With climate-driven disasters becoming the new normal, building resilience is the grail. Communities around the world are developing models created out of practical necessity. We hear on-the-ground stories from two different communities building resilience in the wake of serial disasters. Estrella Santiago Perez and her innovative community rights organization ENLACE have helped organize a collection of marginalized neighborhoods in San Juan, Puerto Rico to overcome the twin catastrophes of Hurricane Maria and a failed government. And far away in the fire-ravaged communities near California’s relatively well-off wine country, Trathen Heckman helped lead the nonprofit grassroots group Daily Acts to build a resilience network from the ground up with engaged citizens action, civil society groups and Sonoma County government agencies. 

Note: this program was produced prior to the recent earthquake in Puerto Rico, and focuses on how communities are still recovering from Hurricane Maria.

(Photo: Estrella Perez – via Bioneers)

We are told that our personal health is our individual responsibility based on our own choices. Yet, the biological truth is that human health is dependent upon the health of nature’s ecosystems and our social structures. Decisions that negatively affect these larger systems and eventually affect us are made without our consent as citizens and, often, without our knowledge. Dr. Rupa Marya, Associate Professor of Medicine at UC San Francisco, and Faculty Director of the Do No Harm Coalition says "social medicine" means dismantling harmful social structures that directly lead to poor health outcomes, and building new structures that promote health and healing. 

(Photo: Dr. Rupa Marya/Courtesy of Bioneers)

Youth movements are rising to restore people and planet. De’Anthony Jones, a former President of the Environmental Students Organization at Sacramento State, Chloe Maxmin, co-founder of Divest Harvard, and Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, hip-hop artist and Youth Director of Earth Guardians, say there’s no better time to be born than now because this generation gets to rewrite history. It could be known as the generation that brought forth a healthy, just, sustainable world for every generation to come. 

(Photo: Xiuhtezcatl Martinez – via Bioneers)

Climate change is more than an “issue.” According to renowned author and activist Naomi Klein, “It’s a civilizational wake-up call delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms, and droughts.” She says it demands that we challenge the dominant economic policies of deregulated capitalism and bottomless resource extraction. She describes the transnational Blockadia movement that’s opposing fossil fuels and warns about geoengineering fantasies. Canadian Indigenous leader Clayton Thomas-Muller of Idle No More reports from the front lines of the Native-led rights-based movement to stop the drilling of the Canadian Tar Sands.

(Photo: Naomi Klein – Courtesy of Bioneers)