Irene and Emergency Preparedness: From FEMA to Grover

On the weekend Hurricane Irene hit New York, my partner and I were visiting western Massachusetts. We weathered the storm in an early 20th century school house that is home to a small Buddhist community in Conway, about twenty miles northwest of Northampton, MA. While we were very concerned about our friends in the city, we also were heartened by the numerous postings and emails we received from those who had decided to bring a festive air to the doom and gloom of the media's weather coverage. It seemed that folks were not only buying gallons of water, but also stocking up on wine, gin and cookies.

Its no surprise that many of our queer friends decided to take the hurricane as an opportunity for some bacchanalian shenanigans. Thanks to the Christian Right and Michelle Bachmann, we know that AIDS, earthquakes and hurricanes are simply God's punishment for gay sex and lesbian parenting. Of course the gays are celebrating! Why pay attention to the hard science of climate change when we have homosexuality and Revelations?

On a serious serious note, although the subway shutdown put a damper on cross-borough partying, this impulse to collectivize seems to subtly index folks' resistance to the talk of "go bags," "emergency kits" and "evacuation zones." Irene hit just a week or so shy of September's National Preparedness Month. Today you can still find ads across Manhattan for FEMA's Readiness campaign, which are not so subtly juxtaposed to memorials for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. On FEMA's www.ready.gov you can find a slew of information about tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, nuclear and chemical threats - and of course how you can make your own emergency kit from home. Rather than focus on neighborly solidarity, the federal discourse of "emergency preparedness" emphasizes an individualist, market-driven response -- how you can take care of your self and your family. And in "family," they mean the nuclear family model, which harkens back to the nostalgic Cold War heyday of fallout shelters and air-raid drills.

Nowhere on this site can you find information for those of us who may not have the physical or financial means necessary to create such a kit. And nowhere does FEMA articulate any "special" suggestions for gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals who are often more vulnerable to being denied basic human rights such as healthcare, shelter and family re-unification during emergency situations. This is also true for the New York City Office of Emergency Management's website and media campaign, which while doing much to help raise consumer awareness as to those necessary "Go bag" items, could have done a bit more for its less fortunate residents, such as the inmates of Rikers Island and those required to evacuate who were home bound or without access to a car.

As adults were told to be responsible and take care of their bodies, minds and property, so too did kids have to learn how to be ready for a catastrophe. The most illuminating aspect of the Ready.gov website is the section entitled Ready Kids!, in particular the fifteen minute Sesame Street episode called "Let's Get Ready!" As we are guided by Grover through the process of "getting ready," the consumer rationale for emergency preparedness becomes evident. Grover visits a bi-racial family in the suburbs to see how they are getting prepared - the nuclear family of today! They're busy putting together their "go-bag":

Realizing they don't have everything they need, mom and daughter visit the drugstore to stock up on some essentials:

Our heroine is incredibly cute, but unfortunately she is being schooled in good consumerism! We all know from our own last-minute hurricane shopping experiences how much money was spent on food, water and batteries before Irene made land-fall. The jury may still be out on the greater effects the hurricane had on the retail industry that weekend - while Home Depot and Walgreens saw a surge in sales, Macys was sadly down in "back-to-school week" profits. The fluctuating market, however, can't hold a candle to the extreme devastation that befell areas of the Catskills, Vermont, and our favorite town in Western Mass, Shelburne Falls - which should remind us of the fragility of these more peripheral communities and ecosystems.

There may be hope for those of us who are skeptical of the current consumer-focused rationale for fighting forest fires, hurricane-force winds and climate change. In a subversive take on emergency preparedness by the muppets of Sesame Street, Grover gives us an alternative vision. In Grover's very large go-bag, which he can barely carry, are a feather boa, googley-eyes, and a bowling ball.

While Grover's Chicana muppet friend Rosita reminds him that these items will not help him survive a hurricane, Grover remains focused on his hopes for impending disaster. Grover asks, "So where is this emergency?" Rosita replies, "There is no emergency, Grover." He responds, "Not even a little one?"

At first struck by melancholic despair, Grover makes due and quickly suggests, "Well in that case, let's go bowling!" Excitedly wielding his bowling ball, Grover accidentally drops it on a cat who meows in pain. The scene closes with him running to her, exclaiming, "Don't worry kitty, I have my emergency kit!"

I leave it to you to find the irony of Grover's somewhat flamboyant take on emergency preparedness. This may all be to say that we must re-evaluate our allegiance to kitties, muppets, inmates, and elders that cohabit with us on this planet. For, as queer eco-critic Catriona Sandilands suggests, queer and ecological politics are intimately entangled, and therefore require us to more deeply analyze the varied structures of power and capital that shape these allied struggles.

Finding our Bearings

A week or so ago, Jess and I took a walk through the sacred land that is the home of the Dzogchen community in Buckland, Massachusetts called Khandroling. Tradition states that this land is populated by Buddhist spirits called Dakinis who protect over the woods and waters of the place and look out for those beings who visit the refuge to seek enlightenment. Along the path, we stopped at the pond to sit and meditate on its banks; our mindfulness was interrupted, or perhaps enlivened, by the loud sound of a very large animal sloshing through the reeds at the far end of the water. Too far from us to be visible, we carefully approached the other side of the pond to be greeted not with the sight of moose antlers or beaver splashes, but with the even more distinctive sound of a great animal shaking the water from her fur coat. We watched and waited, changing our position, silently requesting the being to show herself, but to no avail. Walking back to our meditation spot, we tried to resume but were excited and a bit shaken by the encounter and thus quietly ambled back down the hill towards our car.

A couple days later, after Tropical Storm Irene's arrival, we were at a gathering of the community and spoke with one man who has spent many weeks on the land working on a new meeting hall to be completed in Summer 2012. He mentioned to us that perhaps the animal with whom we had become acquainted was a bear, as over the years one had been sighted close to where we imagined the rustling and shaking to be emanating. We had seen a young black bear once before, in northern Ontario sitting up eating berries from a roadside bush, but this occasion seemed different -- with only sounds to guide our perception, our imaginations had embellished the encounter into mystical proportions. Did she see sense us as we sensed her? What could the animal's presence represent? Through this experience, what are we supposed to learn? The idea that today comes to mind is a version of what Donna Haraway refers to as "regard," of holding one in your regard, paying respect and deference to other beings with attention. We held the bear in our regard, bearing respect for its presence (various puns intended), but did the bear hold us in the same light?

When I returned home to our apartment in New York, on the top of the toilet where we keep our most thought-provoking publications, I found a photograph of a white ghostly bear haunting the cover of the August 2011 National Geographic. The Kermode or "Spirit" bear as it is known, is a native of a unique ecosystem in northern British Columbia, now under threat by the international development of an oil pipeline to run from the Alberta Tar Sands to the coast of the Pacific and eventually to the future car-drivers and energy consumers of China and Japan. The Gitga'at First Nation tribe, who shares the bear's unique coastal rainforest home, is now struggling to stem the tide of industrial development and inevitable environmental degradation that this project would create. While these photographs, and the potential mammalian suffering they uncannily convey, inspired a different sort of regard from me, both of these bear encounters reminded me of the frightening threats we currently face. The logic of oil cannot measure or account for this animal's certain form of grace. Nor can we easily reconcile their losses with the supposed gains that would come by vanquishing the "bear market" - a task seemingly critical to our national security and solvency, and Obama's 2012 election campaign. And so these various spirit bears seem also to be somehow affiliated with the environmental activists who have recently demonstrated against the Keystone XL pipeline to run from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, and been arrested for doing so in front of the White House. I wonder if these activists have witnessed the quiet aura of sensing an animal in the woods. I hope they seek to demand others to contemplate not only the greed and over-consumption this pipeline represents, but to the devotion and respect these animals demand of us. For it might do us some good to sidestep the slightly hysterical and rabid political feelings circulating these days with that other deeply political position that is found in our attendance to the grace of all living beings.

And so on the eve of my return to teaching, writing, and running around in circles, I'll sign off with a poem by Mary Oliver about other bears, birds, and foxes.

"October"

1
There's this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.

What does the world
mean to you if you can't trust it
to go on shining when you're

not there? And there's
a tree, long-fallen; once
the bees flew to it, like a procession
of messengers, and filled it
with honey.

2
I said to the chickadee, singing his heart out in the green pine tree:

little dazzler,
little song,
little mouthful.

3
The shape climbs up out of the curled grass. It
grunts into view. There is no measure
for the confidence at the bottom of its eyes --
there is no telling
the suppleness of its shoulders as it turns
and yawns.

Near the fallen tree
something -- a leaf snapped loose
from the branch and fluttering down -- tries to pull me
into its trap of attention.

4
It pulls me
into its trap of attention.

And when I turn again, the bear is gone.

5
Look, hasn't my body already felt
like a body of a flower?

6
Look, I want to love this world
as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.

7
Sometimes in late summer I won't touch anything, not
the flowers, not the blackberries
brimming in the thickets; I won't drink
from the pond; I won't name the birds or the trees;
I won't whisper my own name.

One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident,
and didn't see me -- and I thought:

so this is the world.
I'm not in it.
It is beautiful.

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, 60.