Helene, climate disasters, and what we owe to each other

Appalachia, distraught.

If you’re able, please consider donating to one of these orgs/resources:

• BeLoved Asheville

• North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund

• Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

• Poder Emma & La Milpa

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My home state is in distress. The Category 4 Hurricane Helene stormed through Appalachia late last week, and has left a jaw-dropping amount of damage in its wake. Entire towns are gone. Towns that I’ve been to, spent nights in, found a lot of peace and solace in—completely washed away. Homes and animals and people lost forever. I don’t know where to put this anguish. People will ask me how we’re doing, I express rueful gratitude for being in a safe part of the state, and then I suddenly realize I’ve been talking about the destruction of a region two hours from where I grew up and three hours from where I live for five uninterrupted minutes. My grief just leaks out of me.

Friends text me whenever they pass Marion, NC on I-40. The city suffered a massive landslide in last week’s storm.

It’s easy, I think, to feel helpless. Like whatever money or goods I donate is nothing in the face of the massive structures and recurring policy decisions that brought us to this highly avoidable place. Helplessness and grief are miserable things to sit with. You can try to ignore them, which doesn’t work. You can try to help, which does help, even if it feels insufficient. Or, apparently, you can be an absolute ghoul. Because why respond to a climate disaster with human empathy when you can rationalize people’s suffering away instead?

There are some bullshit refrains I hear whenever we get shellacked by yet another 100-year storm (those are happening biennially at this point). One of my faves¹: you should have evacuated. First of all: evacuate to where, Greg? And with what money? Even if you think evacuating is as easy as hopping in a car and driving to a motel outside the cone of danger, there are half a dozen inaccessible things in that description alone. Having a car; you and your family all being mobile; having enough money to pay—indefinitely!—for lodging on top of what you’re already paying for housing - all of those are massive privileges that you can’t assume everyone has. And, seriously: when was the last time you evacuated because of danger on the news? For better or worse (the answer is worse), one tends to be used to whatever dangers are endemic to one’s home. Here in hurricane country, we’re used to hunkering down in a big storm and coming through on the other side, tore up plenty but holding together. What we aren’t used to is Category 1 hurricanes leveling up to Category 4 overnight and hitting our mountains harder than anything else. This damage is unprecedented, meaning there’s no way any warning we heard on Wednesday could have prepared us to see chunks of I-40 washing away on Friday.

Photo from the NCDOT.

The cousin of “you should have evacuated” is “you shouldn’t have lived there,” which is almost hilarious. I see that one most often in response to videos of houses on the Outer Banks falling into the ocean. “You shouldn’t build on barrier islands,” tsk the replies, like that’s the real issue here. Like everyone does the same cost-benefit analysis of all the places they could live, so everyone should chose the most logical locations. If we all based our housing decisions on there never being any natural disasters, let alone climate disasters, nobody would live anywhere besides, like, Montana.² You don’t sound sage when you talk like this. In fact, all I can hear is our nightmare of an erstwhile president tee-heeing about new oceanfront property.

drunkenbarman

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And, again, this feels like childish denial that anything terrible could ever happen to you. But we are, all of us, extremely and increasingly vulnerable. This sentence keeps occurring to me lately: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” It may well seem unthinkable to you that you’ll get anything but unseasonably warm winters from here on out. It seemed unthinkable that Asheville, NC, with an elevation of 2,134ft and nearly 300 miles from the ocean, would be underwater.

Like I said, I hate both of those responses. But the one that really turns my stomach is: this is what you voted for. This one is not even pretending to not delight in people’s misery. Let’s even accept this faulty premise that everyone living in a red state is a climate denier. We’ll ignore things like gerrymandering and voter suppression and accept that premise. So these people deserve to die?? This feels good to say? And if we rightfully reject that premise and instead acknowledge that the barely constitutional state government has been wantonly cutting taxes, spending, and regulations for 14 straight years while also drawing itself a veto-proof supermajority: then what? Does your sense of cultural superiority make you feel safe? It honestly reads to me as a clumsy attempt to reframe misanthropy and snobbishness as some kind of moral stance. As though there’s any morality in shrugging when communities are destroyed.

This kind of refusal to grant people any kind of humanity feels of a piece with this sad trend I’ve been seeing online. People bragging about having no friends, cutting people off for mistakes or miscommunications, and generally choosing isolation over connection. Connection demands mess and pain and effort, and I don’t like any of those things, so I can fully understand how opting out can feel not only viable but wise. We’re trying to reframe our loneliness as a moral stance, as opposed to something that feels simultaneously beyond our control and yet deeply personal. But that’s folly, y’all. Denying connection won’t protect you when pain inevitably finds you. Denying connection, refusing to see how my fate is inextricably and beautifully bound up in yours, is at the heart of what brought us to this place of near-constant peril. Connection is the only way to get us through the peril. Community is the only place I can put my hope and imagination for something better.

seedingsovereignty

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1. Meaning, I hate it and whoever says it.

2. Montanans, sound off in the comments if y’all got weather I don’t know about.