climate change justice
LISTEN: Climate migrants in North Carolina
Reporter Lewis Raven Wallace discusses on 'Living on Earth' the EHN/Scalawag Magazine report about Hurricane Florence's displacement of Bern, N.C. residents
Journalist Lewis Raven Wallace joined Steve Curwood on Living on Earth last week to discuss his recent series for Environmental Health News and Scalawag Magazine on how last fall's Hurricane Florence has upended the lives of public housing residents in New Bern, North Carolina, and left many homeless.
Wallace visited New Bern to document the challenges of the community's most disenfranchised. Public housing residents, along with other poor, disabled, elderly, and vulnerable people, are becoming a first wave of climate migrants in the U.S.—people selectively displaced by increasingly frequent storms and floods, moved because they can't afford to stay.
"I think that everybody that I interviewed in New Bern believes that nobody should be displaced, with no place to go," Wallace told host Steve Curwood. "That said, that's already happened, there's more than 200 people who lost their homes at Trent Court."
Wallace went on to outline how this problem is bigger than just North Carolina.
"Well, something that I find kind of stunning with regard to the public housing situation is that we don't exactly know, you know? After Harvey, obviously, after Katrina, Florence, Matthew, there were a bunch of people in the Florida Panhandle who were displaced, just this last fall, from public housing," he said.
"But it's not evident to me that that's being sort of clearly tracked. We conduct a census, but we don't track individuals from one place to another demographically across the United States as they move."
You can listen to the interview above or at Living on Earth.
Read Wallace's entire series on New Bern here.
Nowhere to go in New Bern: Climate catastrophe spurs migrants in US South
Hurricane Florence ravaged North Carolina last fall. While cleanup continues and residents pick up the pieces of their life, many people in New Bern, a small community along the Neuse River in the eastern part of the state, have nothing to pick up. Homes have been destroyed and won't be rebuilt. Lives have been upended.
We visited New Bern to document the challenges of the community's most disenfranchised as public housing residents, along with other poor, disabled, elderly, and vulnerable people, are becoming a first wave of climate migrants in the U.S.—people selectively displaced by increasingly frequent storms and floods, moved because they can't afford to stay.
Their forced removal marks the sputtering end of a long effort to close down the project of government-subsidized housing in this country, leaving affordable housing to the so-called free market. And those that do stay face both psychological tolls and environmental toxins left in the storm's wake.
This is what a climate change catastrophe looks like.
Poor southerners are joining the globe's climate migrants
They put us in this "weird palliative care kind of situation, just waiting for it to die. And they're not providing any support for it while it's dying."
Lingering long after a storm, mold and mental health issues
North Carolinians are organizing against "toxic resiliency," focused on healing from trauma.
LISTEN: Visiting climate migrants in New Bern, North Carolina
"This is the worst storm I've ever endured."
Editor's note: This series is the result of a collaboration between EHN and Scalawag Magazine, an independent nonprofit magazine that covers the American South.