I am drawn to CADAN because of its close relationship with practitioners who work on disaster recovery.  I am impressed with the dedication to understanding disaster recovery processes and foundational assumptions to improve results for recipients’ lives and livelihoods.   

Thirty years ago forest fires ripped through our family home property in the Sierras near Yosemite.  My grandfather was a firefighter for the US Forest Service and my father also worked fighting fires as a young man. We continue actively to try to minimize the risks to our home, our trees, and infrastructure, which have increased in the last 25 years.  

My work at NOAA on tornado deaths and damages, exposure to severe weather such as hurricanes, flooding and coastal storm surges, and oil spills in the ocean have shown me disastrous results on communities and livelihoods, ill-advised recovery practices and even poorer planning practices.  My work in NOAA took me down the path of understanding the trajectories of climate change and implications for coastal communities. I worked on “human dimensions” of climate change and realized the global inequities that are engulfing native and indigenous communities world-wide.  “Slow-onset disasters” insidiously shift ecological baselines through subtle changes in sea level rise, warming & acidification of oceans, increasing erosion and declining sea ice and snowpack.