circumstances. So many of those things that we struggle with are not precisely new. They've been issues for sometimes years, decades, sometimes centuries. It's important to pay attention to those long and complex histories. Because they help produce not only the situations we're in, but they help condition our responses to them.
On the other hand, we're in the face of things that are genuinely new. So I like to say that the pandemic itself is both this brand new thing you might say. And also an intensifier of all the fractures that we see. It's an important thing to say also many of those fractures we could say have to do with resources that are available to be both the level of privilege one has, how one can weather literally otherwise, whether it's a particular environmental disaster or a storm or everyday toxicity. So I think folk who work around in the environmental humanities have been trying to think with their colleagues and other fields about what it means to feel like we live in a just world. How do we imagine futures that involve people's health, people's environments that involve sort of racial and other kinds of identity. How do we imagine those futures together in a way that's more equitable, more safe and allows more people to thrive?
Boyd: How are you working toward answering that?
Campana: From my point of view, we have to respect the disciplines of the humanities because we have accumulated an incredible amount of knowledge and an incredible amount of capacity to do things. We need to know what it is that an environmental historian brings to a conversation, what it is that philosophers and scholars of religion bring to conversations. Why would you talk to someone in English department about the environment? Which has to do with a lot of different things. Everything from the way we represent ecological dilemmas, that could be in the literature of hundreds of years ago, that could be in speculative fiction or in climate fiction. It could be because folk who work in literature are good at thinking about genre, anticipation and expectation. What happens when we sort of categorize something as a tragedy? So in one way we have to understand what the various disciplines contribute. Then we have to work across them and we have to think across with others.
Boyd: I like the way that you're describing this evolving, changing thing. And I'm curious if you can define environmental humanities going forward.
Campana: I would say from my point of view, environmental humanities is a few different things. We talk about the various things that humanists and artists and architects and interpretive social scientists bring to these conversations about the social and cultural life of what we're going through now. I also say to them, the now is really important. You could say this is field called history or sociology or physics and it goes back decades or centuries or thousands of years, depending on your discipline. And it's this thing in and of itself where it's a set of approaches. And in a ways you could say that about an environmental studies or environmental humanities, but I would say, in a moment in which we recognize things we should have recognized for decades in which some people did recognize, which we were in a critical moment of human impact on planetary systems, the feedback of which could have devastating consequences for humans and other creatures.
And already to a certain extent are we certainly have novelists writing speculative or science fiction and it's astonishing how many of them think through environmental questions, which is why one of our more popular courses is scifi and the environment. But there are other ways that can also get us into trouble. We can get locked into too much, either easily utopian thinking or easily dystopian thinking, which is why I love working with some of the best people working across disciplines are artists, that's been consistently true for a very long time. I get to work with this in the center on a project with two fantastic artists, Sarah Rothberg and Marina Zarko, now created a kind of arts design system called investing in futures. Your task is to imagine a future you want to live in and that's challenging. That can be challenging, but it's one way of saying the task of imagining and speculating viable futures in which more people, and for many more creatures, more natural habitats can thrive in the sort of situations that we're in. And it requires a lot of creativity.
It requires flexibility. It also requires an ability to work with constraints, not to be shut down in the face of them, which is why we get dystopia and apocalypse, the whole literature of eco apocalypse. Or why we get kind of naive utopia like fantasies that we can just play geo engineer our way out of everything. Not to say that the contributions of our engineers and scientists are so important, but they also are not in a fantasy land that we can just do anything we want at this point. So this is a way an arts and design system to elicit thoughtfulness and attentiveness to what it means to imagine futures together. There's something incredible about that.
Boyd: The other thing I like about that is that it introduces this idea of play into something very serious.
Campana: Absolutely. We like to imagine play is just this fun departure outside of things. We often use that word creativity in that sort of very debased way. Creativity and play maybe incredibly enjoyable and distracting and sort of all sorts of things, but they're also incredibly rigorous and invigorating. That sense of play I think is absolutely critical right now. Not a kind of departure from reality in an easy way, but rather an attempt to imagine forward.
Boyd: So if somebody asked you, how does a historian talk to a scientist? The answer would be finding those moments of connection.
Campana: It could be a lot of things. It could be finding common issues or problems. I have a lot of colleagues for instance, who work in environmental history, thinking about the kind of social and cultural circumstances around particular biomes or environments or in particular environmental dilemmas. And they do fascinating work. And a lot of it's anchored in the Gulf coast and it involves the history of sort of medicine and epidemiology. It involves the history of science and technology, also the history of race and how kind of race and climate and environment have been tangled up together literally for centuries. So how they stage a conversation just depends. And I think it's also that willingness to learn as much as we can from one another. We have to have a certain kind of humility in the face of a moment that dwarfs us, but a moment that demands a lot from us,
Boyd: Thanks to my guests, Dr. Joseph Campagna and Adrian Kennedy. At the top of the show, you heard the voices of Faith Saley, Stephanie Gibson, Laura McQuinn and Kevin Lindsey. Making Meaning is a podcast from the Federation of state humanities councils, and as part of it's humanities and American life initiative, which is generously funded by a grant from the Andrew W Mellon foundation. You can learn more about our work and member programs by visiting our website@statehumanities.org.
The show is produced by LWC. Elizabeth Nakano is our producer and sound designer. Jimmy Gutierez edited the series. Jen Chien is executive editor. Cedric Wilson is lead producer. You can find more episodes on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. I'm Sydney Boyd. Thanks for joining us.
CITATION: Boyd, Sydney, host. “Environmental Justice, Climate Disasters, and the Humanities” Making Meaning, LWC Studios. October, 28 2021. statehumanities.org/