Climate Policy

Thousands of hazardous waste and abandoned sites are dotted throughout the U.S. landscape. They represent a significant remediation challenge, but also the potential of other ecological and community benefits. This research project considers abandoned land’s carbon storage potential, investigating the contribution that a beneficial reuse of the nation’s hazardous waste and abandoned sites for carbon storage could have, while visualizing the social and ecological benefits of such a strategy. It entails mapping and describing the variety of abandoned land typologies, research into remediation and afforestation strategies for these sites, and development of a Landscape Strategy Toolkit that explains their social, ecological, and carbon benefits.

This atlas was conceived in relation to three intersecting issues. First, excess carbon in the atmosphere is changing the world’s climate: sea levels are rising, temperatures are increasing, and destructive weather events are becoming more frequent. Second, because it is our own systems of extraction, production, and consumption that are causing this climate crisis, an incremental approach to the future is not an option. Third, the US population is expected to grow by at least 100 million people this century, adding significantly to what is already the world’s mostconsumptive, high-carbon economy.

Taking on these challenges requires that we ask some big—and unsettling—questions. What will be lost—economically, culturally, psychologically, physically—should the climate crisis continue unabated? How can we begin to come together around a response to the crisis that will reshape how and where we live? How can we begin to think about investments in the built environment as a catalyst for the broader aims of decarbonization, adaptation, and social justice at a meaningfulscale?

Field Notes toward an Internationalist Green New Deal is a project of the McHarg Center driven by graduate research assistants Palak Agrawal, Selina Cheah, Zane Cooper, Ian Dillon, A.L. McCullough, and Yixin Wei under the direction of Billy Fleming. Employing a variety of digital media, mapping, storytelling, and other methods, this project asks a series of critical questions about the international and justice dimensions of the Green New Deal. How might the buildout of clean energy infrastructure in the Global North reproduce exploitative relations to the Global South? How might the Green New Dealers seek to ameliorate concerns that their vision represents yet another a form of green imperialism or green capitalism? How might designers think differently about where and how they participate in the discourse around an energy transition, a just transition, and a Green New Deal? Field Notes intends to probe these questions through the development of a new website and digital storytelling platform aimed at making these complex power relations and material flows legible; thinking, drawing, and writing critically about the political economy of energy system and infrastructure production with which design is often complicit; and inviting external collaborators to add to our work, thickening and expanding our understanding of the Green New Deal’s international dimensions over the coming years. Think of it as part mapping and representational, part oral history andethnography, and part environmental humanities project rooted in questions of how and where landscape architecture fits within the next century of climate-driven action.