In the era of climate crisis, disaster no longer punctuates time, but rather, it is time. The old logic of interruption, where emergencies arrive and recede, has eroded for many frontline communities around the world. Instead, many live in what scholars call “slow emergencies,” where the abnormal becomes routine, and adaptation replaces resolution. Across continents and contexts, people are making sense of this new condition with stories, rituals, and forms of care that are at once deeply rooted and radically improvised in disaster’s ever-present wake and aftermath.

Living on Shifting Ground: Three Places, One Pattern

Louisiana: Holding Ground in the Gulf Until the End

On the rapidly disappearing Isle de Jean Charles in coastal Louisiana, the land is both ancestor and adversary. This narrow strip of marshland, home to members of the Isle de Jean Charles band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribal communities, has lost over 98% of its landmass since 1955 due to a combination of sea-level rise, oil and gas canal dredging, and coastal erosion. The residents were offered federal resettlement through what was once touted as the United States’ first “climate relocation” project, but many initially refused to leave.

For many residents of Isle de Jean Charles, the decision to stay or go was not reducible to climate forecasts or policy labels. Displacement is experienced not as a clean break but as an unraveling, an erosion of identity rooted in place, memory, and obligation. The island’s residents resist erasure through forms of cultural and infrastructural resilience, which includes elevating homes, adapting fishing practices, and transmitting place-based knowledge of flood patterns and safe passage. The rhythm of flooding itself is not new; what’s changed is its pace and intensity, compounded by state timelines that ignore the lived temporalities of slow violence.

In the autumn of 2024, former Isle de Jean Charles residents began moving into the New Isle, a state-planned resettlement community in Terrebonne Parish. However, the transition hasn’t lived up to expectations. Many homes have been characterized by crooked floors and walls, rain seeping in where it shouldn’t, faulty HVAC systems, and construction clearly not built to withstand the climatic and environmental pressures of coastal Louisiana.

These experiences echo earlier frustrations with government-led relocation efforts: even as new homes are handed over, many feel the vision of cohesion and cultural restoration has been lost in execution. What was designed to preserve community continuity, a key goal backed by HUD and the Office of Community Development, now hinges on whether these structural and governance shortcomings can be resolved. As the community settles into The New Isle, the real test lies in whether the promises of resilience, autonomy, and cultural integrity can be fulfilled on the ground.

Pakistan: Faith and Flood Along the Indus

In Pakistan’s Sindh province, the monsoon had turned monstrous. The catastrophic floods of June–October 2022 displaced over 33 million people and submerged one-third of the country, a horrific climate disaster intensified by melting glaciers and broken infrastructure. Entire villages vanished. The water ultimately took the lives of 1,739 people from a country producing fewer than 1% of global greenhouse emissions. Environmental scholars forecast severe flooding to become Pakistan’s “new normal.”

But amidst devastation of all kinds, cultural practices persist.

Shrines like Sehwan Sharif serve not just as religious sites but as infrastructures of refuge, where displaced families can gather, share food, and reaffirm community amongst great loss. As Nichola Khan illustrates, devotional forms like qawwali circulate across class and ethnic divides, producing a kind of lateral solidarity rooted in affect rather than identity. Sindhi poetic traditions commonly frame rivers, floods, and winds as metaphors for spiritual seeking and rupture. Khan describes how such landscapes mark a shifting temporality, one where identity and civic engagement can behave in a more fluid manner, as the weight of traditional divides strain under the climatic onslaught. These “tidemarks” blur a past, present, and future in overlapping rhythms of loss, adaptation, and when faced with little other choice, climate migration.

Rather than organize through formal political channels, communities engage in what Khan calls “repeated attempts at living”: improvised acts of care, memory, and ritual that reframe crisis as a condition of collective becoming. In these contexts, cosmology doesn’t replace governance, but steadies life when governance fails to arrive or adequately respond. These practices show that in frontline communities navigating the slow, yet rapidly accelerating violence of climate change, cultural forms can offer coherence as a tool to endure, adapt, and reimagine life amid permanent crisis.

The American West: Fire as Atmosphere

Across California, Oregon, and Arizona, wildfire smoke now marks the rhythm of summer, shaping how people work, breathe, and move. Fire season bleeds across the calendar, returning each year as an unwelcome, but not unexpected, recurrence. This shift has reordered the pace of everyday life. Yet amid this ambient emergency, deeper questions surface about whose knowledge is legitimized in managing fire-prone landscapes.

The most powerful knowledge often remains sidelined. Indigenous fire stewardship programs, which practiced controlled burns for centuries, remain marginalized by state forestry departments applying oversimplified approaches to forestry that result in unmaintained overplanting. “[They] didn’t go back and tend the garden — because they don’t know how to do that,” says Ron Goode, a North Fork Mono tribal elder. He speaks for five decades of an approach to land mismanagement that’s practices are not only antithetical to the local Indigenous relationship to the land, but operate in opposition to the environment itself.

However, California is making moves toward righting this wrong. In 2021, the state began permitting cultural burns once more, acknowledging these burns and Indigenous stewardship over the land as critical for its long-term health and longevity. San Carlos Apache tribe member Melinda Adams states, “We don’t ‘control’ fire. We steward fire — in a reciprocal, responsible way.”

In these fire-adapted landscapes, anthropology reveals a contested epistemology between those who treat fire as cycle and those who treat it as crisis. As communities cohere around clean-air shelters, backyard mutual aid networks, and traditional knowledge practices, the old ethic of care centering coexistence with environmental reality is beginning to reemerge.

Time, Belonging, and the Slow Emergency

In the aftermath of Libya’s September 2023 floods, triggered by the collapse of two dams following Storm Daniel, residents described the sky itself as a source of fear. Médecins Sans Frontières reported that, months following the catastrophe, “People are terrified of rain, clouds and climate change.” That fear is rooted in deeply lived experience: in Derna, entire neighborhoods were swept out to sea. “Wherever you go,” said aid worker Emad al-Falah, “you find dead men, women, and children.”

To live in a slow emergency is to create alternative chronologies: clean air windows, water delivery rotations, seasonal displacement routines. These new patterns reflect a shift away from “recovery” toward navigation. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, where air quality consistently ranks among the worst in the U.S., outdoor laborers face heightened health risks from high levels of particulate matter and ozone. “The poor air quality is a silent killer,” says Erika Montejano, a farmworker from Coalinga. “We breathe the smoke from the fires. … That smoke is what causes damage to one’s lungs…kidneys…and everything.” Workers with asthma or heightened concern about air quality more frequently monitor AQI reports to determine when it is safe to work or exercise outdoors, informally adjusting their routines around chronically-high pollution levels.

In the flood-prone deltas of Bangladesh, life is increasingly paced by cyclone logic. After 2009’s Cyclone Aila, young people in particular began organizing courtyard meetings serving as social protection networks designed to navigate disruption and educate participants on disaster mitigation. Among Munda and Muslim forest communities, routine tasks double as storm preparation: households collect and store rainwater during the rainy season using simple rooftop piping systems and clay or concrete pots, mitigating the scarcity of safe(r) drinking water; many rebuild homes on raised concrete pedestals to withstand tidal surges and floods; farmers cultivate saline-tolerant rice varieties, adjusting crop cycles and fertilizer routines to sustain food security in increasingly brackish soil. Heightened, persistent ecological risk is absorbed by force and necessity into the architecture, agriculture, and water routines of everyday life.

New Ways to Govern, New Ways to Care

In climate-disrupted zones, the answer to the question of governance and legitimacy increasingly lies in practice over promise. As the pace of disaster outstrips institutional response, residents in cities and rural stretches alike are building ad hoc systems of governance, informal and rooted in trust. In Jackson, Mississippi, the collapse of the city’s water system in 2022 left thousands without safe drinking water for weeks. With taps running dry, businesses shut down, and schools closed up or shifting to haphazard virtual classes, the breakdown triggered a public health crisis in a city already under long-term boil-water advisories, lead contamination warnings, and structural neglect. While state and federal agencies traded accusations, residents themselves mobilized to meet community needs. Local churches, neighborhood collectives, schools, and ordinary citizens organized pop-up bottled-water distribution points.

Catastrophe has led the way for a redistribution of authority as increasingly seen on the ground in frontline communities; however, some shows of mutual aid are not always comfortable for the state. In post-wildfire Lahaina, Indigenous mutual aid networks quickly mobilized to distribute supplies, provide housing support, and offer culturally grounded healing spaces. But these grassroots efforts, for example, as led by Kānaka Maoli organizers like Noelani Ahia, often encountered friction with state and federal agencies, which imposed restrictions that limited their ability to operate freely on the ground. Ahia questioned whether official channels were truly serving the community’s needs, noting that mutual aid hubs were more nimble and attuned to local realities. These tensions reflected deeper questions about whose knowledge counts in disaster response, and whether bureaucratic control can accommodate the relational, place-based care offered by Indigenous-led recovery efforts.

Stories We Tell Ourselves

In the wake of disaster, people reach for narrative as a means of making space to grieve, belong, and act as part of an impacted community. The stories people tell themselves, and each other, are not both expressions of culture and strategies of survival.

In post-Katrina New Orleans, artists and community members turned to aesthetic interventions, such as door painting, porch installations, and performance rituals as acts of claim-staking in neighborhoods long neglected by recovery efforts. These creative practices materially mark continuity where official channels have failed, asserting presence in spaces otherwise written off by policy and infrastructure. A sense of NOLA community affirmed by visually and materially signaling that the storm didn’t wash everything away in neighborhoods where infrastructure repair was slow, uneven, or absent.

But not all stories liberate. In the American West, the “phoenix” myth, characterized by destruction as a necessary path to rebirth, has become a troubling trope. After each fire season, media narratives rush to highlight rebuilding efforts, often ignoring the chronic disinvestment that made communities vulnerable in the first place. However, this framing seeks to valorize community endurance while absolving the state of its responsibility to prevent or mitigate disaster in the first place. The expectation becomes that communities will “rise from the ashes” in spite of decades of ongoing policy failures in land use, housing, and emergency management.

This myth fuels underinvestment, making it easier for governments to shift from prevention to privatized recovery and for insurers and developers to capitalize on catastrophe. Those most impacted, especially low-income and Indigenous communities, are often left out of the so-called “rebirth.”

If we can’t stop the tide, or the fire, or the storms, then the question is no longer how to rebuild after. It is how to live within. As we move forward in our post-1.5-degrees Celsius climatic reality, time will tell us what forms of care, community, and governance can arise when we stop holding our breath for normal to return.

All the while, we may just have to try moving with the current and hold onto each other tight.

Posted 11 August 2025.