*[Enwl-eng] Building Home

[enwl]

In climate disaster zones, these workers are restoring the fabric that binds 
us together.





                                News of the world environment


                                 NEWSLETTER | OCTOBER 18, 2024

























                                Building Home


                                IT’S BEEN NEARLY two decades since Hurricane 
Katrina, and in that time, there have been over 200 US climate disasters 
that have done a billion dollars’ worth of damage or more each. Our recovery 
in their aftermath depends on these workers, who have become America’s white 
blood cells. They travel from disaster to disaster, rebuilding homes and 
schools and hospitals and whole cities for the federal government and 
private insurance companies. They’re at the center of an economy that spends 
tens of billions of dollars a year on rebuilding, weatherizing, and 
decarbonizing America, an economy that is poised to receive $2 trillion in 
federal investment over the next decade.


                                These workers are incredibly skilled and 
highly dedicated, but they’re also very vulnerable because they’re 
overwhelmingly immigrants, and most of them are undocumented. They come from 
Mexico and Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela. Some come from as far away as 
the Philippines and India. And most of them are dislocated from their own 
homes even as they’re rebuilding the homes of others.


                                These workers are on the road six months at 
a time, traveling from state to state, doing the rebuilding. Yet, they are 
separated from the multibillion-dollar contractors at the top of the 
disaster-recovery industry by layers of subcontracting, earning poverty 
wages on contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Since many of them 
are undocumented migrants, they’re subject to political fearmongering and 
scapegoating.


                                Saket Soni, founder and director of 
Resilience Force, advocates for the rights of highly skilled, yet extremely 
vulnerable, workers who help us return home after climate disasters.


                              READ MORE

                                Photo by William Widmer / Resilience Force






                              SUGGESTED BROWSING

                              Cold Fire
                              “In dark places, it is light that calls us. 
Even in a broken ocean full of chemical fouling and warming water, 
bioluminescent fire remains. Sometimes, a warming and failing ocean makes it 
burn brighter.” (Orion)


                              Secrets in Ice
                              “The (Greenland) ice sheet is packed with 
information, like a giant encyclopedia. Among the first to recognize this 
was Ernst Sorge, a German glaciologist. ‘I’m looking at a landscape whose 
vast simplicity is nowhere to be surpassed on earth, and which yet conceals 
a thousand secrets,’ he wrote.” (The New Yorker)


                              Land Connection
                              “Since I was a little girl, I kept a sprig of 
windmill jasmine from our backyard in a jar on the windowsill next to my 
bed. The scent transported me to a world where I belonged and felt safe. I 
didn’t know it then, but I was longing for a taste of the land of my birth, 
longing for nourishment from the soil of Cambodia.” (Emergence)


                              Emergency Mismanagement
                              “In the face of intensifying wildfires, 
storms, and heat, we are consistently confronted with the vulnerabilities of 
our daily lives: aging infrastructure, hazardously placed developments, and 
our haphazard national approach to emergency alerts and warnings, too.” 
(Rolling Stone)




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                  From: Editors, Earth Island Journal 
<editor at earthisland.org>
                  Date: сб, 19 окт. 2024 г., 2:45
                  Subject: Building Home






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