Suchergebnisse

Retreat, or relocating people and unbuilding land in places vulnerable to flooding and sea level rise, remains on the fringes of conversations about climate change adaptation. Yet already people throughout the world are moving away from the water en masse. Many more want to move but lack the resources to do so. Residents working to organize their own retreat are engaged in a struggle for recognition and support from, paradoxically, the very governments and institutions responsible for planning, implementing, and managing retreat once it becomes necessary. In this article, I contrast dominant official representations of retreat as marginal, unpopular, and infeasible with existing cases of collective movement away from rising waters that demonstrate just the opposite. I argue that the word retreat is a valuable and necessary addition to the language of climate change adaptation, serving to distinguish community-organized relocation from forced relocation and climate-induced displacement. Understanding community-organized relocation efforts as forms of retreat unifies this emerging practice with other social movements and political projects that seek more sustainable ways of settling on earth.

What would it mean for sociology to make climate change a core disciplinary concern? This article reviews research on a selection of trends brought on by the climate crisis: ( a) compounding and cumulative disasters, infrastructure breakdown, and adaptation; ( b) intensifying migration and shifting patterns of settlement; and ( c) transformations in consumption, labor, and energy. While climate change's far-reaching implications remain peripheral to the discipline at large, sociologists studying these trends increasingly understand the crisis as a central problem for the study of social life. We show how sociologists can shed light on core problems emerging from and contributing to the crisis, and also reveal the conditions that make necessary social and cultural transformations more likely. Throughout, we illuminate how sociology can help chart a path out of the climate crisis by identifying alternatives to the high-carbon, low-equity social structures that organize the modern world. Finally, we identify possibilities for scholars who do not see themselves as "environmental sociologists" to contribute meaningful research on the climate crisis, and we encourage them to do so while we can make a difference.

This open access book explores the intersection of property law, relocation, and resettlement processes in the United States and among communities that grapple with migration as an adaptation strategy. As communities face the prospect of relocating because of rising seas, policy makers, disaster specialists, and community leaders are scrambling to understand what adaptation pathways are legally possible. While in its ideal application, law functions blindly and without variation, the authors find that legal contradictions come to bear on resettlement processes and place certain communities further in harm's way. This book will unearth these contradictions in order to understand why successful community-based resettlement has presented such a challenge to communities that are experiencing increasing land deterioration as a result of climate change.