Live Like the World is Dying Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness

Episode Summary
This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin and Brooke talk about flooding, water damage, and how to avoid having your home damaged by those things.

Guest Info
Colin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker.

Host Info
Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info
This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript
Live Like the World is Dying: Colin on Flood Plains and Water Damage

**Brooke ** 00:15
Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. And today our friend Colin is joining us again, this time to talk about flooding and dealing with water damage. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo jingo here!

**Brooke ** 01:40
And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us again today. And this time to talk about dealing with floods and water damage. Would you remind your pronouns, where you hail from if you want, and a bit about your background?

**Colin ** 01:52
Yeah, my name is Colin, he him. I'm from Pittsburgh. And I've been a contractor sort of on and off for the last about 20 years, as well as working in the power plants and industrial electricity, and sort of in and around industry for about the second half of my life. And, yeah, it's, I'm glad to talk about floods, because it's one of those things we're seeing more and more. And unfortunately, it's probably going to happen to pretty much everybody who's listening to this podcast at some point in their life in one form or another.

**Brooke ** 02:27
Yeah. And we've talked about flooding on the podcast before. I don't know that we've ever done a whole episode on it by any means. But it has definitely come up as we've talked about news and other major events. And you and I even talked about it when we did our first episode, a little bit. So I think it's—itll be good to dig into, you know, a nice reminder of what to do and not to do in a flood. And then also, I don't think we've ever talked much about flood recovery. So I'm excited to learn and teach more about that today. I wanted to share one of my own stories about flooding, if you don't mind me kicking off with that before we get into all the do's and don'ts and how tos.

**Colin ** 03:12
Yeah go for it.

**Brooke ** 03:13
Okay, cool.

**Colin ** 03:14
Everybody's got one of those stories.

**Brooke ** 03:16
Seems like it. Well, when I was growing up in the 90s, there was a major flooding event where I live. My hometown. It was built around a river, which of course is true of most older cities, right, because access to fresh water is critical for survival. And then there are also a lot of creeks that run through my town and feed into the river. And I live in the Pacific Northwest and it rains a whole lot here. So we're kind of accustomed to having occasional sudden and heavy downpours and the possibility of some rainwater pooling or briefly flooding. It's not uncommon. But this particular event when I was a teenager was something else. It was a really complicated set of weather events that led to it. But the important part is that, so the creeks that are all over town are overflowing. And then the river, it doubled its level on the first day of the heavy rains. And then within the next two days had crashed at its banks, and then for three days after that remained at flood levels. So the city's downtown area, for instance, it's fairly flat, it's right along the river, and most of the homes there have basements. So in addition to streets flooding, the basements flooded, filled with water. Ther

Episode Summary
This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Tyler from Dark Winter Concepts talk about homesteading, preparedness, prepper culture, and focus on inclusion of marginalized communities within these spaces.

Guest Info
Tyler (he/him) can be found on Instagram @Darkwinterconcepts

Host Info
Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info
This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript
Live Like the World is Dying: Tyler on Dark Winter Concepts

**Margaret ** 00:14
Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Margaret Killjoy, and today I have a guest on that I'm excited about. You might have been noticing that I haven't been hosting as much and that's because I burned out really hard. And not on this subject, but just in general. But I'm trying to get back into it. And part of the reason I'm getting back into it, I've been really excited to have Tyler on, who we're going to be talking to in a minute, because I'm really excited about what's going on in the preparedness space. And it's rare that I get to bring someone on who's just also in the preparedness space and has similar ideas. I think you all will be really excited. And so--well I was gonna say, "Without further ado," but there is more ado. This following ado is that we're a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on that network.

**Margaret ** 01:42
Okay, and we're back. So if you could introduce yourself with your your name, your pronouns. And then I guess just a little quick introduction to what you do.

**Tyler ** 01:51
Yeah, so my name is Tyler. I am started a company called Dark Winter Concepts. Pronouns are he/him. Basically, what I have started doing is I noticed there was a huge void in the prepping homesteading space when it came to making it accessible to newcomers or anyone who's just in a marginalized community. And it's really just so, so important for me to take all the stuff that is natural to me, just from my upbringing, and just make it accessible to people who actually need it, the people who are under pressure in society already.

**Margaret ** 02:27
Hell yeah. Do you want to talk about. . . I have this question here of like, "What got you into it?" But you've already said it's how you grew up. But do you want to talk about that a little bit more? Like what got you into preparedness and homesteading.

**Tyler ** 02:41
It's kind of a funny story/full circle with the name. So I grew up in very rural Pennsylvania and grew up on a farm, but moved around a lot afterwards, working and all that sort of stuff. But then I was kind of coming into wanting to be able to use all the skills that I learned growing up. And then I had a weird gateway experience playing the video game The Division, where the idea of a personified trained individual could use their skills beyond just like, you know, tactical combat--all this sort of stuff--that could use all these technical engineering and other skills to maintain stability in communities after a disaster. And that checked a lot of boxes for me that a lot of other games of that type just really don't. And so that kind of triggered an interest as kind of exploring, "Well, where, where could I be applying these skills? Like how could I be doing this?" And as time went on, I started to explore it more. And once we got out to West Virginia, where--I mean, losing access to resources is pretty common here anyways--it kind of just became a part of life. And then obviously, COVID happened, which, I mean, thankfully, we had kind of already started because that made it a good wake up call,

Episode Summary
This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Dean continue to talk about the ways that mutual aid helps communities prepare for disasters that are already here and disasters that have yet to come. They talk about what things like hope and success can look like even as the world crumbles around us.

Guest Info
Dean Spade is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. You can find Dean's work at Deanspade.net, and you can read the article that Margaret and Dean talk about, "Climate Disaster is Here--And the State Will Never Save Us" on inthesetimes.com. You can also find Dean on Twitter @deanspade or on IG @spade.dean.

Host Info
Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info
This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript
Live Like the World is Dying: Dean Spade on Mutual Aid as Preparedness pt. II

**Margaret ** 00:15
Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and this is part two of a conversation with Dean Spade. So I should probably listen to part one, but I'm not your boss. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on the network.

**Margaret ** 00:42
Okay, I have a kind of final-ish question, I think. And it can be "ish" on the final part. But at the beginning of this, you said that your politics have been moving towards anti-statism, or, you know, possibly anarchism, or whatever. And I'm wondering if you want to talk about that. In some ways, I feel like you've implied a lot of maybe what has drawn you more towards those politics, but I'm really curious about the kind of route you took--not like where you've landed, and what labels you want to throw on things--but what has led you towards those politics?

**Dean ** 01:56
I just talked with somebody yesterday who I know from the anti-Zionist Jewish world who was talking about the. . . about how he feels like people haven't thought. . . that he hasn't thought a lot about anti-State or anarchist politics, and he was like, "Why do you think some people haven't and some people haven't?" and I was like, "Oh, I think people just come to our politics. Like, we just kind of stumble into them." It's like, if somebody stumbled into a punk scene in 1999, they probably found anarchism sooner than me. I stumbled into all this queer, anti-police stuff, and we were doing a lot of identity-based work, and people weren't talking about political tendencies in the same way--in part also, because it had been really divisive, at certain points, in our movements where people had gotten so obsessed with their ideology that they'd been able to work together and got really insular. So there was a lot of, I think, push away for some people from that. I think, also, we have lived in times for the last, at least 100 years, that are so deeply reactive anti-anarchist, in particular, because of the history of anarchism in the US and elsewhere. There's a really great piece by William C. Anderson that came out a while--like not that long ago--after the Atlanta indictment about how policing in the United States itself developed through policing anarchism, that I highly recommend. But anyway, I think a lot of us also just haven't gotten. . . Like, it's like you were told, "Anarchists are just people who want chaos and who are dirty white people," or whatever. There's a lot of things that erase the contributions of anti-colonial anarchists and anarchists who aren't white in all these things. Anyway, Or, anti-State tendencies that aren't anarchism in the European sense. B

Episode Summary
This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Margaret and Dean talk about the ways that mutual aid helps communities prepare for disasters that are already here and disasters that have yet to come.

Guest Info
Dean Spade is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. You can find Dean's work at Deanspade.net, and you can read the article that Margaret and Dean talk about, "Climate Disaster is Here--And the State Will Never Save Us" on inthesetimes.com. You can also find Dean on Twitter @deanspade or on IG @spade.dean.

Host Info
Margaret (she/they) can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.

Publisher Info
This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript
Live Like the World is Dying: Dean Spade on Mutual Aid as Preparedness

**Margaret ** 00:24
Hello and welcome to Live Live the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Margaret Killjoy. And today, I'm gonna be talking to Dean Spade, and we're gonna talk about so much stuff. We're gonna talk about so much stuff that this is going to be a two parter. So you can hear me talk with Dean this week and you can hear me talk with Dean next week. Or, if you're listening to this in some far-flung future, you can listen to it both at once in between dodging laser guns from mutants that have come out of the scrap yards, riding dinosaurs. I hope that's the future, or at least it wouldn't be boring. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on the network.

**Margaret ** 01:53
Okay, we're back. So if you could introduce yourself with I guess your name, your pronouns, and then maybe a little bit about how you ended up doing the kind of work that led you to be on this show talking about mutual aid and collapse and preparedness?

**Dean ** 02:10
Totally. Yeah, I'm Dean, I use he/him. And we could start anywhere. I became politicized primarily, like in the late 90s, living in New York City. You know, Rudy Giuliani was mayor/ There was a really vibrant, like very multi-issue, cross-class, multiracial kind of resistance happening to his range of anti-poor pro-police politics happening in the city; people, you know, in the fight around immigrant rights, in the fight around labor, sex workers being zoned out of Time Square. You know, there was just. . .it was a real moment. And I was part of queer nightlife. And people were experiencing a lot of intense policing. And a lot of us were part of work related to, you know, things that had spun off of Act Up, like a lot of direct support to people who were living with HIV and AIDS and trying to get through the New York City welfare processes, and dealing with housing. So a lot of mutual aid in that work from the get, and a lot of work related to that overlap between criminalization and poverty, from a queer, trans, feminist perspective. And that work was also tied into like, very, you know. . . a broader perspective. Like a lot of people were tied to the liberation of Puerto Rico, and the fight against the US Navy bombing Vieques, people were tied into the fight around Palestine. So it was very local--hyperlocal--New York City work, but it was very international because New York City is a very international place, and those politics were very international. So that really shaped me in a lot of ways. And I went from there to becoming a poverty lawyer and focusing on doing Poverty Law for trans people, you know, really focused on people in jails and prisons and welfare systems and immigration proceedings and foster care and stuff like that; homeless shelters. I did that for a number of years, and then increa

Episode Summary
This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin talks to Brooke about how to asses damage to structures after disasters, what you can do when you're stuck in a building after a disaster, and ways to make your situation easier and safer.

Guest Info
Colin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker.

Host Info
Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info
This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript
Live Like the World is Dying: Colin on Structural Triage After a Disaster

**Brooke ** 00:15
Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for it feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. Today I'll be talking with Colin, an experienced construction and trade worker, about how to prepare for and perform structural triage after disasters. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo doo, doo doo.

**Brooke ** 00:48
And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us today to talk about structural triage after disasters. Would you introduce yourself? Let us know your pronouns, where you're from if you want, maybe some of your background in the construction industry.

**Colin ** 01:19
Yeah, I'm Colin, he/him. Lived in around Western Pennsylvania pretty much my entire life—mostly in the Pittsburgh area. I picked up carpentry right after college just as a way to earn some money. Been in and out that for a while. I worked as an industrial electrician in the power industry for about seven years, and then decided I'd had enough of that and went back to doing carpentry.

**Brooke ** 02:10
Okay, so is your—is your background in those trades the reason that you're interested in this topic, or was there something else that sparked you or made you kind of get into learning about it?

**Colin ** 02:23
Actually, the impetus for this was a little over—actually, seems like ages ago, but actually less than a year ago, a friend had an apartment fire right after Christmas last year. And it's still that big cold snap. And fortunately, we managed to get them recovered from that, but it was only due to the fairly heroic efforts of a lot of friends. And after that I started thinking about, you know, like, what are the ways that, you know, if you don't have people looking out for you and willing to come bail you out, what can you do if you're stuck in a damaged building for a few days while you're waiting for utilities to come back online, first responders to work through a backlog? Just, how can you make things easier in the immediate few days after disaster?

**Brooke ** 03:14
Nice. So is this something that you then have you had to put into practice, or other people around you have put into practice? Or are we mostly theoretical at this point and haven't tested all these things—not that we don't trust your experience here.

**Colin ** 03:31
Yeah, no, I have done some of these things more in the context of camping and backpacking, just like, there are things you can do that will make the situation easier and safer. Also, a lot of my background in working in power plants involved constant safety trainings about how do you do things safely? What do you have to look out for? What are, you know, things that you just need to be aware of when you're in dangerous situations? And I'm continually surprised at how many of those applied to everyday life, and how much of that stuff we just don't have to think about when we're living in a house that has already been designed to be safe. But when you have a disaster, obviously things break. And suddenly, things that are—things that normally have

Episode Summary
This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Brooke, Margaret, and Inmn talk about the environment, how a Boeing whistle blower died suspiciously, Abbot's newest attempt to make Texas a mini fief, and remember the lives of 3 teens. They also talk about hope and some nice things that happened for a change.

Host Info
Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info
This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript
Live Like the World is Dying: This Month in the Apocalypse: March 2024

**Margaret ** 00:15
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff your podcast. . . I did the wrong. . . Did I do the wrong one? Should we keep it?

**Brooke ** 00:23
[All laughing] I love you so much.

**Margaret ** 00:26
Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, the other podcast that I'm one of the three hosts of. I'm Margaret killjoy, and with me is

**Brooke ** 00:37
Brooke. Hi. 

**Inmn ** 00:38
And Inmn, who can't tell if this was a bit or not,

**Margaret ** 00:41
Let's pretend it was a bit. [Sarcastically] I have functional memory. I'm not on podcast recording number five for the week. I don't know what you're talking about. And this is Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. And welcome back. We've been on a break because we were all a little burned out and we wanted to catch up because we didn't want to. . . We thought through our options, we could either have gone off a weekly schedule, but we're like, "Well, we like having a weekly schedule." So we took a break. And I don't remember whether we told you about that break, but it's over. Don't worry. It'll never. . . It'll totally happen again. And whatever, you like watching TV shows that have season breaks, you can. . . I'm sure you all figured it out. Anyway, it's This Month in the Apocalypse, only this time, we're going to be a little bit messy because it's been a little bit. So it's like this month and a half in the apocalypse. So you get an extra. It's like 1.5 as much apocalypse as usual. Y'all are so lucky. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcast and here's a jingle from another show on the network. 

**Brooke ** 01:14
Okay, so it just occurred to me that if we're doing half of March, we're at some point going to have to do half of March. So we're either going to have to have half a month in Apocalypse or do half of March and April, and then there'll be another month and a half. So maybe we should call this 45 Days in the Apocalypse? I'm just saying.

**Margaret ** 02:52
I'll just continue to messily not exactly keep track of "Oh, that happened on this date instead of this state, so it can't come in." But I'm open to it. I can be convinced. So I want to talk about some stuff. One of the things I want to talk about is how I would never say Boeing assassinated a man. But I would say that everyone who pays attention to the following news story comes to the inevitable conclusion that the private company Boeing, which manufactures an awful lot of the planes in this country, has been having a lot of problems lately. A lot of people think they assassinated a man. There was a man named John Barnett. He was a Boeing whistleblower and he was found dead on March 10th. And the news can't say, quote, "he was assassinated." So instead, they're dancing around it, doing things like putting "self-inflicted," in quotes, when they talk about the gunshot wounds that this man had to his head. I honestly. . . like this one, it's like, it's like one of those things where it didn't surprise me, but