As the earth continues to warm, life - both in cities and rural areas - will undoubtedly change. Urban centers, which contribute the lion’s share of carbon into the atmosphere, are at a greater risk, especially those in coastal zones where sea levels are rising.

In this episode, Julian Zelizer and Sam Wang discuss the future of cities in an age of climate change with eco-justice scholar and author Ashley Dawson.

Dawson is the 2017 Barron Visiting Professor in Environmental Humanities at the Princeton Environmental Institute. His book, “Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change,” offers an alarming portrait of the future of our cities.

Dawson also is a professor of english at the CUNY Graduate Center, and at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. He specializes in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities with a particular interest in histories and discourses of migration.

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has been one of the pioneers in the revival of American political history. He is the author of several books including, most recently, "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society." Zelizer is a frequent commentator in the international and national media on political history and contemporary politics. He has published more than 600 hundred op-eds, including his weekly column on CNN.com.

Wang is professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton University. He is known for his books "Welcome to Your Brain" and "Welcome to Your Child's Brain" and for his founding role at the Princeton Election Consortium, a blog providing U.S. election analyses. In 2004, Wang was one of the first to aggregate U.S. presidential polls using probabilistic methods. He has also developed new statistical standards for partisan gerrymandering. A neuroscientist, Wang's academic research focuses on the neuroscience of learning, the cerebellum.