Dr. Kenneth Gould

About

Dr. Kenneth Gould is an environmental activist and scholar teaching courses in environmental sociology, environmental justice, climate change, and sustainable development. His research examines the relationship between political and economic structures and efforts to achieve ecologically and socially sustainable development trajectories, with fieldwork based in the US, Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America. He is a co-author of Environment and Society: The Enduring Conflict (1994), Local Environmental Struggles: Citizen Activism in the Treadmill of Production (1996), The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy (2008), and Green Gentrification: Urban Sustainability and the Struggle for Environmental Justice (2017). Dr. Kenneth Gould grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and currently lives in Queens.

Department and Climate Courses

Sociology of Climate Change (Sociology Department and Urban Sustainability Program, Brooklyn College). 

Political Economy of Climate Change (Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Graduate Center)

Climate Research

Federal, state, and local governments provide the leading and largest responses to climate-change-related coastal disasters, including flooding and storms. Following disaster events, governments decide whether to reinvest and rebuild in coastal areas, to what degree, and in what ways. The extent of public post-disaster investment shapes the future habitability and desirability of post-disaster locales, and who can and cannot afford them. This research problematizes public investment in vulnerable ecological zones and lays out research questions that connect state investment choices to the long-term climate adaptation trajectories of coastal zones in the Anthropocene. Coastal areas are increasingly precarious and choices to reinvest are not based primarily on scientific understandings of local environmental conditions, but are largely shaped by economic and cultural considerations. We outline four types of choices that states could make that direct post-disaster adaptation trajectories ranging from a “do nothing” approach (unmanaged retreat), to managed retreat, limited structural mitigation (hardening shorelines, stilting buildings), to the most extreme massive coastal reconstruction (often led by the Army Corps of Engineers). Through a case study of the massive public investment in Rockaway Beach, New York, post-hurricane Sandy, we outline the process by which public choices were made, the dominant institutions and political considerations, and the consequences of public investment for the coastal development trajectory. We hypothesize that 1) post-disaster state investment drives the adaptation trajectory, and 2) climate disasters lead states to make long-term commitments to anti-ecological coastal development paths. Post-disaster public investment to massive structural mitigation commits the state to further similar investments over time, requiring larger shares of total public resources, limiting state options for other public investment. What are the interests of the state in massive public investment in structural mitigation as resilience? How does the availability of federal funds for such projects shape the adaptation strategies of state and local governments?

Research Citations

“Gould, Kenneth A., and Tammy L. Lewis. 2018. “Green Gentrification and Disaster Capitalism in Barbuda” NACLA: Report on the Americas, 50 (2): 148-153. 

Gould, Kenneth A., and Tammy L. Lewis. 2018. “”From Green Gentrification to Resilience Gentrification: An Example from Brooklyn”” City & Community, 17 (1): 12-15.”