Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
As a climate justice and resilience strategist and educator, Kylie Flanagan is passionate about learning and sharing different solutions we can take to address the climate crisis. In creating Climate Resilience Project, Kylie has spoken with climate leaders and frontline communities across the US to learn and share how we can take meaningful action. In this fireside chat, Kylie highlights her journey of collaborating with 39+ climate readers for her book, Climate Resilience, and the role of community and collective care in building resiliency.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Reflecting on her experience, Kylie emphasizes the importance of learning from various perspectives, experiences, and identities in understanding the many solutions that can be implemented to address climate justice.
What inspired you to start Climate Resilience Project?
I started the Climate Resilience Project as my own research project in trying to figure out the different ways I could show up for the movement and the different roles I could occupy.
The climate conversation has always been focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which is extremely important and foundational. However, at the same time, there's a growing understanding that the climate crisis is already here, and most of our communities aren't equipped to navigate that.
When the Tubbs fire swept through Napa and Sonoma County in 2017, the fire went up to my family’s neighborhood block and much of the neighborhood was left in ash. I remember feeling that my community was so unprepared. We didn’t have a plan to ensure that everyone could remain safe. Similarly, Camp Fire in 2018 demonstrated just how woefully unprepared we were to take care of our elders and disabled folks through the climate crisis, and those communities were devastatingly impacted by the fire.
So, I had a growing desire to learn more about climate preparedness and adaptation, specifically in a way that ensured nobody was left behind. The more that I immersed myself in those spaces, though, the more that I became aware that many mainstream adaptation solutions felt very disconnected and at odds with what’s happening in the climate justice movement.
For instance, I had some experience doing sustainability business consulting for a company that does large-scale infrastructure and construction using asphalt and cement, which are really greenhouse gas intensive materials. They had completed a climate projection analysis, and it showed that the more greenhouse gas emissions increased, the better it would be for their bottom line, because large-scale adaptation projects, like massive seawalls and new roads, would become more and more necessary. That was really hard to stomach. It was a poignant example for me of how the climate adaptation space, and specifically the business of climate adaptation, can be really at odds with climate mitigation and justice.
My research for the Climate Resilience Project began with the question—What might climate solutions look like that simultaneously strive for a radical reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, adaptation to change conditions, and justice for those most impacted by climate change and structural oppression?
I was eager to find more solutions that felt grounded in values like compassion, relationship, humility, long-term thinking and trust. I wanted to acknowledge that a lot of communities have endured some version of these events for a really long time. How could we look to folks who’ve been in similar situations before and who have devised loving and innovative ways to meet the needs of their community members through times of crisis and shortage?
What does climate resiliency mean to you?
I think it’s a term that people use in different ways. For me, at its core, climate resilience is a community’s capacity to keep all of its members safe through both extreme events (eg., hurricanes, wildfires) and also the more slowly simmering everyday stressors, which are sometimes climate-related and sometimes are not.
This question is also something that I asked to all of the contributors in my book. Climate resilience can be a controversial and polarizing term, especially resilience, because it’s a term that’s oftentimes handed to communities who’ve endured a lot of trauma and bounced back. I don’t think that’s how the term should be used. After speaking to all the contributors, I learned that climate resilience is often about preventing trauma from happening in the first place, because sometimes communities or certain community members don’t bounce back.
It’s also about alleviating other stressors so that folks and communities have the bandwidth to be able to bounce back when there are unpredictable or extreme events. The real foundation of climate resilience work is focusing on alleviating injustices and systems of oppression. It’s rooted in community determination and sovereignty over food, water, culture, and traditions while having strong relationships with each other.
What does community mean to you? How is climate action most impactful when it happens in a community?
The definition can differ depending on the context. In some instances, I think it makes sense to have a little bit more of a geographic constraint and work together, for instance, with your neighbors. More generally, though, community can encompass family members and friends, or a small grassroots organization, or a group of people who have common identities, interests, or affinities.
There are a handful of reasons why the element of community is so important to climate action. When we’re looking at a lot of the strategies explored in the book, it’s clear that it takes a team to, for example, grow food locally, build a new community gathering hub, pass policy, elect someone to office, or return land to Indigenous folks. We cannot do this alone and we need so many different roles to get work done.
Climate action in community is also more fun and can be more joy-filled. We can take turns. We can pass the baton when we occasionally need to rest or tap out and the work can still continue.And we can lean on one another to carry the grief, frustration, and rage together. We shouldn’t be carrying that alone.
It’s also really important to learn from the wisdom of the collective. When we talk about climate resilience specifically, it’s imperative to have several perspectives, experiences, and identities at the table. If we don’t include them, folks will be left behind and our solutions will inadvertently cause harm.
What are the qualities of a resilient community?
There are so many qualities that can contribute to a resilient community, many of which are explored in the book and on climateresilienceproject.org. An overarching theme, certainly, is that resilient communities are able to meet many of their own needs and have their own systems of care, where it’s natural for community members to lean on one another.
Eric Klinenberg, a fantastic public sociologist, conducted research on the 1995 Chicago extreme heat wave that really powerfully demonstrated this idea. After hundreds of folks passed away in the heat wave, he was trying to figure out why some neighborhoods fared better than others. After looking at all of the data and struggling to find common patterns, he decided to explore the neighborhoods on foot. He found that communities with a lot of foot traffic, where there was a lot of interaction between the neighbors, and where there were thriving public places (eg., coffee shops, neighborhood blocks, etc), fared really well compared to neighborhoods where folks were more isolated from one another and confined to their homes. He found that close connections to other community members made people far more likely to survive.
What have you learned about finding or building a community?
Each person has a different experience. From my own experience, I know that sometimes you need to try a bunch of groups before you find your people and the strategies that light you up. Many have had success in plugging into a local group, sometimes explicitly climate-related and other times not. Others have built a climate community themselves or have banded together with neighbors, co-workers, fellow parents, etc. to strategize around climate and community resilience together. Whatever it is, remember that learning and acting collectively can be joyful and rewarding.
To read more about Kylie’s work and collaborations, check out her book and her resources on Climate Resilience Project!
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