To unsettle

Disaster politics and becoming more responsive to the world

“Retreat is not leaving in defeat, nor is it giving up hope. Instead, acknowledging retreat creates hope by giving up our false assumptions of human mastery over the environment. Giving up on mastery is not abandoning our relationships to land or place but reinforcing relations by redefining them anew.” – Rosetta S. Elkin via Landscapes of Retreat.

As communities across the Appalachians grieve and begin their recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene recently devastated the region, people on the opposite side of the globe in the remote islands of The Phillippines and the island of Taiwan are starting their efforts to recover from the floods, torrential rain, and mudslides brought forth by Typhoon Krathon. Climate researchers report that “the effects of climate change increased Helene’s wind speeds by about 11 percent… and increased the rainfall it dumped on the U.S. by about 10 percent.”

Meanwhile, people in various parts of Florida are being asked to evacuate as Hurricane Milton deepens her landing.

There is no way to sugarcoat these events. Things are dire. I wish I could end these catastrophes the same way I can simply exit out of the news page. But I can’t.

These hurricanes storm through regions indiscriminately, not caring about whose neighborhoods they unsettle — though they typically impact the poorer communities the most. Many are forced to risk their lives by hunkering down, having no economic means or networks of social support to be able to go anywhere else. Those who can get out leave knowing that they might return to their livelihoods turned upside-down.

It feels apocalyptic to watch videos showing entire towns, even mountainous ones, being flooded, with water levels reaching as high as the roofs of buildings. I grew up experiencing Typhoon seasons and local floods on my home island of Taiwan, but somehow, it hits differently to see such destruction ravaging one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Although I am not currently in the pathway of an active hurricane, I still feel an increase in my baseline level of anxiety that I can’t shake. Maybe this is what people call “climate anxiety.”

Some questions swirl in my mind…

To what extent are “disasters” subjective, or manufactured?

They say that these hurricanes are likely to lead to billions of dollars in damage.

Why do they quantify the infrastructural damage that the hurricane caused, but not the damage and loss from the initial deforestation, habitat fragmentation, ecosystem conversion, paving over of wetlands and permeable terrains, and disruption of local water- and carbon- cycles necessary to realize these profit-driven ideas of urban development?

Why was it not already a disaster when the life-giving, riverly arteries of landscapes were clogged and dammed up for the corporate control and privatization of water, and only a disaster when such colonial water architecture collapsed and created flash floods?

Why was it not already a disaster when corporate interests forced and incentivized communities to entangle themselves into a reliance on centralized systems — whether for energy, food, or otherwise — and only a disaster when everyone suddenly loses power or something else due to interruptions in these particular supply chains, revealing the vulnerabilities of such monopolized systems?

Why was it not already a disaster when the social constructs of borders and land privatization were violently established — dispossessing communities and now denying many of their abilities to migrate and be responsive to their environmental changes as most other species can do — and only a disaster when people’s inability to move with ease within these systems leads to lives and livelihoods lost?

Who defines “disaster”?

When we start asking more critical questions, it becomes clear that we must interrogate what gets labeled as a disaster — and more vitally, what doesn’t. After all, at its core, the word is quite expansive — referring to something that causes great damage or loss of life, or an event with unfortunate consequences.

The multitude of “climate disasters” we are experiencing today seems to stem from a socio-political-economic system that chooses to recognize disasters in narrow ways — largely only when they wreak havoc on colonial-imposed order, infrastructure, and ideas of development.

Because these events are framed as disasters, the government is able to approve rapid funding to help support these urgent crises. While this is commendable, studies show that “disasters, and the federal aid that follows, disproportionately benefit wealthier Americans” — capitalizing on these catastrophes as opportunities to accelerate pre-existing injustices.

And what about other crises leading to “great damage or loss of life” that also need urgent resourcing and repair — like the deeper root causes of colonialism, habitat loss, land conversion, and over-extraction that helped bring about these more tumultuous weather patterns?

In these ways, “disaster” is subjective, manufactured, and arbitrated by power.

This is like how violence tends to be defined by the state and mainstream media in skewed ways — where they amplify and criminalize reactionary violence (violence as a response to oppressive conditions) while normalizing the systemic violence that they uphold.

But if we dig deeper, we might see that colonizing, subjugating, displacing, and forcibly assimilating communities with the most deeply rooted relationships and biocultural knowledges of place was, and is, the disaster.

We might see that severing culture, ecology, economy, education, government, food, and medicine, and reducing the dynamic and complex living world into dollarized value while seeing that representational value as truer than what it attempts to frame, was, and is, the disaster.

And we might see that doubling down on a stress-full economy that requires “endless growth” to sustain itself, impossible by the calculations of math, biochemistry, and the finite materiality of our planet, was, and is, the disaster.

Climatic changes are symptoms asking for us to listen more deeply — not itself a crisis “to fight against.” It asks that we not just respond retroactively to crises but become more responsive in how we ideate societal “advancement” in the first place.

So perhaps it is time to unsettle — to upset our current power structures and their conceptual and material infrastructures that led us to where we are.

Respecting risk, boundaries, and change…

As I simmer with the idea of “unsettling” — both in how we are being unsettled by the Earth’s symptoms of imbalance, and invitations to unsettle as a response, I think back on my conversation with Rosetta S. Elkin on moving beyond “Building Back Better.”

As she writes in Landscapes of Retreat:

“In our times, fixed settlement is beginning to seem like a maladaptive response. The results suggest that retreat is consistently defined by a firm respect for the land that is “left behind.”[ …]

To acknowledge risk is to recognize our relation to it. Perhaps adaptation is, at best, a way of paying attention to risk as an ally; that is, a compassionate acceptance of the iterant, living environment.

This would suggest that our efforts to track, chart, and recover from the effects of a warmer climate are no longer as relevant as the collective effort to acknowledge that the consequences change how we live, where we settle, and what and when we build. This kind of acknowledgment rarely makes headlines and generally receives little attention, especially when compared to the spectacle of the disaster events that only apparently demarcate the unfolding crisis.

But climate emergency is not merely a matter of disaster response and recovery from catastrophic events; climate change is—and must be understood as—the quotidian assumptions and activities that constitute the human settlement patterns contributing to rapid planetary warming. […]

Today all forms of crisis management pose as ‘community-driven,’ when, in reality, they are all primarily market-oriented, with the main objectives being the expedited return to business as usual: accumulation of profit at the expense of the majority of people and the planet. […]

I was part of an academic research team that wanted to talk about not building back, and instead turning many of the land parcels into verdant, public lands.

The idea of intentional retreat—ceding land that had been used for human settlements back to various natural processes—came as an affront to the architects, planners, and engineers who were part of the project. It was clear that the aphorism ‘build back better’ was invented to preserve existing by-laws, the invisible infrastructure that was not washed away by the storm.” – Rosetta S. Elkin.

These are not easy discussions to have. But these troubled times require that we honestly confront these difficult realities, sitting with multi-layered questions that have no straightforward answers or pure ways forward.

With retreat in mind, I’m also still not quite sure what it means to consider that it is disproportionately the wealthy who can and would want to return to “rebuild” in the aftermath of devastating hurricanes — and that counterintuitively, many of these areas with increasing disaster risk become less affordable by way of “climate gentrification”.

Architectural plans for thicker sea walls and concrete, taller buildings, and larger pillars simply re-cycle the hubris of imposition that led to such disasters. This is another example of not just socioeconomic injustice, but also monetary resources, accumulated through extractive values, continually being used to reinforce status quo states of dissociation.

As life as Earth continues to get shaken up, I'm finding myself leaning toward the invitation to sensitize my attunement and responsiveness to my communities further.

How do we realign the ways we live and “root” our lives with the ever-emergent, dynamic nature of our landscapes? And how might we re-establish more fluid lifelines across boundaries, more spaces and passages of refuge, and more inter-communal networks of mutual aid that can help us to become better resourced and regulated, softening the impacts of a more temperamental, turbulent planet?

What are the tectonic plates of your being feeling called to shift with, or u n s e t t l e ?

Let’s dream together ~

If you feel inspired or shifted by the companionship of my writing, become a subscriber to support this independent newsletter and join our private chat & digital gatherings!

I am planning to host a live, informal UPROOTED Zoom gathering for supporting subscribers around the next full moon, on October 19th, 1pm Pacific Time! Thinking we can explore theories of change, fungal teachings (based on my last essay, “The mushrooming of catastrophes”), and unsettling a bit more… and share a general full moon heart check.

Let’s have tea, release, and dream together ~

Dive deeper:

• “Earth needs therapy, not ‘green’ tech or finance,” my past essay on seeing climate change as a symptom and not the problem

• “How federal disaster money favors the rich,” an article from NPR

• Vanessa Raditz: Queering resilience amidst climate disasters (Green Dreamer EP339)

• Rosetta S. Elkin: Landscapes of retreat and troubling afforestation (Green Dreamer EP390)

• “Degrowth” denial (my past Substack essay)

• Reorienting growth: An invitation into appreciative inquiry (my past essay)

• Entangled expressions: Reversing reductionism and becoming artists of life (my past essay)

• Landscape of Retreat by Rosetta S. Elkin