Brooklyn's Climate Crisis: Is the Borough Doomed?

Brooklyn is intensely threatened by the very real threat of global warming and rising sea levels, according to panelists at a recent BRIC TV event.

At “The Cost of an Urban Climate Crisis,” panelists discussed the borough’s impending end in the face of global climate change.

“Superstorm Sandy shows us how vulnerable we are,” City Council Member Mark Treyger began, articulating a defining theme of the evening. He went on to suggest New York City redraw its flood map and be resilient in the face of increasingly impactful storms.

A representative of Coney Island and Gravesend, he emphasized that Brooklyn’s southern shore, including populous residential neighborhoods like Brighton Beach, were meant to be natural barrier islands but have been artificially extended, and that New York cannot escape being a coastal city.

“We should not have built in some of these places,” Treyger mourned, “Some of these areas did not exist until we expanded our geography.”

While Treyger focused on simultaneously precautionary and reactionary fixes like getting boilers out of the basements of public housing developments in his district, the only female panelist, Elizabeth Yeampierre, chair of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency National Justice Advisory Council and local organizer, adamantly implored for less big money fixes and more community involvement.

“Development plans have to develop from a community, they can’t be dropped down by the developers,” she critiqued, further noting that, “More and more people are moving into Brooklyn — that’s more trash, more energy — without a plan.”

One of the loudest voices on the panel, Yeampierre focused on the need for local solutions, not random government aid, and that it is communities of color and low income who are bearing the brunt of climate change.

While Yeampierre and Treyger were the two loudest voices, the entire panel left the audience with a clear and resounding message: Brooklyn is intensely threatened by the very real threat of global warming and rising sea levels.

While panelists were perhaps too knowledgable and levelheaded to rant in doomsday speech about the unavoidable destruction of the borough at the hands of man’s maltreatment of nature, they heavily alluded to a day when many neighborhoods will not be inhabitable. And though their educated opinions were informative and passionate, they left less of a feeling that Brooklynites must rally together in the face of crisis and more that the end is nigh.

BRIC TV is the latest venture from free cultural programming group BRIC. It has opened up its new BRIC House performance space, studio, and gallery at 647 Fulton Street for the town-hall-style conversations on relevant topics to Brooklyn.

For those who missed it, a recording of the entire discussion is available online.

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