FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Co-editors of Loam Center Carework and Mutual Aid in this Practical Guide to Navigating Our Changing Climate
In Compassion in Crisis, Kate Rose Weiner and Kailea Rose Loften draw on the experiences of organizers and first responders to offer a one-of-a-kind resource for tending to our communities, bodies, and spirits when disaster strikes.
BERKELEY, CALIF. — Crisis looms large in daily life. From failing public health infrastructure to resource shortages, endless wars, and melting ice caps the crisis in education is inseparable from the crisis in loneliness, spurred on by the interests and fantasies of a small group of wealthy individuals, for whose sake whole swaths of our planet burn. The name for this compounding disaster is polycrisis.
Confronted with this situation, Kate Rose Weiner and Kailea Rose Loften began collaborating on what would become Compassion in Crisis: Building Disaster-Resilient Communities, a book that presents a strategy for catastrophe guided by values of curiosity and communal care. Knowing this is work with long-growing roots, Weiner and Loften gather a choir of organizers, educators, and healers from across North America to speak to their experiences responding to disaster. Compassion in Crisis is a book of energizing dialogues and clear-eyed checklists for everything from water purification to somatic practices. Readers will learn how to prepare baby formula in an emergency, how to best use stinging nettle or chamomile flowers for first-aid, alongside tips for paying attention to the different responses of our nervous systems to stress.
For many, the word “prepper” conjures images of underground bunkers and rural compounds; it’s an endeavor of individuals. The kind of preparedness such ideologies offer focuses on the survival of one, cut off from (or outright against) their neighbors. Compassion in Crisis affirms that true preparedness is the practice of honoring change, learning to steady ourselves and what we love in the face of it, and remembering that the world we want only follows from acting as if we live there already.
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Advance Praise for Compassion in Crisis
“As we enter an era of climate shifts and more frequent, layered catastrophes, this is the book you want beside you to navigate the realities of disaster and recovery. Drawing from survivors, practitioners, and thinkers, this book offers a guide to cultivating the kind of attentiveness and care that might help us think about preparedness wholistically, from philosophical ideas about how our experiences of time shift to practical and profound advice that can move the needle towards justice in the aftermath of grief and loss. Weiner, Loften, and their contributors help us consider what it takes to move through change and the kinds of transformation that are inevitable in the wake and shadows of disasters, acknowledging that systems and institutions can and do fail us, and showing where and how communities can be created, revitalized, and mobilized to step in and step up for each other.”
—Candis Callison, Member, Tāłtān Nation, and author, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts
Kate Rose Weiner is a writer, editor, and publisher working at the intersections of culture and climate justice. She is the coeditor of community publisher Loam and the director of Loam Library, a mobile library committed to bringing the power of print to the people. Kate’s work is shaped by her studies in environmental art, social practice, and community herbalism.
Kailea Rose Loften is a mother of Tahltan, Kaska, and Black American ancestry. She is the coeditor for the community publisher Loam and has guided climate change policy with an emphasis on Indigenous rights, previously serving as a Climate Commissioner for the City of Petaluma, California. You can contact her through kailealoften.com.
