In the U.S., herbal clinics and self-care stations may be the only form of healthcare some people can access; in the UK and Ireland, conventional healthcare is free at the point of contact, but generally does not include herbal medicine. In all of these countries, the most vulnerable people face barriers in accessing any healthcare.

Although free herbal medicine clinics exist — often associated with herbal medicine schools — the advantage of a mobile apothecary is in reaching vulnerable populations where they are. In addition to providing care, these projects also provide education about herbal medicine, increasing people’s capacity to care for themselves, their families and their communities.

Beyond herbal medicine

The impetus for community herbal projects is the provision for some form of healthcare for those less able to access it, but there is much more to these projects than herbal remedies. Greater valuing of local plants — many of which are often considered weeds or invasive plants — raises awareness about more regenerative land practices. It also strengthens people’s relationships with the plants, soil and nature that they are a part of, improving mental and physical health. 

This is also crucial because as interest in herbal medicine has exploded, unsustainable harvesting of medicinal plants has also increased, causing exploitation of people and land globally and locally. When people learn about local, abundant, nutrient-rich plants, they can mindfully harvest and use these vitamin- and mineral-rich plants as supplements, reducing the amount of packaging and energy-intensive recycling or waste associated with supplements purchased off the shelf, which are often less potent and less bioavailable.

In Washington state, Canoe Journey Herbalists (CJH) — a project which grew after its inception as a medic bus which provided care for Water Protectors at Standing Rock Reservation — is also looking to decolonize herbalism and cultivate indigenous-led herbal care (and wider care) for intertribal people on their lands and waterways, according to founder, Rhonda Lee Grantham.

For two weeks in July, the Intertribal Canoe Journey, the largest intertribal gathering of indigenous people in the U.S., paddle cedar canoes down the ocean together, stopping along the way to be hosted by each tribe for an evening.

Although the bus itself serves as the clinic where more in-depth assessments take place, provision of other types of care enables CJH to serve the approximately 15,000 paddlers, as well as allowing for intergenerational connection. Indigenous healing circles and ceremonies, herbal foot baths that younger generations give to elders, and provision of tea, salves and sunburn sprays, are some of the different ways that non-clinician indigenous people participate in care-giving.

While non-indigenous people may now be far removed from their ancestors’ harmonious relations with plants and the natural world, community herbal projects serve as an anodyne for this disconnection, helping heal the isolation associated with atomized living prevalent in western societies.

1. Clarify your objective:

• Who are you trying to serve? 
• Where do they hang out? 
• What kinds of issues do they face that simple herbal remedies can help?

Answers will undoubtedly evolve over time, but it’s useful to have a focus.

2. Find a few partners for your mobile apothecary:

• It’s easier to go down this path with one or more people committed to actualizing a community herbal project. 
• If you don’t already have a few potential people, reach out once you are fairly clear about your objective. 

3. Do a resource audit and reach out:

Think about assets that already exist in your community. Some community assets to consider are community gardens, private gardens, and local farms.

Those who can supply herbs and medicinal foods: 

• Make sure to source sustainably grown herbs or wild herbs growing in clean, pollution-free areas that are harvested responsibly. 
• Herbalista has established a Grow a Row scheme where local growers can set aside some land to grow specific herbs for the community herb projects. 

Venues:

• For medicine-making sessions if you plan to hold them to make remedies for your stock
• For storing preparations
  • This may be in someone’s home, the mobile unit (bus, cargo bike, etc.), or in a locked drawer in a collaborating organization. 
  • Security, access, and convenience in terms of loading up and transporting around are important considerations.

4. Form strategic community collaborations:

Collaboration can help with the financial side of receiving donations, as well as for hosting the herb station, harvesting or medicine-making sessions, or for storage. Homeless shelters or support organizations, women’s shelters, and refugee- or immigrant-advocacy organizations are all possible collaborators. These organizations may also provide useful information on what kinds of health issues are prevalent and guide what products you provide in your project. 

Below are some community collaborations to consider.

Suppliers:

• Those who can provide dried herbs, supplements such as vitamin C, vinegar, honey, sugar, bottles, jars, beeswax or vegan alternatives. Much of this depends on your particular project.

Herbalists:

• Those who can lead medicine-making sessions. It is not necessary for people to have years of training and qualifications to be skilled in herbal medicine-making and able to lead such sessions. Canoe Journey Herbalists has started an ‘Adopt a Remedy’ scheme where a community organization can take on the production of a particular herbal remedy with detailed instructions and supplies provided by CJH.
• Schools, community groups, or individuals can support the project by volunteering to grow a particular plant needed by the project throughout the year. The donations of plants and products according to their specification enables the indigenous people driving the project to focus their efforts on the intertribal canoe journey, while ensuring a degree of quality control.

Various health and social work professionals:

• When working with vulnerable populations, it can help to have people skilled in mental health and social services involved or available to consult.

Translation and graphics support:

• Depending on who you’re trying to reach, it may be important to have signage and labels in languages besides English; in some cases, using universally recognized images may also be useful. For herbal care in informal refugee camps in France, where Herbalists Without Borders London provides support, labels are prepared in Farsi, Arabic, Pashtu, French, and Kurdish because of the diversity of people served.

Funding sources:

• Identify local grants, ethical business sponsors, and other creative fundraising possibilities. Ask around in your networks, too. There may be people who work or volunteer at places and can advocate for the project to access resources.

5. Decide on the location for your mobile apothecary

• Even though your setup might be mobile, it’s good to decide on a regular, fixed location for a period of time. This allows you hone your procedures and processes, and get to know and establish relationships with the people in that area. It takes time for people to find out about new projects and to feel comfortable enough to try something new. The location will also inform the needs of your project. For example, if you locate outside without any heat or electricity supply, you’ll want to consider if serving hot tea is feasible as this will require transporting large flasks.
• Mauney-Brodek of Herbalista recommends initially setting up a self-care station with safe herbal preparations and teas (ones that do not interact with medicines people may be taking and are safe for folks who may be pregnant). In Dublin, the system of community herbal projects that she helped start began with a self-care station at an occupation of Apollo House, an empty office building taken over by housing activists in the midst of a homelessness crisis. Later, the Dublin Herb Bike was developed, which moves between a few locations. Self-care stations located inside an appropriate venue do not need to be staffed and can easily be built upon as capacity increases. Herbalista has shared guidance on setting up a self-care station here.
• The Mobile Apothecary in London has set up alongside of Refugee Community Kitchen (RCK), which serves free, hot meals outside of an underground station every Sunday. RCK already had a presence there which helped people engage with the Mobile Apothecary. While the Mobile Apothecary operates out of a cargo bike, and may in the future set up at more than one location, it has been running monthly sessions next to RCK. As a staffed project providing a small range of safe products, the Mobile Apothecary is a step above a self-care station, as people can speak to an herbalist or team members. Often, it’s the human connection that transmits the most potent medicine, so this is a really valuable service to provide, even if the capacity to run a full clinic is not there.

6. Organize a team

There are many hands involved in even the most basic of projects. 

• Find people who are interested and have the capacity to help in ongoing roles. 
• Have enough people in your team to rotate staffing or cover absences, and if you plan to run longer sessions, to allow individuals to take breaks. 

Some of the responsibilities may include: 

• Organizing publicity; 
• Creating labels; 
• Organizing medicine-making sessions; 
• Organizing donations of materials/fundraising; 
• Keeping track of stock; 
• Keeping track of budget; 
• Organizing harvests; setting up and taking down the station; 
• Staffing the station; 
• Washing up cups (if reusing); and 
• Documenting feedback

7. Develop a plan

Based on the above, come up with a plan that is feasible to implement with your initial resources and capacity.

• For many projects starting up, it may be more sustainable to run sessions monthly with a small range of products.
• Consider how you will have enough products to set up a station consistently over a period of time and if outdoors, how you will operate in different weather situations.
• The project in Dublin only started distributing herbal remedies after several community medicine-making sessions had generated a good amount of stock.

You’ll also need to consider how to generate funding as even with donated supplies and ingredients, there will inevitably be some expenses.

• Many projects running medicine-making sessions follow the pay-it-forward scheme developed by Herbalista, in which people pay on a sliding scale basis for learning about medicine-making at the session. The money helps to support the project, in addition to other material and in-kind donations.
• Some projects hold periodic fundraising events or sell a resource. For example, Bristol Herbalists Without Borders sells a calendar featuring botanical art and recipes.
• Local grants can also help.
• Although these projects are heavily dependent on volunteers, some projects compensate for a portion of the labor involved. In Atlanta, people leading educational activities are paid for contact time; however, it has taken years to get to the point of paying educators.
• The Mobile Apothecary project in London started with the help of a grant to acquire a cargo bike and another small grant to help cover other costs.

Ensure that the related issues of hygiene and safety issues are addressed in the setup, both for the people staffing the station (if applicable) and for those the project serves. Safety is another reason it is useful to set up with another organization.

• For example, the Mobile Apothecary project in London currently runs in a very busy area that has a pub and street homeless, and sometimes tensions flare up.
• Having people from the Refugee Community Kitchen alongside makes it easier to mutually support each other at these pop-up stations.

Be sure that any prepared medicines are labeled clearly, including the date of production, and are stored appropriately.

• If setting up an unstaffed self-care station, signage and information sheets are especially important.

Consider what’s appropriate for the climate and season.

• Hot teas are simple and really nurturing, but are not so appropriate in a sweltering situation.
• It’s good to plan ahead for the year and create or obtain stock accordingly.

8. Implement and evaluate

Start small—but do start! Lessons will be learned and your project will continually improve.

• Collect feedback and document which products are more popular at which times, what kinds of issues people seek support for, and what additional support the project may need to combat challenges.

• Periodic review and reassessment will help improve your service. As more people become interested, the capacity to scale up with stock, frequency of sessions, multiple locations, or integrating reuse/refill will also grow.

Community herbal projects provide immensely rewarding and nourishing ways to do solidarity work by bringing people together and cultivating deeper connections for them with plants and nature around them. Medicine created by many hands provides healing not only to the recipients, but to all the people involved in the project.

##

This article is part of our series on disaster collectivism. Download our free series ebook here. It was originally published on September 18, 2019 and was updated on May 23, 2024.

The post How to set up a mobile mutual aid herbal apothecary appeared first on Shareable.

While each guest is working on several unique projects, they are connected by their dedication to their communities and their participation in our SolidarityWorks program. Together, we discuss the current threats to their communities, both political and environmental, the ways they are collaborating with others to develop community-led solutions, and how they find joy in their life and work despite the many challenges they face.

Check out the resources below to learn more about all of their projects.

Resources:

• SolidarityWorks
• Emergency Battery Network Toolkit
• Mutual Aid Hartford (MAH)
• FREE HART Closet
• The People’s Saturday School
• Central Florida Mutual Aid
• Beautiful Trouble
• Bvlbancha Collective
• Bvlbancha Radio
• Imagine Water Works
• How To Set Up An Open Mesh Network in Your Neighborhood
• Meet Freifunk, the German group that aims to provide free internet to all
• “The Food Conspiracy Cookbook“
• Urban Recipe (Food Distribution Co-op)

Episode credits:

• Hosted and produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Edited by Robert Raymond
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

The post SolidarityWorks with Gabbie Barnes, Rachel Kinbar and Ida Aronson appeared first on Shareable.

Resistance without a clear vision of the alternative, risks merely reforming the current system, while building the alternative without roots in movements of resistance, with leadership from those on the forefront of struggle, risks both being exclusionary to these folks and their communities, and being co-opted by reactionary/status quo forces.

While there is a growing overlap between the resist and the build movements, there is still too much distance between the two.”

That was the initial invitation shared by the US Solidarity Economy Network before the first Resist & Build Gathering in 2020.

Throughout this season of The Response podcast, we’ve been exploring various methodologies and ethos working to address the polycrisis’ of our times. From Anarchism to Decolonial Marxism, and from Agroecology to Organized Labor.

On this week’s show, we turned our focus towards the Solidarity Economy and what is meant by ‘Resist & Build’; the practice of resisting the systemic forces causing harm to people, planet, and place while simultaneously building alternatives that can eventually replace them.

Joining us for this conversation is Emily Kawano, Co-Director of the Wellspring Cooperative Corporation and Coordinator of the US Solidarity Economy Network, Matthew Slaats, co-director of the Solidarity Research Center and the founder of the Virginia Solidarity Economy Network, and Edget Betru, an attorney who is on the boards of Community Movement Builders and the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy in Atlanta, GA.

Together, we unpack what ‘Resist & Build’ looks like in practice, discuss the necessity of cross-movement dialogue and collaboration, and explore pathways for scaling up (and arguably, more importantly, scaling out) the solidarity economy.

Resources:

• Resist & Build
• People’s Network for Land and Liberation
• Stop Cop City Solidarity
• The Response: Stop Cop City with Jesse Pratt López & Nolan Huber-Rhoades

Episode credits:

• Hosted and produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Edited by Robert Raymond
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Download our free ebook- The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters (2019)

The post Resist & Build with Emily Kawano, Matthew Slaats and Edget Betru appeared first on Shareable.

In this conversation, we talk about some of the recent actions taking place to support the struggle for Palestinian liberation, including recent #BlocktheBoat actions aimed at stopping military cargo intended for Israel from leaving docks in Oakland and Tacoma. We talk about the role of direct action in our movements, the horrific situation in Palestine, and some of the ways you can get involved.

“Direct Action for Palestine with Mohamed Shehk” is Robert’s last interview with The Response! You can follow him and his work at Upstream.

Resources:

• Critical Resistance
• Arab Resource and Organizing Center
• The Palestinian Youth Movement
• US Campaign for Palestinian Human Rights
• Palestine Legal
• Our episode with Pedro Mancilla of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and Anchor Brewery: Labor Battles and the Beer Industry
• For more on police abolition check out our episode: Mutual aid and police accountability with Tha Hood Squad
• Upstream’s episode: Palestine Pt. 1 with Sumaya Awad

Episode credits:

• Hosted, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond
• Co-produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

The Response is published by Shareable.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Download our free ebook- The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters (2019)

The post Direct action for Palestine with Mohamed Shehk appeared first on Shareable.

While the world is currently transfixed by what’s happening in Palestine-Israel, this story did not begin on October 7th and will not end when this current conflict is over.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling at a loss for how to take meaningful action towards an immediate Ceasefire in Gaza. I’ve done my best to keep up with the news, donated to NGOs supporting people on the ground, and signed petitions. I’ve been encouraged by the hundreds of thousands of people who have gotten out in the street in solidarity with the Palestinian people. But what else?

After listening to several inflammatory takes over the past month, I was pleasantly surprised when I came across “There is Another Way: A Round Table on Palestine-Israel” on The Fire These Times podcast. It was exactly the conversation that I needed to be a fly on the wall for.

So today, we’re cross posting that conversation as a bonus episode for listeners of The Response.

The Fire These Times co-hosts, Joey Ayoub and Daniel Voskoboynik are joined by Dana El Kurd, Orly Noy, and Yair Wallach to think through this moment, process their grief together, and articulate alternative visions for both peoples.

We hope you learn or feel something new while listening to this conversation.

-Tom Llewellyn

Resources:

Medical Aid for Palestinians | Adalah | Al-Shabaka | Gisha | Hamleh | Hamoked | The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel | Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre (JLAC) | MIFTAH: The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy | Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) | Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI-P) | Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) | Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling (WCLAC)

Episode credits:

• Presented and co-produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Edited by Robert Raymond
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

The Response is published by Shareable.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Download our free ebook- The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters (2019)

The post There is another way: Round table on Palestine-Israel appeared first on Shareable.

On the positive side of things, prosocial activities like sharing food in public, which had been criminalized in many places, suddenly became normalized. Organizing neighborhoods and blocks became routine. And inequalities which had long been hard to see just under the surface became visible.

But it was not all roses. Mutual aid has a deep political history of challenging the status quo that was often neglected or purposely stripped away. And as the Pandemic transitioned to being endemic, many of the pre-covid policies that criminalized Mutual Aid, returned, with some being much worse.

In our recent feature story, the noted mutual aid practitioner and educator, Dean Spade, wrote about how the Georgia state Attorney General, Chris Carr, is currently arguing that participation in mutual aid projects and practicing solidarity as part of the organizing happening to Stop Cop City constitutes a criminal act to further a criminal conspiracy.

Dean illustrates how this represents a brazen assault on social justice organizers reminiscent of the FBI’s surveillance and attacks on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 1960s and 70s.

And it’s not just in Georgia, all over the US, reactionary policies are criminalizing reproductive justice, climate protests, and more.

Today on the show, we’ve brought on Stephanie Rearick, a founder, and Director of the Madison Mutual Aid Network Cooperative and Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks, or HUMANS for short, which is a new type of networked cooperative ‘creating means for everyone to discover and succeed in work they want to do, with the support of their community.’

In this conversation, Stephanie talks about how mutual aid has changed since the pandemic began, how to create networks of Care that can actually support members of our communities long term, the new tech stack that they’re creating to support mutual aid work to scale, and what it means to live a POSHtarity Lifestyle.

Resources:

• Mutual Aid Network
• Humans at Home
• Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza
• Jewish Voice for Peace Call for Ceasefire in Gaza
• Mutual Aid and the Movement to Stop Cop City

Episode credits:

• Hosted, presented, and co-produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Edited by Robert Raymond
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

The Response is published by Shareable.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable and Robert Raymond exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Download our free ebook- The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters (2019)

The post Mutual aid networks with Stephanie Rearick appeared first on Shareable.

That’s where Footprint Project comes in. Since 2017, they have been proving that it’s possible to respond cleaner and build back greener by deploying 200+ kW of mobile solar and 600+ kWh of mobile battery storage on more than 20 disaster response and recovery missions, to provide emergency clean power access to over 28,000 people in some of the hardest hit communities following disasters.

Today on the show, we’ve brought on Footprint Project’s Operations Director, Will Heegaard, who shares the genesis stories for how he got involved in disaster response work, and the impetus behind launching the organization. He also unpacks the importance of building resilient communities and the role he feels that state agencies should play in disaster relief.

And for those listeners who just completed our Emergency Battery Network Co-Lab (or are planning to check out the course recordings and Toolkit that are soon to be on our website), stick around for the full conversation to hear Will’s advice on how to build power in your community.

Resources:

• Footprint Project

Episode credits:

• Hosted and co-produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Presented, edited, and co-produced by Robert Raymond
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

The Response is published by Shareable.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Download our free ebook- The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters (2019)

The post From relief to resilience with Will Heegaard appeared first on Shareable.

To tell us more about what happened and what the community response has been, we’ve brought on Nicole Huguenin. Nicole is based in Maui and is the co-lead of Maui Rapid Response, an ahupua’a-based citizen disaster response team that’s part of a much broader community response ecosystem working all across the island to provide relief and mutual aid to residents of Maui.

Resources:

• Maui Rapid Response
• Maui Rapid Response on Instagram
• Help Maui Rise Donation Google Doc
• ʻĀina Momona
• Kāko’o Haleakalā
• Tamara Paltin
• Mauna Medic Healers Hui
• Kanaeokana

Episode credits:

• Hosted, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond
• Presented by Tom Llewellyn
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

The Response is published by Shareable.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Download our free ebook- The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters (2019)

The post The Maui wildfires with Nicole Huguenin appeared first on Shareable.

With that said, there is a story that hasn’t hit headlines in the same way as some of these other actions and confrontations — and that’s the story of Anchor Brewery in San Francisco. You might have seen their Anchor Steam beer in the beer aisle before, or heard about their unionization campaign that took place in 2019 after this local, beloved brewery was bought by a giant beer conglomerate, Sapporo. That unionization campaign was successful, but recently, Sapporo abruptly — and controversially — closed Anchor Brewing down. Now, some of the workers at Anchor who don’t want to see this centuries-old institution stripped for parts, want to turn the brewery into a worker-owned cooperative.

This is really a sort of David and Goliath story, and to tell it, we’ve brought on Pedro Mancilla, who led the Anchor Brewery tour program, is a member of the ILWU Local 6 Warehouse Union, and is part of the team working on the cooperativization campaign.

Pedro has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of beer and beer history, and he begins by giving us a sort of virtual tour of the San Francisco brewery’s history and also a bit of San Francisco labor history. He then talks about the union, the struggles with Sapporo, the effort to convert Anchor into a worker cooperative, and also, how local Bay Area beer producers and enjoyers are coming together in an act of true solidarity to stand behind the workers that have been the backbone of this historic brewery.

Resources:

• Anchor Brewing Union
• Stand Together to Save Anchor Brewing Company!
• Project Equity

Episode credits:

• Hosted, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond
• Presented by Tom Llewellyn
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Download our free ebook- The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters (2019)

The post Labor battles and the beer industry with Pedro Mancilla appeared first on Shareable.

As you might’ve heard, July 2023 marked the hottest two weeks in recorded human history — in fact, the planet is enduring a heatwave that might be the hottest in the last 100,000 years, with some regions recording temperatures that are inhospitable to human life.

A couple of weeks ago, wildfires and heatwaves led to mass evacuations in Italy, Spain, and parts of Northern Africa. Here in the U.S., Phoenix and Florida have been shattering land and seawater heat records, respectively; California’s Death Valley hit 134 degrees Fahrenheit in July; the Midwest and Northeast have been experiencing extreme heatwaves — the planet is getting scorched.  

In this episode, we take stock of not just the rapidly increasing intensity and frequency of extreme heat, but how some municipalities, organizations, and activists are responding. Hope you’re able to stay as cool as possible in these extreme and dangerous climate conditions and that the information shared in this documentary might be helpful in building resilience in your community while also challenging the forces that have led us to these hellish conditions.

All across the globe, temperatures are rising, and thanks to the most recent report published by the International Panel on Climate Change and recent U.N. projections, we know that even if we do make sweeping cuts to emissions, we’re still on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of 2.7 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. That means, the record-breaking floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and heatwaves we’re currently seeing — or for many of us, directly experiencing — are just the beginning. Global warming is not just some distant thing to worry about in the future — it’s here. Right now.

Although cataclysmic events like hurricanes and wildfires tend to monopolize most of the headlines on climate change, as paltry as it is to begin with, climate news coverage hardly ever focuses on the less flashy impacts. Things like heatwaves, for example, might draw some attention if they’re record-shattering — but oftentimes, the impacts of long-lasting higher temperatures are not covered in any depth by mainstream news outlets.

In this episode of The Response, we focus on an issue that isn’t talked about enough: energy poverty. When temperatures rise to the point where they become dangerous, what happens to people who can’t escape the heat? As temperatures continue to soar, and extreme heatwaves become the norm, a lack of resources to stay cool — having access to things like air conditioning, for example — is a huge issue across the world. This is especially true in southern Europe, a region that experienced a series of record-breaking, climate-fueled heatwaves this past summer.

Episode credits:

• Written, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond
• Executive produced and narrated by Tom Llewellyn
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats
• Additional music by Belong, Fugazi, and Chris Zabriskie
• Cover illustration by Kane Lynch

This episode features:

• Eleni Myrivili, Chief Heat Officer for the City of Athens (the first person to hold this title – recently featured in New York Times).
• Lidija Živčič is the senior expert at the FOCUS Association for Sustainable Development and a coordinator at EmpowerMed.
• Mònica Guiteras, a member of the Alliance Against Energy Poverty in Catalonia, and Engineers Without Borders.  
• Martha Myers, energy poverty campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe and the coordinator of the Right to Energy Coalition.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable and Robert Raymond exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Transcript:

News Anchor: Forest fires fueled by a protracted heatwave in Greece continue to rage, forcing the evacuation of dozens of villages. A heatwave described as Greece’s worst since 1987 has baked the country for more than a week sending temperatures to 113 degrees…

News Anchor: Madrid could get up to as high as 40 degrees and many homes don’t have air conditioning in Spain, and so elderely are being asked to take particular care…

News Anchor: To have historically high temperatures — the hottest temperature we’ve ever had on record — people around here just don’t have air conditioning units installed in their homes, so it really is a big deal…

News Anchor: Millions of people here in Europe have been sweltering in this summer’s second extreme heatwave. And across the continent, records are being broken…

News Anchor: A weather station in Sicily recorded a high temperature of 48.8 degrees celsius Wednesday, that’s 120 degrees fahrenheit, an all-time record for Europe…

News Anchor: 2020 has tied with 2016 as the world’s warmest year on record. That rounds off the world’s hottest decade as the impacts of climate change intensified…

News Anchor: As the weather sets new records across Europe, climate scientists say such heatwaves are likely to become the new normal in the coming years….

Tom Llewellyn: All across the globe, temperatures are rising, and thanks to the most recent report published by the International Panel on Climate Change and recent U.N. projections, we know that even if we do make sweeping cuts to emissions, we’re still on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of 2.7 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. That means, the record-breaking floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and heatwaves we’re currently seeing, or for many of us, directly experiencing, are just the beginning. Global warming is not just some distant thing to worry about in the future — it’s here. Right now.

Although cataclysmic events like hurricanes and wildfires tend to monopolize most of the headlines on climate change, as paltry as it is to begin with, climate news coverage hardly ever focuses on the less flashy impacts. Things like heatwaves, for example, might draw some attention if they’re record-shattering — but oftentimes, the impacts of long-lasting higher temperatures are not covered in any depth by mainstream news outlets.

In this episode of The Response, we’re going to focus on an issue that isn’t talked about hardly enough: energy poverty. When temperatures rise to the point where they become dangerous, what happens to people who can’t escape the heat? As temperatures continue to soar and extreme heatwaves become the norm, a lack of resources to stay cool — so, having access to things like air conditioning, for example, — is a huge issue across the world. This is especially true in southern Europe, a region that experienced a series of record-breaking, climate-fueled heatwaves this past summer.

We’ll start in Athens, Greece, which, as you might’ve heard, was devastated by a series of wildfires in August — largely fueled by scorching temperatures.

Eleni Myrivili: This summer was a really hard summer for Athens and for Greece, as it was in general for the Mediterranean — a lot of Mediterranean countries ended up having heatwaves and ended up reaching temperatures that were record-breaking for Europe.

Tom Llewellyn: Eleni Myrivili works for the city of Athens as Chief Heat Officer, a position which is part of an initiative that started from the Atlantic Council’s Arsht Rockefeller Resilience Center.

Eleni Myrivili: It actually reached the hottest temperatures that Greece has ever reached.

Eleni Myrivil: It was extraordinary because as soon as the heatwave started peaking, there were wildfires that broke out in the very urban forests of Athens. And because of the prolonged period of very high extreme temperatures that started in June, it really was like a powder keg — the trees just went up in flames.

Tom Llewellyn: It wasn’t just Athens, though. You might’ve seen that viral video of a tourist ferry evacuating people from the Greek island of Evia, which is about 100 kilometers from Athens. Aside from apocalyptic, the most appropriate description of the scene might’ve come from an article in the Guardian headlined: “If Dante had filmed the Inferno on his iPhone, it would look like this.” And if you’ve seen the video, you’ll know that’s really not an exaggeration. And Athens wasn’t much different.

Eleni Myrivili: There were ashes dropping, like ash rain, in Athens for days. Every time that the wind would change, we would get this intense ash rain. I have never seen that before, ash was covering everything, all the different surfaces. And also during several days, we had these post-apocalyptic images in the sky of these grey clouds with reddish kind of light coming through them. Photographs and images that we have seen from California and from Sydney. I mean, we are now starting to share this imagery, which really feels like a post-apocalyptic movie.

Eleni Myrivili: It’s a very very eerie feeling and it feels very unsettling and also very scary. And for us, that kind of are dealing with climate change, it really brings to the front kind of what we will be facing in the future much more often than we are now. And it’s daunting.

Tom Llewellyn: But as devastating and headline grabbing as they are, wildfires aren’t the only disasters that are sparked by rising temperatures.

Eleni Myrivili: Heatwaves and extreme heat is a silent killer. It kind of rolls in and nobody really knows what’s going on and kind of stays there and then kind of rolls out. And then nobody really knows how many people have ended up in hospitals, how many people have died and what the effects really have been.

Tom Llewellyn: Exposure to extreme heat has both acute and long lasting impacts on the human body. Heat stroke is perhaps the most obvious effect, but we also know that exposure to extreme heat is associated with heart disease, lung disease, psychological problems like brain-fog or general confusion — studies have even shown that it’s associated with an increase in work-related accidents.

Lidija Živčič: About 104 million people in Europe cannot keep their homes sufficiently cool in summer.

Tom Llewellyn: Lidija Živčič is the senior expert at the FOCUS Association for Sustainable Development and a coordinator at EmpowerMed, a project working to tackle energy poverty in Mediterranean countries.

Lidija Živčič: Mainly due to the climate change, heatwaves are becoming a new characteristic of European Summers. And, for example, in 2003, in the heatwaves of that year, more than 70,000 additional deaths occurred due to the heatwaves. So summer energy poverty is present, and it also hits disproportionately the most vulnerable. When this happens, the people with lower incomes, people of color, unemployed people, elderly women or also people with health issues or homeless people are basically on the frontlines because they tend to live in the most inadequate homes or actually don’t have homes at all. So they have the least access to cooling and being safe during these kinds of events.

The problem of Summer energy poverty is estimated to rise in the future not only because of the climate change and the predictions, but also because vulnerability factors especially in the Mediterranean areas of Europe, are becoming more and more expressed. Namely, these areas are not only marked by poor buildings and poor insulation, but they also face challenges of errors, indebtedness, and the risks of disconnection.

Tom Llewellyn: There is actually no official EU-wide definition of energy poverty, but it’s generally described by those in the field to occur when a household cannot achieve the minimum level of energy consumption required for satisfying basic needs — and also for effective participation in society. So it’s not just about being able to keep your home cool enough to stay healthy, but it’s also about whether or not you’re able to maintain a decent living environment. So, having a house that’s too hot to invite friends over, would be one, small, practical example.

Lidija Živčič: Households that are affected by energy poverty may experience inadequate levels of essential energy services, like, for example, thermal comfort. They might experience disproportionate energy expenses that are forcing them into decisions that are very difficult to make, like we call it the “heat or eat” dilemma. Or they have very precarious access to energy, for example, depending on very unstable, sometimes even illegal supply of electricity.

Tom Llewellyn: In addition to raising public awareness and formulating local, national, and EU policies designed to tackle the issue, EmpowerMed is also working on implementing practical solutions tailored to empower households affected by energy poverty.

Lidija Živčič: So we’re proposing five different ways to tackle energy poverty among people. The first is so-called collective assembly. It’s a forum to where about 20 to maybe 30 people affected by energy poverty gather in common spaces roughly every two weeks. During the conversation with each other, they help each other to transfer and exchange knowledge and skills about energy use, rethink energy bills, implementing simple measures for energy savings. Also, they’re discussing, for example, how to change energy provider from a more expensive one to a cheaper one. Sometimes people get together in collective assemblies to organize collective purchase of energy. Sometimes they’re trying together to access building rehabilitation grants.

So it’s a wide array of activities that people try to do in support to each other in collective assemblies. But the most important characteristic of this activity is that actually people show each other that they’re not alone, that they all have some sort of knowledge of how to solve and tackle the problem and that they can actually support each other. Sometimes when the mutual support is not enough we actually also accompany people, for example, to go to a company which is demanding that the debt is paid back and we try to help them work out the debt with the company or we’re helping people to change the energy provider and so on.

Lidija Živčič: Then the next way to tackle energy poverty are household visits. We do a short and very simple energy audit based on which we suggest a package of hints and tips about changing behavior in the household. But also we provide the household with a small package of free devices that can help them save some energy, also water and so on.

Tom Llewellyn: So there’s the assemblies and household visits, and EmpowerMed also hosts do-it-yourself workshops where participants can exchange tips and tricks on all sorts of things, from information on how to best shade your house with plants, how to use water and ice to cool a space with simple ventilation, or teaching folks how to read their smart meters.

Lidija Živčič: Then the fourth way that we help the people is that we provide support in accessing small grants or loans or investments. For example, refurbishing the household or changing some of the energy consuming devices such as fridge. So in different countries, there are different schemes, so we provide different help to households to access the schemes. This can entail just giving a bit more information all the way to helping the households to fill in all the forms that are necessary to be filled in to access, for example, a subsidy for house refurbishment.

Lidija Živčič: Then the last step or the last method that we were using, our so-called health workshops. Here we work in to two manners again, one way is that we work directly with people affected by energy poverty and a bit similar to collective assembly, we work with a group of people, but with the support of a therapists who helps people open and tackle their mental problems related to energy poverty.

Mònica Guiteras Blaya: I am Mònica Guiteras, I am a member of the Alliance Against Energy Poverty in Catalonia, and I’m also part of Engineers Without Borders. The alliance is a social movement formed basically by affected families suffering from energy poverty, or energy precariousness, that has been in the struggle for the energy rights and the access to basic supplies since 2014.

Tom Llewellyn: Like EmpowerMed, the Alliance Against Energy Poverty in Catalonia works both on the policy and the grassroots levels — and they run a similar program of collective advisory assemblies every two weeks.

Mònica Guiteras Blaya: We have been having them since 2014, so it means lots and lots of people coming to our open assemblies in which what we do is we have a conversation about these energy poverty situations. Each person explains their case and we transform the way in which energy advice was given in a more unilateral way, because that’s what has been the common measures in many countries, like household visits, paying for some of the bills that are accumulated. But then the next year or the next month, the problem pervades. So what we are offering is an open space where each person can explain their own case with no judgment, with the aim of un-blaming people and with the perspective of collective knowledge.

So there’s no people that knows and people that are experts and then people that know nothing — but completely the opposite. We all know something because we have experienced diverse situations of precariousness and we have something to share. So those who have been disconnected know something about that procedure and how to be reconnected and those who have suffered from harassment, phone harassment, or door to door sellers that want to change the conditions of your contract — those people would know how to face these kinds of cases, no? So, it’s not that we say people, you have to do this, but we are kind of sharing what each of one has experienced.

And we also try to share different roles in the methodology. So someone would be giving the welcoming, someone would be explaining like the main pieces of information, like basic information. What are our rights? What laws are protecting us? Then someone else would see how many new cases we have in the assembly and would give voice to one or the other, like in order of appearance or in order of urgency. And then someone else would also accompany those cases that are more complex. So we try to work in a horizontal way to end with this kind of uni-directional messages, and sometimes an essentialist [?] or paternalist messages that are not really helping people to change the situation for good. So, it’s also a democratizing process so that we can all have a say in the energy model that we live in. [00:14:13]

Tom Llewellyn: The assemblies generally consist of around 25 or 30 people, and after switching to remote meetings during COVID, the Alliance has recently begun experimenting with a hybrid in-person and remote format, which they’ve noticed actually increases accessibility to folks who may not be able to conveniently travel to Barcelona to attend a meeting.

Mònica Guiteras Blaya: For us, mutual support is something that we saw it worked in other social movements — and so lots of recognition for their proposal and their success. And of course, they learned from some others. And we also have a lot to learn from struggles in the Global South. And this more democratized and assembly proposals that have a collective responsibility and that where leadership can be shared and can be changing. So maybe many people that come to our assembly, they don’t know the mutual support is an anarchist proposal, they just know that it works because that’s what we do.

We have the assemblies, but we also have a Telegram group where someone would write at 11:00pm in the night saying, “I just got disconnected. What can I do now?” So we don’t answer every two weeks — we are there. And because we are lots of us and it’s not one person that knows what to do and what to say, if someone is already sleeping, someone else would answer. So it’s a shared responsibility. And you feel the other one is an equal. So you feel valued. We also try to end with the hierarchy of knowledges. Like why is it more important to know how the electricity market works than to have the time to call Olga to ask her, how are you doing? Have you got your electricity yet? Like why is more important the conceptual knowledge than common sense or calls of how are you doing? Which is very simple.

But no one was doing this. I mean, no one for these people, like no one was helping them in this sense. Maybe they didn’t need so much advice, like the steps to follow are this, this, this…You need to fill in this form, this form and this form — but they needed like, how are you? And this is something that not always social services can do because they can’t do anything else, like social workers are having so much trouble coping with all the work they have. So, yeah, social autonomous organization is trying to answer to that. Which doesn’t mean the state hasn’t a responsibility. But in the meantime, and in the urgent perspective, we will be there and then of course in the mid and long term with measures and policies. But we need to have something to say and something to do today and in the urgent term.

So I think this is what this mutual support was, like being there from the less complex perspective, like just knowing that it’s kind of family, but not because it’s super hippy or, oh, let’s make a party together. No, no, no. Like it’s very like concrete, it’s tangible, because you go to the assembly and people is there for you. So it counts. It counts maybe sometimes just as much as a new piece of legislation.

Tom Llewellyn: Of course, that’s not to say that legislation and policy work around energy poverty isn’t needed as well — it definitely is. In fact, a lot of the on-the-ground support taking place in the assemblies informs the policy work being done by the Alliance Against Energy Poverty, which includes proposing legislation or programs to political parties and administrations at all levels, from city councils to the Catalan government and all the way up to the national level. One of their biggest policy successes was a Spanish law barring households from having their electricity disconnected if they were unable to pay their bills.

Martha Myers: Hi, I’m Martha Myers. I am the energy poverty campaigner here at Friends of the Earth Europe. And we work for the most socially and environmentally resilient solutions to the climate crisis. I’m also the coordinator of the Right to Energy Coalition, which brings together social environmental organizations, trade unions, and health organizations across Europe to ensure that we tackle energy poverty and that we ensure a just energy transition for all so that low income groups are included in the European Green Deal.

Tom Llewellyn: Kind of like the Green New Deal here in the U.S., the European Green Deal is a set of policy initiatives by the EU with the overarching aim of making Europe climate neutral in 2050.

Martha Myers: Energy poverty is a specific form of poverty that is normally a result of inefficient homes, neoliberal energy markets, which put profit before people and planet, and also wider poverty indicators. So we’re looking at injustices, structural racism, more austerity measures, etc. When we talk about energy poverty, we really have to recognize that energy poverty is a political decision that needs a political response. So, it is not a personal burden of not being able to pay your energy bills, it is a response to being given insufficient housing that has not been given adequate performance standards. It is a response to governments giving subsidies to fossil gas companies to install boilers rather than for them to subsidize heat pumps and district heating infrastructure. It is important to recognize that this is a structural inequality. This is often something which is misunderstood for those that are living in energy precarity — they think that in some way it is their fault. We actually know that one in five Europeans struggle to keep their house cool during summer. So it’s a huge problem across Europe, particularly in the southern regions where there are inefficient housing, and we know that heatwaves are increasing at an exponential rate.

This is the richest continent in the world where we should have adequate resources to deliver to those that live on the front lines of the climate crisis. And, however, we continue to put the poorest and most vulnerable disproportionately at risk, as well as not giving them access to the clean and affordable energy that they deserve. This is something that the Right to Energy Coalition really works for is to ensure that we are holding governments accountable, holding the EU accountable to deliver to low income groups who have been previously left behind or unheard in climate policy.

Tom Llewellyn: The Right to Energy Coalition has European partners at many different levels — from those with direct experiences of living in energy precarity, to solidarity groups and community organizations who take action to ensure that energy-poor households are protected and are able to access renovations and renewables at a local and municipal level. They also have national partners who are working on changing national policy in EU member states.

Martha Myers: So some of our main demands that we have here at the Right to Energy Coalition to ensure that there are free, grant-based renovations for low income households across Europe and also that low income households have access to renewable schemes. And one of the ways that this has to come forward so that we can remedy the climate crisis is by diverting subsidies from, for instance, fossil gas boilers, which are seen as the current answer to energy poverty, which is very shortsighted, towards more sustainable solutions to ensure that low income households can have access to renewables, green district heating, etc. And this would also mean that low income households would experience less heat energy poverty or summer energy poverty because they would be able to have greener air conditioning that was based on green electricity rather than on fossil fuel infrastructure.

Eleni Myrivili: The more I got involved in this role, the more I got worried about it, and the more I learned about the challenges of the city in relation to heat, the more I felt that I was more and more dedicated to it.

Tom Llewellyn: Here’s Athens Chief Heat Officer, Eleni Myrivili, again.

Eleni Myrivili: And from being part of all these international fora of cities talking about climate change and this and that, I also realized that there was very little work being done about heat in cities. Like people, mostly when they think of climate change, they think of sea level rising or, you know, like extreme events like hurricanes or stuff like that. But very little attention has been given to the fact that we are talking about global warming and global warming means that the heat is rising and the there is very little discussion about cities and how cities are even warmer than other parts because of the way that they’re built and how cities are more and more popular, attracting people to them, and the populations are becoming more and more vulnerable to the weather conditions and specifically to heat.

Tom Llewellyn: In addition to implementing information campaigns and helping to create “buddy systems” where municipal workers and NGO members regularly check-in on and provide a number services to folks who may be particularly vulnerable to excessive heat, Eleni also has larger, systemic visions. And not just for Athens, but for cities all across Europe and even globally.

Eleni Myrivili: A big part of it is to make it more visible and make it more concrete and explain what the dangers that are related with it are to different parts of the population. Part of this, I think it will be game changing if we manage to start naming heatwaves and also categorizing them. So they’re not this vague thing that doesn’t really have a beginning and an end. It doesn’t really have a specific kind of sense of what are we really dealing with. Which I think it will make it easier for the media to communicate them, but also for decision makers to set into motion specific responses based on what level of heatwave we being forecasted and what we will be dealing with. Now all this is very vague and ad hoc, and it’s like, you know, different measures are being taken in different ways that are not at all kind of regulated and standardized.

We have to transform our cities and we have to really aggressively take back public space from cars and really kind of focus on public transportation and on bringing nature and water in the cities. And actually, I think it has to be — I use the word aggressively, very consciously because I think we can’t just kind of keep talking about, you know, creating parks or planting trees. I mean, all this is great and I don’t want to say we shouldn’t do this, but I think we should really vamp up the efforts and really talk about creating forests in the cities. Like long, elongated forests in cities where we can take away space from cars and kind of create other types of mobility that do not depend so much on the car. But generally kind of we have to rethink the surfaces of the cities, we have to use technologies, use different types of materials to cool the cities and also bring water to the surfaces of the cities, which is very important, and use water together with green to lower temperatures.

Martha Myers: So as we have just seen with the release of the new IPCC report, we are really heading towards a climate crisis and this is a lived experience for millions, if not billions of people day to day. And it is the poorest who are on the front lines of the climate crisis, those who have already been marginalized by our current capitalist neoliberal system. And these are people of color, elderly, and those that have been already exploited. And these are the people that have done least impact climate change. And they are often the ones that feel the brunt of this. And we’re seeing this with heatwaves across Europe at the moment and also flash flooding, which has really drastically impacted Belgium, Germany, areas across the U.K.

So these heat waves are one example of the volatile nature of climate change and how this is going to just be escalating for years to come. So at the moment, we are heading towards a 5 to 6 degree warmer world. And really we need to stay within 1.5 degrees to have a chance of any future for humanity and also for other species across the world.

Mònica Guiteras Blaya: We should start really understanding that it is a collective responsibility and that not everybody has contributed the same to climate change. And maybe not only the Global South, but also, for example, people living in energy poverty in Europe or in the states or in any so-called rich country, we can’t demand the energy poor to consume less. We can’t do that because maybe they are consuming too little. Maybe they are consuming under what they need.

We have seen that very clearly in the Alliance Against Energy Poverty. Like people don’t turn on the heat because they are too afraid to the bill that is coming the next month or they aren’t turning on not even the air conditioner because they don’t have that, but the ventilation, the fans, because they are too afraid of what would be the bill if I turned it on. So, for us, it’s very important to understand that we cannot demand the same for people who have been under-consuming. So maybe some need to consume less, for some to consume adequately. And so for us, this is climate justice. And this is what we are trying to explain because there’s inequalities.

Martha Myers: The Right to Energy movement brings together so many different actors to ensure that we are not only amplifying the voices of low income groups in the European Green Deal and in climate policy, but they are at the forefront of every single piece of climate policy. Adding low income groups as an add-on to climate policy is not going to work — these are groups that have been disproportionately excluded and exploited by the capitalist system for decades, if not centuries. So we must ensure that they are at the forefront of every single piece of climate legislation. There is no way that you can bring forward one climate policy that is going to disproportionately impact the poorest and then go, oh, it’s okay, because we’ve actually given them some climate policy and energy efficiency. That’s not how it works. We need to ensure that all green policy is socially just.

Again, it comes down to the question of, we are going to have to spend billions, if not trillions of euros to mitigate the climate crisis. Either we do this through adaptation and mitigation to ensure that we have efficient housing, renewables for all, green infrastructure, and that this is heavily subsidized to ensure that all can have access to the energy transition. Or we have to respond to disaster after disaster, which we’re already seeing is a lived reality for many for decades, but now in Europe, it’s starting to be right on our doorstep. And I think that’s a real wake up call for a lot of European officials who had seen climate change as something in the distant future. Whereas it’s really clear now that we are already too late to take action. And so I do hope that this is the time where we really shift away from neoliberal ideology in our political system towards really thinking about what is going to benefit people and planet in the long term.

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Tom Llewellyn: The Response is officially back for a 4th season. Over the next few months we’ll be increasing the frequency of the show and releasing new episodes at least every other week. We’ve already got a number of exciting interviews and roundtable discussions lined up. And if you would like to hear more episodes like this, you should check out our other audio documentaries mostly exploring specific community-led responses to disasters like the 2017 Mexico City Earthquake, Hurricane Sandy in New York City, the Grenfell Tower Fire in London, and a lot more.

We also encourage you to watch our award-winning 30-minute micro-budget documentary film, “The Response: How Puerto Ricans Are Restoring Power to the People,” on shareable’s Youtube channel (you can find a link in the episode notes). While you’re there it would be a big help if you give it a thumbs up and let us know what you think in the comments.

This episode of The Response was researched, written, and produced by Robert Raymond, our theme music is provided by Cultivate Beats, original artwork was created by Kane Lynch, and was executive produced and hosted by me, Tom Llewellyn.

We would like to thank Eleni Myrivili, Martha Myers, Mònica Guiteras Blaya, and Lidija Živčič for being interviewed for this episode and to Belong and Chris Zabriskie for the use of their music.

This is a project of Shareable.net, an award-winning nonprofit media outlet, action network, and consultancy promoting people-powered solutions for the common good.

Support for this show has been provided by the Shift and Guerrilla foundations, Platform OS, Cloud of Goods, and tax-deductible donations from listeners like you. That’s it for today’s show. Please hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, to hear more stories and discussions like this. Until next time, take care of each other.

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