Vulnerable Populations
"I think about how it doesn't affect everyone equally and that's what really bothers me. It keeps me up at night, I guess, because I know that I'm someone who has the resources and lives in a place like Maine, which, compared to other places in the world, is less affected in the immediate sense. I have the ability to move from place to place and to kind of stay out of harm's way, but just the way that you were talking about Vietnam -- and I think a lot about [the] Pacific islands. My dad's from Hawaii and so I think it feels a lot more immediate when I'm in other locations and I can't help but think about all the socio-political reasons for that and so that really gets under my skin." - Julia Onoyama
"One of things I think about is the opportunity to take a house like that and to have a group of older people and a caregiver stay in the same house. A caregiver, perhaps with a small family, [can] stay on the third floor, and then have the residents stay on the other floors.... This wouldn’t be a high level caregiver... but someone who could be a custodian to a group of people and help them. We have got a lot of houses like that in Dover-Foxcroft. We could do great things. But it requires an addition of money. It requires culture change, thinking about communal living as we age. Most people in Maine are very independent and it is hard for people to think about that action." - Lesley Fernow
"I think because there’s a lot of focus on -- and yes, there are small steps that people can do individually in order to help reduce their own carbon footprint and things like that. And obviously collective action still has large ramifications even if you just think of it on an individual scale. But I think there are lots of things, like seeing signs next to elevators that say like burn calories, not kilowatts, and telling people not to use like plastic drinking straws, some of which are things that are put in place to aid the disabled. The disabled cannot help the fact that they need to use the elevator rather than take the stairs. Sometimes unnecessary onus and guilt is put onto individuals, specifically vulnerable individuals within our culture. Meanwhile, there are large corporations that are dumping waste into various areas and they are larger institutions that are contributing to climate change." - Elyse Kiehn
"I worry a lot about the more vulnerable people in our communities. I worry a lot about the poorer families in our communities. We have elderly patrons who come into the library with incredible respiratory problems that are made worse and worse by how colder and colder it gets every single year. We have entire populations of people who don’t live here for four to six months out of the year because it is too cold for their bodies to manage.... I notice our homeless populations and the fact that if they don’t have a shelter to stay in, then there are people freezing to death. That doesn’t just happen here, it happens in cities and it happens even in places with far more homeless care than we have available here.... I worry a lot about the fact that climate change affects vulnerable people. Because they’re vulnerable, I think it affects them first and I think it affects them the hardest." - Elyse Kiehn
"I feel like the warmer temperatures are going to wake up the amoebas that we don’t want awake and the viruses and bacterium and all of that. The aging population that we have here, they tend to be very susceptible to those diseases. That terrifies me for our population." - Sonja Plummer Eyler
"So this is a photograph of the window dressers window construction.... This year, 60% of our clients were low income clients who receive these for free.... Many of the homes that I went to needed a lot more than window inserts. They need doors, new windows, the house to be propped up, stairs, they need food, and they need lots of other things.... I took this photograph to demonstrate the fact that some of the solutions that we are going to look towards in the future are community solutions... because this improves the health of people. We were talking about climate and environment, but, actually, if people are cold, just like if people are hungry, when people are cold and people are hungry, they can’t live lives that are healthy and safe, and they can’t really live their lives in the best possible way." - Lesley Fernow
"These are people that are making decisions, that are making laws, that’s going to affect – maybe they think because they are rich it won't affect them, but it will. But it’ll affect us first and it pisses me off." - Vicki Ziemer
"And there's also the other aspect of the community garden [which] is feeding people, the whole food security thing. Campus is doing a really good thing. They have a food pantry for students isn't it? Students and their families and stuff that's -- during the summer, stuff that they grow, or that we grew when I was a student there, we distributed to different halls where students could take whatever they needed. And sometimes they offer classes or lunch-and-learns about all -- like here's zucchini, here's easy ways you can make it or different recipes. I think there was one about canned goods. But yeah, it's really something special." - Kaitlyn Norwood
"I thought [water] was going to be another victim of climate change. That fresh water, as the oceans rise, there's going to be more salt water that kind of gets into aquifers and wells. There's going to be large populations of people displaced. I guess it just feeds into my common theory that it seems like an extraordinarily large problem that the resources will be far, far less. I'm really concerned about clean, drinkable water for people that'll continue to inhabit this planet." - Eileen Lewandowski
"Historically, minorities, people of low socio-economic status, have been assigned the least desirable places to live. We've crammed all of the Penobscot people onto this island. If you go down to Miami, the Haitians were actually put outside the city, because that was far less desirable. Now, with sea level rise, the wealthy people living on the coast are moving inland, and so buying up the properties of those Haitian communities, who now have no place to go. We look at the South Pacific Islands, it's so clear, or some of the islands in the Carolinas, where there are either Indigenous or African-American heritage, those types of communities have been sort of stuck out there, and they're losing their islands. And so, as I said, this picture was meant to symbolize that." - Linda Mosley
Kelly Doyle: Housing is huge, it's expensive, it's exorbitantly expensive to rent. My experience, I've always been a homeowner, but recently I tried to rent cause I thought it'd be easier. And the owner of the rental property lives out of state, then they hire a property manager that has nothing vested in this property. They're just there to collect the rent. They don't care if something breaks. They don't care if you're cold. They don't care if the deck is covered in green slime and you can't walk across it without dying in the rain. I did it for a week, and I had to move out because I couldn't -- how much was it? $1200 a month for a rental house that was completely unusable. It looked nice when I first moved in, but nothing really worked. The faucet leaked, the washer and dryer leaked, the fireplace I couldn't use cause I thought that would offset the electric heat, [but I] couldn't use the fireplace because tenants aren't allowed. I could go on and on and on. $1200 a month. $1200. Even people working three jobs, to afford $1200 a month, that's ridiculous. Anyway, in my opinion. Show me the jobs that can afford that.
Lesley Fernow: Yeah, and in this community, in this region, there aren't jobs that pay enough to do that. I mean there are places in the country where you can live on one job, but here, the jobs -- even talking about raising minimum wage to $15 an hour, and everybody goes ballistic. And you say, but you can't live on that.
Kelly Doyle: You still can't live on $15.
About CHANGE
CHANGE is a climate change research project directed by Dr. Kati Corlew and is dedicated to reaching a better understanding of peoples' perceptions of climate change. Our research was conducted using a qualitative research method called PhotoVoice. PhotoVoice, is a method “by which people can identify, represent, and enhance their community”. (Wang & Burris, 1997, p. 369) Our participants met in focus groups to discuss the research topics, and then went out into their communities to take photographs according to their conceptualization, values, and priorities regarding the topic. They then selected photographs to present and discuss in a final focus group (Gleason & Corlew, 2019). By placing participants’ photos, stories, and conceptualizations at the center of the study, we hope to expand the exploratory nature of this research to include themes outside of current climate change conceptualizations. For more information, please visit our Main Page.