Prelims

Half Title Page

JUSTICE, EQUITY, AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

Title Page

COMMUNITY, ENVIRONMENT AND DISASTER RISK MANAGEMENT - VOLUME 25

JUSTICE, EQUITY, AND EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

EDITED BY

ALESSANDRA JEROLLEMAN

Jacksonville State University, USA

and

WILLIAM L. WAUGH, JR

Georgia State University, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Copyright © 2022 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83982-333-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83982-332-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83982-334-3 (Epub)

ISSN: 2040-7262 (Series)

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

Abbreviations and Acronyms

About the Authors

Miriam Belblidia is a leader in the New Orleans water sector who has dedicated herself to reducing risk from flooding and environmental hazards for more than a decade.

She has lived in New Orleans for 10+ years and founded Water Works in 2012, serving as Co-founder and CEO from 2012 to 2018, where she demonstrated a commitment to equitable solutions that respect historic context and local wisdom. In 2019, she stepped back to create space for native New Orleanians and trans and queer people of color to step into leadership roles. Water Works also transitioned to “Imagine Water Works” at this time, and she became the organization’s Director of Research and Advocacy. Most recently, she organized in opposition to HB197, which would have criminalized protestors on “critical water infrastructure” with 3–15 years of hard labor. In June, she celebrated a victory alongside countless individuals and organizations statewide as the bill was vetoed.

Miriam was a Co-founder and the first President of the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, a 300-member regional water management group. In 2018, she joined the University of Pittsburgh’s faculty as a Visiting Senior Lecturer and Director of the Center for Disaster Management. She has championed increased community engagement in planning and decision making, and works alongside residents using a co-creation model to advance a shared vision for “living with water.”

Maraya Ben-Joseph works with the Olohana Foundation as Project Director and Board Member. She represents the organization at international conferences, collaborating with community, state, federal, and indigenous institutions seeking to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change, particularly on native and rural communities. She is actively involved in: the Indigenous Phenology Network, the National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research:Rising Voices, Pacific Risk Management Ohana Indigenous Knowledge Working Group, the Momi-toring Program (“Mothers Participating Directly in Climate Observation”), and The VICTree Gardens Program (“Virtually Interconnected Community Tree Gardens”). Raised in New York, she grew up in a multicultural, multilingual family within a community (Rudolf Steiner Fellowship Foundation) dedicated to the care of the human being and the land. From a young age, she has worked on farms, in gardens, in orchards and with farm animals. In addition she has worked with elders and with children. She graduated from Prescott College with a degree in Community Capacity Building: Native and Indigenous Practice. The focus of her education has been: conservation, nature immersion, wilderness awareness, agroforestry, Hawaiian cultural studies, and restoration at the community level. Currently she is an elementary school teacher at the Kona Pacific Public Charter School, as well as a farmer, mother, wife and musician. She inculcates diverse spiritual, economic, educational, cultural, racial, and ethnic perspectives into her worldview giving rise to her passions, her commitments and her responses to the needs of an ever evolving future.

Lorna Jarrett Blanchard is an advocate of disability rights who develops programs to move her community towards inclusion. According to Blanchard, however, “Those are just words. I simply am a person on a mission to lift people to more resilience.

I am …

Born into diversity.

Demanding equality and inclusion.

Searching for wisdom.

Celebrating life.

Growing old, wistfully walking blessed.”

Paula R. Buchanan is a disaster scientist and emergency management researcher. Her work lies at the intersection of public health, education, risk communication, and outreach messaging. She has professional experience in communications, university-level instruction, business continuity, and project management. She has an MBA and MPH with a Health Systems Management and Policy concentration from the University of Alabama-Birmingham; and graduated from Tulane University with a BS in Biology, BA in History, and a minor in Economics.

A central question of her research is the extent to which socio-technical systems function as a communication channel to provide populations with accurate information to mitigate public health impacts associated with, or exacerbated by, disasters. She is interested in using mixed methods to better understand the multifaceted nature of her interdisciplinary research interests. She is also passionate about using social media, information technology, and data visualization tools to effectively communicate with targeted audiences.

Samantha J. Cordova holds a Master of Social Work with an emphasis in Community Practice and Policy from Boston University, and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Science in Emergency Management at Jacksonville State University. She has worked with several Tribal Governments and organizations on issues related to emergency management and federal funds management. Her professional and research interests include indigenous emergency management, emergency management funding, and emergency management ethics.

Jacob Fast is an Assistant Professor of Disaster and Healthcare Mission Management at Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee. He is also the Academic Coordinator for the Learn-Engage-Achieve-Program (LEAP) at Lee, designed to serve undergraduate students who are either low-income, first-generation, and/or have a documented disability. His education includes a Master of Education from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, a Master of Business Administration from Lee University, and a Doctor of Science in Emergency Management that is in-progress through Jacksonville State University. He is a member of the Southeast Tennessee Medical Reserve Corps as well as an active volunteer for the American Red Cross.

Jerry V. Graves is an Urban and Coastal Resilience Planning Consultant based in New Orleans, Louisiana. He previously served in the public sector for over a decade. He is also currently a member of the master of public administration faculty at the University of New Orleans and Tulane University. He earned a Doctorate in Urban Studies and Master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of New Orleans. He also earned a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Alessandra Jerolleman is an Associate Professor in Jacksonville State University’s Emergency Management Department. She is a Community Resilience Specialist and Applied Researcher at the Lowlander Center, as well as a Co-founder of Hazard Resilience, a United States based consultancy providing leadership and expertise in disaster recovery, risk reduction, and hazard policy. She is one of the founders of the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association and served as its Executive Director for its first seven years. She is a subject matter expert in climate adaptation, hazard mitigation, disaster recovery, and resilience with a long history of working in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. She is involved in various aspects of planning and policy and the national and local level, including participation in several workshops each year. Her experience includes the following: conducting independent research on disaster risk reduction and hazard mitigation for various organizations such as the National Wildlife Foundation; working as the Lead Grant Writer and Emergency Planner for the First Peoples’ Conservation Council, through her role with the Lowlander Center on coastal community resettlement; community based resilience planning across the United States; working with Save the Children USA along the Gulf Coast following hurricanes and tornadoes, on a resilience initiative around children’s needs in emergencies; hazard mitigation planning at the local, state, and campus level; community education and outreach regarding mitigation measures and preparedness; development of collaborative networks and information sharing avenues among practitioners; and delivery of training and education to various stakeholders. She speaks on many topics including: Just Recovery; hazard mitigation and climate change; campus planning; threat, hazard, and vulnerability assessments; hazard mitigation planning; protecting children in disasters; and, public/private partnerships.

Nathan Jessee is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University’s High Meadows Environmental Institute. He uses collaborative ethnographic research to study social, political, and cultural dimensions of environmental change and development in coastal Louisiana. He is currently working on a book based on doctoral research conducted alongside Isle de Jean Charles Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribal leaders focused on legacies of ecocide, community resettlement planning, and the politics of climate change adaptation.

M. Kalani Souza is a gifted storyteller, singer, songwriter, musician, performer, poet, philosopher, priest, political satirist, and peacemaker. A Hawaiian practitioner and cross-cultural facilitator, he has experience in promoting social justice through conflict resolution. His workshops and lectures inspire, challenge, and entertain the listener while calling all to be their greater selves.

His native roots allow him a unique perspective of the collision of two worlds: one steeped in traditional culture and the other a juggernaut of new morality and changing economic and political persuasion. He is a messenger of integration and collaboration in a world normally rife with exclusion, oppression, and hopelessness. His work in behavior modification research, leadership, teambuilding, and political strategy gives him generous insights into group dynamics and systems of governance.

He is the Founding and current Director of the Olohana Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit based on Hawaii’s Big Island since 2008. Olohana focuses on building community capacity, cohesiveness, resilience, and emergency preparedness around food, energy, water, and knowledge systems.

He is also a Coastal Community Resilience Trainer with Federal Emergency Management Agency Consortium member, the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu, Hawaii. He serves as a Cultural Competency Consultant for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pacific Services Center of the US Department of Commerce and is regularly called to lead and participate in workshops and webinars on topics including disaster preparedness, community, relationships, knowledge systems sharing, indigenous environmental stewardship, and climate change adaptation. He also serves as a mentor with the Hawaii non-killing effort out of the Spark Matsunaga Center for Peace and as a board member for the Ala Kahakai Trail Association, part of the National Park Services Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail.

Previously, he taught Conflict Resolution at University of Hawaii at Manoa in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. He served as the Chairman of the Indigenous Knowledge and Education (IKE) Hui of the Pacific Risk Management Ohana, a collection of federal, state, county, and non-governmental agencies that work primarily to mitigate and respond to disasters in the greater Pacific region; and recently consulted with the Presidents Ocean Policy Task Force around the indigenous knowledge and science integration perspective in Washington DC.

He was on the Committee for Intense Public Conflict of the Association for Conflict Resolution, a body of 6,000 international professional peacemakers; and served as one of two Hawaiians in the Native Network, a group of 450 peacemakers on the Department of the Interior out of the Morris Udall Center for Peace in Tucson, Arizona.

He engaged in a musical and media project, the Big Blue O, that produced an album in 2011. The project is also working on a film highlighting issues of community and cultural capacity through the lens of our relationships to one another and to water.

Chenier Kliebert joined Water Works in 2015, co-founded Imagine Water Works in 2018, and became its Executive Director in early 2019. Klie is a native New Orleanian with deep, multigenerational family ties to St. James Parish who brings a unique blend of experience in communications and grassroots organizing, social and community science, and non-profit management to the team. As a Creole, Cajun, and Indigenous person, Klie also has a passion for telling the story of Louisiana, in particular with an intersectional racial and gender analysis. In their role at IWW, Klie not only leads the organization’s daily work, but is also the Lead Organizer for the Trans Clippers Project and the Mutual Aid Response Network.

While at the Foundation for Louisiana, Klie supported efforts toward climate justice, immigrants’ rights, criminal justice and bail reform, housing justice, and more. Prior to joining IWW, Klie worked for the Public Laboratory for Open Science and Technology, an open source international community of scientists and resident activists focused on using simple DIY tools to collect data about our local environments.

Klie is a member of the Baton Rouge Immigrants Rights Coalition; a Fellow with Project South’s first BAM (Building A Movement) Institute for Disaster Preparedness, Response, and Recovery (2019–2021); a Grantmakers United for Trans Communities Leadership Fellow (2019); a Loyola University Institute for Environmental Communications Fellow (2016); and was the first Safety Officer for the Gathering of Open Science and Hardware (2017). Klie has co-written multiple Codes of Conduct specifically within science and tech spaces, and they are a contributor to the Global Open Science Hardware Roadmap: an actionable plan to make science hardware open and accessible to everyone by 2025. Klie is a Volunteer Programmer for the New Orleans Film Society in the “Louisiana Shorts” and “Southern Shorts” categories (2018–present) and an Administrator for the “Nonprofit Happy Hour” (2016–present), an online peer learning group of over 50,000 non-profit professionals.

Sometimes a writer and sometimes a photographer, Klie was accepted as a 2019 Artist In Residence with Works On Water in NYC, exploring concepts of consent with our bodies and with nature – and how these relationships drive our current water management practices.

Richard Krajeski passed away peacefully at his home on December 9 in Gray. He had been diagnosed with a rare and very aggressive form of liver cancer less than a month earlier.

“Dick” was many things, a pastor, father, husband, partner, colleague, philosopher, researcher, teacher, mentor, advocate, friend and, most importantly, working to model his life after that of Jesus.

All of what he tried to do and be was predicated on principles of justice, mercy, and grace. During his ministry, he mentored and inspired many young people and included people who were ignored or left out of the circle. He worked for the inclusion of all God’s people especially for those with special needs. His work embraced justice in long-term community recovery from disasters and has been recognized internationally by practitioners and academics. He was an innovator for making the world better, serving as a founding board member of the Gender and Disaster Network, Wetlands Theological Project, National Hazards Mitigation Association, and Lowlander Center.

Shirley Laska is a Professor emerita of Sociology, University of New Orleans, where in 2002 she created the Center for Hazards Assessment, Response and Technology (UNO-CHART) following a near-decade stint as Vice President of Research. Before this appointment, she established the Environmental Social Science Research Institute. In its 18-year existence CHART has refined collaborative responses to extreme weather risks first with coastal non-hurricane events, then Hurricane Katrina, later the massive Macondo BP oil spill, and now COVID-19. It has served as a training center for more than 150 graduate research assistants now leading a wide variety of risk reduction organizations and positions. Numerous peer-reviewed publications, research grants, service on several National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) committees and awards from the American Sociological Society and Rural Sociology filled her academic career.

During this current “retirement” decade (2009–), she co-founded with Kristina Peterson, a post-disaster, long-term sustainable recovery specialist, the Lowlander Center, which is honing an even more applied Participatory Action Research approach to community collaboration honoring the knowledge and capacity of coastal, inland Louisiana and Alaskan indigenous communities as they cope with extreme risk from the changing climate and the carbon-based enterprises that harm them directly and contribute to climate change. With the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians Tribal Community, Lowlander Center visioned and prepared their resettlement proposal for the Rockefeller National Disaster Resilience Competition for which the state received $52 million to implement the project (2016). Concurrent with the rural work, prior to COVID-19, Lowlander initiated an urban resilience project in conjunction with African American congregations: the storm proofing of rental properties, to improve renters’ opportunities to return to their homes after a hurricane, as homeowners with mitigation improvements are more likely to be able to do. An edited volume by Laska, Louisiana’s Response to Extreme Weather – A Coastal State’s Adaptation Challenges and Successes, Springer/open access has recently (2020) been published.

Julie Maldonado is Associate Director for the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), a link-tank for policy-relevant research toward post-carbon livelihoods and communities. She is Co-director of Rising Voices: Climate Resilience through Indigenous and Earth Sciences, works with the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals to support tribes’ climate change adaptation planning, and is a Lecturer in the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Environmental Studies Program. She is also a founding member of the Culture and Disaster Action Network.

As a public Anthropologist, she has consulted for the UN Development Program and World Bank on resettlement, post-disaster needs assessments, and climate change. She worked for the US Global Change Research Program and is an author on the 3rd and 4th US National Climate Assessments. Her Doctorate in Anthropology from American University focused on the social and cultural impacts of environmental change and habitual disasters in coastal Louisiana. She was the Lead Editor for a special issue for the journal Climatic Change entitled, Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in the United States: Impacts, Experiences and Actions, which was published in 2012. Her book, Seeking Justice in an Energy Sacrifice Zone: Standing on Vanishing Land in Coastal Louisiana, and co-edited volume, Challenging the Prevailing Paradigm of Displacement and Resettlement: Risks, Impoverishment, Legacies, Solutions, were both released in 2018. As part of LiKEN, she organized and is Executive Producer of the Paper Rocket Productions film, Protect, which was released in December 2018.

Mây Nguyễn was an Attorney in Louisiana before joining the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. She continues to serve on the Board of Directors for the Foundation for Louisiana and the Lowlander Center. She is originally from New Orleans and grew up in a SouthEast Asian immigrant community in Oakland. Her childhood years were spent observing her mom organize the apartment’s residents to start and tend to their one-acre community garden. She returned to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to assist with the recovery effort as the Inaugural Business Development Director at the Mary Queen of Viet Nam Community Development Corporation – raising over $4 million to recover minority-owned small businesses and farmer’s market. At the same time, she was organizing alongside local leaders to shut down a landfill that threatened to contaminate the water source for home and community gardens. The campaign was documented in the Emmy-nominated documentary, A Village Called Versailles. Five years later, in the wake of the BP Oil Spill, she led a successful campaign to win recognition and compensation for loss of traditional subsistence use of seafood that fishers brought home to barter, feed the family, and provide for community events.

She holds a Juris Doctor degree and a certificate in Public Interest Law and Policy from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, a Master’s in International Economics and Southeast Asia Studies from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and a Bachelor’s degree from Amherst College.

Tu’o’i Nguyễn is a woman who lives for her family. She has eight children, including one in heaven, and one love. She is driven toward public service. For about 15 years, she was the manager of her apartment building of dozens of immigrant and refugee families from Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia. She organized an urban farm of approximately one acre to feed her community. She believes that she has done good to others. Her friends and people in her community say that she is God sent.

Oluponmile Olonilua is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Texas Southern University where she was the first doctoral candidate to receive a PhD in Urban Planning and Environmental Policy in 2006. She was a Mary Fran Myers Scholarship award winner in 2009; which allowed her to attend her first Natural Hazards Workshop that year. She has been a regular attendee every year since. She is now the Continuing Education Credit Coordinator for the Natural Hazards Workshop, a Board Member of the Natural Hazards Mitigation Association, and a member of the Texas Floodplain Managers Association. She teaches Emergency Management and Homeland Security at Texas Southern University and is a certified Floodplain Manager. She is also a Hazard Mitigation/Floodplain Management Plan Reviewer for Community Rating System credits with the Insurance Services Office. She has published her research in several journals including the Journal of Emergency Management, Journal of Risks, Hazards, Crisis, and Public Policy, and World Health and Medical Policy.

Bryan Parras is one of the Gulf Coast’s most dynamic environmental justice organizers fighting along the entire central and eastern United States. He grew up in a community on the east side of Houston, Texas, near one of largest concentrations of petrochemical plants, refineries, and storage tanks in the world. He is deeply involved in the documentation of environmental racism experienced by marginalized communities from Houston and throughout the greater Gulf Coast region. He has maintained his indigenous roots by core values that have survived over 500 years of suppression. He hopes to learn more about his indigenous roots by reconnecting with other indigenous communities and practices. In 2016, he helped organize the Peace & Dignity Journey along the Gulf Coast, connecting New Orleans with Houston and for the first time opening up the Gulf Coast to the continental journey awakening old trails and trade routes from South to North. He continues to help lead the rising environmental justice movement and is currently helping people in Houston and the Gulf Coast fight for a Just Recovery after Hurricane Harvey. For Harvey’s one-year anniversary, he organized a People’s Tribunal with a coalition of housing, immigration, labor, and environmental organizations.

Kristina Peterson is an Applied Social Scientist who studies scientist/community interaction including how to support and prepare both scientists and community members for working together and how that work transforms both parties. She is a Co-founder of the Lowlander Center, a non-profit organization that helps create solutions through education, research, and advocacy, beginning at the community level, for Lowland people and places in the bayous of Louisiana. She was a founding board member of the Natural Hazard Mitigation Association and the Gender and Disaster Network.

She has created and helped create innovative just housing and land use programs especially in post-disaster situations. She was an early innovator on reuse of building materials and the deconstruction of buildings as a resource for affordable housing.

She is an Advisory Board member of the Thriving Earth Exchange of the Geophysical Union and is a fellow in the Society of Applied Anthropology. Her recent awards include the “Distinguished Service to Rural Communities” from the Rural Sociology Association in 2014, for her years of advocacy and justice work in rural communities, and from the PCUSA-Earth Care, the William Gibson Environmental Award. She was named by her colleagues, the Mother Jones of Disaster Recovery.

Her most recent notable work has been to develop a team of topic experts to work with the Tribal experts of Isle de Jean Charles to create one of the winning proposals in the National Rockefeller HUD NDRC competition – $52,000,000 for a “proof of concept” culturally appropriate, sustainable resilient coastal resettlement community.

She publishes on community adaptation to disasters, the crisis in climate and the BP oil disaster as well as the use of traditional knowledges in decision making and planning. Other publications include appropriate entrée and engagement practices, as well as participatory action methods with communities.

David Rico has worked for several years as a line cook throughout Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. The past three years his main employer has been through Chef Jose Andres’ Think Food Group. Outside of that, he is affiliated with the I-Collective, a group of Indigenous chefs, seed keepers, and storytellers from all over Turtle Island. This group practices gastro-diplomacy through serving pre-Columbian meals alongside their histories of settler colonialism and genocide. Currently, he is working to establish Sovereign Earth Works as a non-profit organization which runs HeartSeed Farm in DC. Sovereign Earth Works and it’s affiliations are a collective of Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, Two-Spirit, People of Color co-constructing liberation from the white cis-hetero capitalist patriarchy by reclaiming ancestral lands to create safer spaces where they can freely exist and live. They reclaim food sovereignty by cultivating relevant, nutrient-dense foods. They reclaim emotional and spiritual well-being through a collective commitment to healing from trauma.

Chayne Sparagowski, AEM, GA-CEM, is a seasoned Emergency Management Specialist currently employed by the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency in Atlanta, Georgia. He was previously employed by the DeKalb County Emergency Management Agency in Georgia and the Coastal Bend Council of Governments in Corpus Christi, Texas. Prior to entering the field of emergency management, he worked as a technician for a radio communications company specializing in public safety networks, and as a journalist.

He earned an Associate’s degree in Emergency Administration and Management from Northwest Florida State College. He is currently completing a Bachelor’s in Emergency Management and Administration from West Texas A&M.

In addition to his work, he is also active in a number of professional organizations. He has held several leadership positions, including serving as the chair, with the International Association of Emergency Managers Emerging Technology Committee. He has served as a member of the Committee on Emergency Management with the American Meteorological Society. Additionally, he also served as an Emergency Management Representative to the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program. He remains active in leadership roles with various local committees and programs related to emergency management and preparedness.

Dezzi Synan is an eclectic artist in many mediums, a poet, a musician, a baker, and a peacemaker, residing in Honolulu with dual citizenship between the United States and Japan, befriending gentle creatures of all sorts.

Julie Torres attended University of New Orleans where she earned two BS degrees in Earth Science and Biology, followed by an MS in Earth and Environmental Sciences. She is a lifelong resident of southeastern Louisiana and knows the coast well. Her current projects include mapping and data visualization for Louisiana-focused projects across several scientific disciplines.

William L. Waugh, Jr, is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Public Management and Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, in Atlanta. His specialities are emergency management, disaster policy, public management, and organizational design and behavior. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Emergency Management and editor of Emerald Publishers book series on Community, Environment and Disaster Reduction Management. He has published widely in emergency management, public administration, economic development, and organizational theory and behavior. He served on the Certified Emergency Manager Commission from 2000 to 2006 and on the Emergency Management Accreditation Program Commission from 2003 to 2016. He has taught at Mississippi State University, Kansas State University, Georgia State University, Florida Atlantic University, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and was a Visiting Scholar at Shandong University, Qingdao, Shandong, China in 2019.