Fordham marked the launch of a seven-year transformative climate change plan with an April 19 event at the Rose Hill campus that brought students, activists, government officials, and neighborhood leaders together on the Rose Hill campus.

The University also welcomed back to campus Elizabeth Yeampierre, FCRH ‘80, who laid out the challenges of achieving climate justice in a keynote address

“In the climate justice movement where I come from, we say that transition is inevitable, but justice is not,” she said.

Yeampierre, an attorney who co-chairs the national Climate Justice Alliance and is the executive director of the Brooklyn-based Latino community organization UPROSE, challenged institutions such as Fordham to shake off conventional thinking.

“Climate change is not conventional. It is unpredictable, it is violent, and it is here,” she said.

“We really need people who are thinking in a way that is unconventional and honors Mother Earth, and are building just relationships and are engaged in self-transformation, so that we are able to hold this work, which is literally the human rights of our day.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with Julie Gafney, Ph.D., director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), on the terrace of the Walsh Family Library, Yeampierre laid out a case for a bottom-up strategy for dealing with climate change.

“We need to be able to listen to the people on the ground. The educated person knows how to take the formal education that they have, break it down, and make it accessible so that people on the ground can run with it,” she said.

As an example, she pointed to an app that UPROSE created for the 90 auto salvage yards in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, to use to access best practices for becoming climate adaptable. It includes information on chemicals that are vulnerable to extreme heat, which is expected to become a bigger problem in the future.

“Environmentalists would like to shut them down, but these are working-class people in our community, and we don’t throw away our people,” she said.

Ryan Chen, a junior environmental science major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and a student advocacy fellow, was one of a dozen members of the audience who engaged with Yeampierre in a Q&A session. He plans to apply the lessons from her talk to his work with Sunrise Movement NYC.

“Sunrise NYC is developing local campaigns to fight for a new green deal that also addresses the needs of people in New York City,” he said.

“What Elizabeth told me is, it’s more important to support the work of other organizations that are already doing. That’s something that I really want to bring to the conversation, to make sure that we don’t co-opt other people’s work.”

The theme of grassroots organization suffused the day’s event, which was organized by CCEL. Tents arrayed on the lawn in front of the library featured representatives from groups such as the Bronx River Alliance, Cafeteria Culture, and Friends of Pelham Bay Park, and speakers included representatives from Loving the Bronx and the New York City Parks.

A panel discussion, “Global Migration, Climate Displacement, and Racial Justice,” featured Annetta Seecharran, GSAS ’94, executive director of Chhaya CDC, an advocacy group that serves South Asian and Indo-Carribbean communities, and Andrew Rasmussen, Ph.D., professor of psychology and head of the Culture, Migration, and Community Research Group at Fordham.

Seecharran, a graduate of Fordham’s International Political and Economic Development (IPED) program, noted that her organization’s clients don’t often bring up climate change as a concern, but they do bring up health and housing problems that are exacerbated by it.

Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive flooding in New York City in 2021, and killed 11 people trapped in basement apartments, was a wake-up call that housing and weather issues can collide, even inland.

“My organization is known for working on tenant and homeowner issues. We’re not known as an environmental organization, but we can’t think of our work as separate from the environmental,” she said.

Rasmussen said community organizations need to organize and document environmental issues that are displacing them, and demand help from local officials.

“Those of you who know your Frederick Douglass remember that power concedes nothing without demand. It never has, it never will. Community organizations are the key to making those demands.”

Andrew Rasmussen, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology who studies trauma and psychosocial stressors in humanitarian disasters. We talked with him about his thoughts on getting through the coming months.

Q: The word resilience has been bandied about more than usual recently. Do you think that the pandemic has changed the understanding of the word?

A: I think that the pandemic has taken the word resilience back to its initial meaning in psychology. It had become a somewhat cheapened version of its former self prior to the pandemic. In psychology, it’s a concept taken from engineering where, if a material is resilient, it can bend, but it won’t break. It had become like, “Oh wow, this person had a hard day, but you know what they feel okay today. So, they’re resilient.” No, it’s more than that.

Q: Your research has involved talking to refugees who’ve moved to new countries, both voluntarily and involuntarily. Their experiences are obviously much more extreme than anything most of us will go through, but is there anything we can learn from their experiences?

A: What the refugee experience does most often for me is it reminds me that humans are adaptive creatures. That’s one of our cardinal assets and our evolutionary advantages. A lot of people point to our cognitive abilities relative to our other primate cousins, but really, it’s our ability to rebuild after going through major life changes. I see it among the refugees and low-income immigrants that I have worked with over the years and particularly among those who I’ve worked with in the last two years where they’re dealing with COVID stress as well as all the other things that they’ve dealt with.

People keep going. Sure, they mourn, and they come together as a community in whatever way they can. Bad things happen, but that doesn’t mean that life is over. In fact, sometimes you can emerge from a really stressful period with a renewed sense of purpose, a renewed sense of community, and for some people, a renewed sense of faith.

Q: What does the field of psychology have to say about resilience?

A: Psychological research says that it’s a little bit more normative than you would think. When faced with severe loss or trauma, most people do okay after a period of grieving and loss. You can think about the way that almost everybody in New York City felt from about March 2020 to May. There was this sort of palpable sense of fear and the sort of eerie silence to the city. A lot of people were isolating and staying inside their apartments. The tales of the first responders and the health workers were harrowing, but sometime around May or June, people started coming out. That is a narrative of resilience in as much as it’s a narrative of troubled times.

Q: Talk to me about the role of fatalism versus optimism. You’ve done research recently that highlighted how that could play a role in people’s behaviors.

A: As the result of a couple of really enterprising undergraduates, we launched a survey of Fordham undergrads and asked questions about various protective behaviors, and also their intentions to get vaccinated. As we expected, there were some gender differences, but the biggest factor in all of this was the sense of fatalism.
We found that the idea that your health was just out of your own hands contributed to whether you were more or less likely to wear a mask and your plans to get vaccinated. If you had a “Well, if I’m going to get it, I’m going to going to get it” sort of attitude, that was the number one predictor of how much people adhered to preventive behaviors. So the quicker we can get across this message of, “We’re going to be OK if we do X, Y, and Z,” the more that instills some sense of optimism and agency among other people, and fights against fatalism.

Q: It sounds like a classic feedback loop.

A: It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. You might think, “I know I should be wearing my mask, but we don’t really know much about this stuff, and there’s always new variants and it’s really not up to me.” These attitudes are attractive because they allow us to be a little bit lazy and not spend so much energy on things that we don’t want to spend energy on in the first place. But once you do that, you get sloppy about prevention, then you’re more likely to get the virus. Then you say, “See, I couldn’t have done anything.”

But if you say, “I really should be doing this” or you’re talking to your friends and they say, “There’s nothing you can do anyway,” you might respond, “You might think that, but I still want you to wear a mask when we’re in the same room together because I know that it can help you.” That kind of attitude doesn’t have consequences just for individuals, it has consequences for social interactions as well.

Q: This would seem to run counter to the notion of rugged individualism that is cherished by Americans.

A: That study with Fordham undergrads and my other work revolves around culture and individualism and collectivism. Are you somebody who is completely individualistic? This is, of course, a mainstream idea. It allows people to say, “I’m going to make my decisions about whether I should get the vaccine or not, and it really shouldn’t matter what anybody else thinks or what anybody else does.” But actually, vaccines work because other people take them. It’s not just about what you think. The way that people think about their relationship to the culture they’re in is important in determining what health behaviors they’re practicing.

Q: How can we each help each other continue to bounce back in the face of change?

A: If we’re going to be supportive for resilience purposes, to bounce back as a society, we need to listen to people’s objections as to why they won’t do what are essentially non-intrusive prevention measures like wearing a mask, getting tested, or getting a vaccination.

At the same time, there are plenty of people for whom just listening and having conversations isn’t going to work. Maybe this is reflective of my own American individualism, but I don’t like the idea of telling people that they have to do something. I do think there’s a place for mandates though, in that they allow people to say, “Well, I didn’t really want to get vaccinated, but I guess I have to in order to keep my job.” But even in that case, it needs to be like, “Yeah, you know what? I know it’s tough.” It’s knowing we’ve all had to do things we don’t want to do.

There still needs to be the openness for listening to people who don’t want to engage in these things. I think that’s how we support each other.

But when you’re uprooted by political violence or a natural disaster, that stress can actually be traumatizing. So it makes some sense to expect that refugees will experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while voluntary migrants will be dramatically better off.

Except when they aren’t.

Andrew Rasmussen, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology and director of the master’s program in applied psychological methods, said that despite the more severe experiences that lead refugees to migrate, there is a remarkable overlap in the ways that both voluntary migrants and refugees cope with the stress of relocating. He joined Fordham’s faculty last year after working as a clinical psychologist and supervisor at Bellevue Hospital, where he interacted extensively with both groups.

“We have all sorts of policies that favor people who come over for refugee reasons, and while I believe that refugees are different from other immigrants, I’m less convinced that the differences are as extreme as our policies seem to indicate,” he said. “There are lots of refugees who are coming with an incredible amount of psychological reserves that don’t fit the traumatized refugee stereotype that we see in the news and in some psychological research.”

Consider Somalis who have struggled every day for 17 years in Kenyan refugee camps to make a living in the camps’ black market economies until they can resettle in the United States. While they may suffer from a form of depression, their psychological reserves likely surpass those of someone suffering from severe depression who is not able to get out of bed.

And there are also voluntary migrants who may have very difficult experiences in their backgrounds, said Rasmussen—experiences that can cause them psychological problems here in the United States.

Rasmussen has studied both refugee and immigrant families. In both sets of families, it’s common that children will have been unaffected by the upheaval that drove their parents to leave their home countries. He has observed similar “generation gaps” in both.

“They’ll say they (children) are becoming too American; they don’t have the same cultural values, they’re wearing funny clothes, and they’re not being as respectful to their elders as they should be. Those are things you hear as much among refugees as you hear among voluntary immigrants,” Rasmussen said.

Refugee parents do differ from voluntary immigrant parents, however, when they’ve been personally affected by political violence and show symptoms of post-traumatic stress as a result. Conflicts will happen more often because parents with PTSD are more likely to be irritable and have trouble sleeping.

“The point is there’s not a ‘refugee family syndrome’ that’s specific, but there are elements of the immigration experience that may be affected by a parent who has trauma symptoms,” Rasmussen said.

The Bronx is an ideal place to explore these differences because it is home to many residents from the same country that have come here both as voluntary migrants and as refugees. Rasmussen recently worked with a community group in the Bronx that caters to the Fouta, an African ethnic group found in Guinea and Sierra Leone. He found that one area in which the two migrant populations diverge is after-school childcare.

“There were just one or two places that voluntary migrants will send their kids, whereas refugees wouldn’t send their kids to any after-school program. They’d send them home to be with brothers or cousins or sisters,” he said.

“So it may be that some of the stress related to being a refugee translates into suspicion of government-sponsored care programs in ways that it doesn’t for voluntary migrants.”
Rasmussen also researches how other cultures express distress. Recently he teamed up with Partners in Health, which is setting up a mental health clinic in central Haiti. Through interviews with Haitian residents, Rasmussen was able to design a questionnaire about mental health that was compatible with Haitian culture.

The questionnaire had to be different from one he’d used in the states because depression in Boston, where Partners In Health is based, cannot be compared to depression in rural Haiti—where residents don’t even have running water.

“Even though we may not be able to create a measure for every single person and then try to compare, we do need to understand the importance of recognizing that culture affects the things we talk about, and the way we talk about it.”