Disasterology: July 2021
The Book Edition
Hello Friends!
This month’s newsletter is going to be a little different because Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontline of The Climate Crisis comes out August 3rd.
THAT IS VERY SOON!
I wrote parts of this book over fifteen years ago when I first saw New Orleans post-Katrina and the Levee Failure. Five years ago I started to write it in earnest and began to find the people who could help create it. It’s consumed my every waking thought since then and in just one week it will be out in the world for you all to read!
That said, I’m extremely impatient so I’ve decided to share an excerpt with you all a bit early!
I would be so grateful if you pre-ordered the book. You can find it at IndieBound, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and as an audiobook. Thank you so much to those of you who have already pre-ordered! I have been absolutely blown away by all the support. I can’t wait to get Disasterology in as many hands as possible.
This excerpt is from the Introduction to Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of the Climate Crisis and has been edited down for length.
IN THE FINAL days of April 1990, my mother went into labor in a town where babies were being born with an increased rate of cancer. It would take years to show the culprit was toxic chemicals from an old coal tar gasification plant that had seeped out of decaying buried drums beneath the town park, where children played under the watchful eye of their pregnant mothers. The women didn’t know that while they sat on park benches worrying about scraped knees and twisted ankles, their unborn children were being poisoned.
Like many other communities across the country, our little town of Taylorville in South Central Illinois was on the cusp of a public health crisis. Our mothers had no expectation of the government riding in on white horses to save them, even if they believed they should. My parents, new to town by way of New York City, were viscerally aware of the fight that lay ahead. In Greenwich Village, they had watched the government ignore the AIDS crisis in the ’80s—leaving them with no illusion that a small town, suffering a comparably small medical crisis, would garner attention or action. It was into this fight, in the last days of April 1990, that I was born and dressed in a little white onesie with, “TAG: Taylorville Awareness Group,” handwritten in Sharpie across my chest.
As she had during the AIDS crisis, my mother joined her neighbors in a battle that they hoped would one day lead to justice. The group, two hundred strong, demanded the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and the Illinois Department of Public Health test the contaminated park. It was eventually uncovered that CIPS Gas Plant, the owners of the property, had buried fifty thousand gallons of coal tar underground before selling the land. In 1985, unaware of the buried carcinogens, the new property owners began digging on the site and, in the process, released the hazardous materials.
The families who had suffered direct health impacts sued CIPS and were awarded $3.2 million—not much given the legal fees and lifelong healthcare bills. It took years of constant public pressure from TAG, but the site was eventually cleaned up. For their efforts, Taylorville joined the ranks of communities that have banded together to fight for their own health and safety in the absence of government regulation, oversight, and intervention.
As protests continued in Taylorville, my parents moved back East to a town where they would not have to worry about their children living so close to a Superfund site. So despite a dramatic beginning, I grew up in Maine where my weekends were spent in the mountains and my afternoons by the sea. Valuing nature was part of the culture, so when our middle school science teacher told us about climate change—then called global warming—my first thought was the health of the planet, not what it meant for us.
It was a pre-Inconvenient Truth world and our teacher’s understanding of climate change was rudimentary. She explained that since the Industrial Revolution, people in industrialized countries had released so many greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere that the entire climate of the planet was changing. By 2100 the coral reefs and ice caps could be gone. At twelve years old, something that might happen at the bottom of the ocean and high up in the mountains in over a century was too abstract for me to grasp.
I also did not believe any of it would actually happen. I understood humans were changing the climate, but I thought we would surely do something to stop it. It was only recently, as I listened to youth climate activist Greta Thunberg, that I realized my healthy skepticism of the seriousness of global warming my science teacher casually presented was rooted in the belief that, if this horrific future was a real possibility, “we wouldn’t be talking about anything else.” At my most imaginative, I could not envision that climate change could mean anything worse than slightly warmer Maine winters and an ocean that rose a bit closer to the edges of our lighthouses.
Our teachers presented us with simple solutions. We could stop global warming and save the polar bears by making environmentally friendly choices each day. They gave us worksheets with checklists of tasks that would lessen our carbon footprints: recycle, ride our bikes, turn off lights, plant a tree. These alleged solutions reinforced my belief that this was an easily solvable problem. I rarely worried about climate change because when I looked around, everyone was doing the tasks we were told to do. We carried reusable water bottles and many of our parents started driving electric cars. Every classroom had a recycling bin and a sign reminding us to turn off the lights at the end of the day. My parents often discussed the benefits of affixing solar panels to the roof of our house and the local news noted the possibility of developing a wind energy industry in the state. They said climate change would happen if we failed to act, but we were acting. In my little world, everyone I knew was ticking off the boxes on the checklist.
In high school, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth premiered, and it occurred to me that perhaps my middle school science teacher had not taught us all the nuances of this impending global crisis. I tried to develop a deeper understanding of the scope and complexity of the problem. I learned that the consequences were not contained to the arctic or the Great Barrier Reef. Climate change threatened everything. I learned some of those consequences were not a century, but just years away. Worst of all, I learned the world was not meeting the carbon reduction targets encouraged by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). All the box checking we had been doing was not translating globally.
In August 2005, the levees broke, and soon afterward I moved to New Orleans to help with the recovery. In New Orleans I found I could not do many of the individual environmental actions that had been second nature to me growing up. I stopped recycling because there were no recycling bins on my college campus. I bought bottled water because the city was often under boil-water advisories. The warped roads and sidewalks, damaged by the recent flooding, made riding a bike an extreme sport. It was not that people in New Orleans did not care about the environment, but that the systems and incentives that had made it easy for us to take these actions in Maine did not exist in Louisiana. The environmentalism I grew up with was one of privilege, void of interrogation of environmental injustice or action related to environmental racism. My family had worried about negotiating tax credits for solar panels on our house, not whether we had a roof to put solar panels on.
I learned more about the complexities of the modern environmental movement and questioned what it meant to be an environmentalist. I could see the limitations of individual behavioral changes, but also felt they were the only thing I could control. Moving to New Orleans and finding I couldn’t even do the most basic environmental actions left me feeling completely overwhelmed and lost. So I pulled away from environmentalism and shifted my focus to what I perceived to be the unrelated work of disaster recovery.
In New Orleans, the scope and scale of the damage was unprecedented and the needs endless. The White House was absent, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was ineffectual, and city and state governments were overwhelmed. I spent as much time as I could working with different non-profits and local groups throughout the city, trying to put the pieces back together, but it was an uphill battle that I often felt like we were losing.
When the oil drilling rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded on April 20, 2010 off the coast of Louisiana, the environmental movement collided with disaster recovery right before my eyes. Eleven men were dead, oil was gushing unabated out of the ocean floor, and its arrival on the shores of the gulf coast was imminent. The BP Oil disaster became the largest marine oil spill in US history . Many of us who had been doing post-Katrina work in New Orleans turned our attention to the coast as we began to understand the full scope of the crisis.
When I look at a calendar now, I can see the crisis unfolded slowly, but in my memory it happened fast. One day a photo of twisting metal blanketed the front page of the Times-Picayune, and the next scientists were chartering boats and CNN was livestreaming the gushing oil on an underwater camera. The stories in the Times-Picayune grew more alarming by the day, but BP claimed—and the media often repeated—that there was less oil than there was washing ashore and that they had found few dead animals along the coast. This, of course, was a lie made possible by the chemicals BP was dumping in the Gulf to sink the oil out of view.
On one afternoon trip to the Louisiana Coast, I climbed up over a dune and under yellow police tape that was being used to keep people away. The beach was being combed by people in hazmat suits that matched the ones we wore when we gutted flooded, molded homes back in the city. The people in hazmat suits carried rakes along the length of the beach and stopped every so often to pick up a dead animal. They’d put it in a bag and throw it into a truck that followed behind them. I felt an unwieldy anger that day. Not only had BP caused this sweeping disaster but they had been, from the moment Deepwater Horizon exploded, deceiving the public. It was standing on that dune that I fully grasped I wasn’t just staring out at an oil disaster—I was standing face to face with the climate crisis.
There was a kind of sick poetry to it all. The oil and gas industry had spent decades tearing up the fragile ecosystem of coastal Louisiana while digging up the fuel that would change the climate. As the seas rise and stronger storms, fueled by climate change, come ashore they cause further degradation to the already weakened ecosystem. Now one of these companies had been caught cutting corners in the name of profit and left the remains of the already battered coastline covered in oil. Hollywood could not have written a more insidious plotline. I didn’t know who the hero would be, but the villain was obvious.
At the time I did not understand the extent to which the fossil fuel industry was knowingly perpetuating the crisis by buying politicians and running misinformation campaigns. The narrative I had about climate change excluded the role of the oil and gas industries in creating the crisis by emphasizing the role of the individual consumer. The campaigns for bike riding and solar panels did have environmental benefits, but they also helped to obscure the extent of the crisis. We had been made to feel that the crisis was our fault because we were driving around too much. When really, we were trying to fight a trillion-dollar global machine with energy efficient lightbulbs. Of course we were losing.
My understanding of the relationship between the environmental movement, the climate crisis, and disasters began to shift. As I became involved with the BP response and recovery, I started to question my perception that disaster work was something separate from environmentalism. I began to understand the connection between the health of our ecosystems, climate change, and the destruction in New Orleans. My understanding of inequality and injustice began to deepen. I learned how the people who are most affected by disasters are often the people who have the fewest resources to protect themselves and rebuild afterward.
The more I learned, the more I realized how much I did not know. My firsthand experience in Louisiana had made it clear that we were not managing disasters effectively, but I didn’t yet know enough to understand the root causes of those problems or how to articulate solutions. One of my professors recommended I go to graduate school to study emergency management. I was skeptical at first. My only knowledge of emergency management was the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which, after years of living in post-Katrina New Orleans, was not exactly an agency I wanted to be associated with. My professor assured me emergency management was much more than FEMA and that I should give it a chance. So I packed up a U-Haul and drove from New Orleans to Fargo for an emergency management graduate program at North Dakota State University. There I fell into the world of disasterology and found a framework and a language for understanding the disasters I had been lost in.
Right away I loved studying emergency management and wanted to tell people about the work I was doing, but I started to notice as soon as I said the words emergency management, people’s eyes glazed over. I would go to a coffee shop or a bar in Fargo and someone would ask me what I do. When I told them what I was studying, they would give me a confused look and say something along the lines of, “so you’re a firefighter?” I didn’t know how to explain what I did.
It’s not like I could hit them with “the profession of emergency management is the managerial function charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with disasters” or my discipline studies “how humans and their institutions interact and cope with hazards and vulnerabilities, and resulting events and consequences” in the Starbucks line. I needed a better way to quickly articulate what I did, so I started saying I was a disasterologist. No confusing definitions needed—people got that I meant I studied disasters.
The theoretical implications of a field of “disasterology” have themselves been a point of global debate among disaster researchers dating back to at least the 1980s. It’s an important discussion within the confines of academia, but to the outside world “disasterologist” just sounds intuitive. I started using the term and it caught on quickly, as other disaster researchers also found utility in describing their work this way. I use “disasterology” in an informal way to describe anyone who does disaster research, regardless of their discipline.
More specifically, I do research within the discipline of emergency management. We study everything related to the disaster life cycle—mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Through this research I have learned the history of disasters and read the empirical research on disasters. I learned how we can better manage them or even prevent them altogether. I also learned that climate and disaster work are inextricably linked. Advocating for hazard mitigation and preparedness are just as much part of the climate movement as protesting oil pipelines.
Years ago, when I first began to understand the urgency of the climate crisis, I struggled to figure out how I could help prevent future climate-driven disasters when I was already standing in the middle of one. How could I justify taking the time to worry over Miami’s future when that future had already arrived in New Orleans?
What I did not understand at the time was that we could— and had to—do both. If we do not radically change our emergency management policy and approach to managing disasters, the apocalyptic Hollywood disaster scenes that come to mind when we think about climate change could become real life. My hope is by sharing with you the long and often indirect journey I have taken to understand the true extent of the trouble that we’re in, you will see the problems clearly too, and find the courage to take action. Because we have a lot to do.
Climate change involves two separate but related problems. The first is cutting emissions to prevent further changes to our climate, which has been the primary focus of the climate movement. To the extent we continue to be unsuccessful in addressing the first problem, we arrive at the second—addressing the consequences of climate change. Accepting the need to manage the consequences of climate change is not conceding that we are doomed. Instead, it is a recognition of the communities that are already living through the climate crisis. It is a recognition that regardless of our actions today, things will get worse before they, hopefully, get better. It is these consequences, and what to do about them, that is the purpose of this book.
The consequences of climate change are all-encompassing. Climate change affects every part of our lives: the jobs we have, the places we live, what we eat, our ability to breathe. These consequences cascade and collide in ways we do not yet even fully understand. The parts we do understand, though, are terrifying—especially the parts about extreme weather. The National Climate Assessment, a compilation and analysis of the latest findings from climate scientists across the world, outlines our current reality and our likely future. The climate is changing and we have begun to see the consequences scientists have warned us of for decades . It is encouraging to read narratives of hope that envision a more sustainable future, but when I look around all I see are the places where time has already run out.
We need to do major damage control. Hurricanes, flooding, storms, wildfires, and droughts are getting worse, and we need to ready ourselves to manage these acute events while also adapting to a new climate. The world around us is changing fast, and we need to change quickly, too. The disasters of recent years have been devastating, but they are also just the earliest symptoms of the climate crisis. The future we face is even more dangerous.
When envisioning a climate-changed world, many think of apocalyptic scenes in disaster movies. Although this world is possible, our imminent future looks more like Beasts of the Southern Wild than Mad Max. There are a lot of people and communities who will suffer the consequences of climate change before the world as a whole becomes unlivable.
From the day I was born, I was taught that we are responsible for the protection of our own communities. We cannot guarantee government will protect us or that politicians will prioritize our well-being. In communities that have historically trusted government, mismanaged crises challenge their prevailing narrative of government as protector. In communities that have historically been ignored, harmed, or abandoned by government, disasters reinforced this reality.
In this book, I will take you around the country and introduce you to the places that are already living through climate-related disasters. I will show you how the recovery in New Orleans post-Katrina was driven by local residents and volunteers, and how the Corps of Engineers would have long ago abandoned a little neighborhood on the coast of Maine if local residents had not pressured them into finding a flood solution. I will tell you about the survivors and volunteers that showed up to help during the Tax Day Flood in Texas. I will explain how the federal government failed Puerto Ricans during Hurricane Maria in 2017 and then failed us all during the COVID pandemic.
Activism and local community organizing has long been the route to protecting our communities and the future will be no different. As disaster after disaster exposes the inadequacy of government response, survivors act to prevent their own suffering, seek justice, and rebuild their lives. I will explain how the history of our approach to emergency management has failed to prepare us for our current moment, and how we need to take charge now if we are to minimize the suffering.
We cannot only work on preventing the climate from changing; we also have to work to mitigate the consequences of those changes, at the same time. We can save most of the places and people we love, but we have to act quickly and wisely. We must be brave and precise. There is no room for error. We need to act big, not because there is nothing to lose, but because there is everything to lose.
If you want to read more you can pre-order at IndieBound, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and as an audiobook.
I’ll be back to our regularly scheduled disaster newsletter filled with enough links to crash your browser next month.
