On being "rurban": A Nordic academic conference

The theme will be "Rurbanity in Nordic Landscapes" when Nordic Geographers meet in February, 2022, in Joensuu, Finland. Abstracts are due by Nov. 12.

 

Here's a description of the concept "rurban."    

The dichotomy of the rural and the urban is one that has been cultivated and reproduced for a long time. One concept is defined by the other and their contestation affects everyday practices, biographical decisions and even institutional arrangements and political agenda. The concepts have long been in the focus of geographers in different research contexts. This session, however, is interested in the mingling of the two and calls for contributions that theorise and inquire empirical data through the prism of rurbanity. Rurbanity (Masuda & Garvin 2008) here is understood not only as a territorial indication, but also includes fusion of practices, movement, lifestyles, interactions, assemblages, hybridities etc. Thus, we call for papers that would assess enacted and experienced rural-urban differences and coexistences.

 This can include community relations, mobilities, narratives, mnemonic practices, heritage management, landscape change, bordering dynamics, institutional reforms, ruralisation of the urban as well as urbanisation of the rural. We encourage the papers to delve on the following questions:

• Do we still have rural and urban landscapes or is it more beneficial to tackle them as rurban landscapes as the logic behind their operation is similar? 

• How has the development of mobilities changed the structural and spatial processes in rural and urban areas? 

• Do these mobilities reproduce the concepts and make them more distinct or do they blur the conceptual borders between the two? 

• What are the relations between everyday practices and the rural/urban conceptualisation? 

• How are the recent social and technological developments affecting the community relations in the context of the rural/urban borders? 

• How are the people sensing these borders? 

• How are migration processes shaping the understanding of the rural/urban borders? 

• How are the contemporary urban elements shaping the rural everyday and what rural elements are affecting the urban lives? 

• How have institutional reforms been shaping the urban/rural dichotomies? 

• How much have institutional regulations been driven by these opposites? 

• How has the Covid-19 pandemic affected the rurban dynamics? 

• Have the borders between rural and urban sharpened or blurred? Why?

Literary Ruralism (Part XXVI): The Tsar of Love and Techno

This post is going to seem to some folks like a stretch as far as rural goes.  However, a passage from Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno (2015) struck me as rural in the sense of reminding me of rural attachment to place, even as the place declines and opportunity is lost. 

The "place" in Marra's book is a Siberian town north of the Arctic circle, Kirovsk, where nickel was mined and, as a consequence, pollution has been rife and its effects have accumulated over the years.  Yet, after several generations there, the descendants of those shipped there because they were disloyal to Stalin (or perceived to be), people are reluctant to leave.  Marra writes via the voice of a 30-something woman whose grandparents were exiled to Kirovsk by Stalin: 

The layoffs began shortly after the first war in Chechnya ended.  Automated machines mined nickel with greater efficiency than our husbands.  Pensions vanished in the fluctuations of foreign stock exchanges.  Even those who kept their jobs struggled.  With the collapsing ruble, the payments of wages and pensions delayed for months, no one could afford the imported products that replaced familiar Soviet brands.  We considered moving to a milder climate but couldn't manage relocation costs.  Besides, our children were the fourth generation to call the Arctic home.  This meant something even if we didn't know quite what. 

Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Public Service reveals Alaska's "two-tier" justice system, which barely serves rural areas

I'm devastated by what this multi-part series discloses about crime and justice system deficits in rural Alaska, but I'm so delighted that the Anchorage Daily News and Pro Publica have been awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for their "Lawless:  Sexual Violence in Alaska" coverage.  The Anchorage Daily News describes the series in its coverage of the award:

“Lawless” was the first comprehensive investigation to document Alaska’s failing, two-tiered criminal justice system, in which many rural communities are denied access to first responders. The project evolved from reporting on similar issues by the Daily News in 2018, and the partnership continues in 2020.

The collaboration’s first story, based on more than 750 public records requests and interviews, found that one in three rural Alaska communities has no local law enforcement of any kind. These communities are also among the nation’s most vulnerable, with very high rates of sexual assault, suicide and domestic violence. The series’ second major installment found that many Alaska villages, desperate for police of any kind, hired officers convicted of felonies, domestic violence, assault and other offenses that would make them ineligible to work in law enforcement or even as security guards anywhere else in the country.

Another major story revealed how the state’s 40-year-old Village Public Safety Officer program, designed to recruit villagers to work as lifesaving first responders, has failed. The series documented how Alaska State Troopers resources have been deployed largely to patrol areas on the road system, and concluded with a set of practical solutions based on interviews with experts, village leaders, Alaska’s congressional delegation and sexual assault survivors.

In the wake of the investigation, U.S. Attorney General William Barr visited Alaska last spring. He declared an emergency for public safety in rural Alaska and pledged more than $52 million as part of a sweeping plan to better support law enforcement in Alaska Native communities. The plan included three new federal prosecutors to focus on rural Alaska, the hiring of 20 more officers, upgrading public safety infrastructure for Alaska villages and expanding tribal victim services. The U.S. attorney’s office in Alaska announced it would hire rural prosecutors, and some communities will receive Alaska State Troopers posts for the first time. 

I'm surprised that this story (and the series on which it reports) doesn't say more about Alaska Native women in particular; they are mentioned only in this prior paragraph. 

Reporters and editors primarily responsible for this reporting include Kyle Hopkins, David Hulen, and Tess Williams of the Anchorage Daily News.  For Pro Publica, Charles Ornstein helped edit the series, and Adriana Gallardo and Nadia Sussman contributed reporting and photography.

The series confirms and illustrates a lot of my own theorizing about rural difference  and disadvantage over the years, especially in relation to the presence of law, legal actors, the state.  Perhaps most on point is "The Rural Lawscape:  Space Tames Law Tames Space," which appeared in a legal geography collection published by Stanford University Press, The Expanding Spaces of Law:  A Timely Legal Geography (2014).  At the workshop where the scholars who participated in that collection came together to discuss our contributions, I was nearly laughed out of the room for insisting that rural places were more lawless than urban ones, that the state struggled to police these areas.  All of the other legal geographers there were coming from an urban perspective.  I was the sole ruralist, though one observer, a legal scholar who had grown up in a small town in North Dakota, was perhaps my most vocal critic that day.  He refused to grasp the difference between small town America and remote rural, open country, which is exceedingly hard to police because of sheer space/material distance. As I said then, it can be policed, but doing so is costly, in personnel and/or technology.

Other work I've done over the last 15 years that is also consistent with and relevant to this reporting:  "Place Matters:  Domestic Violence and Rural Difference," "Gender, Geography and Rural Justice," "Toward a Feminist Theory of the Rural," "Law Stretched Thin," and "Legal Deserts:  A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access-to-Justice," among others.

I'm reminded of this passage from my 2006 article, "Rural Rhetoric." The case is One v. State, and it was decided by the Alaska Supreme Court in 1979 (592 P.2d 1193, 1195).  In it, the Court observed that residents of a rural fishing camp were more threatened by an escaped criminal than those in more developed areas, because those in the fishing village could not call nearby police and receive a quick response.  I believe the determination of relatively vulnerability or threat was relevant to sentencing.

Post script:  The series, "Alaska Daily" (2022-23) is, according to wikipedia, based on the reporting that won the Pulitzer, but the television series features a much greater focus--indeed, a nearly exclusive focus--on missing and murdered Alaska Native women.  Rural spatiality and corruption among local law enforcement are present, too.  

On abortion as "a free trip to the city" ... and having the last word

Last week, Alaska state representative David Eastman of Wasilla (a suburb of Anchorage, home of Sarah Palin), commented that some women "try to get pregnant to get a 'free trip to the city' for abortions."  He said this in the context of legislative debate about "abortions being covered by state funds and Medicaid."  Interesting because I'm not aware of any federal funds, which would include Medicaid, being available for abortion, as dictated by the Hyde Amendment.  In Alaska, however, state funds are apparently available, as this additional detail from the AP report explains.

The Alaska Supreme Court has held that the state must fund medically necessary abortions if it funds medically necessary services for others with financial needs.

How progressive of that high court.  This reminds me of one of the most knuckle-headed things a judge ever said about abortion access.

A woman in Alaska, for example, could be required to travel 800 miles to get to an abortion clinic merely because she lives in one place and the nearest abortion clinic is on the other side of the state. But that certainly doesn’t constitute anything even approaching an undue burden.

Interestingly, the judge who said this was Dee Benson (now a senior judge), and the case was Utah Women's Clinic v. Leavitt, 844 F. Supp. 1482 (D. Utah 1994) (discussed here).  Why the Utah judge thought it appropriate or necessary to use an example from Alaska is beyond me, but maybe he was looking for the most extreme example of distance he could find.  Given that Alaska is the largest state in terms of land area, Judge Benson necessarily turned to "The Last Frontier." In light of that point, it is perhaps significant that the second largest state, Texas, became the subject of the latest round of litigation over abortion restrictions, and that distance ultimately loomed so large in relation to the Supreme Court's assessment of the undue burden standard. Read more here and here.   

Speaking of distance and undue burdens also reminds me of a recent exchange between Prof. Carol Sanger of  Columbia Law and me regarding abortion and the significance of spatiality/geography/rurality regarding abortion access.  This is, of course, a topic I've been writing about for nearly a decade.  In the end, Sanger agrees that my plea for attention to rural women should be "the last word" in the exchange over Sanger's new book, About Abortion:  Terminating Pregnancy in the 21st Century, which says very little about the geography issue  (Sanger's "last word" phrasing is especially pleasing to me because my mother's nickname for me was "last word Lisa," an identity that may well have put me on the path to law school).

Sanger also includes some really interesting data on military women, who don't choose to be "rural," but who are assigned to bases in nonmetropolitan (or small metropolitan) places without ready access to abortion.  Sanger writes:

An amici brief,filed in Whole Woman’s Health on behalf of the Service Service Women’s Action Network And Retired Or Former Military Officers, explained that “the entire western half of the [Texas], covering over 130,000 square miles—in which five large military bases are located—would lack any abortion care providers at all.” If HB2 had remained in effect, the brief noted that service women at Goodfellow Air Force Base [San Angelo] would have a three hour drive to San Antonio, 199 miles away, and this is without the added difficulties of obtaining a pass, arranging a timely appointment, and finding the funds.

It's a sub-issue I had not not thought about amidst the many pages of my writing about spatiality in relation to abortion access.  But then I don't tend to think of military bases as "rural," located as they often are in small cities, in smaller metropolitan areas.  But when we look at what happened under Texas H.B. 2, women in places like Killeen (population about 150K)/Fort Hood certainly suffered serious detriments.  The sole abortion provider in Killeen closed after the Texas H.B. 2 admitting privileges requirement went into effect, a few months after the law's passage in 2013.  That closure left women on that massive Army base--the largest in the world in land area--forced to travel to either Austin or Dallas for abortion services.

But let me return to the issues raised by Eastman in Alaska, which are less about the burden of distance--which the state of Alaska has pragmatically taken care of--and more about the character of women.  The AP story, by Becky Bohrer, includes more helpful background for us on abortion availability in Alaska and--for late-term abortions--in Seattle, Washington.

First, here is more of what Eastman said:

We have folks who try to get pregnant in this state so that they can get a free trip to the city, and we have folks who want to carry their baby past the point of being able to have an abortion in this state so that they can have a free trip to Seattle.

Then Bohrer tells us more about the furor Eastman's comments have generated:

Eastman, who is a member of the House minority, made similar comments to another media outlet later.

In a speech on the House floor Friday, Democratic Rep. Neal Foster of Nome said Eastman’s comments were unacceptable and said he hoped Eastman would apologize.

“It shocks the conscience to think that a female in a village would want to endure the physical and the emotional pain of getting an abortion just so that they could get a free trip to Anchorage,” Foster said.

Most of the women who live in villages that Foster represents are Alaska Native and feel Eastman’s comments were directed toward them, Foster said. Many Alaska communities are not connected to a road system and smaller communities often have limited health services that necessitate travel to larger communities for care.

When asked if he felt he had anything he need to apologize for, Eastman said he would be glad to speak with Foster and “understand exactly what he’s getting at.”

Following the floor session, the House majority caucus distributed a letter to Eastman signed by Foster, House Speaker Bryce Edgmon and two other rural lawmakers, demanding a public apology. Rep. Geran Tarr, an Anchorage Democrat, said she may seek a motion to censure Eastman. She called Eastman’s comments “deeply offensive, racist in nature and misogynistic.”

Great to see other state legislators standing up for Alaska Natives and other rural populations.  That is encouraging.  And it also brings me to the really outrageous part of what Eastman said--that women might purposefully get pregnant so that they can have a day out on the town, a freebie trip to a place where they can get an abortion ... and then tie on some shopping or a fancy meal, maybe even a jaunt up the Space Needle.

This brings me back to Sanger's over-arching point in her new book:  women take abortion seriously--and we should presume they can make good decisions about it for themselves.  We should therefore not presume--as Eastman suggests--that they will get pregnant willy-nilly to "earn" a frolic in the city.  Insulting, misogynist and racist, indeed.

In the news ...

I'm on vacation with spotty internet access and little time to write when I have it.  But the rural headlines are stacking up, so I'll simply collect some recent ones here:

Spoils of the Sea Elude Many in an Alaska Antipoverty Plan, dateline Akiak, Alaska

Inspiring Mayberry, and Then Becoming It, dateline Mount Airy, North Carolina

West Virginia, Still Home 

Marijuana Crops in California Threaten Forests and Wildlife, dateline Arcata, California

How a Merger Could Affect Congress' Favorite Airport, dateline Washington, DC, but with references to Bangor, Maine

And then there is the farm bill news:

House Smacks Down Farm Bill, and Farm Lobby, Too

Fraud Used to Frame Farm Bill Debate

and

House Rejects Farm Bill as Food Stamp Cuts Prove Divisive 

Two stories highlight spatiality's challenge to service delivery in Alaska

NPR reported this morning on the federal government's efforts to track down veterans in remote northwestern Alaska, the same day that the New York Times reported on the challenges presented by rural and remote spatiality to deliver medical services in that region, but in an area to the south, in the Bethel and Kuskokwim Delta area.

Kirk Johnson's story for the Times, headlined, "Health Care is Spread Thin in Alaska's Vast Frontier,"  focuses on the spatial and climate challenges faced by the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, which serves 28,000 residents, most of them Alaska natives.

[H]ere in the state’s far west end, spread out over an area the size of Oregon that has almost no roads. People can travel by boat or snow machine at certain times of the year, but not right now: the Kuskokwim River, which wends through Bethel to the Bering Sea, is choked with unstable melting ice in late May, magnifying the isolation that defines everything in what may be America’s emptiest corner. 

* * * 

The 56 tribes in the region voted in the mid-1990s to bundle their health care money from the federal government to finance the hospital. Grants supplement the work. 

But the one thing that shapes every care decision, from the routine to the catastrophic, is the map. Triage in medical decisions, logistics and money is all filtered through an equation of time and distance on a vast and mostly untracked land.

Not only is this story about the challenges of spatial isolation and the struggle to achieve economies of scale, it tells of how the health corporation trains local residents, called community health aides, to assist with triage and to provide care.  At a time when California is debating whether to permit nurse practitioners to practice alone--in part because of the dramatic need in rural areas and other underserved communities--I was struck by the description of these health aides, who have far less training than a nurse practitioner.  They are part of a "uniquely Alaskan" system that dates to a 1950 tuberculosis outbreak, in which aides were trained to dispense medicine:

[I]n sessions here at the hospital, ... 150 ... aides, mostly women, learn medical skills that include trauma response, pregnancy testing and vaccination, all based on a book that they call their bible, which walks them through a kind of algorithm of step-by-step questions leading to treatment protocols.

Lack of anonymity can be an added stressor for these aides.

In a tiny village, every patient is without exception also an acquaintance or a relative.

One aide is quoted:  

It’s really tough to work on someone you know.

Lack of anonymity and spatial isolation also play roles in Quil Lawrence's story for NPR.  Lawrence reports from Wales, Alaska, population 150.  It is the westernmost population cluster in mainland Alaska, and is farther north than Bethel, part of the Nome Census Area.  The headline is "Searching for Veterans on Alaska's Remote Edges," and this is the story of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs outreach efforts to those entitled to benefits, but who may not know that.  Amazingly, the Department does not have a master list of those who served.  That means someone from the VA has to go find them.  It's a task that tests the limits of the federal government's commitment to these folks and their communities.  

This vignette in particular is the story of the VA's assistant secretary for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs, Tommy Sowers. He has traveled many hours from Washington, DC, to near the Bering Strait to find veterans and inform them of their rights.  Lawrence reports:  

Sowers visited Alaska recently to look at what challenges rural veterans face in getting benefits, but it turns out that just finding them can be a challenge. 

Twenty-two million Americans served in the military, but the vast majority are from the Vietnam and Korea generations. They're getting older now, and many live in rural, sometimes remote areas. Alaska has the highest number of veterans per capita in the country — native Alaskans and other vets who got posted up here and never left.

Ron Huffman, a tribal veterans representative who volunteers as a liaison between the VA and local veterans, is an example of the latter phenomenon. The military brought Huffman, a Virginian, to Alaska in 1963, and he married an Alaska native woman and stayed.

But this is a story not only about the literal spatial challenge of finding vets, it is also one of a frontier culture of self-reliance.  Huffman states:

Most of these vets, they've never applied for any type of entitlement whatsoever. ... And a lot of them are at the age now that they're suffering with some pretty severe-type ailments. It would be very beneficial for them to try to get connected with [the VA]. 

Indeed, Huffman knows about the ethos of self-reiance.  Though Huffman now lives in Nome, he and his wife visit her native village each summer, where they catch enough salmon to get them through a winter.

Alaska village an early casualty of climate change

The Guardian reported this week from Newtok, Alaska, a mostly Yup'ik Eskimo village of about 350, surrounded on three sides by the Ninglick River, on the state's west coast.  Suzanne Goldenberg came to Newtok to do this story because scientists predict the village will soon be flooded due to rising sea level attributable to climate change.  Goldenberg calls Newtok's residents "America's first climate refugees" because their village could be underwater in as little as four years.  Here's an excerpt:

The people of Newtok ... are living a slow-motion disaster that will end, very possibly within the next five years, with the entire village being washed away. 

The Ninglick River ... has steadily been eating away at the land, carrying off 100ft or more some years, in a process moving at unusual speed because of climate change. Eventually all of the villagers will have to leave. 

* * * 

It is not a ... future embraced by people living in Newtok. Yup'ik Eskimo have been fishing and hunting by the shores of the Bering Sea for centuries and the villagers reject the notion they will now be forced to run in chaos from ancestral lands. 

But exile is undeniable. 

A report by the US Army Corps of Engineers found "no possible way to protect the village in place."  A new site nine miles away has been selected for the village.  Ironically, Newtok is a creature of Alaska's statehood.  In 1959, state authorities "ordered villagers to move to a more convenient docking point" for delivery of supplies, and that became Newtok.  Needles to say, the locale was not chosen with a view to climate change.      

NPR picked up the Goldenberg story, including its attachment-to-place theme.  NPR quotes resident Tom John:

"I'd rather stay here, where I grew up.  I love Newtok, you know. I don't want to move to somewhere else."

NPR's story continues with excerpts from an interview with Goldenberg:  

The Yupik Eskimos who live there are intimately connected to the land, Goldenberg says, where they've fished and hunted for centuries. All that time they have built a culture and tradition that comes from depending on each other in a harsh environment.

But changes in the climate have meant changes also to those centuries-old routines, according to some of the village's residents, who spoke with Goldenberg and her videographer Richard Sprenger. 

"The snow comes in a different time now. The snow disappears way late," says villager Nathan Tom. "That's making the geese come at the wrong time. Now they're starting to lay eggs when there's still snow and ice. We can't even travel and go pick them. It's getting harder. It's changing a lot."

* * *  

There are also the financial considerations. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has estimated that the cost of moving Newtok — with 63 homes — might reach $130 million. The people of Newtok do not have that kind of money, Goldenberg says. 

"These people are living well below the average income of other Americans. They're able to live that way because they hunt and fish for what they eat," she says. "So they can't all of a sudden go and build and pay for new houses on the other side."

And Newtok is hardly a unique case.  Climate change is presenting similar challenges to 180 Alaska native villages.  

More on the Arctic as rural

Last month, a student wrote this thoughtful post about the Arctic as rural.  That made me read this NPR story on Arctic Russia a bit more closely.  The headline is, "As Arctic Melts, It's a Free for All for Oil ... and Tusks."  An excerpt follows:

In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey released a report estimating that 13 percent of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the remaining undiscovered natural gas could be in the Arctic. 

* * * 

But petroleum products aren't the only commodities appearing where Arctic ice once was.
In Siberia, the tusks of long-dead mammoths, which have been encased in ice for centuries, are now becoming exposed. That's bringing along tusk hunters and ivory poachers. 

"After the international ban of elephant ivory trade in 1991, mammoth tusk became sort of a substitute for [elephant ivory]," says photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva who grew up in a town in Siberia and heard about the rush of local men selling mammoth ivory. "So I would say from 1991, people really started to see it as a business." 

There are millions of tusks out in the tundra. Many of them are buried very deep in the ice, but some are near the surface, and that's where local hunters are finding them.

So, that's the basic NPR story, but what really caught my attention was an exchange between readers commenting on the story.  A writer named Steve Beeman wrote:  

Thinking about this rationally, it doesn't seem quite as bad as trading in elephant ivory. After all, they are not killing the mammoths. The amount of scientific information from 100 tusks is not ten times the amount of data from 10 tusks. Still the damage done by the ivory trade is so devastating, anything similar has to be condemned.

To that, a writer calling him/herself decora, decora responded:

yes. lets be sure to condemn the activity of remote rural hunters in the remotest reaches of siberia that hardly anyone ever visits, ever, and that we have never heard of, whose names we can't pronounce, who we didn't even know existed 5 minutes ago. obviously impoverishing them is the solution to chinese business men hunting elephants in africa.

Just another reminder of the disconnect between rural and urban--and how rural livelihoods may suddenly seem like they matter to urban folks, if only because of the urban desire to control valuable resources that happen to be present in rural places.  

Far-flung and near: the Arctic and climate change

In the last issue of the New York Review of Books, Ian Frazier reviews Subhankar Banerjee’s anthology Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point. Banerjee is a photographer and activist who has been recording the changing Arctic for the past decade or so.  Arctic Voices is an anthology composed of writing and photography documenting climate change and fossil fuel exploitation in the Arctic. 

The Arctic is a particular place of interest, because like the rural, it tends to exist outside of our everyday mainframe.  It seems that the Arctic is not only spatially isolated, but temporality is experienced differently as well, the lived experience there is appropriate for the longue duree.  NYRB contributor Ian Frazier quotes environmentalist and activist Bill McKibben describing the Arctic environment as nestled “deep in geological time.”

The Arctic is a site for exploitation of fossil fuels and rare minerals, and so, despite its far-flung positionality, the harms experienced by Arctic peoples directly implicates the larger political economy surrounding extractive industries and energy production.  The particular industry of resource extraction concerns all of us, the cost and question of energy pervades so much of our everyday life, and must be contended with, brought into our everyday consciousness. 

I have been thinking a lot about the Arctic. Not only do residents of the Arctic directly experience the negative externalities that coincide with fossil fuel and mineral extraction, the Arctic is now warming at twice the rate as the rest of the world. The paradox of the Arctic is this: due to their traditional lifeways, native Arctic communities  do not consume energy as ravenously as compared to the average city dweller, let's say, and so by extension, their carbon footprint is much lighter than modern societies.  And yet, and yet, they are experiencing warming at twice the rate as the rest of the world. 

In the age of climate change where it is difficult to experience the “impact” of climate change as specific discrete events, despite Hurricane Sandy, despite record droughts, despite 2012 being the hottest year in US history, despite warnings from some of the leading scientists of our time that going forward with the regulatory status quo will quite literally lead to apocalyptic disaster, we must cast our attention to the most far-flung, least considered spaces.  Because there, in the Arctic, for example, we witness the most rapid effects of climate change occurring in real time, with real consequences, and real harms, to the most vulnerable populations. 

Kivalina v. ExxonMobil, a case recently decided before the Ninth Circuit, articulates the harm experienced by a traditional Inupiat village located on the tip of a barrier reef on the Chukchi Sea in Alaska.  Due to increasing coastal erosion and melting sea ice, the Native Village of Kivalina will have to be relocated from their ancestral home at the cost of anywhere between $95 million to $400 million. The language of law is instructive.  The Government Accountability Office calls it relocation.  The Ninth Circuit ruled that Kivalina’s claim is precluded by federal regulatory displacement of common law claims.  I like this word displacement, some ironic catachresis. It highlights the disjuncture, this gap between legal language and the descriptive language of what is actually occurring in Kivalina: because common law claims are being displaced by federal regulations, the residents of Kivalina’s actual physical displacement from their land cannot be redressed by the court. 

Consider some other descriptive possibilities: rootshock and genocide.  I have been thinking a lot about the Arctic.  Give a thing a name and find the law to let the narrative develop or give a thing a name and find the law to squash it.  Welcome to the Anthropocene age, welcome to climate change and the law.   

Rural Alaskan community a headliner in climate change litigation

Read the story here from yesterday's New York Times. The dateline is Kivalina, Alaska, population 377, which is north of the Arctic Circle. Kivalina filed a suit in 2008 accusing more than 20 fuel and utility concern of causing climate change that is causing the village's barrier island perch to erode. Here's an excerpt:

Blocks of sea ice used to protect the town’s fragile coast from October on, but “we don’t have buildup right now, and it is January,” said Janet Mitchell, Kivalina’s administrator. “We live in anxiety during high-winds seasons.”

The village wants the companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, and many others, to pay the costs of relocating to the mainland, which could amount to as much as $400 million.

The Kivalina lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in Oakland, California, in October, but Kivalina is appealing.

One question that occurs to me is how Kivalina found lawyers to represent it--or perhaps more likely, lawyers hoping to set a precedent for environmentalists, found Kivalina. If this all sounds far fetched from a law perspective, I found interesting the comment of a law professor who likened cases like Kivalina's to early suits against tobacco companies. They looked shaky early on, but ultimately succeeded as lawyers experimented with different legal theories.