Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Brooke, Margaret, and Inmn talk about some news from Gaza, the climate, hurricanes, University occupations, Texas' latest attempt to become a mini fief, abortion laws that are older than states, an update on an Arizona gun law, Taylor Swift, and TikTok.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: This Month in the Apocalypse: April, 2024

**Margaret** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. Oh, wait. Brooke, you had a better... You wrote us a new jingle to sing, right? Why don't you do that right now?

**Brooke** 00:26 [Singing] I wrote us to do jingle to sing. Bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling.

**Margaret** 00:36 And that's now our jingle forever. that doesn't even include our name in it. That's what happens when... Right before we hit record, we were like who's going to record the intro. And I was like, I'm going to record the intro because I have an idea. And my idea was to make Brooke come up with something to sing off the top of her head, because I'm a good person. But who's not a good person.... Wait, I'm not introducing the bad stuff yet. More good stuff. Also a host today is Inmn. Hi, Inmn.

**Inmn** 01:06 Hello, hello. I hope everyone is doing as well as they can in our in our great times.

**Margaret** 01:15 Statistically, at least one of you is punched a cop in the last week. So that's pretty cool. And also, we're a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. [Singing] This is a new jingle for a show on the network. It goes like this.

**Margaret** 01:46 And we're back. So anything happened in the world this month, Inmn?

**Inmn** 02:22 Nope. Not at all.

**Brooke** 02:24 Everything was good. Bye, yall!

**Inmn** 02:26 Absolutely. Absolutely nothing has happened. Only sunshine.

**Margaret** 02:29 What if we just did updates about like the things that we saw on TV? I guess that's a different kind of podcast. It's the wildest thing. Velma got the Scooby Doo gang together... Anyway.

**Inmn** 02:43 We do This Month in the Apocalypse, but it's only it's only from the fictional worlds that we spend too much time inhabiting. [Everyone lauging]

**Margaret** 02:52 I conquered the entire world for my god.

**Brooke** 02:56 My child has been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer because she's been curious about this show that was like my formative high school experience

**Margaret** 03:05 Aw, to like connect with you, watching old people shows like Buffy.

**Brooke** 03:09 Right? So that's what's happening in the world right now in my world. Yeah. Wow.

**Inmn** 03:14 You know, every once in a while it lines up though. Because, you know, I was recently watching, as part of my delve back to things I watched in high school, which is the Gilmore Girls, the family that I grew up with on TV. And they actually talk about Palestine quite often in the show. Or like they mentioned that... They mention that that stuff is happening, which lines up politically with like when the show was on the air and there was also a lot of bad stuff happening in Palestine. And but I don't think the show's creators were... They were kind of like adopting a neutral but mostly support Israel thing, which is, you know, it's--

**Margaret** 04:07 Not our line here.

**Inmn** 04:11 Which is not our line here, but is... How much can you expect from mainstream TV? Like I wasn't surprised to rewatch it and discover this.

**Margaret** 04:24 So what's our Gaza update?

**Inmn** 04:27 Yes, this is my very funny segue into Gaza stuff.

**Margaret** 04:31 No, it's good.

**Inmn** 04:32 Yeah, so... Which, I mean, there's nothing absolutely nothing funny about this. But so there's like a big... There's like big kind of like ceasefire talks happening right now, which I feel like this is something... You know, obviously people have been wanting there to be ceasefire talks for a long time and they they sort of happen and then Israel's, like, "We're not doing ceasefire talks. Fuck everyone." But they're... In this more recent round, while people kind of like imminently await a ground invasion of Rafah, which like the last little southern piece of Gaza that pretty much everyone who lives in Gaza has been forced into. And Hamas has responded to a call for ceasefire negotiation talks, saying that in order to start negotiations, they need for there to be a ceasefire. And part of part of what they're asking for at this point is like, yeah, we're willing to talk about hostage stuff, because I think they are still like 130 hostages, or something--

**Margaret** 06:03 Which is sort of--like from a pure detached point of view--like kind of impressive that they've still held on to these hostages, as the entire region falls?

**Inmn** 06:16 Yeah, yeah. And--

**Margaret** 06:20 Like, tactically impressive.

**Inmn** 06:25 Yeah. And they. So, kind of what they're asking for is like, yeah, we're willing to play ball. We're willing to do... like, we're willing to release hostages. But what we what we need is for Palestinian people to have basic human rights, and to not get bombed, and for there to be a ceasefire. And what do you think Israel's response to these like, pretty, pretty basic requests were?

**Margaret** 06:56 Did they build a time machine to kill all the peoples'.... No, they probably already did kill all those people's parents. Nevermind. Something really disproportionately, impressively evil. That's my guess.

**Inmn** 07:12 Yeah, well, it's kind of like.... So you know how this thing happens in politics, sometimes, where people kind of talk up a response as being much more internally conflictual than it actually is? The same things kind of happening in Israel were awaiting Netanyahu's response, like all of the like defense, prime ministers and stuff have been like, "If you don't continue with a ground invasion, we're abdicating and your government's going to fall apart." And Netanyahu was has vowed multiple times that regardless of whether negotiations happen, or there is a ceasefire, that a ground invasion of Rafah will happen. So it's kind of like fake strife, like fake internal strife. You know? Cool. And, yeah, that's kind of the state of the ceasefire talks. And something... This is just a piece that I've been trying to learn a little bit more about, which is a topic on a lot of people's mind, which is like, "Jey, Egypt, what's up? Why aren't you letting people into Egypt to escape genocide?" And there's kind of a few different factors at place. And one interesting development on that is that Egypt has started to build a buffered wall zone. Like a border between the border kind of thing. Which is just like a giant concrete pen that can fit about 150,000, people that they're building in anticipation of the border between Rafah and Egypt rupturing during Israel's ground invasion of Rafah, which they've... which Israel's all but announced is imminently going to happen. And likepart of what Egypt has said about this is they have been saying like, "Oh, well, we don't want to let people cross over into Egypt because we don't want people to then not be allowed back into Palestine when the war is over." It's kind of like this farcical idea that Israel's gonna do a war, take care of Hamas, and then just like peacefully leave Palestinians to like go about their lives.

**Margaret** 09:47 Yeah, I mean, like, it is true that... It certainly seems likely to me that Israel will not let anyone back in after they leave because Israel seems pretty clear that their goal--and has been their goal since 1895. Can I tell you a thing I learned about this? Sorry.

**Inmn** 10:05 Yeah, absolutely, please.

**Margaret** 10:09 I'm not sure when this podcast comes out. I just recently recorded, and it'll be out around the same time, an episode of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff about Palestinian resistance to the British Mandate of Palestine, basically the period between 1917 and 1948. Well, technically, the Mandate kicked in, in 1922. But after the British control started, right? And in that I learned a little bit more--like maybe a lot of the listeners already know this stuff--but everything that's happening now was in the diaries, and often public statements, of all of the founders of the State of Israel, down to very specifically like, "No, we are going to absolutely remove all of the--" they would never use the word Palestinians. They wouldn't even use the word Arabs. They specifically only said "non Jewish people" when they refer to the people who are already living in Palestine. And it's just really, blatantly clear that since the beginning, the project of Israel has been not just to create an Israeli State--or sorry, a Jewish state--but to remove non Jewish people.

**Inmn** 11:24 Yeah, yeah. And it's--yeah. Which it's like part of that, that makes it really confusing to see Egypt's response--

**Margaret** 11:35 I mean, I'm sure they're still doing it because they're bastards. But that part about like, oh, well, no one would be allowed back. That's probably true.

**Inmn** 11:45 But it's probably true regardless. A

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin and Brooke talk about flooding, water damage, and how to avoid having your home damaged by those things.

Guest Info

Colin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker.

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Colin on Flood Plains and Water Damage

**Brooke ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. And today our friend Colin is joining us again, this time to talk about flooding and dealing with water damage. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo jingo here!

**Brooke ** 01:40 And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us again today. And this time to talk about dealing with floods and water damage. Would you remind your pronouns, where you hail from if you want, and a bit about your background?

**Colin ** 01:52 Yeah, my name is Colin, he him. I'm from Pittsburgh. And I've been a contractor sort of on and off for the last about 20 years, as well as working in the power plants and industrial electricity, and sort of in and around industry for about the second half of my life. And, yeah, it's, I'm glad to talk about floods, because it's one of those things we're seeing more and more. And unfortunately, it's probably going to happen to pretty much everybody who's listening to this podcast at some point in their life in one form or another.

**Brooke ** 02:27 Yeah. And we've talked about flooding on the podcast before. I don't know that we've ever done a whole episode on it by any means. But it has definitely come up as we've talked about news and other major events. And you and I even talked about it when we did our first episode, a little bit. So I think it's—itll be good to dig into, you know, a nice reminder of what to do and not to do in a flood. And then also, I don't think we've ever talked much about flood recovery. So I'm excited to learn and teach more about that today. I wanted to share one of my own stories about flooding, if you don't mind me kicking off with that before we get into all the do's and don'ts and how tos.

**Colin ** 03:12 Yeah go for it.

**Brooke ** 03:13 Okay, cool.

**Colin ** 03:14 Everybody's got one of those stories.

**Brooke ** 03:16 Seems like it. Well, when I was growing up in the 90s, there was a major flooding event where I live. My hometown. It was built around a river, which of course is true of most older cities, right, because access to fresh water is critical for survival. And then there are also a lot of creeks that run through my town and feed into the river. And I live in the Pacific Northwest and it rains a whole lot here. So we're kind of accustomed to having occasional sudden and heavy downpours and the possibility of some rainwater pooling or briefly flooding. It's not uncommon. But this particular event when I was a teenager was something else. It was a really complicated set of weather events that led to it. But the important part is that, so the creeks that are all over town are overflowing. And then the river, it doubled its level on the first day of the heavy rains. And then within the next two days had crashed at its banks, and then for three days after that remained at flood levels. So the city's downtown area, for instance, it's fairly flat, it's right along the river, and most of the homes there have basements. So in addition to streets flooding, the basements flooded, filled with water. There were houses that got washed off their foundations, of course cars got washed away. And then even in other parts of town where there wasn't, you know they were more on the hills or what have you, there was so much water in the ground that it caused foundational issues to a lot of houses because the pressure of the water pushing on home foundations are running around it. And there had been an ice event right before the rain started that had caused his damage to a lot of pipes. So there were pipes that were bursting and breaking because they'd been weakened or already had broken because of the ice storm. And it led to all this flooding. And it's interesting as I've grown up in the town and come back to it as adult, that the damage of this event, the way it's imprinted itself on the psyche of the city, even my mom, when she comes back to visit will drive around, she'll go, oh, you know, such and such creek looks a little high today. You know, this creek is, you know, she always looks around at all the creeks to see where the waters levels are kind of this caution about how high is the water. Like, are we in danger of having some kind of event again. And anyone that lived here, you know, had or knew someone that had some kind of really severe damage or loss because of that flood. So that's really imprinted into my psyche because, of course, I was still a young person at the time this happened. And it's really impactful to me. So when we talk about flooding, it's like, oh, yeah, that was one of the major traumatic events of my youth, at least collectively in my society or my, you know, my town.

**Colin ** 06:13 Yeah, that's actually a really common situation you describe, of having an ice event or cold weather and then a warm front comes through, drops several inches of rain onto frozen ground, there's nowhere for it to go, and it just goes straight into rivers. Like you're seeing that more and more and that's actually exactly what I was gonna open with is that, with climate change, even if you're not living in someplace like Charleston, or Miami, or one of the other low lying areas that everybody knows is at risk for flooding either from rising ocean levels or because you're in a major floodplain. Just having these wild swings in temperature and rainfall makes flooding a much bigger issue. It's like living in Pittsburgh, it seems like we don't get mild old rains anymore, we either get four inches right now, or nothing. So it's not the, like, nice, gentle soaking rains that I remember from being a kid, it's like everything comes in a burst. And when that happens, dry ground does not soak up water nearly as well as slightly damp ground. So dropping lots of rain onto parched ground, you end up with lots of run off, and even though it's very, very dry, you end up with massive flooding.

**Brooke ** 07:35 Yeah, one of our cohosts and one of the collective members was—we were talking about it and she was describing, like, if you go to water your garden and you haven't watered your garden in a while, and like the first water that you put on, it kind of rolls off. It takes it a minute to actually, like, settle and sink in, and then it's easier to water the ground. And it's the same kind of thing with these flooding events which I, you know, had never thought about but can picture in my mind how that, oh yeah, how that happens, how that works. So it's, you know, we're at risk of flooding for so many different reasons than ever we were before because of super dryness or, you know, I feel like we've seen more atmospheric rivers in the news as well. Maybe I'm just paying more attention, but that seems to becoming more common too.

**Colin ** 08:26 Yeah, and with the big events, like, there is a definite limit on how much you can really do to prepare yourself short of just moving to someplace where these things don't happen, you know. Somebody told me, water always wins.

**Brooke ** 08:44 Ah!

**Colin ** 08:45 You're not going to beat it. It's heavy, it's powerful, and if it wants to come into your house, you're gonna have a really hard time stopping it.

**Brooke ** 08:56 Okay.

**Colin ** 08:57 You know, you can fight back against the inch or two, but if nine feet of water comes knocking at your front door, you're not gonna win.

**Brooke ** 09:06 Sure, but surely there are some things that we could do that would, you know, maybe help prevent the smaller amounts of water or help make it less bad, yeah?

**Colin ** 09:16 Oh, yeah, definitely. And especially if you're in one of the areas like sounds like you are, or like I am in Pittsburgh, where there's enough terrain that I'm not worried about a flood filling up the valley nine feet deep, because if that happens, you know, we have bigger problems. The issue is more, you know, an inch or two of water flowing along the surface running down the street, coming across the yard and down to the basement steps. Like that kind of stuff you can defend against, and it's really not that hard to do. But it takes a lot of preparation and, particularly if you're in an area where this has simply never happened before, it's very easy for that to catch everyone off guard. Sounds like that's the situation with the floods you described was this was what used to be a what they call, you know, a 100 year storm.

**Brooke ** 10:07 Uh huh, uh huh!

**Colin ** 10:09 Now the 100 year storms are happening every six months or so.

**Brooke ** 10:13 Yeah, well, we haven't, you know, had another one quite like that since the 90s. But also, I know that a lot of, you know, houses and whatnot are much better setup for it, you know. For instance, the downtown houses that got basements flooded so badly, a lot of them—I want to say all of them, but that might not be true—had sump pumps

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Tyler talk about homesteading, preparedness, prepare culture, and focus on inclusion of marginalized communities within these spaces.

Guest Info

Tyler (he/him) can be found on Instagram @Darkwinterconcepts

Host Info

Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Coming Soon

Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Dean continue to talk about the ways that mutual aid helps communities prepare for disasters that are already here and disasters that have yet to come. They talk about what things like hope and success can look like even as the world crumbles around us.

Guest Info

Dean Spade is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. You can find Dean's work at Deanspade.net, and you can read the article that Margaret and Dean talk about, "Climate Disaster is Here--And the State Will Never Save Us" on inthesetimes.com. You can also find Dean on Twitter @deanspade or on IG @spade.dean.

Host Info

Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Dean Spade on Mutual Aid as Preparedness pt. II

**Margaret ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and this is part two of a conversation with Dean Spade. So I should probably listen to part one, but I'm not your boss. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on the network.

**Margaret ** 00:42 Okay, I have a kind of final-ish question, I think. And it can be "ish" on the final part. But at the beginning of this, you said that your politics have been moving towards anti-statism, or, you know, possibly anarchism, or whatever. And I'm wondering if you want to talk about that. In some ways, I feel like you've implied a lot of maybe what has drawn you more towards those politics, but I'm really curious about the kind of route you took--not like where you've landed, and what labels you want to throw on things--but what has led you towards those politics?

**Dean ** 01:56 I just talked with somebody yesterday who I know from the anti-Zionist Jewish world who was talking about the. . . about how he feels like people haven't thought. . . that he hasn't thought a lot about anti-State or anarchist politics, and he was like, "Why do you think some people haven't and some people haven't?" and I was like, "Oh, I think people just come to our politics. Like, we just kind of stumble into them." It's like, if somebody stumbled into a punk scene in 1999, they probably found anarchism sooner than me. I stumbled into all this queer, anti-police stuff, and we were doing a lot of identity-based work, and people weren't talking about political tendencies in the same way--in part also, because it had been really divisive, at certain points, in our movements where people had gotten so obsessed with their ideology that they'd been able to work together and got really insular. So there was a lot of, I think, push away for some people from that. I think, also, we have lived in times for the last, at least 100 years, that are so deeply reactive anti-anarchist, in particular, because of the history of anarchism in the US and elsewhere. There's a really great piece by William C. Anderson that came out a while--like not that long ago--after the Atlanta indictment about how policing in the United States itself developed through policing anarchism, that I highly recommend. But anyway, I think a lot of us also just haven't gotten. . . Like, it's like you were told, "Anarchists are just people who want chaos and who are dirty white people," or whatever. There's a lot of things that erase the contributions of anti-colonial anarchists and anarchists who aren't white in all these things. Anyway, Or, anti-State tendencies that aren't anarchism in the European sense. But for me, I think what happened is that I've been in movements that have been benefiting from a range of genealogies, including women of color feminism--specifically Black feminism--and other political knowledges and methods that have been anti-institutional, in really great ways have had critiques of the borders and the cops and the military have also had a focus on practices of collectivity and horizontality with us, you know, inside our movements, which are very. . . You know, that really parallel with a lot of anarchist methodologies like "Let's not have a boss in this group," you know? And so all of those things really dovetail with anarchism, but I wasn't ever studying anarchism itself. Some people who were in groups I was in maybe identified as anarchists, but it didn't seem like an essential thing for me to study for a number of years. And I didn't think a lot about whether or not that was my position, because also I just had the same caricatures in my mind that other people did. And I also was like, "Do anarchists think that people shouldn't get welfare?" I don't know. I had some of my own, you know. As somebody who grew up on welfare, I had some questions about that, that I didn't have resolutions to. And then over time, especially doing abolitionist work, it just was so clear to me more and more not only that everything I was already doing dovetailed with anarchism: my interest in mutual aid, my interest in horizontal tactics inside our groups, and building group culture where we learned how to share with each other, and not boss each other around, and all that stuff. But also, the ways in which, I think, abolitionist frameworks are just. . . like, they're so deeply anti-State. It's like, 'Yeah, don't build a better cop. Don't build a better jail. Don't build a better prison. Don't build a better social services framework that's actually still a cop," or you know. And, that you can't have a country without cops, borders, and military. That's what a country is made of, you know? You can't have a Capitalist economy without a boot on everybody's neck making us participate in it. So I just came to realize like, I'm not only--I always knew I was against the United States settler colonial slavery project--but I was like, "Oh, my God, I'm against countries. I'm against that." And then I did start actually reading about this stuff and I was like, "Oh, my God, they're a recent invention. They don't need to be able to organize themselves. That's not how people have always organized themselves." And I also started to see how it actually makes a difference in our tactics about what we're going to do today, if we know this about ourselves, right? Like how we're going to get basically co-opted by projects of "Oh, let's let's do a let's do a million local elections and try to take over a city council 'thing.'" A lot of that work steals the oxygen out of local movements really intensely. And I'm not gonna say it should never ever be done, but I just feel like so much of it actually has a lack of a conversation about what can happen in those spaces behind it and then is incredibly resource intensive and doesn't lead to the things I think people hope it will lead to, like, "Oh, we're gonna have an abolitionist prosecutor and abolitionist city council person or mayor and it's gonna change everything," right? And then not seeing that happen. I think we've seen that it's played out. Or the, you know, I think this is even sharpened for me with the period of the "Defund [the police]" work--which I care a lot about, trying to defund the police--and seeing the fights inside city councils and how deeply impenetrable--like even when you supposedly, in 2020, get the whole city council saying we want to defund the police and there's so much effort on that side--it's like our cities are run by real estate developers, chambers of commerce, and police departments. And the entire apparatus of the city councils--which is in some ways more accessible than any other level of government, of course--is still unmovable. Like you can't. . . you can be right all day long. You can do every kind of research. You can show you can turn up with all the people every single time. And as soon as they can turn around and reestablish their nonstop march to constantly increase the police budget, that's what they'll do. And that is what they have done since 2020 after all this amazing work by so many people. So I think I'm just continually evaluating "Wow, where are there still parts of my own approach to politics that are assuming we can convince governments of things?"--even while I want to get rid of those kinds of governments--and why do I ever think they will voluntarily put down their weapons? And why do I think about getting any different people inside there, inside that machine? I don't believe that about the military. I'm not like, "Well, maybe if Margaret Killjoy was the general, it would all be fine." I know, that's not true. So why do I, and where have I still. . . And I, you know, I forgive myself and all of us. We're all just trying shit our whole lives. And there's so many things I've been involved in that I think were not that generative, but you know, we couldn't have known that. Or, where there was a backlash so that the thing that was generative for a while stopped or, you know, was turned on us in a way that undermined our hopes. But I think that for me it's just an ongoing deepening with different anti-State frameworks, an ongoing deepening of reading history, and understanding why different revolutionary projects that then took on State forms became authoritarian, trying to understand what this kind of insight--which is very hard, because it's about letting go of a lot of hope and a lot of tactics that people are putting a lot of effort into--like, what it directs us to do to most immediately support people's well being,

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Dean talk about the ways that mutual aid helps communities prepare for disasters that are already here and disasters that have yet to come.

Guest Info

Dean Spade is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. You can find Dean's work at Deanspade.net, and you can read the article that Margaret and Dean talk about, "Climate Disaster is Here--And the State Will Never Save Us" on inthesetimes.com. You can also find Dean on Twitter @deanspade or on IG @spade.dean.

Host Info

Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Dean Spade on Mutual Aid as Preparedness

**Margaret** 00:24 Hello and welcome to Live Live the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Margaret Killjoy. And today, I'm gonna be talking to Dean Spade, and we're gonna talk about so much stuff. We're gonna talk about so much stuff that this is going to be a two parter. So you can hear me talk with Dean this week and you can hear me talk with Dean next week. Or, if you're listening to this in some far-flung future, you can listen to it both at once in between dodging laser guns from mutants that have come out of the scrap yards, riding dinosaurs. I hope that's the future, or at least it wouldn't be boring. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on the network.

**Margaret** 01:53 Okay, we're back. So if you could introduce yourself with I guess your name, your pronouns, and then maybe a little bit about how you ended up doing the kind of work that led you to be on this show talking about mutual aid and collapse and preparedness?

**Dean** 02:10 Totally. Yeah, I'm Dean, I use he/him. And we could start anywhere. I became politicized primarily, like in the late 90s, living in New York City. You know, Rudy Giuliani was mayor/ There was a really vibrant, like very multi-issue, cross-class, multiracial kind of resistance happening to his range of anti-poor pro-police politics happening in the city; people, you know, in the fight around immigrant rights, in the fight around labor, sex workers being zoned out of Time Square. You know, there was just. . .it was a real moment. And I was part of queer nightlife. And people were experiencing a lot of intense policing. And a lot of us were part of work related to, you know, things that had spun off of Act Up, like a lot of direct support to people who were living with HIV and AIDS and trying to get through the New York City welfare processes, and dealing with housing. So a lot of mutual aid in that work from the get, and a lot of work related to that overlap between criminalization and poverty, from a queer, trans, feminist perspective. And that work was also tied into like, very, you know. . . a broader perspective. Like a lot of people were tied to the liberation of Puerto Rico, and the fight against the US Navy bombing Vieques, people were tied into the fight around Palestine. So it was very local--hyperlocal--New York City work, but it was very international because New York City is a very international place, and those politics were very international. So that really shaped me in a lot of ways. And I went from there to becoming a poverty lawyer and focusing on doing Poverty Law for trans people, you know, really focused on people in jails and prisons and welfare systems and immigration proceedings and foster care and stuff like that; homeless shelters. I did that for a number of years, and then increasingly felt like I. . . I just felt the real limits of doing that work as a lawyer and really prefer unpaid organizing and not being do not doing that to kind of the nonprofit and sort of like social services, legal services frame. And so my job, for now 15 years, has been that I'm a law professor. It's like a really great job that's not like. . . you know, it's not a nine to five, and that's wonderful. You don't have a boss really, and things like that. And so I teach to kind of pay my bills and what my life is really about is, you know, a lot of. . . it's been a lot of local abolitionist stuff. Like, you know, site fights around different jails and other facilities or police stations or whatever and mutual aid work and, you know, tied in for years with various aspects of like Palestine movement, especially around trying to push back against pinkwashing. And like writing stuff and making media and collaborating with artists and and, yeah. So, that's like that's that same. . .I've always think I've stayed the same, but also, I think my ideas have changed a lot over time. I've gravitated more towards anarchist or anti-state thought. And thinking a lot more in recent years about the ecological crisis and collapse and just kind of like what that means for the tactics and strategies we're all engaged in kind of all these different movements spaces.

**Margaret** 05:41 I think that that's probably--that last point--is kind of the core of what I want to ask you about and talk to you about, because while you were talking, I was thinking about how like, you know, all of these things that you're talking about--the activism you're doing in New York, for example==I mean, it's all preparedness, right? Like us, helping each other out is being. . . like, aware of actual threats and working to mitigate them? And that's what preparedness is for me, right? And, I actually think activism is a very good, solid place to come from for preparedness, right? I'd rather have a bunch of activists and organizers around me than specifically people who like, know how to skin squirrels. I like people who can do both to be honest, but you know, as compared to the traditional assumption of what a prepper or someone who's involved in preparedness, what their background would be. But I also. . .okay, so it's like I want one, I kind of wanna talk about the activist-preparedness pipeline. But the thing that I'm really excited to talk to you about is kind of the opposite, is the thing that you just brought up. What does awareness of ecological crisis do to our activism? What does it do to how we make decisions around what to prioritize? How to live? Like, for me, the thing that started this show was that I was like, "I'm very aware of this coming ecological crisis. I feel a little bit distant from other people because I feel a little bit like I'm running around screaming, 'the sky is falling.' Because I could see it and I don't understand why no one else can see it," you know? And it was basically like, how does this inform the decisions we make? Right? Which is where the title sort of literally comes from. But I think you've done a lot of work around this, around how awareness of ecological crisis impacts how we choose to be activists. And I'm wondering if you could talk about how it's impacted you or how you've learned to help communicate this to people. Right, because that's one of the biggest scary things is how do we not Chicken Little while needing to Chicken Little? You know, we need a little bit of Chicken Little--a little. Yeah, okay. I'm done.

**Dean** 08:05 I want to come back to the pipeline later. Let's remember to do that. But one thing that your question brings up for me also is just, I just want to talk--and I'm curious about your experiences of this--I want to be real about how much denial there is like. And I think this is really interesting. Like, I find an extreme amount of denial about the level of the crisis, even amongst people I know who are incredibly radical and spent their lives trying to end denial around other things they care about. Like we spent our lives trying to be like, "Look what's happening in prisons and jails in our society," or "Look at what poverty is," or "Look at what the war machine is." But then when it comes to like, "Hey, y'all, I think that, like, collapse is nigh, and that might affect our strategies." People are like, "I don't want to hear about that." Literally, "Don't talk to me about that," because it's so scary, and there's so much stress. And then I get like a certain set of like really common denial reactions like, "Well, the world has ended before." And it's like, yes, every time colonialism is happening a world, a way of life, a way people have been together is ending. Absolutely. And there is something unique and specific about this particular mass extinction event. And it's okay to say. . . it doesn't mean that those things didn't happen or aren't happening. But they're. . .but that feels to me like sometimes a phrase people use that's just like, "I don't want to think about this anymore." I'm like, let's think about that and this because actually, they're all happening together. Right? Like, obviously, colonization is ongoing and it determines who is feeling the heat fastest, you know? That, I get that one a lot or I get like, "Well, humans are bad and maybe the world should just end," kind of thing. Like, let's hasten it, or like, you know, maybe not, "Let's hasten it," but like, you know, that feels really messed up to me. That feels like skipping over and denying how much meaningful suffering we want to acknowledge and recognize and also try to prevent, and it ignores the fact that not all humans have made this happen. Actually, most humans who ever existed have fought against extraction and states and wars, and it's like just elites running state formations that have m

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin talks to Brooke about how to asses damage to structures after disasters, what you can do when you're stuck in a building after a disaster, and ways to make your situation easier and safer.

Guest Info

Colin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker.

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Colin on Structural Triage After a Disaster

**Brooke ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for it feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. Today I'll be talking with Colin, an experienced construction and trade worker, about how to prepare for and perform structural triage after disasters. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo doo, doo doo.

**Brooke ** 00:48 And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us today to talk about structural triage after disasters. Would you introduce yourself? Let us know your pronouns, where you're from if you want, maybe some of your background in the construction industry.

**Colin ** 01:19 Yeah, I'm Colin, he/him. Lived in around Western Pennsylvania pretty much my entire life—mostly in the Pittsburgh area. I picked up carpentry right after college just as a way to earn some money. Been in and out that for a while. I worked as an industrial electrician in the power industry for about seven years, and then decided I'd had enough of that and went back to doing carpentry.

**Brooke ** 02:10 Okay, so is your—is your background in those trades the reason that you're interested in this topic, or was there something else that sparked you or made you kind of get into learning about it?

**Colin ** 02:23 Actually, the impetus for this was a little over—actually, seems like ages ago, but actually less than a year ago, a friend had an apartment fire right after Christmas last year. And it's still that big cold snap. And fortunately, we managed to get them recovered from that, but it was only due to the fairly heroic efforts of a lot of friends. And after that I started thinking about, you know, like, what are the ways that, you know, if you don't have people looking out for you and willing to come bail you out, what can you do if you're stuck in a damaged building for a few days while you're waiting for utilities to come back online, first responders to work through a backlog? Just, how can you make things easier in the immediate few days after disaster?

**Brooke ** 03:14 Nice. So is this something that you then have you had to put into practice, or other people around you have put into practice? Or are we mostly theoretical at this point and haven't tested all these things—not that we don't trust your experience here.

**Colin ** 03:31 Yeah, no, I have done some of these things more in the context of camping and backpacking, just like, there are things you can do that will make the situation easier and safer. Also, a lot of my background in working in power plants involved constant safety trainings about how do you do things safely? What do you have to look out for? What are, you know, things that you just need to be aware of when you're in dangerous situations? And I'm continually surprised at how many of those applied to everyday life, and how much of that stuff we just don't have to think about when we're living in a house that has already been designed to be safe. But when you have a disaster, obviously things break. And suddenly, things that are—things that normally have the engineering and safety built into them no longer work the way they're supposed to, and suddenly, you have to take care of all of that on your own. It's not that hard to do, or even that expensive. You just have to do the planning and preparation before it happens. Because once you find yourself in that situation, it's too late.

**Brooke ** 04:46 Yeah, that makes sense. And we're gonna get into those details in a second. But for the listener, I just wanted to share that Colin had reached out to us with this really great list of different things we could explore on this topic. And as I said to him, the the part that stood out most to me was he was talking about how to shelter in place in a compromised building and how to do structural triage and first aid that can make the eventual recovery easier. So we may get into a lot more than that today, we may have a second episode at some point to talk about other things because Colin has a lot of great info to share. But that was the part that really struck me and the areas that I wanted to focus on. And so right before we get into the details, another question I wanted to ask you was, how broadly is this applicable? Like, you know, there's all kinds of different disaster situations, right? We've got floods, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, unnatural disasters. Do you have different tips for different scenarios that we're going to talk about, or is a lot of this like works across multiple possibilities?

**Colin ** 05:50 It's some of both. A lot of the things you need to be concerned with sheltering in place, or just being aware of what are the things that change when systems go offline. So when you don't have power anymore and you're relying on batteries or a generator, or you lose your gas, now, suddenly, you're relying on kerosene heaters or lamps. All of these things change how you have to think about your safety in a house. Obviously, people have been living with fireplaces and wood stoves and oil lamps for a very, very long time. It's not that hard to do. But if you're used to being able to flip a switch and have the lights come on, you're going to have to make some changes. And if you don't do those things, you can cause yourself serious problems.

**Brooke ** 06:38 Okay, so let's talk about the first part of that where work. Let's say we're in a situation where we've just had a disaster, we're in a compromised building—whether it be like—I guess mostly we're talking about homes, or maybe your apartment complex too, not necessarily, like, work structures. So let's say we're in that in that situation, we're in this compromised building right after a disaster, what's one of the first things that we need to do?

**Colin ** 07:01 So the very first thing is always keep yourself safe, because there's no disaster that you can't make worse by getting injured. And this is especially true—

**Brooke ** 07:12 [Laughing] That's a good line, yeah!

**Colin ** 07:12 That's especially true when you have, you know, something like the ERCOT disaster down in Texas and 2021, and you have an entire city that is struggling, and your first responders are overwhelmed.

**Brooke ** 07:28 Was that when they lost power?

**Colin ** 07:30 Yeah, they lost power for I want to say a week or two? I don't think it was continuous. I think it went off, and then it came back on, and then it went off again. The estimated death toll from that was like somewhere between 250 and 700 people, which is—that's like 10 times the number of people that die from an average hurricane season. And most of it was due to things like hyperthermia and carbon monoxide poisoning. Just because people were trying to stay warm and making bad decisions either because they didn't know any better, or they didn't have the tools they needed. Most of it could have been avoided. But obviously that was a terrible situation, and Texas is still recovering from that. So yeah, you've got to keep yourself safe. Couple parts of that. The easiest thing is the personal protective equipment side. Because that's just a matter of throwing a little bit of money at the problem, and it doesn't even take very much money. This is stuff like have worked gloves around so that you can protect your hands. Keep safety glasses around, because getting an eye injury will make life real bad and real tough right now. Earplugs. Disasters are often loud, and even if they're not, things are going to sound different. So having earplugs can help you sleep better. These are, like, not—things that do not cost a whole lot of money. But the most important thing is just to look at the situation and take a beat and figure out what has changed and what you need to do to stop the problem from getting worse. So the first part of this is anything that is broken or not working the way it is supposed to needs to be shut down. So like, do you need to get the power turned off? Do you need to get the gas turned off? Do you need to get the water turned off so your pipes don't freeze and burst? These are things that the average homeowner can do: turning off the power, as long as you have access to the circuit breaker, it's a matter of flipping a switch. Water should just be a matter of closing a valve. The problem is a lot of times the shutoff valves for water don't work the way they're supposed to because they haven't been maintained. I have run into that a few times. And—

**Brooke ** 09:42 I know I know at my own house, shutting off the water is a much bigger deal than it should be.

**Colin ** 09:48 Right and most of the time that's fine, until you have pipes that are actively spraying water, and suddenly it's not fine. Getting the gas shut off. Usually, again, just matter of going outside with a wrench and turning the valve at the meter. But you have to have the right s

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Brooke, Margaret, and Inmn talk about the environment, how a Boeing whistle blower died suspiciously, Abbot's newest attempt to make Texas a mini fief, and remember the lives of 3 teens. They also talk about hope and some nice things that happened for a change.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: This Month in the Apocalypse: March 2024

**Margaret** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff your podcast. . . I did the wrong. . . Did I do the wrong one? Should we keep it?

**Brooke** 00:23 [All laughing] I love you so much.

**Margaret** 00:26 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, the other podcast that I'm one of the three hosts of. I'm Margaret killjoy, and with me is

**Brooke** 00:37 Brooke. Hi.

**Inmn** 00:38 And Inmn, who can't tell if this was a bit or not,

**Margaret** 00:41 Let's pretend it was a bit. [Sarcastically] I have functional memory. I'm not on podcast recording number five for the week. I don't know what you're talking about. And this is Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. And welcome back. We've been on a break because we were all a little burned out and we wanted to catch up because we didn't want to. . . We thought through our options, we could either have gone off a weekly schedule, but we're like, "Well, we like having a weekly schedule." So we took a break. And I don't remember whether we told you about that break, but it's over. Don't worry. It'll never. . . It'll totally happen again. And whatever, you like watching TV shows that have season breaks, you can. . . I'm sure you all figured it out. Anyway, it's This Month in the Apocalypse, only this time, we're going to be a little bit messy because it's been a little bit. So it's like this month and a half in the apocalypse. So you get an extra. It's like 1.5 as much apocalypse as usual. Y'all are so lucky. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcast and here's a jingle from another show on the network.

**Brooke** 01:14 Okay, so it just occurred to me that if we're doing half of March, we're at some point going to have to do half of March. So we're either going to have to have half a month in Apocalypse or do half of March and April, and then there'll be another month and a half. So maybe we should call this 45 Days in the Apocalypse? I'm just saying.

**Margaret** 02:52 I'll just continue to messily not exactly keep track of "Oh, that happened on this date instead of this state, so it can't come in." But I'm open to it. I can be convinced. So I want to talk about some stuff. One of the things I want to talk about is how I would never say Boeing assassinated a man. But I would say that everyone who pays attention to the following news story comes to the inevitable conclusion that the private company Boeing, which manufactures an awful lot of the planes in this country, has been having a lot of problems lately. A lot of people think they assassinated a man. There was a man named John Barnett. He was a Boeing whistleblower and he was found dead on March 10th. And the news can't say, quote, "he was assassinated." So instead, they're dancing around it, doing things like putting "self-inflicted," in quotes, when they talk about the gunshot wounds that this man had to his head. I honestly. . . like this one, it's like, it's like one of those things where it didn't surprise me, but it still surprised me. I don't know how to describe this. It's a very common feeling these days were something absolutely horrible happens, where you're like, "Oh, of course that happened." But you're still a little bit like, "I can't believe that happened." John Barnett was a quality control manager at a Boeing plant in South Carolina. He worked on the 787 Dreamliners. And he had been pretty upset about a lot of the quality control that was going on. There's been a lot of conversation recently about Boeing and its lack of quality control, because their planes are literally falling apart in the air. And of course, there were two crashes a couple years ago that killed hundreds of people, that had to do with some faulty technology that caused the planes to go into nosedives that the pilots couldn't correct.

**Brooke** 04:52 And John Oliver just did a longer piece on Boeing too. So that brought it out in conversations.

**Margaret** 04:57 Yeah, well, and then the main thing that brought it up I think is that in the US it actually happens to US people. So people noticed. An airplane had the plug in the side of the plane blow out. And it was before it had gotten up to cruising altitude and it would have gone a lot worse if it had happened a little bit later. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured and the plane was able to land. And from there, it's just been this cascading thing. I really recommend John Oliver's The Last Week Tonight about Boeing and what's been going on with the planes. Anyway, John Barnett, quality control manager, and he was in Charleston to give a deposition against Boeing because he was suing them for retaliation because of his whistleblowing, and then they were like, "Hey, how come he didn't show up in court?" And so they went to his hotel and they found him dead in his pickup truck, having a quote unquote, "self-inflicted" gunshot wound. He was 62 years old. And rest in peace. And I have yet to meet anyone who has heard this news and not been like, "Yep, Boeing killed a man."

**Brooke** 06:15 Sure seems like it.

**Inmn** 06:16 That's what reasonable people would come to the conclusion of because it's what's happened in the past.

**Margaret** 06:27 And, you know, I mean, there's also. . . Sure there's technically a version of the world where he was like, "I'm just so sad about. . ." No, he was. . .whatever. Anyway, Okay, so then I'm gonna talk about environmental news.

**Brooke** 06:42 Do that.

**Margaret** 06:44 Don't worry, it's worse.

**Inmn** 06:46 Oh, no.

**Margaret** 06:48 So let's see. This was the warmest February in Earth's history. This is the ninth month in a row that we have been in the warmest of this following month on record. The time we beat this time, for February warmest, was 2016 was the previous warmest month of February in history. And charts are literally being recalibrated to show the excessive heat. If you look at a lot of these charts, the lines from this year don't even touch previous years, you know? Next, there's the warmest winter on record in the United States. This month, the average global sea surface temperature was the highest it's ever been in the recorded history of the Earth for any month at all. The average global sea surface temperature was 69.96 degrees Fahrenheit. And we're very likely to have a very active hurricane season this year in the Atlantic because of the fact that. . . We actually might not have a hotter year this year than last year because the--I get El Nino and La Nina mixed up--but overall we've been--I'm pretty sure it's like El Nino is the thing we've been in and it's the thing that makes it warmer and La Nina cools things down a little bit. And so that's like, cool, right? We're like, "Oh, all right, we could definitely use some cooling things down a little bit." However, people have guessed. . . "Guessed" is the wrong word. Scientists who study this shit have looked and been like--you know, or climatologists have looked--and been like "Well, this slight cooling coming at this particular way that all this heat is working we're very likely to have a very active hurricane season."

**Brooke** 08:27 Do you know what that starts?

**Brooke** 08:31 I don't live in a hurricane zone, so I. . . Like I know it's always summer and early fall that it's crazy, active , busy and the worst of it, but I feel like I don't know when that season quote unquote, "starts."

**Margaret** 08:31 No, I don't.

**Margaret** 08:43 I can't remember that I don't live in that area anymore. But speaking of seasons not being what they used to be, there was a study that showed that--it's not just in your head--spring is indeed on average 13 days earlier in the United States than it was in 1981 There's a chart up you can look at--the Washington Post actually has a pretty good article about it--that shows, it's kind of a U shape of the country, is having way earlier springs, whereas some parts of the the Upper Midwest are a little bit later springs than usual, although not this year. But--and especially on mountain ranges--Spring is remarkably earlier, which made sense as I was walking my dog today in the middle of March and looking at the flowers blooming and thinking to myself, "Ah, yes, April showers will bring those flowers to me in May." [sardonic]

**Inmn** 09:42 It's early.

**Margaret** 09:43 Yeah, so that's not just in your head. It's a thing that's happening. Texas saw an incredibly destructive wildfire in the past month or so. It's the most destructive in Texas history, is the Smoke House Creek Fire. It burned more than a million In acres. And Texas is primed for more fires. That, actually, that fire came earlier than the usual fire season, which is March and April. In the panhandle of Texas there's a lot of basically dry grasses. And there's

Episode Summary

This time on This Month in the Apocalypse, Brooke and Inmn talk about volcanoes, fires in Chile, rivers in the sky, storms of new magnitudes, the war in Ukraine, the ICJ ruling on Israel's genocide, how the immigration bill is confusing and bad, God's Army descending on Eagle's Pass, and how charitable bail funds are under attack. Live Like the World is Dying will be taking a break until sometime in March! Stay tuned!

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke. Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Ben and Brooke talk about communication systems during a disaster. They cover basic communication infrastructure and equipment as well as what kind of information is vital to be able to communicate when cell phone towers go down. They also cover just how awesome amateur radio is.

Guest Info

Ben Kuo (he/him) is an amateur radio operator. Ben can be found on Mastodon @[email protected]

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Ben on Communicating After a Disaster

**Brooke** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. Today I'll be talking with Ben about communication and sharing information after disasters. But first, we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Jingle, Jingle jingle goes here.

**The Ex-Worker Podcast** 00:45 The border is not just a wall. It's not just a line on a map. It's a power structure, a system of control. The border does not divide one world from another. There is only one world and the border is tearing it apart. The Ex-Worker Podcast presents "No Wall They Can Build: a guide to borders and migration across North America" A serialized audio book in 11 chapters released every Wednesday. tune in at crimethinc.com/podcast.

**Brooke** 01:29 And we're back. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about communication and information sharing after a disaster. We'd love to know a little bit more about you if you're willing to share your pronouns and where you hail from and anything else that you want to say to introduce yourself?

**Ben** 01:49 Sure. My name is Ben Kuo, and I am in Ventura County, California. My pronouns are he and him. And my background in disasters is I have been very involved in responding to disasters, providing information on social media, and making sure that people, you know, get the information they need to stay safe and stay healthy and help other people.

**Brooke** 02:17 Nice. Was this something that you got into because of a disaster that happened? Or was it something you were interested in before...before it became useful in this context? If that makes sense?

**Ben** 02:28 It's interesting. I really got involved in this in 20--I believe it's 2018--when Hurricane Maria hit, and hurricane Maria was a category five hurricane, and I am...one of my hobbies--and I have many hobbies-- but one of them is amateur radio. And for folks who have never heard of amateur radio, what it is, is a hobby where you learn how to use the radio and to communicate with people. And that is locally, you know, with people in your area, that is internationally. And you can talk to people all across the globe using just a radio, a power supply, a battery, and an antenna without any of the world being up. So that's no internet, no telephone, no power supply, no power grid. And you can communicate with people all over the world. And it's fun. And I started because it was a lot of fun. But it ends up being very, very, very useful nowadays with the increasing pace of disasters. And so I became an amateur radio operator partially because of the emergency aspect of it. There's a big community around it. But also just because it's a lot of fun for the technology and playing with the technology. So the big story of how I got into the disaster is Hurricane Maria was bearing down on the Caribbean. And it is...I don't know if you've seen the trend in recent years but hurricanes have been spinning up much faster and much more intensely. And it's called rapid intensification. And because of that you don't have quite the warning that you used to with hurricanes. And so people go, "Oh, we can watch this. And we can react." or "Oh, it's gonna be coming in a week." And that's not happening as much anymore. So what happens is someone says, "Hey, it's a tropical storm. We don't have to worry too much." And all of a sudden, it goes from a tropical storm to category five hurricane. This actually happened only a few months ago in Mexico. A tropical storm, everyone says, "Oh, it's just going to be a tropical storm." Even the expert of the National Weather Service said, "Oh, it's just gonna be a tropical storm." And it went from a tropical storm to category five hurricane. And it totally decimated a resort area in Mexico.

**Brooke** 05:16 I had no idea. And it's interesting because I feel like I seem to hear about them going the other direction so often. Like, oh, there's a hurricane off the coast and it, you know--especially on our coast here on the West Coast--and then it dissipates into, you know, just a tropical storm or what have you. So I wasn't aware that we're seeing an increase of them going from tropical storm to hurricane. That's really interesting.

**Ben** 05:40 Yeah, I think the scientists say, you know, it's an outgrowth of warmer oceans and with the climate crisis and all that, you have more energy. So it hits a warm spot in the ocean and all sudden, you know, it becomes quite crazy. So how I got involved is--I was not involved very much with emergencies and disasters, until hurricane Maria--and I was, you know, monitoring things here and there. And I learned that amateur radio was the only way to get to the...there's a little island nation called Dominica, it's not affiliated with any large country. It's kind of its own country. And they were cut off from the world by hurricane Maria. So they had, I guess they lost 90% of the roofs. They lost...they had no power system. They lost their telephones. And interestingly enough, everyone thought they were okay, because they didn't hear any messages from Dominica. They were like, "Oh, category five, it should be fine." And no one called for help. [Brooke exclaims incredulity] I got on--the amateur radio operators had already been active. There's an active Amateur Radio Group on the island. And I stumbled upon them and discovered they were in big trouble. And they were just begging for help. And so I stumbled in here--I'm all the way in California--and using the magic of amateur radio was actually talking to these folks in the Caribbean. And actually also using the internet kind of to bridge some of the parts of it. It's interesting, all the technology aspects. But the important thing ended up being that they were in a lot of trouble. There's no one to help, and they just needed to get information about what was going on. And I started relaying information to the amateur radio operators there in the region on what was going on, what help was on the way or not on the way. In the meantime, they actually had...the amatory operators actually arranged a rescue of the Prime Minister of the country. And that's like, you know, rescuing the President of the United States. Yeah, they rescued the president of Dominica, the Prime Minister. And they had...they were laying information back and forth like, "Oh, we need this. There's a problem here. People here need dialysis. How can we get help from these people? These people are trapped." At one point, I relayed information from them about someone who had been...who was able to--I guess there's limited cell phone coverage within the country--where they were able to tell somebody else that they were stuck underneath the house. And that got relayed by amateur radio operators out of the country, and I got it and it went back into the country elsewhere. And I rescued somebody. And in fact, I ended up relaying information from the US Embassy. And they actually were sending in...they actually sent in an entire warship, the USS Wasp. It's an amphibious carrier. And they were airlifting US citizens out of the country. And they would actually go in and, you know, drop people off and pull them out of the, you know, whatever vacation villa they're staying at and have them evacuate. It was a big operation. No one...no one really heard about it here. But that was kind of my introduction to the fact that amateur radio was very, very useful in really, you know, like a worst case scenario. And I learned a lot of lessons there, for sure, about how to deal with it. And eventually after Hurricane Maria hit Dominica, it actually hit Puerto Rico.

**Brooke** 09:37 What year was this by the way?

**Ben** 09:39 It was September of 2017. And it first hit Dominica, but then the hurricane curved up and it hit Puerto Rico. And I was involved in that. There's a huge...Puerto Rico also had no communications. And the only communications was amateur radio for a good two days I believe. And I was really relaying information back and forth there. And how this ties into social media is I was collecting all this information, relaying it back and forth. And I said, "Hey, I'm listening to all this, I can see what's going on and I might as well post it up on Twitter." And I did that. And I also put up a YouTube stream of all the radio communications that were happening....

**Brooke** 10:25 Back when Twitter was good and useful and we loved it.

**Ben** 10:29 Yeah, back when it was a cause for good as opposed to what it is now.

**Brooke** 10:33 Sorry, go on. Mourning the loss of Twitter.

**Ben** 10:38 Yeah, exactly. It's actually quite a thing. So interesting...that would have been it for me. I was going to delete my account. But shortly after that, there was a fire

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Zena and Brooke talk about parenting

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

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