Do We Need FEMA To Respond To Natural Disasters?

Over the last few heady weeks, many news stories have decried Elon Musk’s efforts as head of the Department of Government Efficiency to tear down the U.S. government. I even saw a story about the proposed dissolution of FEMA, the government agency established to respond to natural disasters.

This proposal faced immediate pushback from Republican lawmakers—likely because deep Red states’ exposure to extreme weather make them prime beneficiaries of federal disaster relief. I initially agreed that killing FEMA was crazy.

The new administration’s scrubbing of all mention of “climate change” from government websites does not change that we are living in a post-Climate world. As I mentioned in a recent article about the L.A. wildfires, our focus as a society should now be investing in climate adaptation strategies. Sadly, one aspect of adaptation is increased disaster relief, given that climate change has made the natural disasters we have faced in 21^st century substantially more frequent and intense than those of the 20^th century.

This called to mind a recent conversation with Natalie Bogwalker, founder of Wild Abundance, a school in western North Carolina that specializes in teaching women carpentry and small-home-building skills.

I first learned of Wild Abundance when I reviewed A Call To Farms, which features Ms. Bogwalker’s story in one chapter. Bogwalker was about to enter a traditional career in academia when a near-fatal car accident caused her to rethink her purpose in life. She moved to the mountains of North Carolina to practice regenerative farming and primitive skills, learning carpentry and building her own house from scratch.

In 2009, her passion for living a connected life led her to start Wild Abundance, one of only 2% of all women-owned enterprises generating $1 million or more in annual revenues. She has taught skills of self-reliance to over 50,000 students on her campus and online.

Wild Abundance response to Helene, one of the worst natural disasters to hit North Carolina

In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene left a swath of devastation from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic Ocean, by way of western North Carolina. Its impact was immediate and profound: over 230 lives were lost, entire neighborhoods were reduced to debris fields that stretched for miles, and direct damage exceeded $50 billion, making Helene one of the costliest storms in U.S. history.

Through all of this, the Wild Abundance campus, situated in a lovely, forested area, was unscathed. Bogwalker knew enough about resilience to site her buildings away from trees, so none were crushed; even her garden was designed to avoid washouts from hard rains and continued producing vegetables as if the hurricane had been a mere inconvenience.

Bogwalker’s neighbors in nearby Barnardsville, however, were not so lucky. Roads and bridges were washed out, debris from overflowing rivers opened a hole large enough to drive a car through a local restaurant, and floodwaters carried countless homes and trailers all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Bogwalker and her team at Wild Abundance sprang into action, building small homes for displaced residents free of charge. Wild Abundance focuses on building tiny home “shells” which are finished and customized either by students or their intended occupants. Storm victims much prefer custom-built tiny homes to FEMA vouchers for local motel rooms. (Bogwalker offers tiny house workshops at her school.)

Bogwalker took an early leadership role in an impromptu organization called Mutual Aid Barnardsville. Before volunteers started flowing in from other parts of the country, local residents pooled resources to provide food and necessities for the hardest-hit residents. Along with coordinating repairs and supplying food, water, and medicine to victims, they provided lunches to hundreds of volunteers and hard-hit residents. The owner of an old fire station let the group utilize the building for free.

With roads washed out and bridges impassable, Barnardsville residents had already cleared hundreds of trees from roads, delivered food and medicine, set up a first aid clinic and a food distribution center, and distributed generators to power lifesaving devices before the first FEMA teams were able to reach their hamlet. A few days after Mutual Aid Barnardsville kicked into action, other community groups took over the local community center and elementary school, distributing food, clothing and other essentials.

There is a lesson for us in this vignette, one similar to that which I offered when discussing food resiliency. To live well in our new world, we must form stronger communities focused on growing local food, patronizing local businesses, and looking out for our neighbors.

Natural Disasters are inescapable in our post-Climate world

We are living in a new and more dangerous world. Neither the residents of Pacific Palisades nor those of a rural trailer park are immune to the effects of climate change.

I believe that the pace at which large natural disasters are occurring will eventually overwhelm our system’s ability to provide centralized relief. This sad milestone will only come sooner as Elon Musk’s wrecking ball cracks the foundation of the administrative state.

Rather than defenestrating FEMA, why not think about better ways to provide this already necessary and soon-to-be-more-necessary service? Rather than thinking of disaster relief from an Industrial Revolution paradigm, where command and control are centralized, we should focus on community-level resiliency.

Local FEMA teams would form a network with other teams in their region and be supported by state-level and multi-state-level organizations. Each concentric circle above the local level would be thinner in terms of personnel, with the thinnest layer that at the federal level. This would increase local resiliency, allow for quicker and more effective responses when disaster strikes.

Natalie Bogwalker and Wild Abundance are the exception rather than the rule, making Barnardsville, North Carolina blessed in a way many communities are not. When natural disasters strike, citizens will need assistance. If FEMA is not around to provide it and community resiliency is as low as it is now, Americans will suffer in a way that is common in the third world, but which should be uncommon in the wealthiest nation in the history of humankind.