Full Transcript

INTRO 

This is The Climate Story Project— where we share real stories about how climate change is shaping our lives. Stories that connect us. Stories that move us to act. This is a project of the New York Climate Exchange, a non-profit organization that’s accelerating climate solutions through a unique partnership model and climate campus on Governors Island. In each episode, you’ll hear voices from different places and walks of life in our growing archive of personal climate stories, so that we can remember, reflect, and respond together.

The story you’re about to hear is from Caleb Smith. Caleb is a Resilience Coordinator from We Act, a partner of the New York Climate Exchange. 

CALEB

There's a day that I'll never forget that really solidified things for me, um, in terms of making sure that every day I was doing something that responded to the climate anxiety I was feeling and turning it into something productive.

September 9th, 2020. The San Francisco Bay Area in the East Bay. The sky was orange and full of ash and soot from the wildfires. It was dark at 2:00 PM in the afternoon, and all I could do is think about my nephews and, and, the next generations in my family and just wonder do they think this is normal? Um, what's gonna be left for them if they grew up with this being a common occurrence?

In the Bay Area the homeless population is visible in ways that it's not here in New York City, especially in Oakland, there are large encampments. It was hard to think about what it would mean for someone to just be out 24 hours in the day, when the air quality is in like the two hundreds, three hundreds. All the people that were displaced from the more rural areas that were directly displaced by wildfires, that was, uh, a serious hit as well.

I also couldn't help but think about my parents, particularly my mom and my grandparents, because my mom is a kidney transplant recipient and my grandparents are, are older and thinking about how the air quality was affecting them. And this is all happening in the midst of a pandemic. It was pretty scary. So that was like a real epiphany for me. How, if I am just doing any old job, am I supposed to act like I'm not thinking about this instead? 

I started working more on environmental issues with the chief resiliency Officer in the city of Oakland on community-based projects that address air quality and climate issues. That was really, I think, what cemented me to come to New York, uh, get my master's at Columbia. 

I came here knowing that I would experience climate differently than I would in California. But I think actually living it was, uh, a totally different thing. In particular, the humid heat. My first year in New York as a grad student, I didn't have air conditioning and I couldn't put in an air conditioning unit cause I was on a fire escape. And I found these little tiny evaporative cooling units And I just remember sitting there, sweating, running these little, there was like two of them that I would just fill with water and hope that that would be enough. And they would run out in the middle of the night and my eyes would like bolt open and be like, how am I going to finish this degree with no sleep for like six weeks at least?

While I was in my Master's in Public Administration program, uh, I was connected to the We Act first Cecil Corbin Mark Fellowship program. And I applied and directly after graduating from my program, I have been working at We Act ever since.

So the We Act membership area is Northern Manhattan. Harlem is one of many formerly redline neighborhoods in New York City that are amongst the highest scoring on the heat vulnerability index, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's tool to recognize what is the community level risk of heat related illness or death. Especially for historically and predominantly black neighborhoods like Harlem, black residents are twice as likely to die from heat exacerbated illness compared to their white counterparts in New York City, like that's a really stark difference. 

And a lot of the people who die from heat related illness die at home. And that's the place you're supposed to be the most safe. You know, a 90 or 95 degree day, when you're indoors and you don't have any way to cool down your apartment, that heat lasts. The buildings trap a lot of heat. There is research that draws linkages between higher rates of violent crime in the summer. And outside of that, our mental health and our energy levels I think also have an economic impact as well. 

Especially thinking about professions like in construction. If people don't have access to shade or air conditioning, breaks or the right to acclimatize to a new hotter climate when people are first starting on the job, that can result in accidents, sometimes end up in deaths. And then they come home and if they don't have access to cooling, um, it can have very serious knock on effects.

I think there's a sort of gap in making this information grounded and practical for people, in a way that doesn't sort of become overwhelming and, and hard to retain. Keeping it actionable is the most important thing. 

In New York City, I think, you know, we're in, in one of the better places in the country. Because we're extremely data rich. There's a lot of really smart and passionate people working in city government to address these issues. But where there's less resources, lower capacity for research and community outreach, I think people have to sort of create the solutions, show that they work, and then bring them to government. People should feel empowered to, to organize their neighbors, their friends, their loved ones to respond to the needs that they see, as climate change disrupts our lives in, in a variety of different ways. You don't have to wait for anyone to move that work forward.

Maybe we can try to sort of imitate other ways of living, and learn from cultures that have a much more harmonious and right relationship with nature. That should be, in my opinion, the future that we want to live in.

OUTRO 

This story is part of The Climate Story Project. To find more stories and learn more about The New York Climate Exchange, visit nyclimateexchange.org and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. This episode was produced by Kylie Miller. Thanks for listening.