Category Archives: Climate

Sobering Portrait of a Fiery Future

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Summarizing the major points from a densely factual book like Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future, by Edward Struzik (Island Press, 2018), is about as challenging as understanding precisely what is happening in the midst of a rapidly moving massive wildfire. While California is not the focus of Struzik’s book, I might note that confronting such fires in November, such as we have seen on the news in recent weeks, ought to prod more interest in the recent National Climate Assessment and similar climate change science. The wildfire season most decidedly used to be shorter in California, a point Gov. Jerry Brown has made repeatedly. Put more bluntly, it is time to drop the political knee-jerk reactions and study the findings.

Horse Fire at Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2016. Photo from Wikipedia

In Firestorm, Struzik takes us north, much farther north. He starts his story by focusing on the utterly hellish nightmare of the May 2016 scene surrounding Fort McMurray, Alberta, during what became known as the Horse Fire, or among firefighters simply as “The Beast.” People with moderately long news memories may recall following this fire for several days and nights on television, as the fire swept through an area dominated by oil sands development, the heart of Canada’s energy sector. As Struzik notes, megafires (defined as exceeding 100,000 acres in size) are nothing new or unusual in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska. Three fires bigger than The Beast had occurred in Canada since 1950.

Not so long ago in human history, however, the consequences would have seemed less catastrophic because of the lack of large human settlements in the area, which is not to say that such fires would not have affected native villages and smaller towns. But energy development has brought urban development, and Fort McMurray in 2016 was a city of 88,000 people. As the wildfire attacked and surged through the area, generating massive confusion, it destroyed an estimated 2,800 homes and buildings, burned nearly 1.5 million acres, and produced nearly $9 billion in total losses, including predicted insurance losses of $3.77 billion. The book does not state whether these are U.S. or Canadian dollars (worth about 10 percent less), but I am assuming U.S. given its publication in the states. Either way, it is a massive impact. It is certainly a staggering economic impact on a province like Alberta, home to such facilities as the Imperial Oil plant, which according to Struzik produces 220,000 barrels per day of the bitumen that helps fuel Canadian energy exports.

Much of Struzik’s book, which often starts chapters with quotes from Dante’s Inferno, tours us through the ground-level experience of the fire in and around Fort McMurray in early May 2016. We follow police who worry about family members evacuating, police who work door to door warning people to evacuate, hospital workers preparing for incoming casualties, and highways filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic including people in SUVs abandoning their vehicles in ditches after running out of gas, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) ensuring that such people found alternative rides to safe destinations. Air tankers fly low over the fire to drop their loads of retardant, and helicopters scoop water from nearby lakes in 180-gallon buckets to disperse as strategically as possible. Wildfire response is no less sophisticated or expensive than in the U.S., although Struzik notes some Canadian pride in protecting firefighter safety and eschewing the “hotshot” approach that can lead to heroic but tragic deaths. He paints a realistic but deeply troubling portrait of the human elements of confronting a massive wildfire.

RCMP responding to wildfire in northern British Columbia. Photo from RCMP website

If such fires in the far north are not new, then what, if anything, is the impact of climate change? As has been pointed out many times, it is folly to link any one event directly to climate change, tempting though it may be for many people. The reality is more profound and concerning. Since the 1970s, in Canada, the area burned has doubled, with the prediction that it may double again by mid-century and possibly triple by 2100. In short, the connection to climate change is not any one fire, a natural phenomenon in a fire-adapted environment, but in increased frequency.

Ashes and devastation after the fire at Fort McMurray. From RCMP website

As California has learned, that frequency can also be abetted by a longer fire season, itself a product of climate change. Struzik explains the fire triangle, a combination of heat, dryness or low humidity, and oxygen. On May 3, 2016, the temperature around Fort McMurray was 91°F. The humidity was only 13 percent. For those unfamiliar with the boreal forest, it may be surprising to learn that such temperatures are not entirely unusual in the summer, even in Alaska, with much longer days than in southern latitudes, just as winter brings deeper freezes and very short days. It is a climate of extremes. But climate change is warming the far north faster than almost anywhere else, producing the loss of polar ice caps and the melting of glaciers. Montana, Struzik says, may see average temperatures rise by 5° F., and Montana has major wildfire issues already. Melting ice caps and glaciers are factors in sea level rise, which in turn affects major cities like New York and Miami much farther south, but Struzik notes that we are all connected in other ways to the fate of the northern forest. In a major wildfire like that in Alberta, air quality has been shown to suffer in places like Chicago because of the upper atmospheric drift of ashes and pollution. Northern Alberta may seem a world away, but it will never be distant enough to have no impact below the border.

Personally, I find the science behind all this intriguing, at all levels. Most people, for instance, may not know the origin of the term “firestorm,” which grew out of the cataclysmic 1871 wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which took more than 1,500 lives, the deadliest in American history. The term refers to the behavior of lightning storms in pyrocumulonimbus clouds (aka pyroCBs), which involve an updraft “that sucks smoke, ash, burning materials, and water vapor” high into the sky. As these cool, they perform like classic thunder clouds. But a chemical reaction forestalls any rainfall, allowing the lightning strikes to stoke and expand the fire. The phenomenon remains a mystery and subject of intense study for meteorologists. It is also obviously terrifying and deadly for those beneath it.

Ultimately, in such a book, the question is what we are going to do about the problem. Both the U.S. and Canada have struggled to find appropriate ways to fund wildfire response and suppression, although it is clear also that more money needs to be directed to mitigation and preparation. Firefighting by itself is a completely futile approach. Struzik emphasizes a need in both nations to invest more in scientific research and in developing a “holistic plan” to deal with wildfires when they occur. The price of not developing a better approach, he says, includes the loss of clean water, of birds and animals who will lose their habitat as the problem intensifies, and the loss of jobs afforded by the forest environment. That research must inevitably account for the impacts of humanly generated climate change in coming decades, a task that should never be underestimated because, as one scientist notes in Struzik’s last chapter, keeping up with climate literature is like “drinking from a fire hose,” a curious metaphor in light of the problem. We must also be realistic. Nature has always provided for natural recovery because fire is a natural phenomenon, but it is the pattern of recovery that may change significantly in a changing natural environment.

Jim Schwab

Aligning Planning and Public Health

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Just nine days ago, on November 15, I stood in front of two successive audiences of long-term health care practitioners to present workshops at a conference in Wisconsin Dells discussing, of all things, “Fundamentals of Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery.” Where, some might ask, is the nexus between these two subjects?

Patients who survived evacuations from New York City area hospitals, six in the city itself and one just outside, during Hurricane Sandy would know. People with disabilities, the elderly, the ill are especially vulnerable during disasters, and moving them out of harm’s way is no picnic. They cannot just grab the keys to their cars and drive out of town ahead of the storm. Evacuating them is a major undertaking that must be well-planned.

And so, our fields of expertise converged. I discussed what I knew from urban planning, but I invited input from their experiences in handling such situations. Some had not yet experienced a disaster, but others had, and their numbers in the health care field are growing, as doctors and nurses find clinics and hospitals impacted by wildfires in California, and hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes elsewhere. Mine was not the only presentation related to such concerns. The keynote by Desiree Matel-Anderson, founder of the Field Innovation Team and a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) advisor, detailed personal interactions with disasters. Others focused on emergency management. The audience needed to know about new regulations and laws, such as those promulgated in 2016 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) or the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (DRRA), passed in October as a

Photo by Kristina Peterson

rider on the FAA Reauthorization Act. DRRA outlines new responsibilities for the FEMA administrator in providing training to local officials and utility providers in planning for emergencies for nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals, and for the Federal Highway Administration regarding evacuations for these facilities, prisons, and certain classes ofdisadvantaged persons. I told the nurses and administrators in my audience they needed to prepare for these new responsibilities. There seems to be a growing conviction in Congress and federal agencies that health care institutions need to be better prepared to protect their patients during disasters. In the light of events dating back to Hurricane Katrina, that does not seem unreasonable.

To some extent, I believe it is the growing engagement of the urban planning profession with natural hazards that is facilitating a re-engagement of the profession with public health practitioners. I say “re-engagement” because the two fields grew up together, at least in North America. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, industrializing, rapidly growing American cities were often festering incubators for diseases because of pollution, overcrowding, and fire and other hazards. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 laid the groundwork for major reforms related to building codes, helping to create the largely masonry-based architecture now predominant in the city. Activists like Jane Addams inveighed against oppressive health conditions for the working class. There was an urgent need for both better planning and public health measures that would prevent the spread of disease, and the two professions matured accordingly. At the same time, civil engineers took growing responsibility for developing the sanitary infrastructure cities needed, such as sewer treatment systems and effective drainage, a topic I addressed in a keynote in September 2015 in Boston for the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute (COPRI) annual conference. All three professions grew up in the same cradle, addressing urgent societal needs for health care, better urban design, and public sanitation.

Scene on the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy.

All of this is a long, but I think crucial, introduction to a book by Michael R. Greenberg and Dona Schneider, Urban Planning & Public Health: A Critical Partnership, published by APHA Press. I had planned to review it earlier, but recent events expanded the context for its importance. Greenberg, a long-time planning colleague and professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, previously authored Protecting Seniors Against Environmental Disasters (Routledge, 2014), a book inspired in part by his own experience with elderly parents during Hurricane Sandy. He is certainly familiar with the territory. Schneider, also at Rutgers, brings the perspective of a public health expert.

The book reads mostly like a textbook and thus may be of most valuable to instructors willing to acquaint students in both fields with their organic relationship to each other and why the partnership is important today. Admittedly, the problems are not the same. We no longer face the scourge of tuberculosis, and smokestacks no longer belch particulates as freely as they once did. The water is less polluted. But our society is creating other problems of a momentous nature, including climate change and the resulting increased severity of weather-related disasters. Under the Trump administration and various less environmentally friendly state administrations, there have been concerted efforts to retreat from previous initiatives aimed to clear the skies and foster environmental justice. It is thus imperative that we have trained, knowledgeable, and articulate professionals who can advocate for the public interest when powerful political forces push in other directions.

The book makes powerful arguments in this context for the salience of a collaborative assault on the threats posed to our communities by natural hazards, using the tools of both public health and planning to analyze the threats and identify meaningful solutions. Not everything needs to happen at a macro level, either; in fact, planners and public health officials often are at their best in examining trends at the neighborhood and community level to find very geographically specific solutions to localized but persistent problems.

The authors are methodical, laying a groundwork in the first three chapters for understanding the building blocks of the two professions and their integral relationships. One can easily detect the influence of Greenberg’s long and distinguished career on both a practical and theoretical level as he discusses the impacts of various approaches to zoning, such as the use of downzoning to protect open lands and natural resources and the use of special districts, as in Austin, Texas, to protect the environmentally sensitive Edwards Aquifer through measures such as integrated pest management practices, which reduce the use of toxic chemicals that can enter the water supply. And the connection to natural disasters? Even recent history has revealed the vulnerability of Texas to prolonged drought, making the protection of water supplies essential to public health and welfare.

Recognizing the modern context for their focus on this “critical partnership,” the authors have included significant material on the role of risk and hazard mitigation analysis in planning, with a whole chapter on “Keeping People Out of Harm’s Way.” As with much of the book, it leads students on a path through the critical minutiae of planning and public health analysis, including case studies at various levels of analysis—for example, a brief but close look at the Galveston City Hazard Mitigation Plan.

Other sections address critical current issues such as the availability of healthy foods in poor communities, and how that can be addressed through laws, community organizations, and better resources; how to redevelop safe community assets from former brownfield sites; and potentially evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of major regional development proposals. In short, this is not bedtime reading for most laypeople, but it is solid instructional material for aspiring young professionals and may be useful as well to community advocates who are willing to learn the nuts and bolts of using planning to achieve better public health results in their neighborhoods and communities. As such, it is a timely and needed addition to the literature.

Jim Schwab

When Denial Is Not an Option

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Wildlife in the Louisiana wetlands. All images in this post by and courtesy of Kristina Peterson.

It has always amazed me how much time and energy has been wasted, particularly in the U.S., on the denial of climate change in the face of so much scientific evidence. Sea level rise is a directly measurable phenomenon. So are changes in precipitation patterns over time. The fallback denial position, once the data are made clear, is that we do not know what is causing the change that we see, and therefore it is pointless to point to human influence on the environment. This, too, is of course nonsense because the theory behind the impact of greenhouse gases on warming temperatures has been with us for more than a century and has been validated for several decades. Yet, in the world of politics, the silliness goes on. And on.

One intriguing aspect of this denial is that distance from the problem seems to lend itself to a greater disposition toward denial. It is easier to ignore a problem that does not confront you visibly and directly. This distance need not be geographic; it can also be social and economic. Those near the seacoast with greater wealth and the ability to protect their property may not feel the pain of increased flooding and sea level rise nearly as much as poor homeowners who have fewer options to move or rebuild. For the same reason, if one can avoid loaded political language and discuss practicalities, it is possible to get many farmers to observe that growing seasons have grown longer, droughts have grown drier, and that something has surely changed in recent decades. As the saying goes, it is what it is.

Elizabeth Rush will not let us forget what is. In Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, she gently but firmly seizes our attention to lead us through coastal communities that are already experiencing the ravages of sea level rise. She does not focus on projected damages or what may happen in three generations. She speaks powerfully, poetically, lyrically about what happens to people in communities that have depended on coastal ecosystems for generations but now must face the prospect of relocating or abandoning the places to which they belong, of which they have been an organic part. We visit communities in Florida, Louisiana, San Francisco Bay, and New England that are witnessing permanent change in their shorelines and the loss of neighborhoods and towns that are no longer viable. She takes us on hikes through forests and wetlands that are already changing or have changed permanently, where scientists are documenting the adaptation of plant and animal species to changing weather and higher water.

Albert Naquin (in Santa Claus pose)

Rush is not a scientist but a scientifically literate environmental journalist with poetry in her bones and empathy in her manner. She sits down with Isle de Jean Charles Indians in the Louisiana bayou to discuss their removal from a once robust island that has shrunk from 55 square miles to less than one square mile in the past century, a place where few can still live and many have left already. Albert Naquin talks in poignant terms about his tribe’s struggle to reassemble a homeland further inland on higher ground in the face of numerous bureaucratic obstacles at both the federal and state level. Rush allows many other actors, in places from Maine to Staten Island to Pensacola, to speak in their own voices and tell us firsthand of the wrenching experience of loss and relocation. This is not a book about those with the means to choose their homesite. This is about people who have known and adapted to one place for a long time and have no options left. The book reminds us vividly that the issue of climate change is as much about people as it is about abstract scientific concepts.

Members of the Isle de Jean Charles community.

Over the years, with the hurricanes and the land loss and flooding, many people have been displaced. It got to the point that if something wasn’t done eventually there would be no Native community, no more people of the Isle de Jean Charles. Many of those that left, it looks like they’re going to be included too, and I think for them especially this relocation can do some good. The island is already a skeleton of its former self and that’s what’s happening inside the community as well. When we relocate to higher ground we will at least be able to hold on to each other. I mean if we can stay together, then we haven’t lost as much.

. . . . I mean really we are talking about having to choose to move away from our ancestral home. I know a lot of people figure we would be celebrating, to be moving to firmer ground and all. But it’s not like I threw a party when I heard about the relocation. I’ll be leaving a place that has been home to my family for right under two hundred years.

Chris Brunet

Of course, many others have experienced the pain and mixed feelings of forced relocation. Coastal storms and inland flooding have led to the buyouts and relocations of thousands of Americans in recent decades, and the toll climbs with every Hurricane Katrina, Harvey, Irma, or Maria. The toll will continue and grow.

Nolia Naquin, Albert’s sister.

Still, Rush’s book is not the typical call to action of a climate change activist. Rush is engaged more clearly and subtly in attempting to adjust our mindset, showing us in real terms the impacts of a history of environmental racism in which the least fortunate live in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, less by choice than because of a historic lack of options. She is raising our awareness of our historic ignorance about the ecological value of wetlands, which has caused us to compromise their protective functions and make shorelines more vulnerable. She is introducing us to the powerful sense of place of traditional communities, a sense that is generally lacking in affluent vacation homes by the sea. She is sensitizing us to a sense of doom in some communities and the lost opportunity felt by the departing residents. In short, she wants us not just to know but to feel the immediate loss produced by sea level rise today.

There are many volumes of studies and reports where one can acquire detailed scientific data about climate change. I have cited many for readers of this blog, and they are important. But it is also important to understand this crisis on its most human level. Helping us do that is Rush’s forte. Rising is a great introduction to the human cost of our global environmental neglect.

Jim Schwab

Paris Minus U.S., One Year Later

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Last Friday, June 1, marked one full year since President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from participation in the Paris climate accords that President Barack Obama had signed just two years ago. As too often is the case in this administration, one wonders how much of this move was driven by Trump’s anxious desire to wipe away the achievements of the Obama presidency out of sheer animus, and how much of it, if any, was informed by any serious knowledge of the relevant issues. Trump’s grasp of environmental issues can most generously be described as tenuous.

Most people who care are already well aware that Trump’s decision left the U.S. as the only nation in the world that is outside the Paris framework. At the time Trump withdrew, only Syria and Nicaragua had not joined the agreement, and Nicaragua objected only because it felt the agreement did not go far enough. Last November, Syria became the last nation to join, leaving the U.S. alone in its reactionary stance.

The problem is that the U.S. remains the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases behind China, which has four times the population. China, however, is taking significant steps to reduce its emissions amid growing concern that industrialization has brought deadly levels of air pollution to Chinese cities. There is no Chinese hoax here, as Trump once claimed. What is happening is a clear recognition by the Chinese government, despite its many missteps in the realm of environmental regulation, that acting to clean up its urban air and its contributions to global warming is in its own self-interest. One wonders why that logic is so hard to sell to Republican policy makers in Washington. How, for instance, will allowing U.S. manufacturers to produce more polluting products make American cars, appliances, and other products easier to export? When other nations are ratcheting up their standards, who will want those products unless they comply with international agreements to address this global problem?

Wind energy in New Zealand.

It is that very question that is producing a reaction within the U.S. to maintain a presence in the Paris climate accords even without the participation of the federal government. Certain economic trends already are working to undermine the Trump agenda in this regard. Despite administration efforts to prop up aging, polluting coal-fired power plants, for instance, the number of coal plant closures continues to increase. Some 12,000 megawatts of coal-fired power are expected to shut down this year. The major reason is that coal is no longer competitive or cost-effective in the long run in comparison with natural gas and renewable sources. The International Renewable Energy Agency, for instance, notes that costs for utility-scale solar photovoltaic electricity have fallen 73 percent since 2010. Renewables are expected to reach parity with fossil fuels by 2020, but the two categories are headed largely in opposite directions. A president supposedly dedicated to free enterprise is so blinded by his own assumptions that he is wrestling with the free market even more than he is wrestling with environmentalists.

The result is that 17 states and numerous cities have joined the U.S. Climate Alliance, launched by Govs. Jerry Brown of California, Jay Inslee of Washington, and Andrew Cuomo of New York, to counteract the federal government’s retreat on climate change and maintain a vigorous U.S. presence in climate discussions, even as major corporations like McDonald’s and Walmart have pledged compliance with the international agreement. Brown is hosting a Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco September 12-14. Trump may have withdrawn, but states, cities, and numerous companies have sustained a U.S. voice in support of international cooperation on climate change.

Needless to say, the official U.S. stance is neither encouraging nor helpful. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been effectively rendered useless as a source of creative energy for forward-looking U.S. policy on climate change. But there is great reason to remain both hopeful and active. Climate agreement supporters have shown that we are not and need not be completely reliant on the White House for positive change. The 2016 election is not the final word on this issue if scientists who can speak to the facts, and activists who can provide commitment to addressing those facts, can keep this issue alive. This fall, there is a major opportunity for all concerned to question candidates and office holders relentlessly on their plans to address climate change and their willingness to reverse course toward a more positive collaboration with the rest of the world. If we must throw out the bums, we should not be bashful about doing so. In numerous state-level and special elections, voters seem to be awakening to this challenge. If we install new members of Congress, new governors, eventually even a new president, willing to confront the reality of climate change, there is still time to generate major progress toward leaving our children a habitable planet later in the century.

Although it probably will have to be in the short term, this also should not ultimately be a strictly partisan issue. It has not always been. Under the administration of President George H.W. Bush, EPA Administrator William Reilly was an active participant on behalf of the U.S. in the Rio de Janeiro climate summit. Beginning with the Republic rebellion in 1994 led by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, anti-environmental forces hijacked a Republican party that, until then, had often helped forge bipartisan agreement on numerous environmental issues. A strong vote for change may yet force a reassessment of that stance, but it may not be easy or pretty in the short term. But it is clear that advocates for change can tap into considerable momentum if they are willing to present a strong case in both environmental and economic terms. Let’s make it happen.

Jim Schwab

Climbing the Mountain amid a Landslide

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Where will we find badly needed leadership for climate adaptation?

The United States, under President Trump, has withdrawn from the Paris climate accords. That does not, of course, eliminate the problem of climate change, but it does create a gaping leadership void regarding federal policy support for either mitigating climate change (by reducing greenhouse gas emissions) or adapting communities and businesses to better withstand its impacts. Many cities and some states have claimed the mantle of leadership by pledging continued efforts, and a few foundations have undertaken initiatives such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities. Newly emerging professional associations have emerged, notably the Urban Sustainability Directors Network and, perhaps most on point, the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. Other long-standing professional associations, such as the American Planning Association and the American Society of Civil Engineers, have weighed in on the subject, and even offered professional training, while maintaining their traditional focus.

But is all this activity a concerted push in the right direction? Or is it a growing babble of voices without strategic direction? Amid it all, is there an emerging field of practice for climate adaptation professionals, and if so, how well defined is that field? What credentials should it develop or require? These are no small questions because a great deal depends on the credibility of the scientific assessments made of the problem we must confront.

Kresge Foundation’s Climate Adaptation Influencers meeting in Washington, DC, January 22. Jim Schwab was a participant. Kresge Foundation photo.

In that context, a new report from the Kresge Foundation, Rising to the Challenge, Together, is a welcome addition to the conversation, even as it stresses the urgency of both the conversation and our response to the problem. Given the steadily increasing toll of natural disasters and the increasing threat of sea level rise for coastal communities, high-precipitation storms for others, and prolonged drought and increased wildfire for many western and heartland regions, one can understand when the report, authored by Susanne C. Moser, Joyce Coffee, and Aleka Seville, states bluntly:

“The accelerating pace, all-encompassing scope, and global scale of climate change converging with other societal and environmental challenges—juxtaposed with the sheer difficulty of challenging and changing thinking, politics, and institutions to close the resilience gap—leave the field rather worried about the state of adaptation efforts in the US at this time. Some fields of practice have the luxury of evolving at their own pace; in the field of climate adaptation, failure or slow adaptation could mean death and destruction. Incremental progress in climate change simply does not match the rapidly accelerating pace of climate change.”

It is difficult for anyone well grounded in the science to argue with this sense of urgency. One is tempted to fall back on the nearly cliched image of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland running to stay in place. But I’m not sure that image reflects the real urgency the Kresge report implies. A more appropriate image might be that of attempting to scale a mountain amid a landslide. That does not mean that I think the situation is hopeless. It does mean that the only solution may be to buckle our safety belts and rapidly grow our tenacity in confronting the perils that lie ahead. Tenacity is very different from panic. Later, the report states, “Crisis-driven adaptation has its limits.” Responding to crisis is reactive; tenacity requires vision. The problem, the authors note, is that the adaptation community has not yet defined a “vision for a desirable future.” What brave new world sits at the top of that mountain?

How Kresge survey respondents responded when asked to rate the status of selected sub-components of the adaptation field. All graphics provided by and reproduced with permission from Kresge Foundation.

Attendance at climate-and disaster-related sessions at the APA National Planning Conference has risen dramatically over 20 years. Credit: Jim Schwab

There is an aspect of the emerging climate adaptation field that calls to mind the origins of both the urban planning and public health fields, which most people would describe as having the maturity that this new field seeks to achieve. Both responded to urgent health crises in rapidly growing modern cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Because of uncontrolled industrial pollution and poor sewage management, cities like Chicago, New York, and Baltimore were virtual petri dishes for disease. In time, both professions established positive visions for desired community outcomes, but those visions must now contend with the new threats climate adaptation aims to address. Thus, APA national and state conferences over the past two decades have seen dramatic shifts in content, with a greater emphasis on preserving those positive visions by addressing climate change and mitigating natural hazards. The Kresge report in its final chapter attempts to assess what the vision of a mature field of climate adaptation would be.

It is important, however, to understand the framework the report offers for the essential components of the climate adaptation (or any other) field of professional endeavor. Derived from lengthy interviews and surveys with study participants, including attendees at the 2017 National Adaptation Forum in St. Paul, Minnesota, Kresge offers what it calls “the 4 P’s.” These are:

  • Purpose (why does this field need to exist?)
  • People (who should be involved with what credentials?)
  • Practice (how are best practices in this field identified?)
  • Pillars (the public policy and funding support for the field)

This framing device may be one of the report’s most important contributions to thinking about the future leadership of the climate adaptation field. I would add that it is particularly important to see climate adaptation, much like its planning and public health forebears, as a field that is less about theory, although theory remains important, than about applied knowledge, which is almost inherent in the definition of adaptation. Unless adaptation is a matter of practice, the urgency the report discusses makes no sense. That said, one crucial skill planners may be able to contribute is synthesis. Planners may have their own unique set of skills and analytic methods, but they rely overwhelmingly on borrowing technical knowledge from the sciences, engineering, and economics to make sense of the urban organism and to help shape its future. Likewise, climate adaptation practitioners, while needing a solid knowledge base in climate science, will need to rely heavily on a bevy of other skills to succeed. Notable among these will be communication and people skills. Our communities will become hotbeds of climate progress only when the public is sold on both the nature of the problem and the feasibility of the solutions offered. The ability to facilitate that dialogue will be critical. Climbing that mountain will require pervasive public support.

The question of initiating effective dialogue with a public that is sometimes skeptical (location and timing matter here) feeds into another question raised in the Kresge report—whether it is more important to mainstream the concepts of climate adaptation or seek societal transformation with climate adaptation as a driving influence. Mainstreaming refers to the incorporation of climate adaptation concerns and practices into existing institutions and procedures. One major example would be hazard mitigation plans; another would be infusing such ideas into various elements of comprehensive plans, as well as regulatory tools such as zoning ordinances and building codes. Transformation, on the other hand, involves the pursuit of systemic changes in social and political structures. If there is to be a debate on this point, it seems to me the debate must be more one of emphasis than absolutes and should be context-sensitive. Transformation depends on situational opportunities tempered by foresight and the tenacious pursuit of a longer-term vision, but it does not rule out mainstreaming. Both approaches help to build more resilient communities for the future, but each may miss the mark if it is seen as the only valid perspective.

This is not an “either/or” choice but “both/and.” Because Kresge strives to maintain a social equity focus in climate adaptation discussions, I will point out that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was both a visionary and an effective tactician. One must know which matters most at a given moment. The report also mentions the tension between urban and rural perspectives and the potential for smaller communities being left behind in the quest for resources. Here lies a huge opportunity for transformational change, given the recent political divide. God bless the politician who can construct a connecting narrative that brings these forces together behind a progressive, scientifically informed agenda.

That leads to my final point before simply recommending that anyone with a serious interest in this field download and read the report. In its final chapter, the report takes note of the pressing need to build relationships across silos, to develop a common language and shared understanding of the problem, and to use a “whole community” approach to address problems. There is much more detail, but this is enough to suggest the drift. Climbing this mountain amid a landslide is no easy task. The details can be grinding and even discouraging when things do not go well. It is important to know how to measure progress and to keep the obstacles in perspective.

Rose diagram shows a way to visualize progress toward adaptation.

Planners, particularly, should know this. We are a profession of visionaries who know that details matter.

Jim Schwab

Life Lessons from Freezing Weather

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post . . . .

Tens of millions of Americans are accustomed to weather bulletins in winter months advising them of wintry conditions, whether they involve bitter cold or blowing snow. It is no great secret to anyone in recent days that even places as far south as Tallahassee, Florida, and Charleston, South Carolina, have been dealt an unexpected dose of the icy blast, while places like Boston and Maine, which have seen it all before, are being assaulted with both snow and icy storm surges from a northeaster.

Yes, I was a year old at one time. Thank God, photography has improved. Credit: Halle Studio

With friends who inquire about my background, I like to joke that I have spent my life moving back and forth along the 43rd parallel. Born in New York, I was moved at a year of age to a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1950, where I grew up. In January 1979, I moved to Iowa, first to lead a statewide public interest organization, later to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa. By 1985, I moved briefly to Omaha, where my wife and I were married; she was a lifelong Nebraskan. By Thanksgiving, I had a job in Chicago, and we have been here since then. That also means I have spent about six decades along the Great Lakes, experiencing various aspects of the famous “Lake Effect.” One aspect is that it can dump a ton of snow in your backyard—and everywhere else. You learn to deal with it.

As you can see, Roscoe can barely contain his enthusiasm for being outside in the cold.

Chicago, by this weekend, is expected to complete a record-tying 12-day stretch in which the temperature has never reached 20°F. Overnight, it has often slipped below zero. I’d like to sound more poetic, but the simple fact is that it’s been cold out there. Our 14-year-old Springer Spaniel, Roscoe, doesn’t even want to partake in his usual long evening walks with my wife (or sometimes both of us). He prefers for now to take care of business in the snow in the backyard, then run to the kitchen door to be allowed back in. Dogs are very intelligent, practical animals.

When nature gets nasty outside, I tend to remember the first big test of my mettle in a blizzard. Unwittingly and unintentionally, I learned a great deal about myself from this incident. In February 1975, I bought a new Ford Maverick from a dealer in a Cleveland suburb. Radial tires were not yet in widespread use; drivers would use heavy-tread snow tires in the winter and lighter tires the rest of the year. With at most one month of winter left that year, I chose not to buy snow tires until the following fall.

However, in late April I drove this car with two friends to a small conference of progressive activists at Franconia Notch in New Hampshire, near Franconia College. At 25, I had never been to New England. For the first time, on the way up the purple mountainsides, I drove through fog that, when it broke, left us with clouds in the rear-view mirror. We drove past mountain lakes that were frozen on the shady side and rippling on the sunny side. Such scenery was exhilarating to an Ohio flatlander.

Don’t ask me what the conference was about. I no longer remember. All I recall is that, on the last afternoon, a Sunday, warnings began to circulate about an oncoming blizzard. It would be best for everyone to exit the mountain promptly to safer locations. The meetings were disbanded. It was the last weekend in April. I had never seen snow in April in Cleveland, so the thought that snow tires would be useful for this trip never occurred to me.

I soon learned otherwise. As we began our descent down the mountain, the wind whipped snow across the road, making visibility tough and traction even tougher. One thing I recall clearly is that I never panicked. Despite the nervous tension of my passengers, who had to watch me navigate with no control over their fate, I somehow summoned deep reserves of patience, kept my foot firmly but softly on the brake, and focused my eyes on the road ahead, cognizant of the deep chasms to the side. For perhaps the first time in my life, I became acutely aware that losing my nerve was not an option. Muscles taut, I steered the car downhill for what seemed like hours but was probably a mere 20 minutes. Eventually, my two friends were greatly relieved when we reached the base of the hill, which then led to an entrance to I-93, and then to I-91 and south to Hartford, and on through New York back to Cleveland. Where we stayed that night, and what path we subsequently followed home, is all a blur. The only truly emblazoned memory is that of driving down that slippery hillside amid a flurry of white precipitation.

What I learned was something akin to the famous British slogan, “Keep calm and carry on.” I learned that, in a crisis, I could call upon nerves of steel. Freaking out would have resulted in a wrecked car and possibly three dead passengers. Instead, we all got home safely a day later.

In later years, having been forged in that snowy ordeal, those traits reasserted themselves almost instinctively when new challenges arose. In January 1982, my old Plymouth died amid a bigger blizzard near Michigan City on the Indiana Turnpike, in what is ominously known as the snow belt (think “lake effect”), as I was returning after the holidays from Cleveland to Iowa City, where I would start graduate school later that month. Although I did not know the cause immediately, I learned later that the timing chain had snapped. Under such circumstances, the only option is to steer the limping car under its own momentum to the side of the road. I must note for younger readers that cell phones did not exist at the time. Some people, particularly truckers, had CB radios. The rest of us just had to wait for help. I retrieved a white emergency flag from the trunk and tied it to the antenna, noting sardonically to myself that this was of marginal value with the snow blowing and drifting in every direction.

For two hours, I sat patiently in the car, unable even to turn on the heater, and trying to stay as warm as possible under multiple layers of clothing. Finally, an Indiana DOT truck pulled up behind me and approached to find out what the problem was. He called a tow truck for me, whose driver then dropped off my car at a repair shop and took me to a nearby motel for the night. There may never be another motel room that will feel warmer. Whether and how I got some food for the evening, I don’t even remember.

The next day, I took a cab to the South Shore commuter rail station, rode to Union Station in downtown Chicago, and then caught a Greyhound bus for the five-hour ride to Iowa City, where I was greeted by 27 inches of snow but made it to a duplex I shared with roommates. I still can hear their voices when they greeted me at the front door: “He made it!” Later, when the snow was gone and the repairs to my car were complete, I took a day off from my new position as a graduate research assistant to make the reverse Greyhound-South Shore trip to Michigan City to retrieve my car and bring it home.

In between, I had a conversation outdoors with the same roommate, Paul, who first greeted me at the door. We were discussing the difference with weather in California. “This is great!” he exclaimed. “It keeps out the lightweights.” Californians, beware of Midwestern attitudes. We may not want your wildfires, but we can deal with the snow and the cold. We like to think we’re tough.

Sabula, Iowa, and Mississippi River bridge. From Wikipedia

Of course, snow is hardly the only challenge nature can provide. On one occasion about two years earlier, I had been in Dubuque, Iowa, before heading south to another meeting. As I was following U.S. Rte. 52, aka the Great River Road, a thunderstorm erupted. At points, following the river bluffs, the highway is steep and the hillsides even steeper, but rain mostly requires careful driving. Unfortunately, as I watched in alarm, the rubber windshield wiper on my side of the car worked its way loose, and bare metal was scraping the glass, making a screeching noise that was about as unsettling as finger nails on a chalk board. I had to turn off the wipers while continuing downhill because there was no shoulder and I could not block traffic. This time, those steady nerves forced me to lean forward and watch with utmost care for the yellow stripes down the middle of the road, and stay just to the right of them until I made it to the bottom of the hill.

My ordeal ended in Sabula, the only Mississippi River island community in Iowa, which sits at the end of a causeway that leads to a bridge across the river to Savanna, Illinois. Although it was not a big deal in the larger picture, I also recall that the one service station in town charged what I thought was an outrageous price for a wiper replacement—sort of an ultra-miniature version of the small-town Arizona ripoff garage scene in National Lampoon’s Vacation. At the time, I just paid the price and gladly installed the new wiper. My car, at least, did not have to limp away. It drove away very smoothly.

That situation may have prepared me well for Louisiana a dozen years later. Researching for my book about the environmental justice movement, Deeper Shades of Green, I had driven one morning from Baton Rouge to meet two women activists in Lake Charles. I had spent the day with them touring the area and interviewing people before returning in the evening. The one and only obvious path for this trip is I-10, which crosses the Atchafalaya Swamp for about 50 miles, in many areas on a two-lane strip of concrete in each direction above water, interspersed with cypress trees, snakes, alligators, and mud. None of this, of course, is at all foreign to the numerous Cajun residents of small towns in southern Louisiana, but it was new and interesting to me. In the evening, however, an intense thunderstorm swept the area. While there are guardrails on the sides of the interstate highway, I was not interested in sliding into them at 70 mph. I drove carefully, but visibility at times was little more than 100 feet amid torrents of descending water. My patience was rewarded when I finally found an exit into a small town where I bought coffee at a Burger King and waited out the storm. I noted with amusement that no one needed to worry about being cited for speeding (if they were even foolish enough to do so) because the police were also hanging out at Burger King. Eventually, when it seemed the storm had passed, I drove back to the highway, only to catch up with the storm further on my route back to Baton Rouge. Perhaps I had not been patient enough. But I made it back safely, with yet another story to tell.

Nasty weather can teach us patience and perspective, if we are willing listeners. I am grateful that my lessons came at a young age when such impressions matter most. I must admit they don’t make me patient about everything. Computer software glitches can still sometimes send me up a wall. But there is a difference. I just pack up my laptop on a sunny day and take it to the Geek Squad. They make money doing what they do best, I vent some frustration, and nobody gets hurt. Who can question such a sublime outcome?

Jim Schwab

Resilience in Utah

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Amid all the necessary attention to current disasters, small community conferences across the country are steadily training and educating local government staff, emergency volunteers, and local stakeholders in hazard-related issues to become more resilient. Because hazards vary widely with geography and climate, the specific focus of these meetings varies widely as well. The quiet but important fact is that they are happening, and people are learning. This is one particularly salient reason why, in my new post-APA career, I have made myself available as a public speaker. These conferences provide an excellent opportunity to feel the pulse of America regarding hazard mitigation and disaster recovery.

All is far from perfect, as one might expect, but the progress can be encouraging. My latest presentation was on December 6 in Salt Lake City, at the Resilient Salt Lake County Conference in the Salt Palace Convention Center. About 240 people had registered, I was told, for this one-day event.

While, for many people outside Utah, the word “Mormon” comes to mind quickly in connection with the state, one important fact to know is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) is itself active in encouraging members, congregations, and communities to become more resilient and aware of the disaster threats around them. One interesting feature of the conference was that it focused as much on individual attitudes and resilience as it did on community planning. Given my background, I tend to focus on the latter as a public speaker, but I do not underestimate the value of personal emotions and outlook in handling stressful situations. In fact, for me, the most valuable takeaways from my visit dealt with those issues, even though many people attending may have felt the opposite after listening to me. Sometimes, the issue is simply what you need to learn at a given moment. But communities are composed of individuals, and whole-community resilience depends on the sum of its parts.

My own after-lunch presentation certainly started with a personal element, as I walked people through what I called “an emotional journey” through Sri Lanka and New Orleans in 2005, and events beyond, to regain a human perspective on why our community-level planning for hazard mitigation and disaster recovery remains important. I then highlighted many of the tools we had developed during my tenure at the American Planning Association to advance such planning, and concluded with a primer on the most practical aspects of adaptation for climate change. But I want to focus instead on what others said that I found important.

Utah’s Threatscape

First, I might note that a presentation early in the day by Matt Beaudry, from the Utah Division of Emergency Management, provided an effective handle on the state’s approach to resilience, which seems to involve a serious effort to take a holistic approach. Beaudry used the term “threatscape,” not one I have heard much before, to talk about the comprehensive array of hazards facing Utah communities. This threatscape, he noted, is “evolving daily,’ and that we are “planning daily for things unimaginable 10 or 20 years ago.” Most of these new threats are not natural but involve the critical infrastructure we have built in our communities and include cybercrime as well as active violence such as vehicle rammings.

Nonetheless, the natural hazards remain. Utah has fault zones and is subject to seismic disturbances, but are communities prepared for earthquakes? It is easy enough to understand when the wildfire season starts, but earthquakes provide no warning. The best preparation is seismically resistant construction, but what about older buildings? Beaudry discussed numerous acronym-laden state programs to address these needs, many of which can be found on the Utah Department of Public Safety website, but one was refreshingly non-acronymic and easy to understand—“Fix the Bricks,” a Salt Lake City program offering grants for seismic retrofitting of older buildings.

Utah has also experienced floods, wildfires, and landslides. Beaudry noted that catastrophic disruptions to water supplies threaten life itself. Hospitals cannot stay open without water. What happens when that lifeline is cut off?

Michael Barrett, resilience program manager for Salt Lake County Emergency Services, followed up by noting that Salt Lake County wants “to ensure that all plans include resilience.”

The ComeBACK Formula

The last morning speaker, Sandra Millers Younger, whom I had never met before this trip, provided the most powerful perspective of the day on individual resilience. Her story began from personal experience, which is not surprising, nor is the fact that she converted that personal experience into a book, The Fire Outside My Window. That fire, the largest in modern California history and known as the Cedar Fire, consumed 280,000 acres near San Diego in 2003.

It also destroyed the house she and her husband had built on a hill they called Terra Nova, which, she says, afforded lofty views “all the way to Mexico.” I must confess that I might have hesitated to build in that location, but what matters for her story is what happened after she awoke to see fire outside, “grabbed our pets and belongings,” including many of her photographer husband’s images, and jammed everything into an Acura Coupe. They headed downhill along a steep route, lost visibility amid the smoke, and feared going off the road and over a cliff until a bobcat leaped in front of her headlights. She followed the bobcat into the smoke to safety. But twelve neighbors died. It was Younger’s struggle with the aftermath that ultimately yielded her story and her approach, which she now calls the ComeBACK formula. At the core of that approach is a quote she uses from Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who wrote a highly regarded book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he writes, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

That underlay the simple statement that, confronted with crisis or disaster, we can choose to be victims or survivors. Younger noted that a current subset of psychological research deals with “post-traumatic growth,” ways in which we grow our personal resilience as a result of our experience with disaster. This is not to gainsay the reality of post-traumatic stress, which has gained far more attention, but to acknowledge that we do have choices about the ways in which we respond. To give reality to her approach, Younger stepped the audience through an exercise, pairing up at their tables to share answers to questions based on her approach.

Younger’s five points in the ComeBACK Formula are straightforward enough, but not always easy for people to internalize:

  1. Come to a place of gratitude.
  2. Be patient; believe you can.
  3. Accept help; be tough enough to ask.
  4. Choose your story.
  5. Keep moving forward.

I found it interesting that a female speaker and counselor would use the phrase, “be tough enough to ask,” in reference to accepting help from others. As a man, I wonder how many men would even think of framing the question of accepting help in those terms; yet it feels instinctively true. Asking for help, especially when you are a professional helper, means having the courage to expose your own vulnerability, but also your willingness to learn and grow by doing so. As she notes, it is “hard to call 911 when you are 911.” On the other hand, it is hard to be a hero without understanding what it means to be rescued. To become a better giver, learn how to receive.

The Extreme Example

All this may well have set the stage for the closing keynote, 93-year-old Edgar Harrell, a World War II Marine Corps veteran who survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis on July 30, 1945, as it was returning to the Philippines from Guam. A lurking Japanese submarine had spotted the ship and launched six torpedoes, two of which struck and literally cut the vessel in half.

Unbeknownst to its crew, the ship had delivered to Tinian Island the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima a few days later. Most of the crew, 880 men, perished while a shrinking contingent that included Harrell, then 21, struggled in tropical seas for five days to survive without food and drinkable water. Finally, a U.S. airplane spotted them, and a seaplane rescue was underway. Here was an example in which the only route to survival was to accept help because no one would have lived otherwise. Harrell lived and retold his story in Out of the Depths.

Younger had earlier noted that she met a man who had lost only his garage in the wildfire, yet was bitter about the outcome, while others who had lost relatives or suffered grievous burns had far more positive attitudes about the future. When any of us think we have seen the worst, it is these stories that remind us of the truth of Victor Frankl’s observation. We do indeed choose how to respond.

Jim Schwab

Life after Tornadoes

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Despite the impression many people may have from watching the news, most disasters do not result in a presidential disaster declaration, and the federal government is not always involved in response and recovery. Many smaller disasters, however, result in a state declaration issued by the governor. The threshold for determining whether federal assistance is justified differs by state, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency assuming larger states are capable of handling larger events. Major or catastrophic disasters like Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria invariably trigger federal assistance, but it may matter whether a tornado occurs in Texas or Delaware. It also matters greatly how much damage it produces. In any event, assessing the toll that nature has inflicted is never simple business.

The remains of a home destroyed by the tornado.

On April 29 of this year, seven tornadoes rampaged across rural Van Zandt County, east of Dallas, Texas, and parts of some neighboring counties. One of those was an EF-3; another was an EF-4. The scale runs from EF-0, a relatively minor twister, to the very rare but extremely dangerous EF-5. Such a monster struck Greensburg, Kansas, ten years ago, causing enormous damage and nearly wiping the small city off the face of the earth. Fortunately for Van Zandt County, the tornadoes struck mostly in rural areas outside Canton, the county seat. Nonetheless, four people died, and dozens were injured. The state issued a disaster declaration.

Vicki McAlister, Van Zandt County’s public health emergency preparedness coordinator, noted at a disaster recovery workshop in Canton on October 26 that a triage center was established at Canton High School within a half-hour, and that almost immediately “between 35 and 40 ambulances were on the scene.” The triage center, however, had no electricity because of extensive damage to power lines from the tornadoes, which damaged or destroyed about 200 homes in the area, and killed between 250 and 300 cattle. Within two hours, two task forces were conducting search and rescue along every mile of the 35-mile storm path. The county shut down air traffic around the path in order to focus on the effort. McAlister noted that they were soon “swamped by the media,” for whom they set up briefings on a regular basis. It is critical in such situations to keep the public informed through accurate news of the events that follow the disaster.

Student interns join me (left), Melissa Oden (to my right), and Texas APA chapter administrator Mike McAnelly (far right) for lunch in Canton the day before the workshop.

The workshop was the result of a collaboration between the Texas Public Health Association and the Texas chapter of the American Planning Association (APA), joint recipients of a $70,000 sub-grant from APA’s Planning and Community Health Center in Washington, D.C., operating under a much larger multi-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control for a program called Plan4Health, designed to foster collaboration between urban planning and public health professionals. The unique feature in this case is its focus on post-disaster recovery public health needs, but It is the third Plan4Health project between the two Texas organizations.

I attended the workshop as the invited keynote, but I played another role as well: I facilitated a group exercise in which those attending broke into five groups, each of which spent time summarizing on an easel sheet where they saw their efforts now, and where they would like to be. Each group reported back to the whole, and those reports became part of the record of the workshop itself. After that, I spoke over lunch.

Debris from the April 29 tornadoes.

What was interesting to me, however, especially after listening to Russell Hopkins, the leader of the county’s Long-Term Recovery Group, a body empaneled to handle claims of those suffering losses or injuries from the storm, was how he felt that the county would have been better off having created such a group before any disaster had hit, and how those from neighboring counties echoed that sentiment by indicating they would like to take that step before enduring the ordeal facing Van Zandt. His group was activated in mid-May, and he felt they could have saved weeks of valuable time in advancing recovery in the community if they had been established before the disaster. From my own research and experience, it is clear Hopkins is entirely on the right track, yet few communities think about such contingencies until disaster strikes. Hopkins is also director of Public Health Emergency Preparedness for the Northeast Texas Public Health District.

Much of what TPHA and Texas APA learn from this project will be compiled in a tool kit designed to assist rural communities with recovery planning. Rural communities often face different challenges in disasters from urban areas because local government is small, staff and resources are limited, and training is sometimes less available. The workshop aimed to help shrink that gap. The two sponsoring organizations marshaled important academic resources to advance this mission, including the help of faculty and graduate student interns from the public health program at University of North Texas (UNT), in Fort Worth, and the planning school at the University of Texas campus at Arlington. Six of them were helping to manage the workshop, led by Melissa Oden, a public health professor at UNT and a recent president of TPHA. Also involved was the Northeast Texas Public Health District, based in Tyler. It is expected that the tool kit will become available online early next year.

Ultimately, in my opinion, what matters most in these situations is the peer-to-peer learning between local professionals and recovery volunteers. The latter group had already donated about 20,000 hours of help since April. Some came from outside the area, as often happens, but many were local. These people also help to raise money. Hopkins noted that the recovery effort had raised about $530,000, which was being used to help people rebuild, many of whom had lost a great deal, if not everything. A little more than half were either uninsured or underinsured, according to McAlister. There can be many reasons for this, including poverty and poor health, which can easily lead to financial stress.

I had noted that rural areas and small towns can have advantages in recovery because of greater social cohesion, but it is also easy to wear out a limited pool of civic volunteers. Hopkins noted that he was “not sure” the members of the Long-Term Recovery Group “knew what they were getting into.” While pointing out the need to make sure claims for assistance are legitimate and that the group was “doing the most good for the most people,” he added that, “We’re frustrating our citizens and ourselves because of the slowness of our work.” The committee spent “long hours wordsmithing” its mission statement to ensure flexibility in responding to people’s needs and was finally ready to distribute money in late June. That circumstance led to his observation that a previously appointed, standing recovery group could have put assistance in motion much sooner. This point surfaced repeatedly when we heard from attendees from neighboring counties. Hopkins’s observation did not go unnoticed. I tried to reinforce it in my lunch presentation by directing people to a Model Recovery Ordinance APA had developed nearly two decades ago, and updated and refined more recently, to help communities accomplish precisely this objective. I suspect that my suggestions did not go unnoticed, either.

If anything, other speakers throughout the afternoon continued to reinforce everything said earlier. My long-time friend and colleague David Gattis, formerly the planning director in Benbrook, a Dallas suburb, concluded the afternoon by discussing planning needs in post-disaster recovery. Gattis served just a few years ago as the chair of an APA task force that developed an APA policy guide on hazard mitigation. It built partly on work from the Hazards Planning Center, which I then managed, so we have collaborated a bit over time. He is now applying his expertise in Bastrop, a Texas community that, in recent years, has been afflicted by wildfires (2011), floods (2015), and other events, including impacts this year from Harvey. One issue he emphasized was that, “Short-term responses can have long-term recovery implications.” We do not want to put people back in harm’s way. It is less clear in the case of tornadoes exactly where that is because tornadoes are much more random events geographically than floods or wildfires, but there are lessons to learn, nonetheless, including improved building codes and ensuring access to safe rooms, either within a house or in a nearby community facility. It is particularly important to pay attention to such needs with disadvantaged populations, such as the elderly, children, or the disabled. There is almost always room for improvement if we are looking to build greater community resilience. That includes attention to climate change, even if there may be greater skepticism in some areas. I made my own point very simply regarding climate issues: We cannot solve a problem if we don’t talk about it.

But much of Texas, I believe, is talking about a variety of post-disaster issues, and many communities have sought assistance since Hurricane Harvey. A new normal of public debate may emerge from those discussions, and many of those communities may never be quite the same again. In time, they may be healthier and more resilient as a result.

Note: All photos above provided by TX APA and TPHA (thanks).

Jim Schwab

Engaging for Sustainability

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I know. My very title for this blog post sounds to some like yet another naïve stab at kumbaya. Well, stay with me, anyway. We are talking about solving problems in our communities, and the more people who get behind the solution, the more successful it is likely to be.

Kristin Baja, right, with Dubuque Mayor Roy Buol before her presentation.

What I am really aiming to write about, in the narrowest sense, is a morning keynote presentation by Kristin Baja at the tenth annual Growing Sustainable Communities conference in Dubuque, Iowa, on October 4. The City of Dubuque has been hosting this event from the outset, and I rather like the riverside convention center where they host it. Hell, I rather like the mystique of the Mississippi River, the very reason Dubuque exists. I’m fascinated enough that I thought the conference a good venue for meeting people who might be useful to my pet project since leaving the American Planning Association (APA) at the end of May: a two-book series on the 1993 and 2008 Midwest floods. Dubuque is one of those communities that understands that environmentally healthy communities are a necessary path to the future.

That is why they engaged Kristin Baja, a former planner for the city of Baltimore who was instrumental in effecting significant changes in planning that recognized the fundamental problems that Baltimore needed to address, both socially and environmentally. She openly states that Baltimore was built on a legacy of racism that must be overcome through new approaches that must complement the city’s efforts to address climate change. The poor tend to be more vulnerable to natural hazards. Recently, Baja left her city position to become the Climate Resilience Officer for the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. In this new role, she is essentially bringing what she learned at the local level to the national stage.

What she seems to have learned most, and emphasized in her keynote, is the value of empathy, a quality often sorely lacking in national politics. I frankly think we are more likely to relearn its value at the community level, where we can engage directly and personally with our neighbors. Perhaps then we can reapply it to national policy discussions if we can get past the angry tweets and the noise of shouting talk show hosts.

Baja started with a display of many of the same points I have made in this blog before. The climate is changing, and we have plenty of evidence to make this point if we can get people to listen. We cannot afford to continue to confuse weather with climate, for instance, by using one snowstorm to ridicule the entire notion of global warming. “Weather is your mood, climate is your personality,” she suggested, and it is not a bad analogy for helping people to grasp the distinction between short-term and long-term trends. If we are to achieve resilience in our communities, it will be essential to understand that we must build community strength in the face of both shocks, which are sudden and unexpected changes, and stressors, those long-time problems that weaken a community’s social fabric, like high unemployment, poverty, racism, and distrust of authority. If community leaders want to overcome some of that malaise, it is critical that they foster and sustain mutual trust, be accountable, keep promises, share power, value people’s time, and focus on community cohesion. It may be a tall order, but I would add one other factor. When a community finds such leaders, it needs to honor them. Too often, the best intentions are drowned in a tidal wave of vitriol.

I will not reprise every aspect of Baja’s captivating presentation. What I want to share is the underlying logic of her approach. She first came to my attention when I learned about Baltimore’s now well-known DP3 project, which stands for Disaster Preparedness and Planning Project. DP3 resulted in the approval in 2013 of a combined local hazard mitigation plan and climate adaptation plan. Baja participated in a July 2016 webinar I organized for APA on the subject of merging climate adaptation and hazard mitigation plans.

Hazard mitigation plans have been produced by the thousands by state and local governments ever since the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 decreed that they would be ineligible for federal mitigation grants, which pay for many hazard mitigation projects after disasters, unless they adopted a FEMA-approved plan. All states now have such plans, and about 20,000 units of local government have adopted them, often participating in multijurisdictional efforts. But almost universally, until a few creative cities like Baltimore began to outline a new approach, these plans have been backward-looking in identifying local hazards. Why? Because the standard approach is to project future hazards based on historical patterns. The problem is that climate change is disrupting those expectations and exacerbating existing vulnerabilities. The path to resilience lies in using climate science data to anticipate the hazards of the future. Baltimore accomplished that by integrating data about climate trends into its hazard mitigation plan, thus elegantly addressing both existing and future hazards. Baja was at the center of this activity.

But her innovative style goes farther. She worked on the use of vacant lots in cities for development of green infrastructure to help remedy urban flooding. In March of this year, she attended the first of two day-long roundtables APA organized with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on ways to integrate climate science into the local planning process. She was feisty and persuasive as usual, and we all appreciated her contributions.

Ultimately, what Baja discussed with the audience was not merely the policy changes that are needed to produce climate-resilient communities, but the practices of community engagement that would undergird those policies and make them stick, embed them in municipal and regional civic culture. She unleashed her own flood of ideas about how to do this, including training staff, as she has done recently in Dubuque, with training games that make the undertaking fun, such as a “Game of Floods.” The laundry list that rolled from her tongue and flowed from the PowerPoint screen included these tips for engaging members of the community and removing barriers to participation in civic meetings:

  • Go to people
  • Partner with community leaders
  • Provide transportation
  • Provide food and beverages
  • Provide childcare or activities with children
  • Consider language barriers
  • Translate signs and data
  • Insure compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act
  • Collect stories
  • Approach all stakeholders with empathy
  • Provide interactive and fun ways of engagement
  • Invite participation on advisory committees

One of her approaches, used in Baltimore to give life to these ideas, was to create a community ambassador network to empower the very people who often labor to advance these ideas through small neighborhood organizations with no financial support from the city. Recognizing the contribution these people make to their city goes a long way to strengthening the trust that supports progressive policy making.

There is a method to the madness of making this all work. Baja is not the only person who has discovered the value of empowering volunteers for good planning, but she herself is now a full-time ambassador through USDN. I’d say they found the right person.

Bike tour of Dubuque’s riverfront at the end of the conference.

 

Jim Schwab

Hurricane Harvey Interview on CBC

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For those who have been reading the posts I have recently done since Hurricane Harvey made landfall, I thought it might be of interest to see this video clip of an interview I did with Canadian Broadcasting Corp. two days ago: https://youtu.be/UFslrKPd04s 

Jim Schwab