Climate Resilience - Finding a Collective Path Forward
Special Guest Blog By Sarah Kamal
Why should we talk about climate resilience?
As spring blooms, many people are thinking towards the summer. With the catastrophic 2017 and 2021 wildfire seasons fresh in our minds, it's no wonder that many are anxious over what weather events 2022 will bring.
2021 was a year of too much, all at once, especially in British Columbia. The year began with pandemic-enforced isolation and anxiety, then the physical evidence at Kamloops and then other residential schools of what Indigenous communities had known for years in May 2021. June/July 2021 brought the heat dome with its 500-700 excess deaths and destruction of Lytton, BC, and was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history, called a once-in-a-millenium event. The Delta wave of COVID-19 was a major concern around August. November's atmospheric river then washed out roads and bridges, submerged homes and businesses and livestock, becoming the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history.
We lurched from crisis to crisis, reeling, with little room to breathe. The prospect of more of the same is disheartening, and yet we would be wise to face what may be around the corner. So I'd like to discuss community resilience in the context of climate change: how can we realistically, pragmatically, weather the storms of 2022 and beyond?
First, I'd like to acknowledge the adversities many have suffered. Whether the loss of loved ones, homes, jobs, or health, the impacts of recent crises have gutted our resilience reservoirs and exposed gaping voids in our institutional crisis management.
Second, I'd like to hold space for the intense emotional distress many of us are experiencing. Grief, anxiety, fear, anger, the desire to return to a stable world that no longer exists – change is buffeting us at every turn, and educators say younger generations growing up with climate change, the pandemic, and ever-present technologies of distraction are more emotionally fragile than ever before. New words are being coined to describe the difficult feelings arising as we face mass species extinctions, including our own.
Many of us are exhausted, depleted, in pain. It can feel like an exercise in futility to prepare for climate disasters we cannot predict, and an impossible task when we have yet to recover from recent and ongoing events. I don't have a way out of that impasse. Collectively, however, we have to attempt the impossible. We have no option but to mourn, endure, and forge on with heart, adapting to the changing landscape.
If I may offer some thoughts, in no way complete, on moving forward…
2021 BC Wildfire Season, image courtesy of Globe and Mail
Grounding
Life is not always easy or kind. We need to ground ourselves and reconnect, and dig deep for resilience. In our Zoomscaped world, we can return to our flesh, to the soil beneath our feet, the plants and animals that sustain us, to the life force of the sun. We can reach out to each other beyond the many isms of our world, across online mob mentalities, out of hardened slogans and into clasped hands, into the languages of the earth, rain, wind, and sun – these forces that we thought we knew, but which are now speaking to us in new ways, with urgency. Mainstream society is experiencing ravages – displacement, loss, impoverishment – that Indigenous communities have lived through for centuries and seeing impacts of climate change that Inuit communities warned of in the 1980s. Some Elders have generously shared ceremonies and practices, profound hard-won lessons on how to bear hardship. These and other grounding and reconnecting contemplative practices can root us despite turbulent times.
Allies
We need allies: people we can lean on, people who get it already and are in the trenches or providing moral support from the sidelines. This requires discernment. I remember an epidemiologist friend telling me in February 2020 that because we had no living memory of a pandemic, decision-makers did not believe the COVID-19 would hit us – until it did. Likewise, we have no precedent for what is coming at us climate-wise, and some leaders may stay in denial until it is too late. An unfortunate reality is that there are many among us who are incapable of thinking collectively, or might choose to stay sheltered in the toxic insensitivity of privilege. We will have to do our work despite them. Finding allies then, is less about barking at trees until we are hoarse, and more about finding our pack, looking out for each other and circling to share the burden of ensuring safety.
Personal Responsibility
We must take personal responsibility. This is not to let people in power off the hook, but it is to recognize that we are facing urgent problems, and we cannot expect the creaking institutions of power or our strained emergency systems to do all the work. All of us juggle a welter of conflicting priorities, but taking a day to update a grab-and-go bag and household emergency procedures can mean the difference between fleeing with the clothes on one's back versus an organized departure with medicines, pet supplies, and copies of important documents. Our personal emergency preparation doesn't have to be perfect. What matters is to do what we can, with what we have right now. Every little bit of shoring up resiliency, thinking through resources we could call on, gathering what we need to stay safe and perhaps even have the capacity to help others in their time of need, counts.
72 hour emergency survival kit from canadiansafetysupplies.com
Protecting Emergency Workers
Let us please reduce the burden on our emergency management workers and experts. This can take the form of believing and circulating the advice of specialists who saw the flooding of the lower mainland coming, who warned of the systemic gaps in emergency communications that worsened the 2021 fire season. It can mean engaging with work on municipal emergency plans, signing up for emergency notification apps, or volunteering with search and rescue. We can continue to press for and expect better from multiple levels of government, but also have our own skin in the game. Write a quick letter to your MLA and MP and your local councillors letting them know what you have done and what you need from them. Tell them you support funding for emergency management recruitment, supplies, salaries, and training.
Take Care of the Most Vulnerable
The good news is we can be selfishly selfless. Emergency response can better support all of us when there are fewer people in dire trouble. That means community resilience is increased when the most vulnerable – frail elderly, children, people living in poverty, marginalized groups – are seen and supported. There are ongoing and concerted efforts at adjusting policies and centering the experiences of the most vulnerable in disaster response, but the translation of these policies into action will take time and be imperfect. In the meantime, if you have the capacity, be aware that disasters discriminate against those who are already marginalized. Some groups are vulnerable to being the 'forgotten', the politically unimportant – too small to be a voting block, too different to have their specific needs addressed. If there is a vulnerable person or group you can or have built relationship with, consider donating your time, your hands, and mind to coordinate emergency supplies, transportation, or communications options that will work for them. Some people will not know that they need help and fail to ask emergency services for help (people suffering from excess heat, for instance, can become confused) so ensuring personal networks is key. Some communities have been harder hit by waves of crisis and may not have the capacity to build up emergency plans and stock right now. Remote communities will need pragmatic self-sufficiency solutions as they will have less access to the kinds of services available at larger population centres and are vulnerable to isolation if transportation corridors are blocked.
Expect the Unexpected
All the planning in the world won't prepare us though for what we couldn't imagine would happen. For instance, the heat dome hit especially hard because it stretched over the Canada Day long weekend, when many emergency workers were on vacation and air-conditioned community spaces were closed. As our environmental conditions move outside of historical patterns, we may also suffer equipment and material failures related to how our systems are not designed to handle more frequent weather fluctuations and more extreme heat or cold or wind or water. Communities in the US are reporting changes in ashphalt and tire performance in rising temperatures, and in some cases even walking is newly hazardous due to heat radiating from pedestrian walkways. We won't be able to foresee and plan for every circumstance, so it's important to maintain an ability to stay flexible and improvise. In the meantime, let's do the best we can to build the overflow capacity and redundancy in emergency services that we saw became a critical need in hospitals during the pandemic.
Adjust to Change
We are having to reconsider practices, like emissions-heavy habits, expecting ever growing material prosperity, or investing for financial returns whatever the social or environmental cost. Societally, we are not who we were two years ago. Many of us are ragged, hurting – rebuilding our world as we grapple with uncertainty. It is okay to be angry. Life is unfair. Some of us have done everything right and still got the short end of the disaster stick. It is reasonable to rage at how often collaborative, socially responsible efforts are blocked by the uncaring, irrational logic of winner-takes-all-even-as-the-world-burns. It is reasonable to mourn how we have only realized what we had now that it isn't there anymore.
From Acceptance to Pivoting
Accepting that we are in a different era, we can make step-by-step efforts to realign priorities, looking forward, rather than back, to our place in an evolving world. Growing our resilience doesn't bring glory or a chorus of triumphant trumpets. It's the plodding, seemingly never-ending work of addressing vulnerabilities and preparing for the unknown. If we are successful, a crisis will be planned for, possibly prevented. And weirdly, if we do our job well, people won’t notice, as it’s hard to see absence of crisis compared to crisis response. Regardless, preparing now to flatten the crisis curve ahead will matter, whether our efforts are applauded or not, because each wave of crisis depletes us and cuts into our ability to deal with difficulties that follow.
Dream Differently
There may be attitudinal and cultural changes needed to accompany the more frequent disaster trauma, healing, and rebuilding that climate science predicts. We could see rest and recovery as productive activities. We might in some cases release what we thought we needed and wanted and instead embrace quieter and less ambitious dreams. One could, for instance, pursue resilience, integrity, and connection instead of a carefree happy ever after. We may be in for a period of stonier dreams that reflect a humility Mother Nature is enforcing.
Future Generations
That said, if I may, I'd like to point to how our curtailed dreams might offer bittersweet hope: I've mentioned how educators say younger generations are more fragile, but I've also heard them say today's youth are the most empathic they have ever seen. As a parent, even as I froth at the many things beyond my control, as I flutter to protect my child's heart and soul in a world sometimes seemingly gone mad, I also have faith in future generations' bedrock of values and ability to handle the extraordinary burdens we are passing on. If we do our best, imperfect as it is, and pass to them our love and gratitude instead of our fear and shame, they will persevere. They will learn to bear with difficulty, and they will find joy on our marvelous little ball of blue and white, walking through hardship with as much indomitable spirit as we can pass on to them, and further refining the rough tools and structures we build now for our collective and future wellbeing.
About the guest blog writer:
Sarah is a climate displacement and community engagement specialist and a Director for the Fraser Canyon Emergency Services Society. She lives with one sarcastic son and two rowdy cats on Musqueam land.