EGA President and CEO
We are at the height of the northern hemisphere summer marked by an aggressively warm hurricane season, matched only by the heat of our politic.
As predicted, climate disasters are more common as the planet heats up. The early summer has borne out the truth, we are reeling in the impacts of climate change. In mid-May, tornadoes tore through St. Louis, Missouri, destroying communities, including historic Black neighborhoods. Recently, the country witnessed another round of devastating losses to the ecosystem and human life during floods in Kerr County, Texas. And war on every possible front reminds us all of our ability to escalate our conditions more quickly than our minds can attend to them. We are in need of an ethic of mindfulness more than ever. It informs our creativity and capacity to care in the face of taking, reshaping and breaking.
We are all called to respond to the relentless challenges to communities in free fall from loss of basic support during government disinvestment. We are further challenged by the resonance of recent history including the upcoming twentieth (20th) anniversary of Hurricane Katrina; which birthed the climate justice functions of environmental work and knowledge, and exposed the foundations of interlocking crises.
Twenty years ago, many Americans were knocked out of complacency by a hurricane that tore through vibrant peoples and a beloved place. New Orleans and the surrounding cities, towns, and parishes continue to recover from an extinction-level flooding event, exacerbated by lack of basic infrastructure investment, poor emergency planning, and racialized zoning disparities targeting poor and vulnerable neighborhoods. This extreme event has become apart of a global story of climate changing, everything.
Recent tragedies in St. Louis, MO and Kerr County, TX are present reminders of how widespread and important local, regional, and national investments in people and planet are. The failure to launch emergency systems, in each case, resulted in greater damages and loss of precious human life. Our greatest resource is the myriad means by which communities of care come together in times of crisis and recovery. Our collective failing is in translating these lessons and codifying their strength into infrastructure when the water recedes.
As of this writing, the moral and economic backslide of the HR.1 tax reconciliation bill is defunding life affirming programs that deliver medical services, and food to the chronically underserved and the hungry. Federal emergency dollars are being rerouted from common access to meet the goals of the few. Our response must include strengthening narrative as knowledge, bolstering mutual aid programming, and solidarity resource networks. But it cannot stop there.
Environmental grantmakers are empowered to continue to bolster the work of decades. The best expressions of that align capital to shift decision making to sites of resistance with nimble, reinforcing resource strategies that meet the makers, doers, and resistors with operational, working, and experimental dollars.
Now is the time we have to act like today matters to tomorrow.
