We Are All Disaster Survivors Now
For many people — and certainly for those concerned about climate change — the recent election was a disaster. Not, perhaps, the same as a wildfire or flash flood, but like a climate disaster, it will have massive and lasting impacts.
And like a climate disaster, for many, recovery from those impacts may never happen.
Today is the 6th anniversary of the Camp Fire that devastated Paradise, CA. As you probably know if you read my work, I lost my home in that fire and nearly died. We moved to western North Carolina five years ago, and now we are working on recovering from Hurricane Helene, which happened 6 weeks ago today.
So, I’ve lived through two climate disasters (plus a pandemic) and I want to talk a bit about what I’ve learned from my experiences, particularly in reference to the political disaster that we all see is coming, and how to deal with it.
It’s difficult to know exactly what our Dear Leader will do, but he has total control over all branches of government now, so probably a lot, and most of it probably bad.
We know that public health is going bye-bye. We know he will cut every safety net — including Social Security and Medicare — that he can. He’ll end Obamacare. Privatize the National Weather Service. Impose tariffs that will make everything more expensive. End the Department of Education. Ferret out experts and career public servants and replace them with loyal flunkies. It’s… a lot.
The impacts will affect us all, and will destabilize all of our systems. And it will come as a rude awakening for many, many people.
The Camp Fire was a rude awakening for me.
Sure, as a scientist, I knew climate change was real, but I lived in a state of blissful ignorance, believing that it wouldn’t affect me or would happen sometime in the distant future. I went about my life and my job as if everything was fine.
Until that distant future arrived very suddenly and the illusion that I wouldn’t be affected was revealed to be a cruel lie.
Wake up calls have a funny way of radically changing your perception of the world. Blissful ignorance comes to a sudden, jolting end, and your eyes are abruptly opened to reality, like stepping out of Plato’s metaphorical cave into the blinding sun.
In order to survive what is to come (both climate change and authoritarian rule), the scales MUST fall from our eyes. We can have no illusions regarding whether or not either will affect us — they will with complete certainty.
The only question is how we will survive what’s coming.
After surviving the Camp Fire and now Helene (not to mention Dear Leader’s insane first term), I think I’ve learned a few things about surviving disasters. No, I haven’t lived through a genocide or a war, so I’m not a certified expert on surviving the apocalypse, but I think I’ve learned a few useful things worth sharing.
I talk about some of them in a piece I wrote last year about dealing with collapse awareness.
In it, I outlined four keys for dealing with collapse:
- Calm
- Community
- Connections
- Capacity
I highly recommend that you read it.
Here, however, I want to talk about how my responses have changed between my first and second climate disaster, as well as between my first and second Trump election, and what you can take away from that.
In 2016, I literally panicked when Trump won. These were very bad people and my gut reaction was to batten down the hatches and prepare for the end of the world. We had a trip to Hawaii planned for January 2017, and I canceled the entire thing because… well, I’m not sure why. I was panicking. I expected the end of the civilized world on day one.
Well, we all survived Trump’s first term, crazy as it was. And I learned something very valuable in the process: America was maybe never all that great to start with, and the “again” part of MAGA was more about returning to our white male supremacist roots than anything else. For eight years, we’ve all been trying to believe that Trump is an inexplicable aberration. He isn’t. He is what America wants.
The scales have fallen from my eyes, and I’ve been able to put aside what I wanted to be true to see what was actually true. It isn’t pretty, but it’s true.
So, I was not in the least surprised that Trump won this time. I expected it. I predicted it. And I was psychologically and emotionally ready for it.
That readiness has granted me a measure of calm in the face of what will clearly turn out to be an unhinged and dark period in American history. Calm that I — and all of us — will need.
Am I happy about it? Not in the least, but I’m doing everything I can — physically and emotionally — to be ready for it.
— — — — — — — —
Two years — to the day — after the 2016 election, on November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire turned our lives upside down. We were in no way prepared for what we would go through for the next 6 years (and counting).
But we have learned a lot in the past 6 years about surviving climate disasters (and dealing with FEMA, insurers, banks, lawyers, ad nauseum), and have taken many actions to both reduce and mitigate our climate risks, as well as to be prepared (physically and emotionally) for the next climate disaster.
As a result, we were much more prepared and much more realistic when we went through our second climate disaster when Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina last September.
We knew that the system could sputter, so we had stored food and water, multiple ways to cook, cash on hand, backup power, etc. We had done what we could to mitigate our risks (removing hazard trees, removing wildfire fuel ladders). And we did OK; better than most.
We were clear-eyed and prepared for what happened. And, again, that preparation granted us a measure of calm in the face of the devastation around us.
So great. What’s my point then?
Be Prepared
Yeah, yeah, the Boy Scouts isn’t quite the America icon that it once was, but their motto is more relevant now than ever.
If there is one lesson I’ve learned from two climate disasters, a Trump administration, and a pandemic, it is this:
Be as prepared as you can.
And I mean prepared physically (having food, water, and cash on hand in case of disruptions) as well as psychologically and emotionally (having the calm and acceptance required to make rational choices and to not be constantly going insane).
I’m not talking full on doomsday prepping here; that’s pointless. I’m talking about giving yourself options when things start to get iffy. So don’t get carried away. At some point, no amount of material prepping will help.
The idea is to be as ready as you can for disruptions, whether from cuts to services, incompetence, climate, greed, civil unrest, or supply chain issues caused by mass deportations and tariffs.
None of those involve building a bunker and filling it with AR-15s and MREs.
When the shit really hits the fan long term, this type of prepping won’t help you, but neither will doomsday prepping. But it will help as the system sputters. It will give you options and buy you time.
And that’s the whole point of preparation: to give you options.
The more prepared you are, the more options you have. The more options you have, the more likely one of them will come in handy as things go south.
So what exactly should you do? First, you should go back and read the article below because it talks about explicitly about being prepared for what’s coming.
After that, you should start doing whatever you can to be ready. Will it be riots against Trump? A thousand year flood? Economic collapse? A wildfire? Another pandemic?
I can’t tell you what it will be, but based on my experience, it will be something. And it will affect you. Accepting that will go a long way in helping you be prepared.
Will you survive our coming disasters?
Well, no, actually. We all die at some point. But do you want to have some sort of reasonable and fulfilling life for as long as you can? It’s likely that you do.
Then you need to be ready. You need to be prepared. You need to have calm, clear eyes.
Because we are all disaster survivors now.
