The Article on The Cameron Town in The State of Louisiana Regarding The Climate Changes

The article is about how the small town of Cameron, Louisiana is the first place to be experiencing climate change firsthand in the United States. The port town is almost underwater, due to the rising sea levels and increased numbers of hurricanes associated with human-caused climate change. However, despite all of this, most of the town consists of climate skeptics and Trump voters, and the Trump administration generally consists of climate deniers as well. The article explores why they made this decision and why they think their town is literally sinking into the ocean.

Terms I didn’t know that well

Mitigation land- a term used by the U.S. government to describe areas of land used to fight back against environmental concerns, for example, designating land for wetland restoration. In the article, a farmer from the town is talking about how mitigation land is taking over farmland that is essential for the local economy.

Hurricane insurance- I didn’t know that this existed, but it’s essentially something that people in hurricane-risk areas can supplement into their homeowner’s insurance. In the case that a hurricane destroys their home, that money can be used to rebuild and support the restoration efforts of their home.

Topic Questions

1) An example of neocolonialism in the recent age is the Cold War between the U.S. and USSR. Each country exerted its respective power on other countries in order to try and gain an edge on the other. An example of this power exertion was the “Red Scare”, in which the U.S. mass produced propaganda that shunned Communism and proposed to overthrow foreign governments that did not follow U.S. capitalist ideals. This reinforced U.S. power by politically influencing countries to follow their lead and become more like them.

Transnational corporations are a huge factor in neocolonialism, because companies can outsource their labor to cheaper areas. This greatly increases said company’s profits, which in turn leads to more power for the company internationally. When their headquarters are in a core country, the country’s economic power increases, because they have indirect control over the workforce of the country they outsourced to.

2) Climate change, as we know, is not only a result of the Industrial Revolution and the mass production of pollutants and environmentally harmful products, but is hugely a result of the reluctance of people to change for the better. The more people that deny its existence, the higher the likelihood of consequences. This is shown in the article I chose, because the results of climate change are happening right around these people, and they do not believe it. Their coastlines are completely going away, and flooding is becoming an increasing issue, as well as the increasing risk of hurricanes. These people voted in climate change deniers to the highest office in the United States, and this directly shows their reluctance to change. Their main local economy is a small shrimp fishing business. The rising sea level and tides are displacing the shrimp and making them harder to catch, because they end up being washed further on the shore than they ever have before. Not only this, but increased ocean salinity and acidity is killing shrimp habitat at an alarming rate. This hurts their local economy, and requires the increased imports of seafood, which causes a price hike, hurting the larger scale economy as well. This stunts economic development, and sends small towns such as Cameron into backward spirals.

This article is definitely a negative effect of the changes happening around us, because it shows that even though things are changing, people aren’t believing the evidence and are not trying to make a change for the better.

3) The geographic location affects life expectancy in many ways. A major factor in life expectancy of a country is access to healthcare. In a place with a lower life expectancy such as Niger, there is generally little to no healthcare available to its citizens. It seems like these places also have a higher rate of disease with no ways of treating it, causing huge epidemics (e.g. ebola, zika). Another thing that goes along with healthcare is the lack of access to contraception. If there is a lack of access to contraception, more babies are going to be had, meaning more mouths to feed, and in a poor country this is devastating. Another factor is education. Studies show that higher educated women tend to have less children. Due to this, countries with little to no public education, tend to have a higher fertility rate, and therefore lower life expectancy.