Nataya Friedan: Climate Change and the Labor of Forgetting in Houston

Abstract

As climate change disasters worsen across the globe, it is clear that evidence does not necessarily lead to action. Instead, misinformation, conspiracy, and outright lies have created new forms of climate denial and mistrust in science, especially in the United States. This lecture uses ethnography to bring the climate conversation out of the abstract and down to the concrete of Houston, Texas. In the fall of 2019, Houston experienced the fifth 500-year flood in five years by the federal risk designations at the time. Despite scientific consensus and data specific to the Gulf Coast, many leaders in local government as well as the business community were calling the storms "just another wet cycle." Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork beginning in 2018, this lecture follows civil servants, activists, politicians, and businesspeople as they grappled with climate change evidence in an oil industry town. In the day-to-day process of planning flood infrastructure, climate denial was a refusal to look backward as much as forward. This lecture argues that the consequential falsehood determining action in Houston was not "climate change isn't real" but "fuel is cheap." This claim, whether in Houston or elsewhere, requires persistent denials of past liabilities as much as future climate impacts.

Biography

Nataya Friedan is a Postdoctoral Associate in Urban Climate Mitigation and Adaptation at the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities. Nataya is a social anthropologist whose work focuses on climate adaptation and misinformation in North American cities. Her current book project, Selling Swampland to Yankees, is about the political life of scientific evidence in Houston, Texas, an oil industry town experiencing climate change impacts. Her ethnography follows business people, politicians, residents, and activists as they renegotiate the economic concept of externality in the day-to-day process of planning flood infrastructure. Nataya's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner Gren Foundation.