Natural and man-made disasters are an important and increasingly relevant topic for us all. World-renowned expert Dr. Kirsten Bookmiller, professor in the Department of Government, Law, and International Relations and a faculty associate with the Center for Disaster Research and Education at Millersville University, discusses the complex impact of disasters on every level, including human rights, migration, and displacement, and the need for robust interdisciplinary frameworks for disaster law.
Narrator
This podcast is a production of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment and Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Christoph Courchesne
Hello and welcome to the Hothouse Earth Podcast. I'm Christoph Courchesne, associate professor of law and director of the Environmental Advocacy Clinic and associate dean for environmental and experiential programs here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. For today's episode, we are delighted to be joined by Dr. Kirsten Bookmiller. Kirsten is a student of ours right now, but has a much, much longer, much more exciting resumé that I wanted to share with you all before we get started.
Dr. Kirsten Bookmiller is a professor in the Department of Government Law and International Relations and a faculty associate with the Center for Disaster Research and Education at Millersville University, specializing in the field of disaster law and policy. She served as an analyst, subject matter expert, researcher, trainer, and international project director. In addition to her 30-year academic career in the international relations discipline.
She was a co-founder and co-chair of the Disaster Law Interest Group at the American Society of International Law and is a co-founder and a member of the Steering Committee of the International Disaster Emergency and Law Network, and formerly on the editorial Board of the Yearbook of International Disaster Law. She also previously served as a project lead with the North American Humanitarian Response Initiative in the area of team specialized equipment and supplies from 2017 to 2019.
Dr. Bookmiller holds her Ph.D. in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia and is now in her third year here at Vermont Law School, pursuing a JD in Environmental Law. She completed further training through the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the Hague Academy of International Law. She is published in International Disaster Law Cross-border Disaster Response and Humanitarian Studies, and her work has been utilized by the International Federation of the Red Cross, Red Crescent, the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group, and several national governments.
We are absolutely honored to have Dr. Bookmiller here to talk with us today about disaster, an important and increasingly relevant topic for all of us. Welcome, Kirsten, to the podcast.
Kristen Bookmiller
Thank you. It's an honor and privilege to be here with you first off and to talk about a topic that's a longstanding passion of mine.
Christoph Courchesne
So let's before we dive into disaster or law, let's go even more basic. What's a disaster?
Kristen Bookmiller
Well, as we'll probably see with a lot of what we're talking about today, it doesn't have the most straightforward answer. It's certainly evolved a lot. I think that there's been there's a popular conception around disasters that thinks about it as a particular hazard. And if we go back even further, we put it under the category. We would hear, you know, when I was growing up, acts of God, acts of nature, this idea that it was something remote, it was something done to us.
Correspondingly, it was something that we can't really do much about in response. But over time, we've begun to really understand that disasters are much more complex. So first of all, there is the hazard itself. We again often complete the disasters, the hurricane or the earthquake, or the tsunami, whatever it might be, but that's the hazard. What we really need to still have are a number of other components.
One is that, as I say, it has to the hazard has to collide with people and things people and things have to be exposed. They have to be in the way of when an event of some kind happens. So we have a lot of variations on the theme of this, but we often say, for instance, if an earthquake takes place in a completely uninhabited area, you don't have a disaster.
So we definitely have to have that collision. But beyond that, we now even have a more subtle social understanding. It's about also vulnerability that in terms of social, economic, physical, that some people are more impacted by that hazard than others. And then we have an additional layer over the past few years where we really start to think about also the capacity to respond to deal, to absorb the shocks of that event.
So it's a confluence of the hazard of exposure of vulnerability and then also the ability to respond for a given community.
Christoph Courchesne
So as we sort of trend into the law area, how does that play into this and how would you define disaster? What?
Kristen Bookmiller
It's a rather new developing field kind of comparatively speaking. And we also have, I always say, kind of spinning orbits that exist when we talk about disaster law. It's truly in the eye of the beholder, or I should say the eye of the practitioner of disaster law. So broadly, broadly speaking, it's the law of the disaster cycle, so to speak.
So, whether it's mitigation and risk reduction, any laws associated with preparedness response, which is what most people come to the conversation thinking about it specifically about how the disaster impacts are dealt with in an immediate kind of time frame. But it's also about recovery and resilience. But what I meant by the orbits is that we have, which is a little bit more the space I operate in.
There's an orbit of international disaster law or ideal that really began. In some ways. It traces its origins going back a century to the League of Nations. But the modern energy came around the 2000 when you had the Indian Ocean tsunami, you had the Haitian earthquake of 2012, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, just a series, the Haitian earthquake of 2010, the 2011 triple disaster in Japan, where we really started to think through the international community about what was needed with regard to the interstate level and establishing guidelines, frameworks very for anyone who does international law, what we call soft law, kind of establishing normative expectations, not hard law frameworks.
So we have that world happening where we're trying to ideally, to have these kind of standardized approaches to legal approach preparedness worldwide. Then we have, as my one colleague says, there's no such thing as domestic disaster law. But the flip of this is disaster law within countries. We have widely, widely differing developments on that front across the world.
And here in the United States that it has a particular common connotation, I think more recently around the federal relationship with the state level. So kind of the the Stafford Act before that, the creation of FEMA in the late seventies, the Stafford Act in the eighties, what do federal-state relations look like? So that's a little bit of the flavor here in the States, but it's broader than that, really.
I would say you can plug disasters into almost any part of a country's body of law. So, it can be torts, it can be administrative law, it can be here in the United States, civil rights law, or constitutional law. So it's certainly in that law with the broader cycles of set around disaster management. But it's the way that looks is a bit different on the international front versus the national front.
Christoph Courchesne
So, how about environmental law? How does this field of disaster law overlap with or intersect with sort of the field of environmental law, whether it be international environmental law? We see this law of international agreements around environmental problems as well as our well elaborated extremely complicated in its own right field of environmental law domestically.
Kristen Bookmiller
Definitely. And I think I think the go to for anyone we look at that overlap between environmental disaster currently is specifically climate change. I think that's just the automatic. We can see where we overlap. I often refer to us as close cousins, depending on the type of events that you're talking about. And I think it's interesting when you see a lot of the literature in environmental law, they'll refer to, you know, with growing, you know, the intensity of events due to climate change and that kind of go go into climate change and other disasters liable, you know, talk about due to climate change, the go over to the disasters, there's there's a lot of overlap
happening there, but it's it's much more broad than that. So there's a lot of conversations taking place, for instance, around how can we harmonize countries, climate adaptation plans and laws and harmonize them, for instance, around disaster law frameworks where there is a very interesting literature looking at biodiversity loss and their connections to epidemics and potentially pandemics, and then how this kind of immediately pours over like a wave into our discussions about disaster law.
I myself am looking at the connections between environmental peacebuilding and disaster law. So it goes on a lot of the different directions. Climate change, of course, being climate action being huge, but there's a lot more to it. And if we think about whenever we get into environmental degradation and environmental harm, it often can spur a disaster, of course, and then the disaster can in turn do a lot more further damage to the environment.
So and it goes beyond natural hazards as well. We think, for instance, disaster oil covers industrial accidents, industrial disasters and those disasters, how they're going to, of course, impact river systems, air or whatever it might be. So there's there's a lot more overlap than at first glance.
Christoph Courchesne
So as disaster line has developed into a field in its own right, how did it do that? How did we start to see, you know, an elaborated set of principles and playbooks and toolboxes that different governmental entities and other stakeholders are utilizing across this space?
Kristen Bookmiller
Really, the origin story for anything related to disaster law and policies is often when you have unfortunately very significant tragedy happened and the response is not pretty, to put it mildly, and in fact can often become which is really the the the space that I'm especially interested in when the response is it's so inefficient and so unaccountable and so poor that you've created an additional disaster within the original event.
So we see this pretty much universally, both within countries, within regions like neglected to say, there's a lot of very interesting regional frameworks, for instance, in the Caribbean and the Pacific and elsewhere that kind of occupies that space between national and international frameworks. But typically, the poor countries, the catalyst, the trigger is going to be that they've had something happen.
It has sadly had a lot of loss of life, societal damage, infrastructure, and infrastructural impact. And that typically is what has goaded authorities to kind of think through. It's certainly been the case here in the United States, but any country that's going to be essentially their trajectory, disasters really expose what's going wrong in a society. And that's not just law across the front.
It's an incredible mirror for society to hold up against itself and see where its vulnerabilities and its weaknesses are. So, again, we're we're we're seeing this as when things have gone horribly wrong, like the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, the response was really, really I mean, of course, the scale of that was extraordinary. But still, what we were seeing on an individual level is that countries were outside, countries were responding to the region.
It was chaos, frankly, true chaos. And so the idea was, well, how can law and ultimately policy and plans get us to a level of efficiency and simultaneously accountability that we reduce suffering and enhance human dignity?
Christoph Courchesne
What's our track record in this so far or this life cycle of of professionalizing and thinking about this area more systematically? It strikes me that this is an area where there's a lot of intense focus on these questions in the immediate aftermath of a disaster in a particular country or in a particular region. But perhaps the momentum for that thinking in that planning, in that work may diminish as the disaster moves further into the rearview mirror.
And so the area might be subject to the same kind of challenges when it gets hit again. So can you speak a little bit to that dynamic?
Kristen Bookmiller
We definitely deal with some of these kind of cognitive biases and issues and challenges that we we have. And one of the things, of course, we're seeing right now, too, is that there's so much, you know, crowding the attention of decision makers and lawmakers around the world. So, you know, it depends on the country that we're talking about.
I'm I'm a glass-half-full gal. So I think the fact that we are looking at this in a very intentional way, taking it very seriously, getting very nuanced about it, when, as I mentioned, the the stages that this has gone through is really originally was very siloed around response is if you know, that would take care of everything.
We've gotten much more multi-dimensional in our understanding of, well, the responses needed because of things that happened beforehand or how we do recovery. We have some really good academic literature developing. There is a welcome globally to this. So there's there's been a lot of progress in the sense of understanding the problem. And as you rightly say, developing toolkits to deal with it.
But it goes without saying, As I said, when countries are trying to solve a lot of different kinds of problems simultaneously funding time and then, you know, I'm also as a political scientist, I understand that just because you've got something that is on a piece of paper, the challenge is only begun, right? How do you really get a deep societal awareness of the role of these frameworks, what their contents are, how they can be helpful to communities?
And there is, in terms of communities, an ongoing concern, and it's always the case too, and environmental laws. Well of that really local stakeholder involvement that you know that we don't have too many top down approaches. So that is something where, how do we really get communities on the local level to understand the role of these laws and how they can be helpful and empowering to ultimately help these communities recover after something happens.
But we have a while to go and with, you know, the barn on fire, literally and figuratively, trying to figure these things out in real time. There's obviously a lot of pressure. But the fact of the matter is we can say, you know, we can observe that countries are getting repeatedly hit by disasters. Right. So there really isn't a space in which you can say, oh, that was really rough, but it won't happen again if we look at our own country. But any country around the world, they really can't kind of claim amnesia because we are continually reminded that this is just one of our great global and national challenges.
Christoph Courchesne
Because we think about disaster law. What jurisdictions are examples you might cite that have really taken on this challenge and started to do and do good work on building out disaster? Our principles to protect people, to protect, you know, social values, to build in that preparedness. Where where do we where do we find some good examples so far?
One of my favorite examples is in our backyard, and that's the Caribbean community and CARICOM, that has been for a good number of years doing year round the day to day grunt work. The member countries, they're obviously highly prone to climate change impacts sea level rise, among many other things, but also vulnerability felt, for instance, during COVID, where they were talking about the mirror holding up.
They were so, so reliant on the tourism industry. And when that shut down, they began to realize vulnerabilities. And so, how to work through that. So they have developed, as I said, a number of really exciting regional frameworks of mutual assistance, disaster risk reduction. They've really done a lot of the heavy work of doing death studies, as we call them, really doing a self-examination of where they're vulnerabilities are.
And they have, in fact, a Caribbean CDMA, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency. So really kind of putting this to work and operational all applicable ways. And they're a great example for other parts of the world.
Christoph Courchesne
But on the other side of the ledger, where has inattention to these frameworks led to some pretty devastating results?
Kristen Bookmiller
The laundry list is long and and there can be a lot of reasons. By the way, again, this is said they can have it on paper, but have they really given it the power that it is needed, the awareness that they exist, the infrastructure? So, I mean, it really many, many countries still are struggling with. As I said, even if we narrowed it down to international assistance coming in, this is the original stage of international disaster law, what we call IDI RL, international disaster response law.
And this is specifically in the context of when countries require assistance from abroad and request, and most importantly, are requesting through their sovereignty assistance from abroad. But often still what can happen is do all the players or are they aware that these frameworks and policies and protocols exist? Because if you think about it, that assistance is arriving, it's coming to the border, right?
So does your on the ground. Border Patrol agents know that something is going to be coming in from acts and it should be expedited, that they have expedited facilities for it related to clearances and all of those kinds of things. So this is still a dynamic that we are seeing that we can can document in numerous places, particularly after a sudden event or rapidly unfolding events that an earthquake, whatever you might have, you, if it's still a mountain, we need to climb that even where we've had success of getting something, as I said on the books, that the system, the entire system that's involved with the response, focusing specifically on that, they're on the same
literal and literally and figuratively, are they on the same page? Do they understand the assignment, as the young kids like to say? Do they know what they need to be doing and how they plug in to that? And that's where really so much of the energy is going in as well. It used to be not that anyone really thought this was a magic bullet, but if we got these legal frameworks, you know, in tip top shape, were good.
But that's only the beginning of the story. It's really then the hard work of a vertical and horizontal, you know, understanding and embracing of how these laws are real tools for a country to absorb shocks, a disaster, or as.
Christoph Courchesne
You speak a little bit to how this is an interdisciplinary problem with lots of different types of professionals that maybe don't necessarily interact outside this context. Having to work together, come up with a common vocabulary and develop trust across professional boundaries.
Kristen Bookmiller
You know, the interdisciplinarity of disasters is the thing. One of the things that makes it a very exciting field to be involved with the Absolutely. We really do have these well, it's obviously a very common thing we like to say about siloization, but that's definitely the chute, as you said, common language. So engineers, for instance, are a huge part of this discussion, and we're physicists and the nature of early warning systems, and it goes across medical professionals, trauma folks, social workers, international relations, political scientists, the lawyers, the sociologists.
It goes on and on. And when we started the conversation, we were talking about what is a disaster. You know, there's still kind of an intense discussion about even across disciplines, what we're talking about. So that we can kind of move forward so that we recognize it's an all-hands-on-deck, that it has to be all truly all disciplines, and I haven't even gotten into the protection space, the human rights space, the disproportionate impact related to gender, various economic, social classes, migration, displacement.
You know, it it gets it can get dauntingly big. It can get to the point where your head hurts and you don't know quite how to move forward. But again, those conversations, I can tell you are taking place. The conversations are taking place across disciplines. We recognize the importance of trying to learn the other's language. It's taking place across countries.
So there's there's a lot going on, but it is definitely one of those areas. You touch one thing, and it becomes 50 other things. And so I think the challenge for all of us is not to let it get too paralyzing for us. And, you know, you have to also be careful as you get interdisciplinary, you don't sacrifice depth.
So there's that. I mean, that's any, you know, field where you have this happening. For instance, in my area, I really focus specifically, as my bio noted, on response. And even though we have a much more complex understanding now of law around the broader disaster management cycle and the importance of risk reduction, everything which I'm fully, fully appreciative and sensitive to, we still haven't cracked the nut of response, you know.
So as it gets more and more crowded, which is really exciting to see, we we've are, we need somehow to still have that deep specialized zation and also that cross-fertilization happening simultaneously, and we're moving in the right direction. But there's a long way to go.
Christoph Courchesne
If you could share a little bit about your own personal journey to law school, being a noted academic and professional in this space practitioner, thinker leader, how did you make the decision to come join us at Vermont Law Graduate School to study environmental law?
Kristen Bookmiller
Well, as often with journeys, it was long, winding and twisty, and goes back decades that I had the opportunity. I knew that I've always loved law and I've taught law for a very long time, especially international law. But on the undergraduate level, and from a political science perspective. So my career is really thought a lot about the intersection of, again, law when it's when it's down on paper, what happens next, and what does that look like, and what are the challenges and so on and so forth.
So when I had the opportunity to go to graduate school, I did have the opportunity to also do the JD, and I thought, I'm not there yet. And I will tell you what I thought was a life. Regret turned out to be just what it needed to be, and so went down that route. But I have always loved the law.
I'm a firm believer in the importance of the rule of law. And so fast forward, my career started really focusing on natural disasters and abroad, those that were happening, the big international disasters, like I have referenced, I was part of my home university's development of our Center for Disaster Research, Education, and our emergency management program contributed to that.
Have had a lifelong interest in actual natural disasters. And I'm really a child of the very kind of evolution that we're talking about, that in 2000 I found out about this new topic, disaster law, the international disaster law, specifically. And it brought all of these kinds of concerns together. My interest in natural disasters, international relations, and the law.
And then fast forward beyond that, you know, COVID hit and, you know, it allowed for I am specifically part of the online hybrid JD program at Vermont that did open opportunities for students such as myself, full-time professionals who had an interest in going to law school for the first time to think about doing that. And in my mind already, I've been thinking about disaster law and environmental law, the silos, the intersections, how we could help each other.
As I was applying, Vermont announced that they had the JD option and there was an environmental law pathway, and it was just magic for me individually. I was just amazed. So it's been quite a journey to insert more gray hairs. But it's it's also been extraordinary. It's really been extraordinary. And now my horizons are so much wider than when I started and have a much more nuanced understanding of the conversations that need to take place. So it's been a real honor to be part of the program.
Christoph Courchesne
It's terrific that we're able to engage folks who bring the backgrounds that, you know, like yours to the classroom table to talk about, you know, these issues of environmental law, but also how legal structures are set up, what are the systems of power that's that, you know, are built into those laws and how to navigate them both as both as a conceptual matter, but also as a practicing professional in this space, which you've been for many years.
Why do you think it would be important for graduate school to, you know, include a specialty or a course of study on this topic of disaster law going forward?
Kristen Bookmiller
I know that many folks think about environmental law as a particular place, but really, you know, across the law school areas, as we've talked about, disaster law is just there. It's we just don't think about it in that way. But to me, there's really not a day that we are now not picking up the paper, even if we talk about here in the United States, not a day doesn't pass that we're reading about a disaster that has impacted this country.
And of course, the time of this recording, we have had the devastating loss of life in Texas as a result of the flash floods that took place there. But very sadly, Texas, where we're in placed and as well, even where I am now in the mid Atlantic, we had horrendous flash floods here as well that took lives in New Jersey, whether it's wildfires, hurricanes, whatever, or, you know, Flint, Michigan.
And what happened to there? Water supplies and their pipes. Ever since the BP oil spill. It goes on and on and on. And so for me, I think we're really at a you know, in terms of the field of law. But then as a country, since the law is so important here and everywhere, that if we don't have legal training that's more disaster sensitive, we are really handicapping ourselves in terms of how we're going to deal with these issues.
It's got to stop being scattershot, second thought, or oh, it's too bad that happened. And as you said, we have amnesia. We need law programs across the country to really think through this as a strategic necessity for this country. I truly believe that you know, bring in disaster law as an integral part of the curriculum. At minimum, at least have I would urge law schools to have a course in it and then you can kind of go from there and think about it more systematically. And you will you will get students that will be drawn to it.
Christoph Courchesne
If you were talking as you probably do throughout your work, to, say, local officials and they came to you and said, well, what should I be thinking about in my community right now, given how important this issue is and we don't feel prepared, what would you would you tell them to focus on or think about?
Kristen Bookmiller
Well, obviously, every community is different, right? And so one of the things is that the community wants to have a conversation of what they perceive as their specific threats, which can change depending on a number of different events and including small and large. For instance, one of the things I'm very concerned with as many others are, and again, the Texas floods expose these rural areas.
We often think about those more populated, but rural areas are incredibly, incredibly vulnerable to events, whether you know, it's a cold wave or snow or whatever it might tornadoes and having access to response and first responders and so forth. So one of the things is to really do a self-examination, a study of what are those things. You know, are we near a river or are we prone to now heat waves, fires?
What does that look like? And then what looking at what the capacity is, you know, what what is our infrastructure looks like with regard to communications, roads, hospitals, first responder capacity, and so forth, early warning systems. This, of course, has also been a very big discussion. And in Texas, about who is alerting what, when. But at the heart of it, there was a very heavy reliance on cell phones, which drives me crazy.
I'll be honest with you, it's one of my personal pet peeves is that we think that the cell phone is a magic wand, but we're not. When you have rural areas with spotty cell phone service and something's happening in the middle of the night. So communities really need to think through this. And when I say communities, I don't mean just governments.
I mean all of the potential local stakeholders that you can possibly think of: children, elderly, school systems, businesses, you know, across the board, and then at the same time doing a legal self-study, where are the vulnerabilities? What do you have down? What do you have covered? Is that kind of an ideal legal framework? Where are the holes, where are the gaps?
What could be better? And then again, going to the other side of the cycle, even if you're looking pretty good on that, how does it actually work in operation? And this is where we really encourage tabletop exercises, workshops, simulations to really, really test. Okay, if you got a call, if something happens in the middle of the night, what does that look like?
Do you have frameworks and protocols in place? So first it begins with taking a look at what are your needs, particularly unique to your community?
Christoph Courchesne
There's an imperative to address this issue. How do you see solutions to the major impediment, which is really resources? Communities are barely scraping by with the staff and the funding sources that they have. Many communities are now losing funding sources that they were hoping to rely on in the coming years. We have a major climate finance gap across the global South, where the commitments to addressing adaptation and preparedness for climate-related disasters is falling well short of the need, but are the solutions that are on the table or what's the discussion like on that question?
Kristen Bookmiller
Well, certainly it's a system under stress. There's no doubt about it. It's and it continues to be mind-blowing, and it's, you know, the scale and at the same time depth of what we are talking about. And then further, even if you look at international assistance, began an area very close to my heart, what it does is that it blows open the vulnerabilities.
You begin to realize, well, we've been talking for quite some time, for instance, about the international humanitarian system was creaking under the weight before the major developments of January 2025, where we knew that there were some fundamental structural weaknesses, flaws, vulnerabilities. And of course, this blew it wide open. And then, of course, we can go down to where local communities will be the first to say when someone says, Oh, you need to do a, you know, a scoping report and this will cost, you know, $25,000 from consulting firm X and it's like, no, not going to happen.
Even if the, you know, the spirit is is willing. But again, I look at it from, okay, well, this is not ideal. We do it is an uphill challenge. We're going to have to get creative. One of the things is that I would say to these communities, because I've witnessed it myself, is that academia is still very much in the game.
But for instance, we have a disaster center there throughout the country in which, you know, if a community says we're just so crunched, but yet on the other hand, we've just been hammered by an event to build those bridges because many of them will, you know, bring in students, the faculty will want to do is an opportunity for research and and pushing the disciplines.
So it may be that they'll charge something very modest or they'll want to do it as a community engagement process. And it's an extraordinary opportunity then for students and so forth. And we're going to have to just get more creative about partnerships and knowledge exchanges. And I have seen the transformative effect of people just talking to each other from across communities, across countries.
Someone sets up a Zoom and they exchange ideas, and there can be real magic in that happening when they understand they're not alone in it, and that creative ideas are bubbling everywhere. And I think there's a lot of pressure to get very high tech. And I think that there are, you know, there are workarounds that we can find at least as stopgap measures.
But one of the things, for instance, is if the communities have no weather radios, which are really not that expensive and which blast in the middle of the night when something happens, and even if only one person has that, and then you have a good old fashioned community chain of communications, if your systems are down, there are very, you know, old, treasured community ways of addressing some of these issues, like incredible expertise and know how we we can go back and we can kind of say what are low tech ways.
We can't prevent a disaster from happening. We really have to establish expectations. You can minimize that, most importantly, the loss of life. So we just have to get creative and we have to talk with each other and who and even by that talking, I think that potentially, you know, some community-based solutions can come about that don't necessarily break the bank.
Christoph Courchesne
So my last question for you is about a political context in which we're living and the example in the news recently of the FEMA flood maps being redrawn to leave out the most low-lying areas of this children's camp that was so affected by the floods. And obviously, that was a financial slash political move that goes pretty hard against all the principles of thinking rationally about preparing for disasters to occur.
And sort of approaching them from a clear-eyed perspective without the sort of lens of political or fiscal pressures that, you know, these decisions are fraught with. I'm wondering how in the disaster community, as well as in other discussions you've had, how professionals in this space, where there are all these sorts of cross-currents, we're seeing them in the funding space.
Of course, right now we're seeing them in their efforts to dismantle federal agencies that are the hubs of resources in this space. And we're, you know, we're certainly seeing it in the aversion to types of governmental cooperation and collaboration in this particular arena. How can we restore some rationality and community-mindedness to our decision-making?
Kristen Bookmiller
Well, that's a big question. It's the last question. Yeah. And of course, if I had the answer, I would be a very, very popular person. I bet it goes without saying. I think about it. A lot of my colleagues are thinking about it a lot. Of course, when we talk this is happening in law in general, and not only on this particular front.
For me, what I think is really most important. Well, two things. One's a little bit darker, but one's a little bit more hopeful. I guess I'll start with the darker first. Is that in the same way that we've talked about the disaster law or disaster studies in general has been driven by really a nasty event that's taking place, and then it kind of propels it forward.
Another related dynamic we're seeing is that we take things for granted and we don't actually understand the things where the things that we take for granted came from to begin with. We think they just naturally occurred. So when we have had the responses that we do, we just kind of assume that just happened that way without intentionality. To be clear, many FEMA administrators would tell you that there were challenges, there were you know, FEMA was not a perfect entity, and they were often the first to say that.
And I know many, many, many, many people, colleagues that I know personally who always understood they were a work in progress and continue to be. So there have been challenges around it. But I think the reason why FEMA was even developed in 19 1978, 78, 79 and the Stafford Act came around in the mid to late eighties, was because we had this mess of disaster coordination, the federal and state level, and then we've had it for many decades as our system.
And so I think we kind of took for granted that these were pieces that, you know, during my lifetime, but did not exist before. So the darker thing is that, unfortunately, if we don't have this infrastructure, we're going to begin to realize, oh, that's what that was about. Right? Okay, now I can draw a line. Now I can understand where FEMA itself had a role to play.
The lighter side to this is that I think we are going to really have to seek and strive to find a common language, obviously, that challenges all of us to get out of our silos, our individual silos, and say, what is the common ground? It's not going to be easy. It's not going to be uniformly successful. But how do we find a common ground, a common language in which we understand that this is the kind of thing that affects all of us men, women, children, young, all the wealthy, the poor, whether we'll get there or not, I don't know.
But I think we need to we need to try. And we absolutely need to try. But it's it's difficult to be in both disasters and environmental has has been a double a double challenge. And also, as someone who does international relations. So I'm very aware of the difficulties we're facing. But it's it's keeping it simple and finding that language and find a shared human space to move forward.
Christoph Courchesne
No question. I think that's a great place to leave it for our discussion today. It's been an honor for us to have you. Thank you so much, Doctor Kristen Bookmiller, and I'm Christoph Courchesne. Thank you for joining us today on Hothouse Earth. And we'll see you next time.
Narrator
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