Disaster Preparedness—A Doorway into Addressing the Climate Crisis
My job is working with people with disabilities and their families, allies, caregivers, and service providers. I am learning ways to gently and amicably bring up climate issues without shutting people down [making people lose their attention]. I am also working with a small group of my neighbors who took the Community Emergency Response Team class taught by the local fire department.
People who identity as “disability community members” tend to be progressive and to accept the reality of the climate crisis. They also have lives that may feel and be hard. They are often managing on a low income and are largely People of the Global Majority who experience several intersecting oppressions. They tend to be discouraged by discrimination and exclusion along with having physical struggles.
My chosen doorway into addressing the climate crisis has been disaster preparedness. California (USA) is experiencing many disasters—fires, floods, sea level rise, and more—all clearly related to the climate (plus we are in an earthquake zone!). Our non-profit organization got a grant to develop disaster preparedness resources—workshops, webinars, YouTube presentations, brochures, and so on—that include our additional information on the climate.
Focusing on disaster preparedness is attracting my constituency of disabled people to our events and materials. (The majority of people who die in disasters are disabled people and seniors.)
Disaster preparedness involves mostly individual planning, individual solutions to social problems, “because government can’t do everything.” Potentially interested people tend to first approach it—and the climate emergency and environmental injustice—with an attitude of “Are you kidding [joking]? I’m overwhelmed just getting through my day. I can’t think about the planet or an earthquake.” But because disaster preparedness is personal and not abstract, they often make their way to learning about it.
At our gatherings we talk about the climate crisis. Then we have listening pairs, including one in which people talk about their next actions. We try different things, using humor and suggesting “baby steps.” We play with hope and despair and sing silly songs. We appreciate our resiliency and creative solutions, which we have as disabled people because we have to.
We encourage people to connect with their neighbors as the most important safety action they can take and to see themselves as useful in disasters, doing what they can with the resources they have. For example, blind people and wheelchair users can be communication point persons.
Connection is the key in all aspects of this! We encourage people to form buddy teams for creating “go bags” (essential items if one has to evacuate). Having “think and listens” about what to put in the bags, and so on, makes it fun. We are reframing the climate crisis as an opportunity (an idea taken from Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything).
The following is our fifteen-minute disaster preparedness presentation on YouTube: <www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTMTjPTR47Y&t=10s>. The funder resisted our including climate issues, but our website certainly does: , then click on Climate Change.
Our personal relationships with community members and local and national leaders have been helpful. To be visible, we join committees and do a lot of public speaking. Sometimes this feels busy, slow, and of little impact. We can’t know what people do or think after they read or watch our materials or leave our events. But I keep taking a direction of continuing the work whether it seems effective or not. Doing so pushes me against my discouragement. And we have decades-long connections and relationships with hundreds of people who respect us and our work. We have an audience, even if it’s a very, very discouraged audience. I am pleased that sometimes people say, “I’m doing X because Marsha (or another team member) said I should.” Yes!
El Cerrito, California, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders in the care of the environment
(Present Time 198, January 2020)