BU Today: Prof. Williams Shares Expertise on Long-Term Solutions to Natural Disasters
In light of recent natural disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires, policy makers in the U.S. are looking for effective ways to enhance climate change preparedness. Prof. Darien Alexander Williams from BU School of Social Work explains that this work involves systemic changes, including rethinking land development and considering climate change when urban planning.
Excerpt from “In the Wake of LA Fires, What Does the US Need to Do to Prepare for Future Natural Disasters?” by Alene Bouranova:
There are a few systems that we have to dismantle, or at the very least reimagine, if we’re going to make it out of this. For one, corporate donations in politics. It’s a socially acceptable and legalized form of [bribery]. The US would call that corruption in other countries. We also need to find new ways to think about property ownership and what it means to own land versus stewarding land and what you still owe to a community even if you have the deed to a square of land.
There are also questions that something as simple-seeming as mitigating wildfire risk require us to engage with, that kind of strike at the core of what it means to be a US citizen. Like, did any of us need to be here to begin with? That gets you further back in history to colonialism and the fact that our colonial settlements were a departure from people living in harmony with nature’s cycles for centuries. I know of firefighting organizations adopting Indigenous burning practices [to introduce controlled burns in certain environments]. So we already have people reaching back into the past to rethink things in a fundamental way.
Lastly, we need to come up with new systems of care for each other. Even if we stopped our emissions right now, we’ve already deeply damaged our climate. When something like [these wildfires] happens, the fact that some people can hire private firefighters to come and protect their parcel of land should be a cause for alarm for how we’re distributing resources. That we have elected officials saying that any aid the federal government [gives California] should be conditional on certain changes being made is really concerning. That’s going to have a real impact on communities. And very predictably, we know that the people who are going to have the hardest time recovering from this disaster are the same people that have the hardest time recovering from everything in our society: poor people, Black people, undocumented people, the disabled, the elderly, and people of color in general.”