Chapter 9
Activities
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Sidebars
Sidebar 9.1
For interactive visual resources related to redlining and heat, see “How decades of racist housing policy left neighborhoods sweltering,” by Plumer and Popovich, in the New York Times (24, Aug 2020), and “The lines that shape our cities: onnecting present-day environmental inequalities to redlining policies of the 1930s”, an Esri StoryMap from the
University of Richmond, The Science Museum of Virginia and Esri.
Sidebar 9.2
The documentary Cooked: Survival by Zip Code by Judith Helfand is adapted from Eric Klinenberg’s book on the 1990 Chicago heat wave and considers why disaster response structures in the U.S. do not invest in disaster prevention. Check with your school library for access to the film.
The eight-part podcast Floodlines, from the Atlantic takes a compelling look at the series of events that led to the disastrous outcomes of Hurricane Katrina. Many of the themes discussed throughout this book run through this story including the failure to build sustainable, resilient communities; the components of disaster risk: hazard, exposure and vulnerability; the misalignment between levels of government (e.g. FEMA, City of New Orleans); and how the outcomes that unfolded were caused by historical segregation and inequality, and continued to further environmental injustices.
Sidebar 9.3
Cities in the U.S. and beyond have adopted the legislation of the Green New Deal for cities with a commitment to address the intersection of economic inequality, racial injustice and the climate emergency. Smaller cities like Ithaca, NY and Cambridge, MA have adopted ordinances for the Green New Deal, while larger cities like Seattle and Los Angeles have enacted Green New Deal resolutions as climate action plans.