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Climate justice supports disability justice, says Tiffany Yu on Climate Curious. LA resident, disability advocate, and author of “The Anti-Ableist Manifesto”, Tiffany shares her on-the-ground experience of the LA fires from an often forgotten perspective: the disabled community.

Created by TEDxLondon
Executive produced by Josie Colter
Produced by Ben Beheshty
Hosted by Maryam Pasha and Ben Hurst
Communications by Tara Cooper and Issey Gladston

00:00 Introduction to Climate Quickies
00:49 Meet Tiffany Yu
01:34 Experiencing the fires as a disabled person
03:18 Community response and mutual aid
05:04 Long-term health effects of the fires
07:00 Intersection of climate and disability justice
07:15 Conclusion

Transcript

Introduction to Climate Quickies

Maryam Pasha: Welcome to Climate Quickies, bite-sized nuggets of climate Goodness. From our TEDx London experts in under five minutes.

Ben Hurst: We are two months past the Los Angeles fires that studies say were 35% more likely to happen due to human made global warming. Today we are getting the story from a different perspective.

Ben Hurst: Tiffany Yu is a disabled advocate, founder of the disabled community, diverse ability, and an LA local. [00:00:30] She shares her experience of the fires as a member of the disabled community, the long-term health effects likely for residents, and how the disabled community came together in mutual aid and support.

Ben Hurst: Let’s head over to her now to hear more. Stay curious.

Meet Tiffany Yu

Tiffany Yu: Hi, my name is Tiffany Yu and I’m the author of the Anti Ableist Manifesto, how to Build a Disability Inclusive World, and I’m a disability advocate who runs a disability centered community called [00:01:00] diversability. My entrance into this space comes from lived experience.

Tiffany Yu: At the age of nine, I was involved in a car accident where on the way home from dropping my mom off at the airport, she was traveling for a business trip. My dad lost control of the car, and I acquired a handful of injuries and disabilities, including permanently paralyzing one of my arms and much later being diagnosed with PTSD, post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is a type of mental health disability.[00:01:30]

Experiencing the fires as a disabled person

Tiffany Yu: So I currently live in Los Angeles and lived through these wildfires that. Ravaged our city and county in in January. Some of the initial casualties of the fires were disabled people. And there was a father, a disabled father, and a son who are both waiting for access, which is our accessible public transport system, while the fires were [00:02:00] ravaging their area.

Tiffany Yu: And as someone who lives in LA who is also disabled and doesn’t have a car, it also does cross my mind that as much as I love public transport here, and it’s great for the environment during an emergency. I don’t have the privilege to be able to hop in a car right away. I do feel privileged enough that I have enough community of friends, of people who were checking in on me while the evacuations were [00:02:30] ongoing to see if I needed to evacuate.

Tiffany Yu: I. Many of my disabled friends prematurely evacuated because they knew that in an acute situation where you needed to leave immediately and weren’t sure when you were gonna come back, and people were scrambling right when the fires hit to grab everything that they could or some didn’t even get to return to their homes.

Tiffany Yu: So that was the first that happened. And then the second was kind of in the recovery effort. And as we’re recording [00:03:00] this, we are. Less than two months out from when the fire started, and the recovery’s gonna be long. It’s gonna take years. Entire homes and communities, libraries, grocery stores have disappeared.

Tiffany Yu: Essentially, it’s the equivalent of the entirety of San Francisco disappearing in the recovery efforts.

Community response and mutual aid

Tiffany Yu: It didn’t feel like there was a centralized place where disabled people could go if they needed medical equipment or. Replacement mobility devices, and this [00:03:30] is where I saw mutual aid efforts really step up.

Tiffany Yu: There were donation centers that were saying they could no longer accept donations. People were shipping things in, shipping in products. I had a couple of friends who stepped up, I’ll name their names specifically because I. I really am so grateful for their capacity to disseminate information and, and create the partnerships and collaborations to set these up.

Tiffany Yu: But one was Stephanie Nagura. She’s a deaf actress here in la. She partnered with Off the Grid [00:04:00] Missions, which is this incredible nonprofit that supports deaf and disabled inclusive disaster response. There’s another organization called the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, which also focuses on disability inclusive disaster response.

Tiffany Yu: So, uh, the partnership had created a phone number or an email address that you could call if you had needs off the grid. Missions had set up a form that you could fill out, and Stephanie partnered with Lolo Spencer, who is another [00:04:30] disabled actress who has a large social media following to help disseminate the information.

Tiffany Yu: Stephanie and off the grid created two disability inclusive donation centers that you could go to across LA where during certain hours of the day, they would have a SL interpreters available. And in addition to that, many of the Centers for Independent Living end up becoming these great centralized tubs for information as well.[00:05:00]

Long-term health effects of the fires

Tiffany Yu: I think one of the things that we don’t realize is the lasting effects of the fires. There was a webinar that was hosted that brought together a lot of advocacy groups and advocates who are doing a lot around clean air. So first they shared that fire smoke is 10 times more toxic than traffic pollution, and the air in LA before the fires was not great.

Tiffany Yu: And now it’s even worse. And one of the things that [00:05:30] I thought was interesting that they brought up in in this webinar was the effects of nine 11 that happened in New York in the aftermath of nine 11. The public health messaging was really downplayed around the dangers of the air. And almost 500,000 people were exposed to toxic air after nine 11, and over a hundred thousand of those, of that 500,000 are now receiving care for its health impacts.

Tiffany Yu: [00:06:00] And so if we think about the health impact of all this fire smoke being in the air, it’s gonna have respiratory effects like exacerbating asthma, complications of COPD. Increased risk of respiratory infections, acute bronchitis, I could go on and on. And so there is going to be a large group of us, and I am curious, it’s gonna take years for the air to recalibrate.

Tiffany Yu: This is going to have. [00:06:30] Disabling effects on the creation of respiratory related disabilities and illnesses for many of us who who did stay in the area. And it’s also seen that toxic error like this in the aftermath of a severe climate event, can create mental health effects like depression, anxiety, and PTSD with children and pregnant women who are at the highest risk.[00:07:00]

Intersection of climate and disability justice

Tiffany Yu: Different justice movements like the climate justice movement also intersects with disability justice. And so if you wanna learn more about that, you can pick up the book, the Anti Ableist Manifesto, how to Build a Disability Inclusive World, or you can follow up with me.

Conclusion

Tiffany Yu: My website is tiffany u.com and you can find all of my social links there as well.

Ben Hurst: Thanks for listening to this quickie.

Maryam Pasha: This episode was created by our superstar podcast team at TEDx London. Until next time,

Ben Hurst: stay curious.