I'm always at my most coherent five minutes after talking to a reporter. Emily Cochrane of the NYT did a great job of making sense of what I babbled...but what I meant to say, in response to her important question of whether the southern #Appalachian communities will be able to "build back better," was...🧵
But that sort of process takes time and resources, both of which are in short supply right now. The sheer scale of damage caused by Helene, the unfathomably urgent need for help right now, across such a wide spread area, means we don't have the luxury of thinking about how to build back better yet. 4/
Our mountain neighbors will need to supported so that they can, ultimately, lead any and all conversations about "building back better." But right now, what they most need is direct aid to cope with the impacts of Helene. They need food, water, shelter, health care. They need to know if their loved ones survived. They can't wait for conversations about building back better. Lives and livelihoods are on the line.
If you want to help, one way is to give directly to the amazing organizations already on the ground in the southern Appalachians. I have a steadily growing list of organizations I (and/or those I know and trust) can vouch for:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RR5HML5ni83NdVodRGp2NZvyDJ_HtiAgw3J-IlMtPuA/edit?usp=sharing
/end
And those of us on the outside don't have any right to be leading those conversations anyway. We've spent over a century extracting the southern Appalachian's natural resources and exploiting its culturally-rich communities under the guise of economic development...and in the process, directly creating the conditions that allowed Helene's impacts to be so catastrophic to so many mountain communities*
*yes, this is foreshadowing a much longer and politically heated conversation