Protect people from Climate Change
Tornados struck STL and I'm too distracted too write about ag
Hi all,
I wrote this on Tuesday morning in the air between St. Louis and Seattle. My plan for the flight was to integrate a bunch of the crazy headlines that have been piling up in my folder of links to share into a long catch-up edition of Ag is for People, Community News. Unfortunately, there was no wifi on the plane.
I tried to come back today and actually include the links that I want you to be aware of, but, still, I’m distracted. I'm distracted because pockets of St. Louis got obliterated on Friday by an E3 tornado. I'm fine, my apartment is fine, no one that I personally know and love was catastrophically impacted. But, honestly? I'm shook, and I don't shake easily.
Even as I drive through apple orchards in the Columbia Basin and talk to wicked smart growers about nerdy details around production and tech - literally one of my favorite things to do - I can’t help but look at the tarps draped over alfalfa stacks and think about my city. My heart is with St. Louis right now, and I really just want to be out there cleaning debris and collecting food and trying to help rebuild. But instead, I’m schlepping around beautiful Washington State, talking with growers, fundraising, learning - working. And I love this work, because it does give me hope. For instance, it feels wildly inefficient, in a solvable way, that there are so very many apples that are going to waste out here due primarily to market inefficiencies that could be being distributed to the folks standing in line in Fountain Park right now to collect food and basic necessities. I try very hard to stay in my lane of expertise, because I think that I’m most likely to be able to leverage my knowledge and network in this specific niche that I’m in. But, I’m also a human, and I want to be in community with the other humans that I care about, and I want you to also care about these other humans. And so, this is a weird edition of Ag is for People. If you don’t like it - tough shit, that’s what you get for signing on to a free newsletter. :) I promise to return to regular programming next time.
Today, though, I'm doubling down on one specific facet of “impact” in agtech- the importance of addressing environmental issues in ag. Climate change is here, and we have to react in order to protect as many people from being impacted as possible. I'm offline, so, for once, I'm skipping footnotes and stats and sticking to personal experiences. Climate change is happening in real time, and it's hurting people in real time, and we have got to both decrease emissions (in ag) and invest heavily in adaptation and mitigation measures.
So few people seem to even know that this happened. I want you to know about it. St. Louis doesn't get the attention it deserves in media - this isn't the first time that historic events have occurred in the Lou that have gotten ignored (see Anthony Lamar Smith's shooting by police officer Jason Stockley in 2017 and resulting protests/National Guard violence), even since I've been here, and I fear that it won't be the last. I haven’t even mentioned eastern Kentucky, where an even bigger F4 tornado ripped across ~55 miles on Friday. Rural places don't get the attention they deserve. Our most disenfranchised towns, people and places are going to be hurt the worst by climate change, and no one is even going to hear about it. But you are going to hear about this event. Keep reading.
I’ve spent 5+ years, over 2 separate time chunks, living on Pershing Avenue. Dumb luck being what it is, I moved 3 years ago to my current place, safely outside of the storm’s path. My first adult apartment was Park Luxe, where I lived from 2016-2017 with a roommate. I screenshotted it below using the interactive map that the folks at Surdex Corporation put together. A few folks I care deeply about have been temporarily displaced by damage to their buildings. The small, locally owned gym, also on Pershing Ave, that is functionally both my church and community center got pretty trashed. Swathes of Forest Park, one of my favorite places in the city, got destroyed. A big chunk of the North side of the city, which includes a lot of St. Louis’s most divested neighborhoods, took seemingly the worst beating.
During the couple of hours that I've spent trying to make myself useful in parts of the tornado's path, I stepped over displaced fiberglass insulation and ducked under ghostly poofs of insulation hanging from downed trees. I felt that tickle in my lungs from inhaling who knows what, and I'm left wondering how long-term air quality will be impacted in my city. Dropping off tarps and surveying still-down wires and piles of bricks and roofs blocks from where they used to be earlier this weekend, I couldn't shake the feeling that these blue tarps and the plywood are about to become permanent features of this neighborhood. The wealthy folks in Central West End, who, don't get me wrong, are suffering from this storm, will rebuild. We'll clean up the gym - it might even end up a bit better than it was - it’s never been the fanciest gym in town. But what’s going to happen to the folks who can’t afford repairs? You see, I live in a city where my neighbor is an eccentric woman in her 60s with a dented Prius and a decaying fence and a gutter that’s been hanging off her slanting back roof for over a month. I offered to help fix it and she said she’s on it (she must have seen my attempt at “fixing” my parent’s fence in NJ…I should maybe stick to writing.) I know she can’t afford any professional help. There are houses on the streets that I walk every day that good people live in that have permanent plywood window installations. And my neighborhood is wealthy relative to some of those that got hit.
This was the most damaging tornado to hit STL since 1959, but isn't the first tornado I've gotten up close and personal with this year. Another tornado touched down Mar 15, and we've had at least 5 other tornado watches from NWS so far this spring. On April 2nd, I was attempting to drive home from Starksville, MS to get back up to St. Louis. As I hit Memphis, my phone started its tornado warning bleeping, and blinding thunderstorms started. I know Memphis fairly well, and I have good friends there that I know I could crash with, but I also know that Memphis floods. I couldn't see the exit signs well enough to get off the road and be sure that I wouldn't end up in a flash-flood prone area. I ended up calling my sister so that she could pull up a radar map from the safety of Brooklyn and give me instructions on a route that would keep me out of the direct path of the tornados. Unfortunately, there was both a tornado coming up through Western Tennessee (moving toward me ~55 mph, I was going ~75-80 mph...kind of a sick return to high school math class) and another tornado forming up in St. Louis and moving down towards me. I ended up driving West and staying over in Jonesboro, Arkansas because it looked to be relatively off the path of the tornados, and because the worst place you can be during a tornado is in a car. Again, I was fine, my car was fine, that hotel was fine, but, that tornado did hit the edge of Jonesboro. The next morning, I stopped at a donut shop at 5am for a coffee before hitting the road. There were 2 men in there in front of me. One of them was talking about how he "lost everything I've worked for" in the storm last night. The other, a stranger, bought his donuts and reassured him. Driving home, I had to take backroads because roads were blocked and flooded. I drove through a strip that the tornado had obviously ripped through - sheds and signs and trees had been picked up by the storm and dropped 100s of meters away from their original spots. Fortunately, it was rural, and, at least on my drive, I didn't see too much home destruction. Fields that should have been ready for planting were flooded. I had 4 hours of contemplative time on that drive to think about yield impacts, economic ramifications for farms and other businesses in those regions, and I'm still thinking about that poor guy in the donut shop. Who's going to help him rebuild?
The silver lining of things like this is, everyone is kinder to one another. There is something extra sticky about a trauma bond. This morning at 5:40 am when my Uber driver, “P”, picked me up, we really asked one another how we were doing - not just surface level. We genuinely both wanted to know and to at least hear one another. P, like me, lives in the Grove and stayed out of harm’s way. But her wheelchair-bound elder mom lives in a retirement home that was in the line of the storm. P recounted her mother’s traumatic experience watching the storm throw trees around the courtyard, and her mom’s inability to maneuver her electric wheelchair away from the window-filled living room. Fortunately, her mom is physically ok, but she’s confused and panicked to the point where P is thinking about clearing out her home to make space for her mom (and her bulky wheelchair) to come back home and be with P and P’s children.
Get ready to know more people directly impacted by extreme weather events. I sincerely hope that it's never you.
I'll write more specifically in future posts about exactly how labor must be centered in considering opportunities to reduce emissions and pollution, and to investing in mitigation and resiliency. For now. sit with me and the folks in Missouri and Kentucky and everywhere else that are feeling, in real time, the brutality of climate change. We will rebuild, and we can even make money off of some of the necessary mitigation and resiliency opportunities, but, for now, just feel it.
And contribute to the rebuild, if you can: https://www.stlmag.com/news/st-louis-tornado-relief-ways-to-help/
Love,
Connie