Disaster Response

When the levees broke in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the images of destruction and desperation launched a national conversation about disasters, inequality and climate change. Much of the conversation has focused on how to better prepare communities for future disasters

In crisis, a window of opportunity is thrown open. Despite everything else going wrong, despite grief and loss,
despite the hands that are paid to enforce law and order being beyond reach, and despite lacking survival basics, we happen upon a chance to prove to ourselves and each other that we’re human.

The recovery work in Houston is far from over, but in the last six months, we've learned a heck of a lot.

There’s a sign still hanging on the front door of the house on West Street where West Street Recovery (WSR) launched a week of boat rescues from as Hurricane Harvey passed over Houston.

The storms are coming. The water is rising in some places and running empty in others. The refugee situation now is just a glimpse at what it very well may become once we see the results of the seeds we have sown of wetlands loss, climate change, urbanization, and fossil fuel extraction.

The object of this booklet is to teach the fundamental skills of rescue work.

A Guide to Resilience for the New ‘20s

Building resilience: prepare to prevent and manage impacts of extreme climate events.

The purpose of this course is to move you beyond yourself and beyond the thinking that we all have: that the organized, institutional world as we know it will continue to exist.

By thinking about both the process and product of resilience design,
we can help shift resilience design efforts to be more effective for
marginalized communities on the front lines of climate change.

Pensando sobre ambos el proceso y el producto del diseño resiliente,
podemos ayudar a cambiar los esfuerzos de diseño resiliente para ser
más eficaces para las comunidades marginadas al frente del cambio
climático.

“It was like an atomic bomb went off,” says a local Boricua (as people born in Puerto Rico are often called) about the view of the mountains the day after Maria passed. “Every branch and every tree was torn apart and broken, and scattered everywhere. Every green area was gray and brown.”

Welcome to hurricane season in Louisiana! We know this time of year is especially stressful, so we work hard to make this annual Imagine Water Works: Hurricane Season Guide as trauma-informed, practical, and accurate as possible.

Kahlil Abu Yahia writes about climate justice and mutual aid in Gaza. His anti-colonial friends and comrades in Israel write memorials keeping Kahlil's memory and vision alive.

We share these lessons, knowing that there are many like us: individuals, collectives, organizations, networks, and movements that lovingly, boldly do the work of revolution, striving to ground that work in an ethic of care and mutual aid. Disasters may soon become the new normal. There will be many times on the paths ahead of us when there aren’t easy answers. But we want to share with you what we gleaned from our time doing this work, in hopes that you can build off of the successes and avoid the mistakes of previous iterations of this type of organizing.

This is a difficult time, and most of us are under enormous pressure. We might be experiencing isolation, illness, income loss, fear for loved ones, loss of loved ones, anxiety, and many other painful circumstances. A mad map is a guide we can make for ourselves, usually best worked on in moments were we are feeling more centered or having more capacity, that we can turn to in moments where things go sideways or we feel ourselves slipping into more difficult states.

In mid-November 2018, smoke from the hellfires of so-called California drifted to my home base, socalled Michigan, as humans and nonhumans on the West Coast struggled to breath, struggled not to die from the latest “historic” new normal of capital/state-fueled climate catastrophe.

COVID-19/Coronavirus es un virus contagioso que puede ser diseminado
rápidamente por personas que no saben si son portadoras. La infección puede amenazar la vida, especialmente en personas ancianas o inmunodeprimidas.

In times of unnatural disaster, prisoners caged within institutions in storm paths and mandatory evacuation zones are regularly abandoned to ‘shelter in place’ where they endure horrendous and dangerous conditions. Simultaneously, inmate labor is exploited by the state and corporations alike and prisoners are routinely put on the frontlines of climate catastrophes to face flames and floodwaters alike for next to nothing per day.

Natural disasters have a way of clarifying things. They sweep away once-sturdy delusions, to reveal old treasures and scars.

Ready Together is an invitation to you to get together with your neighbors to prepare for whatever comes your way. Along with this Emergency Preparedness Handbook, ReadyTogether.Net provides additional news and resources.

This resource binder was created for CAMBU (Las Marias, PR) in anticipation of presenting a workshop there that I put together (included in this binder). I felt that it would be important to help equip this CAM with some basic tools and resources that can help guide volunteers, teachers and parents in their work with youth.

Our ability to meaningfully respond during times of disaster begins at home with us, rippling out into the radiating circles of support we create across our neighborhoods and communities.

This zine is a quick compilation of the following resources accessible online to support mutual aid-based projects providing services for their communities amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 30 years ago leading scientists from NASA began warning policymakers that global temperatures were warming as a result of the emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gasses.

In a time of climate catastrophe, living in New Orleans means being constantly aware of our tenuous relationship with the environment.

What lies in your hands is a preliminary guide to inhabiting the catastrophe of the present, to laying out a strategy for the hurricanes to come, and to snatching the future from the jaws of defeat. There are many roads partisan, but only one warpath.

Post-civilization theory posits that while civilization is, at its root, unsustainable and undesirable, the way we must move is forward, not backwards. This zine collects together six essays written by Margaret Killjoy that first appeared in the magazine Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic between 2010-2011.

This guide introduces the vision and model of a “resilience hub” – a space where people can take more pride in their neighborhood, learn new skills together, provide for basic needs, prepare for disruptions, and build a more inclusive and joyful community.

Sometimes, it’s only through disasters that we unearth a power within that
can’t be measured or defined. Sometimes darkness is our candle. Sometimes our wounds illuminate our path. And sometimes healing happens, in roundabout ways, all around and deep inside us.

The disasters of the past year have filled our hearts and headlines with devastation, grief, and profound shock. We send our deepest love, compassion, and strength to those around the world who are now living in the aftermath of these disasters – rebuilding a sense of home, mourning lost ones, and making sense of their new reality.

Radical solidarity through Covid-19 Community mobilizations for mutual aid and medical solidarity have formed in as many spaces as the new coronavirus (Covid-19) has spread.

All the things that you needed to know that you never wanted to know. A survivor's survival guide.