“The Land is Unstable”: Place-based Understandings of Climate Change in Washington, DC

In order to understand the subjective and place-specific impacts of climate change on elderly residents of Washington, DC, I conducted 12 semi-structured interviews. I interviewed seven people once and five people twice, for a total of 20 hours of interviews. Everyone I interviewed noted a deterioration in the climate and ecological diversity in DC. The majority connected this environmental degradation with perceived social degradation: a withering of communal bonds and responsibilities. Similar descriptions of change, and of how much DC has changed, were also rooted in the subjects’ unique memories of what the city used to feel like. Discussions about environmental change in DC were emotionally charged, as interviewees described feeling alienated from a once-familiar home, and unable to keep up with the accelerating pace of change. In studying place-based understandings of climate change in DC, I seek to gain insight into how these residents grapple with the emotional and psychological effects of living in a rapidly changing, often unrecognizable, world.