Fighting “Disaster Fatigue”
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2023
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It feels like we live in a world of near constant environmental disasters. Whether it’s living through an emergency, or consuming coverage in the media, collective trauma takes a mental toll. What steps can we take to be ready—for ourselves, our communities, and to help the recovery?
Guest: Dr. Tara Powell, associate professor, School of Social Work, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just for a minute, try to tick off all of the disasters you read about over the last |
| 0:10.6 | few weeks. |
| 0:11.6 | We are live again tonight from Maui reporting from the fires in Maui, because it is grappling |
| 0:17.8 | with the worst natural disaster in its history. |
| 0:21.0 | The earthquake in Morocco. |
| 0:23.0 | It's been a long time since we've seen this storm, an hour by hour. |
| 0:25.9 | The desperate search for survivors pushes on. |
| 0:30.0 | And now Libya is trying to recover from stunning floods. |
| 0:35.0 | Libya is now coping with major flooding that has wiped out entire villages and reportedly |
| 0:40.6 | killed thousands of people. |
| 0:42.9 | The pictures are just staggering. |
| 0:45.6 | There are these eerily silent drone shots showing mud-soaked rivers overrunning their |
| 0:50.7 | banks. |
| 0:51.7 | With seeing these images of just water everywhere, cause with swept away, people swept away. |
| 0:58.6 | And here in the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association released a report |
| 1:03.8 | just this week saying that 2023 set a record for the number of billion dollar weather events. |
| 1:11.2 | And the year, it's not over. |
| 1:14.3 | It left me with this question. |
| 1:16.5 | Did you feel like the summer of disasters to you? |
| 1:19.5 | Or is it just me? |
| 1:22.6 | It definitely felt like a summer of disasters. |
| 1:28.3 | Tara Powell studies disasters. |
... |
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