Introducing How to Save a Planet

Lately, I've been thinking it would be nice to get out of here. Out of my apartment for sure, but also out of this city, out of this country, and off this planet. Everything here feels totally messed up, and at times like this, it's very tempting to think maybe there's something better, a new place, a fresh start, a nicer planet. But of course, I know better. I'm Lynn Levy, host of The Habitat, a show that's all about how hard it would be to live on another planet. If there's one thing I learned making this show, it's that Earth, for all its many faults, is still our best option by a lot. So I want to tell you about a show that some of my favorite people at Gimlet are making. It's called How to Save a Planet. It's about all the ways we can take care of this planet, our home planet, so we can keep living here for the long haul. I'm going to share one of their most recent episodes with you, and if you like this episode, go listen to the rest of them. There's a new one every week. This is How to Save a Planet. I'm Alex Bloomberg. And I'm Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. And this is the podcast where we look at what we need to do to address climate change and how to make those things happen. So Ayanna, you know that thing you just said? The tagline, you mean? Yeah, the tagline. This is the podcast where we look at what we need to do to address climate change and how to make those things happen. That word address. It's not like the sexiest verb, is it? I know. We've discussed this. We have discussed it. I wanted to use a different verb. Solve. Solve. You wanted solve. I wanted solve. But you pointed out there was a problem with the word solve. Yes, because it's not possible. And so, you know, as the Buzzkill scientist co-host, I am chimed in to say, it's already here. We can't actually make it go away, but we have still this range of possible futures still available to us. And if we work really hard and have great policy and listen to scientists and all do our part, we could have a better possible future than we would otherwise have, which is literally the worst tagline of all time. So we went with the dress. So the point is simply, you can't solve something if the effects are already here. And the fact that the effects of climate change are already here has become increasingly obvious over the last few months in the United States. We begin with those out of control wildfires scorching California. Laura slamming ashore as a monster category four. Fighters are scrambling to contain at least two dozen large fires in the middle of a historic heat wave. Seeking relief in the waves as temperatures soared up to 125 degrees Fahrenheit. That's how many homes were right in the path of this fire. So what's happening here in the United States, what's being talked about in those news clips, we know is consistent with climate change. A warming planet means more extreme weather. And here in the United States, that means more frequent heat waves, more intense wildfires, more damaging hurricanes, and more severe flooding. And of course, all of this is happening in the middle of a pandemic. And if you're sitting there thinking, oh, but this won't happen to me where I live. There has extreme weather like that. Please think again. Climate change means wild storms and other disasters are appearing in places where we've never seen them before. And so part of what we need to do to address climate change is to prepare for the changes that are already here. Address. So today on the show, how to prepare for a world with more extreme weather. Disasterologists, participant marshmallows, and a conversation with a woman who's lived through one of the most extreme weather events a person can face. So to understand what it's like to live in a world where extreme weather is increasingly common, we decided to start the show with someone who has lived through a major hurricane. We got in touch with Christine Nieves Rodriguez, who lived through Hurricane Maria and wrote an incredible essay about it. That essay, it so happens, is in an anthology that you co-edited, Ayanna. It is. Yes. Don't be shy. Let's tell the world. It's called "All We Can Save, Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis." It's got a ton of really incredible essays in it, and I'll just put a quick plug. You can pre-order it now. It comes out on September 22nd. 41 essays, 17 poems, some incredible original illustrations. And you've been working on this book basically since as long as I've known you, as we were sort of preparing this podcast, getting ready to launch it, you would be like pinging back and forth between sort of like doing interviews for the podcast. And then at one point, you and your co-editor had like all your manuscripts set up in a conference room and we're sort of laying everything out. It's been a real labor of love, and it's been really cool to see all the time and effort you guys have put into it. So I'm excited that the world will get to see it. Thanks, Alex. On behalf of my co-editor, Dr. Katherine Wilkinson and I, thank you. Well, it's also been a great source of story ideas for us, including this story we're about to tell featuring Christine Nieves Rodriguez. Christine's is the final essay in our anthology. It's the note we wanted to end the book on. And when we get to the end of this episode, I think you'll understand why. But let's start with introducing her. Today, Christine runs a climate change focus nonprofit in Puerto Rico. But back in 2017, she had just moved home to the island after many years away. She'd only been back for about nine months when she got word that a big hurricane was headed toward the island. Now, Christine had just lived through Hurricane Irma. Hurricanes were a part of life in Puerto Rico. So she thought, we can deal with this. The wisdom and the history of having experienced hurricanes before. It gives you a kind of like muscle memory, like you already have done this so much. You know what to do. But we had no idea what Hurricane Maria was going to be like. In Puerto Rico, people speak about pre and post Maria. I mean, Maria marks the beginning of an era. The night of the storm, Christine, her now husband, Luis and Luis's cousin, Omar, were in Luis's childhood home in Mariana, a community about an hour's drive from San Juan, Puerto Rico's capital. Mariana is a hilly region known for its lush forests. Christine, Luis and Omar had done all the usual things you do to prepare for a storm that filled the car with gas, got in cash, the normal checklist. And then they'd gone to bed. And around 11 or so, essentially, the power went out and we were awakened by just the sounds of the storm. What did it sound like? Oh my goodness, let's see. It was like a deafening, deafening sound. It was just like, it felt like I had a giant tornado on top of me, sucking every single thing in, but also simultaneously throwing everything against the door. It was just like, just like glass, like the sound of sharp objects just exploding. And then the volume of the wind got so loud inside the house. And I could almost feel the glass was essentially just flying around with the wind. And then there was this moment when my husband put his hand on the concrete wall and he felt the house shake. And that's when he said, holy, okay, this is, that's where he realized our lives might be in danger. We actually need, you know, plan B. Christine remembered a story she'd heard about a woman surviving a hurricane by locking herself in a closet. So she did a quick inventory of the rooms in her home. The smallest enclosed space turned out to be a tiny windowless bathroom on the lower level of the house. So Christine, Luis, and Omar grabbed the dog, a very unhappy cat, a bottle of wine, and a guitar and drums, and headed into the bathroom. And they played bonbon music to keep themselves calm and to drown out the sounds of the storm. For hours as night turned into early morning, they hunkered down in that bathroom. It felt like ages, but there was a moment when, even though everything was felt muffled because we're in there, it went a little bit quieter. It was still there, but a little bit quieter. And that's when Omar, he opened the door and we walked out and I mean, everything is flooded completely and there's stuff everywhere. And we walked through the hallway to the furthest bedroom that had a window overlooking our garden. And when we got there, it was already morning and I saw, I watched Luis cry, just watching him overlooking a landscape he couldn't recognize anymore. What had been lush green surroundings were essentially gone. Massive trees that had been there for so long were lying down in the mud. Everything he grew up with had just vanished, not even one leaf. It was just bare and confusing. And you could see things you couldn't see before. I mean, before we were completely enclosed around a barrier of trees. They were so tall and lush, you couldn't hear noises coming from anybody, from neighbors. And when we walked out, I realized we had three neighbors just down there. Sometimes I was like, "Whoa, there's people that have like right there." I could be like, "Hey, what you cooking today?" I had no idea, but the destruction was so much and we couldn't even comprehend the material loss we had gone through. It was the natural loss that hit us most because you're not used to that kind of, "Wow, this was so powerful that even nature couldn't stand, couldn't stand it, even the soil and the trees." The storm was over, but nothing was working. No radio, no cell service, no electricity. They were completely cut off. They did have some food in the fridge, and for a couple of days they ate that, cooking what they had over open fires outside. When the food they had started to rot, they supplemented their diets with coconuts from the downed palm trees all around them. But coconuts only go so far. They needed to find more food. There were several issues. To get to food, you need transportation, but then you couldn't get transportation because there was a shortage of gas. Oh, and then in order to get gas, you need a cash, but then there was also a communications warehouse down, so then ATMs weren't working. The roads were probably full of debris. The roads were, I mean, think about all the different, it was like boom, boom, boom, boom. You had four different obstacles before you get to that. Even if you made it through that gauntlet, you could mostly only buy dry goods because there was no electricity, which meant no refrigeration, and no cell service meant limited connection to the outside world, so they had no word on when power might be restored or when help might arrive. Christine, Luis, and Omar would see helicopters flying overhead, but the helicopters never stopped. And so after two weeks, they decided we need to drive into San Juan to get some information. On the way there, they finally ran into an aid truck. They gave us essentially six little bottles of water of like the small 10 ounce bottles, four cans of Vienna sausages, skittles, and like a nutrient grain. This is per family. Oh no. That was the food that we were given. There was this, that breaking moment. I think it was the skittles. I think when I saw the skittles, I was like, "You got to be f***ing kidding me." I was like, "This is, this is atrocious." This is actually not what we need most right now. That's when we realize, "Oh my God, they're going to wait for us to die before like, we're not, we're not going to just stand idle and wait for food. I mean, this is the food, this food is going to kill us." The hurricane was this moment of me seeing like, "Oh my God. The way we've created our lives, if one thing collapses, all of them collapse around it, and then your life turns into a survival game of just trying to, just trying to stay alive." It was like dystopian future. I felt like all of a sudden I'm in hunger games, but I didn't know how to hunt. So quick summary of the plot of Hunger Games, it centers around a young woman who lives in a dystopian future where children are forced to fight to the death. The last child standing wins food for their home community for a year. But then along the way, the main character learns that if we're operating as individuals, we end up destroying each other. If we come together, we survive. Christine and Louise, of course, also realized this. And in fact, a couple of days before this pivotal skittles moment, they had approached a big event center in the middle of town, which hosted these big festivals that Mariana was famous for. Christine and Louise had asked if they could use the facility to set up a community-wide kitchen. But the center organizers had said, "You're crazy. How can we cook when we don't have either food or electricity?" But as Christine and Louise were on their way back from that trip to San Juan, the one with the skittles, they came across a community mutual aid society. And what Christine saw there changed what she thought was possible. When I stopped there, what I saw, it really, it was the thing that I needed. And I just saw color. There were people with guitars, and there was, kids were coloring, and the teenagers were helping the grandmas and the abuelas. And the rules were so clearly stated. It wasn't rules. It was agreements. They didn't respect each other. And if you need food, right, you can get food in exchange for your time. You can come here and spend time with us, or you can bring whatever food you cannot cook and we'll cook it. And we'll add it to everything that we have, kind of the stone soup metaphor, if you've heard it, or the stone soup story. Or you can give money. And just the process, I just saw so much happening, and people were laughing. And when I saw people laughing, I was, it was like this moment of, it was like medicine for me. Christine took out her notebook and started writing down how this mutual aid society had organized things. And bolstered by this vision of what was possible, she went back to the event center in Mariana. And this time, the center said, yes, you can make a community kitchen here. So now they had a kitchen to use, but they still needed, you know, electricity and water and food. Christine had been making these occasional trips to San Juan, where there was still cell service. And going on Facebook Live to tell everyone she knew how bad things were in Puerto Rico, how supplies weren't getting to the people who needed them. And now with the center on board, she could reach out to her network on Facebook and say that if people had resources to offer, they could send them to this location. And the event center was actually already pinned on Google Maps. That's how big a deal it was as a community hub. But it was easy for people to send stuff there and food and supplies did start flowing in. Some church found out that we were doing this operation and that first week on Friday, we had this church drive over a huge truck unannounced. A truck comes in, people get out of their cars and make a human chain and start getting food out of this truck into our kitchen. We're just like, okay, well, let's keep doing this. We have food for another week, and that's how we operated. You never knew if you were going to have enough food, if food was going to go bad. Because of that, it was very immediate, okay, we need a generator. And I would, again, go to San Juan or find a way to get internet connection. And then someone would show up with a generator. We had no idea how we were going to be able to cook and do dishes every day. And then this one man would spend hours driving down the hill with a pickup truck and a cistern, filling up the cistern, driving up, and then spend hours waiting for the cistern to empty. And he would do that a couple of times a day for older people that were staying at home and for us. And the kitchen opened and when the word spread, the first day was 125 people, and then the second day were 200, and then by Friday we had over 300 people. They'd escaped the Hunger Games phase, but things were far from normal. In many ways, Puerto Rico has never fully gotten back to normal. It would still be six months before people in Mariana had water, and around nine months before they had electricity. During that time, the kitchen was essential to the survival of the people there. It ended up feeding people for almost a year and a half after the storm hit. So what's the main lesson from Christine's story? For me, it's that even if you do have a functional government, after a disaster there is a period of time where help just won't get to you. You're on your own. And the U.S. government's disaster response is beginning worse and worse, so the time you'll likely be on your own is getting longer. And so if you find yourself in Christine's position, and chances are getting higher that you will, what should you do to prepare? And how prepared is my co-host Alex? That's coming up after the break. Welcome back to How to Save a Planet. As we heard in the first part of the show, disasters are increasingly becoming a common part of life. And we wanted to know, given this reality, what could we do to be better prepared? And so we turned to the person on our team, best equipped to answer that question, Kendra Pierre-Louis, a senior reporter on the How to Save a Planet team. And Ayanna, you know how we have this channel where we share messages with each other. And for months, you know how Kendra has been posting these notices, starting way back in May about how hot and dry the weather is out west, and how it's perfect conditions for a really bad wildfire season? And how warm the water is in the Atlantic, and how that means that we're looking at a really bad hurricane season, possibly the worst on record. And I was like, if I'm honest, I was sort of like, why is she always posting those things? To me, because I was like, well, it might happen, but it hasn't happened yet. But then, of course, everything that she was posting about in May and June came exactly true. We are having one of the worst hurricane seasons in the Gulf. We are having one of the worst wildfire seasons out west. Everything that was sort of like, conditions predict X, X has exactly happened. Thermodynamics gets to every time. Exactly. Well, exactly. And so I talked to her about this, and we had this conversation. I was like, Kendra was like, you were telling the future. And in a very kind way, she was like, no, you dummy, I just remember the past. Like I have been a climate reporter for 10 years, and I now understand cause and effect. And I know that-- And this is the math. This is the math. If the water is really warm in May, it means we're going to have a bad hurricane season. And if it's really dry and hot out west, it means we're going to have a really bad fire season. That's just facts. It's just physics. It's not just that Kendra sees that these things are coming and just sits and waits for them to arrive. She actually has taken a lot of steps personally to prepare, as someone who gets text messages from her over the last year or two, seeing how she takes steps based on this information to make sure that she's not caught unprepared when these things actually happen. And as I'm sure you know, I know she's on a mission to make sure that other people aren't unprepared either. Yes. Including me. I set up this video call to try to get me to the prepared place where she is. And she's a longtime veteran reporter. She's worked for The New York Times. And so when she sits down to talk to you, she doesn't start with softball questions. She just dove right in. So do you have a disaster bag? As my son says, "Oh, what now?" A disaster bag or preparedness kit? I have a backpack that has pens in it usually. What would you do if there was a hurricane? If I had to leave in a rush, I have nothing to grab. I would just, I would get my phone and my wallet and I mean, my children first if they were here. I would get my family and then my phone and my wallet if I could, and then I would be out the door. But I don't have a bag. Is this what you're doing? You're calling me up to shame me. And wait, should I be, like, are you telling me that I need a disaster bag? Is this what the point of this call is? I think you need a disaster bag. You need something that you can grab relatively quickly. Do you want to see my disaster bag? I'm actually passing it lovingly like it's an animal. Yes, let me see it. I'm going to turn it around so I can actually answer it. I swear, it's not as heavy as I'm making it sound. How heavy is it? It's, like, 45 pounds. So inside, there's just stuff that you need to last a while, you know, so a spare outfit, a spare pair of glasses because I have terrible vision, toiletries, my passport as a backup ID. In case I need to flee the country. So you, if you put yourself in a position where you're using this bag, what is happening all around you? Like, describe the scene right now if this bag, if you need to go get this bag. I'm generally imagining a scenario where it's going to be kind of a pretty epic hurricane and it's going to happen during COVID. If this was a non-COVID year, I would pack this bag differently. And I have some time to get out, but not a ton of time to get out. And I need to go someplace where I can socially isolate, right? So, like, I might head up to my friends in Vermont or I might go west, depending on whether or not I have access to a vehicle. But I can't just, like, show up and turn up in their house and hang out in their living room, right? Because, normally, that's what you would do. But during COVID, that's not a great thing to do. So I'm assuming that if I have to evacuate, I can't just crash on a friend's couch, but maybe I can set up a tent on their front lawn. So I pack to a tent, a sleeping bag, and perhaps, most importantly, you're some cash. How much emergency cat, if it's not too personal, a question? I can count at 50, 70, 90, 110, 130, 150, 170, 180. I'm down to 188 because I kept rating it during COVID for takeout money because I wasn't going to the ATMs. I kind of want to have 1,000, which it sounds obscene, but, like, the thing that I think about a lot is, like, when I lived in New York City during Sandy, I lived in an area that wasn't super heavily affected by Sandy, but the ATMs stopped working. Right. Because they literally ran out of money. It wasn't even that we didn't have the other issues, but the banks weren't refilling them. And so, like, getting the cash when I couldn't get the cash just seems to make the most sense. Right. And then I have food. And what do you have in there? What kind of food? Marshmallows for a treat. It's all marshmallows. The entire bag is marshmallows. Not just marshmallows, cinnamon churro marshmallows. These are, like, the golden Cadillac of marshmallows. Just because you're leaving Brooklyn doesn't mean you have to leave Brooklyn. Cinnamon. I technically live in Queens. Alex, I resent that comment. People in Queens know what a marshmallow is like. We have better food than Brooklyn for the record, and I will stand by that. Clearly. Judging by your go-bag. Patagonia salmon. Oh, my God. This is the most artisanal go-bag I've ever seen. How many days of food do you have? So the official recommendation for ready.gov is 72 hours. I have about a week's worth of food. 10 days. What else you got? So the official recommendations are that you're supposed to have 72 hours worth of water with you, but, like, how do you carry 72 hours worth of water? So instead, I have three sort of, this pains me as a climate reporter. It pains me. Three bottles of, like, what are they, 16.9 fluid ounces of water. Okay. But then I also packed my, there are iodine drops in there that purifies water, and then I have a water filter that's really good at purifying water, and so I can refill on the go. Got it. Okay. And then I have fresh water, but, you know, that's what the Bronx River is for. And then stuff to cook. So this is a camp pot, a camp cup, a camp stove. You attach it to propane, and it sits on top. And then the pot sits right there. But yeah. That is a fossil fuel. It is. I'm sorry. That's all right. But what I have on the other side, that is not a fossil fuel, is a solar panel. Oh. So I can charge my phone. Oh my God. Does that really work? Yeah. That's so cool. That's amazing. You literally have a solar panel in your go bag. How long does it take to charge your phone with a solar panel? Like an hour or so to get it fully charged. It does depend on how sunny it is, but you can use it while it's charging, so you don't have to get it fully charged. That is amazing. So the scenario is the storm is here. How much time do you normally have to evacuate? Yeah. So it depends on how good the storm tracking has been. One of the things that's been happening because of climate change is that there's an increasing number of storms where they get way more intense at the last minute. So they thought it was a category one or category two, and then it intensifies at the last minute and becomes a category three, four, or five. So that predictive capacity has gone down because the storms are behaving so much differently than they have traditionally. But the other thing to remember is that a category of a storm, one, two, three, is just the wind speed. It's not the water, and water is the deadliest part of a hurricane. So a category five matters only in the sense that your property probably won't withstand it. You need to leave because your property can't withstand it, but generally, the truism is run from water, hide from wind. How does having this bag make you feel? Better. It just makes me feel a little bit more in control. Probably at a time when we're feeling widely not in control. Just knowing that if I have to leave, I can leave, and I'll have the things that I need pretty quickly makes me feel better. There are some things that I probably should add. I don't have any coffee in there yet, which is a problem because I'm addicted to coffee. That would be the first thing I'd put in, literally coffee, coffee, then my children's social security cards. This is good. This is making me want to do it. I have gone from being a person who didn't want to have a to-go bag because I don't know, for all the emotional reasons that people don't prepare go bags, they don't like living in the world where they're a disaster refugee to think it through. But somehow, talking with you about it turns it from this thing that on some sort of emotional gut level I just don't want to think about to something that I'm just sort of like, it's a cool, interesting puzzle. What would I want to bring? If I had to bring something, what would I put in this bag? It turns it from something that feels like a depressing, I don't know, thing to think about to a mental video game that you're trying to win. Yeah, I think for me, thinking of it very much in the context of camping has made it a lot easier for me with a little bit of zombie horror flick thrown in. Right. If it was Walking Dead. What kind of to-go-bag-what-I-want-if-Walking-Dead-was-real? In that case, I should probably pack my hatchet. Right, exactly. So that was very illuminating to listen to this conversation between the two of you. Thank you. We're all now three of us together, me, you, Ayanna, and you, Kendra. Well, my main takeaway is that Kendra is extremely polite and let you get away with saying to-go-bag instead of go-bag as if this is like take out Chinese food as opposed to like a survival kit. I kept calling it a to-go-bag, didn't I? To be clear, if it was to go, I would be completely covered. I would have nothing to worry about. I'd like a to-go-bag. Could you just like express delivery? I'll give you an extra tip, yeah, some soy sauce, double fortune cookies. That's great. Go-bag, note it. So are you going to make one? I am going to make one. I'm going to make one and I'm going to make it a big project with my family. Oh, that's fun. Well, I'm really glad you're going to make a go-bag. And it's something I've been meaning to do also. The fact that you guys are talking about making your go-bags is great because one of the things that I learned is that you shouldn't buy a pre-made preparedness kit or go-bag because the thinking through of the process of making one is almost as important as the bag itself. So you're thinking about like what circumstance you'd use the bag under and what your contingency plans would be. And you don't get that if you just go on Amazon and buy like a military rations and like an emergency blanket. So besides making the go-bag, though, is there anything else that we should be thinking about? So yeah, there is one other really important thing to mention. I learned about it from Samantha Montano. She's an assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. But she tends to call herself a disasterologist. And she's like definitely, yeah, pack a go-bag, it's a good thing, but that like your go-bag is your first step. Yeah. So it's a lesson that Christine learned in Puerto Rico in going through Hurricane Maria. Right. The Hunger Games lesson, that it's harder to survive on your own. Yes. So Dr. Samantha Montano, the disasterologist, she says research backs it up. There's like a saying in disaster research that one of the best things you can do to prepare for disaster is to bring your neighbors a basket of muffins. But what if I hate my neighbors? That's not good. You know what, making amends with your neighbor might be a good thing to do. It's kind of a joke, but it's getting at this really important point about social networks and how social networks can be leveraged during times of disaster. For example, after an earthquake or a windstorm like the one that happened in Iowa, it's your family or your neighbors that are going to be the first ones on scene to dig you out. And that extends to your online networks too. I don't know if you all were paying attention during Harvey in 2017. Harvey was this incredibly slow-moving storm that just like Hurricane Maria was incredibly wet. It dumped something like 127 billion tons of water on Texas. It just wouldn't stop raining. And so these people who thought they'd like survived the hurricane and did it stuck in their homes as the water was just slowly like going higher and higher and higher. And they didn't order evacuations and emergency 911 was overwhelmed. And so there were all of these sort of like informal community groups that took over and they were using social media as a huge part of that. So people would tweet like, I'm at this location and the water is up to my third floor. I'm at this location and I'm on my roof. Can you come get me? And then all of these like the Cajun Navy is one group. All of these volunteer rescuers really informally were going out and rescuing people. There was an app that you could use where like people could act as impromptu dispatchers from really far away to kind of coordinate efforts because official emergency management channels were just so overwhelmed that that was the only way people could get help. So your disaster bag is not enough in this context for sure, right? No. I mean, we joked that your Twitter following actually might save your life, which is a really grim thing to think about. But yeah. Right. So you have to think about yourself and just your individual needs, what you need in your individual bag, but also about who is around you. Your community. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a huge part because, you know, one of the biggest questions that often happens with hurricanes in particular is why don't people evacuate? And a main reason why people don't evacuate is because they don't own a car. So if you don't own a car or if you have a car and you can't afford to put gas in it or you have nowhere to go because you can't afford a hotel room, you're less likely to evacuate. Or you don't have people nearby to stay with or all your people are also evacuating because they're your neighbors. So if you do want a car, you sort of want to find out the people around you who don't. And if you don't have a car, you want to find out the people around you who do. And who has space in their car, right? Because, you know, Alex, you have a family. That's right. If there's one more person. Yeah. I would happily sit in the backseat in the middle between your two kids. They're very cool. And what strikes me as we talk about this, Kendra, is that a lot of times what predicts how bad the disaster is, is how prepared people are for it. It's less about how bad the actual weather is and more about just sort of how prepared people were and how they acted in response to it. Yeah. That's why a lot of disaster experts like Dr. Manteno avoid the term natural disaster. Avoid the term natural disaster entirely? Yeah. They like to say natural hazard if you're talking about a hurricane or tornado, but they don't like the term natural disaster because it kind of skips past the fact that humans are kind of responsible based on where we build our homes or our behaviors into turning that into a disaster. If a hurricane hits a beach that nobody lives on, it's just weather. It doesn't matter how big or catastrophic that storm is. It's just weather. Right. The thing that makes the nature the disaster is human beings and where we've built and what we're doing there. Right. And so if we accept that these natural hazards are increasingly a part of our lives, then we need to organize our lives around them. And that brings us back to Christine Nieves Rodriguez in Puerto Rico. I promised we'd come back to her at the end of this episode and that's because of the importance of what she's doing now. Christine is leading her community in preparing for future extreme weather events so that they won't always mean extreme disaster. After experiencing the completely insufficient government response to Hurricane Maria, they started building their own disaster response plan beginning with a map of the area's resources. We said, well, what we need to do is we need to know where everyone lives that is sort of more vulnerable. So that's when we started creating a, essentially a community emergency mapping. I remember every single party or festival, like after the hurricane, every single, every time there was something that would bring people together, we had a huge map on top of several tables and people would come over with little flags that had different information identified. And they would say, okay, this road has a very, it's, it's, you know, very dangerous because it floods or like this person needs additional help, but then also know where are the things that were assets, like whose house has solar energy or where are the kitchens or where are the bodies of water. With this plan, we could go to the agencies and say, this is how you do your job in relationship to us. This is what we need. Don't bring us bottled water because we have water filtering towers here. If you bring water, we'll just create waste for us. What we need is X, Y or Z. A friend, a reporter who came over early on and started asking me questions, you know, what were we envisioning out of this? And not knowing what I was saying, because honestly, there's no way I could have known. I said, this is not a disaster relief or disaster response operation. This is a community redesigning, rebuilding, redeveloping on its own terms, and we can do this, we can build differently. Right now, there are not nearly as many people as there should be thinking about how to build differently. There are relatively few kinders and Christians who know they have to prepare for what will happen in the future because of what they see now. And unfortunately, there are lots of people like me pretending, like maybe physics won't work this time, that hotter oceans won't make more hurricanes, melting ice caps won't raise sea levels and hotter, drier climates won't lead to more wildfires. So I'm calling on those of us like me and me, we should stop doing this and instead we should prepare for the world that we already know is here. Yeah, it's a sobering new reality that we're living in. And to prepare for this brave new world, we have some concrete recommendations for you, what you can do as an individual, for your family, and with your community. And just one note, there's a big part of this equation that we haven't talked about in this episode, which is what kind of disaster preparedness should be happening on an even higher level, the state or the federal level. And of course, there is a lot that should be happening at those levels that a lot of smart people feel like is not happening. We are definitely going to be talking about that in future episodes of How to Save a Planet. For now, here are recommendations for you and your community from our very own in-house disaster expert Kendra P.R. Lewis. Thanks, Alex. So everything I'm going to say will be in the episode notes. One of the first things you can do is pack a go bag. If you go to ready.gov/kit, they will have tips I want to pack. But remember that it's a guide and not an all-encompassing list, so there are things on there that you may not need, so don't pack them. And there are things that aren't on there that you might need. So it's really about thinking through what you will need in a disaster, which is why, according to Dr. Montano, it is so important to build your own disaster bag rather than sort of buying one of those pre-built preparedness kits you can find online. It's not just what you put in the bag that matters, but the whole process and thinking through it and the contingency plans that you develop while building that bag. Speaking of contingency plans, that's the second thing you can do. You should check out ready.gov/plan for some help in thinking through your disaster preparedness plans. And if you have children, ready.gov/kids helps you incorporate your whole family into your preparation. And that's really important because kids will be going through these disasters too. Once you have your go bag and your plan, you should also check out your home. Is your home prepared for the hazard that it's likely to face? If you're in fire country, have you removed shrubs and plants to create defensible space so firefighters are able to protect your home? If you're in an area that's prone to flooding, have you installed sewer backflow valves to make sure that during a flood event, the sewer doesn't backflow into your home? And we are only as strong as our community. Is there something that you can do to help make your church or your community center more prepared? FEMA actually is an entire guide for protecting your congregation. And if you want to go even further, consider getting community emergency response team or SIRT training. Really hold your local government sort of accountable for helping you through a disaster. All of these details will be on our website and in our newsletter. So sign up at gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet. Thank you, Kendra. And one more reminder/plug. You can check out Christine's essay in the book that my co-host Ayanna co-edited called All We Can Save. It is available for pre-order right now. Christine's essay is called Community is Our Best Chance. And if you get that book, there's a special bonus. Kendra Pierre-Lewis also has an essay in that book. It's called Wakanda Doesn't Have Suburbs. And when I read it, I remember thinking like this essay sort of perfectly encapsulates the ethos of this entire podcast, what we're trying to do here. It's really fantastic. And so check out the book. Over 40 essays. It is well worth your time. Thanks, Alex. And let's kick it back to Kendra to take us home with the credits. How to Save a Planet is a Spotify original podcast and Gimlet production. You can follow us @howtosaveaplanet with the number two on Twitter and Instagram and email us at [email protected]. How to Save a Planet is hosted by Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Bloomberg. Our reporters and producers are Rachel Waldhaus, Anna Ladd, and me, Kendra Pierre-Lewis. Our senior producer is Lauren Silverman. Our editor is Caitlyn Kenney. Sound design, mixing, and original music by Emma Munger with additional music by Bobby Lord and Katherine Anderson. Our fact checker this episode is Claudia Guyb. And thanks for listening. We're off next week, but we'll see you the week after.