As human-driven global warming amplifies the frequency and potency of natural disasters, we are increasingly dependent on one group of workers who live in the shadows: the migrant workforce that arrives to clean up and rebuild.

In his book, “The Great Escape,” Saket Soni tells the personal stories of young men from India who were lured by ads to migrate to America with promises of good salaries and, more importantly, green cards in exchange for working on disaster recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The men had to pay up to $20,000 for this “opportunity”  – a not-uncommon part of the deal for such migrants. 

“A green card for a migrant worker is the holy grail of immigration, right. But it's not for people who are welders and pipefitters who build refineries who build infrastructure, roads and homes,” Soni says.

What follows is a chronicle of one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history. While Soni’s book focuses on the case of these particular men, it showcases the wider inequities and suffering faced by thousands of workers in similar positions.

“They don't want to leave home, but they have to because of economics, because of family security and economic safety,” Soni says. 

Yet these are the people doing the hard work of cleaning up as climate-fueled disasters follow one after another. 

“I came to understand these workers as the white blood cells of the climate crisis. Each time there was injury these were the workers who arrive to heal.”

Soni is founder and director of Resilience Force, an organization working to ensure a more effective and equitable approach to disaster preparation, response, recovery and rebuilding. 

“The challenge the workers face is that this is a deeply subcontracted industry and the rights get lost in the layers,” he explains. “So, there's a worker who’s earning nine dollars an hour on a roof in Florida and if it rains that contractor at the bottom wants that worker to stay on the roof. The worker isn’t documented, doesn't have recourse. If he slips and falls, he'll get injured. So, that's the situation of that worker. But six layers above him, there is a $100 million contract given to an enormous contractor that perhaps has done half a billion dollars of business since Hurricane Sandy.”

Soni sees a future where resilience is an industry like the automotive or steel-making, a source of solid, family-supporting middle class jobs. And as climate disruption brings more severe disasters every year, that resilience corps will become an essential part of our new world. 

Related Links:

Resilience Force

The Great Escape

Risky Business: Underinsured Against Climate Disaster

Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas.  In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region.

This week, world renowned three-time Grammy winning singer, songwriter, film composer, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, founding member of the band “Rising Sons,” and Blues legend Taj Mahal recorded live at Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View, Arkansas.

Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr, better known as “Taj Mahal,” is an American blues musician, a singer-songwriter and film composer who plays the guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, and many other instruments.  Taj incorporates elements of world music into his works and has done much to reshape the definition and scope of blues music by fusing it with nontraditional forms including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, and the South Pacific.

Accompanied here by bassist Bill Rich and drummer Kester Smith, Taj Mahal takes us on a musical journey like no other.  Raised between two very different musical traditions, the American gospel of his mother and the Caribbean jazz influences of his father, Taj takes his music into unique and interesting territory.  This journey has taken him around the world with a career spanning over five decades.  In addition to being one of America’s greatest cultural treasures, Taj Mahal has garnered three Grammy Awards, a Blues Music Award, an honorary doctorate, and the Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

“What inspires me most about my career is that I’ve been able to make a living playing the music that I always loved and wanted to play since the early 50s,” Mahal says. “And the fact that I still am involved in enjoying an exciting career at this point in time is truly priceless. I’m doing this the old fashioned way and it ain’t easy. I work it and I earn it.  My relationship with my audience has been fun, with great respect going both ways! I am extremely lucky to have fans who have listened to the music I choose to play and have stayed with me for 50 years. These fans have also introduced their children, grandchildren and in some cases great-grand children to this fabulous treasure of music that I am privileged to represent. It’s very exciting, to say the least.

“Like ancient culture,” he adds, “the people are as much a part of the performance as the music. Live communication through music, oh yeah, it’s right up there with oxygen!” - http://www.tajblues.com

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, musician, educator and country music legacy Mark Jones offers a 1976 archival recording of another three time Grammy winner and Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, country folk icon John Prine performing his classic song “Paradise” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

The James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed the discovery of its first exoplanet. Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, one of the leads on the team that made the detection, joins us to discuss the details. Stay tuned as we provide insights on the night sky in What's Up. Discover more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2023-JWST-confirms-its-first-exoplanet

ClassicalWorks (Episode 182)

This is family talk in rural Ireland toward the end of an extraordinary life. My brother Patrick was the youngest of six, the saint among us and always the brightest company. Two winters ago he’d struck an odd note in our regular catching-up by phone, from his community farm in County Kilkenny to my base in Boston. He said, “Chris, I’ve aged more in the last 10 weeks than in the last 10 years.” To walk 50 yards had become an ordeal. The villain turned up in a Dublin exam: it was ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease of the “motor neurons,” which spares the victim’s thinking and speech even as it cripples the body. There was nothing to be done about this – except, I ventured, to record a gabby memoir in the time we had, over Zoom, and then face-to-face on the porch of Patrick’s little farmhouse in the town of Callan. We are tracking the glow of a soul. What had made such a life even possible?

Patrick was the brother who never had a salary, or a personal savings account. His famous high school, Phillips Exeter, gave him its highest award, for a life “non sibi,” not for self. He’d found his match in Gladys Kinghorn, from Aberdeen in Scotland, visionary and inexhaustible, like himself. What they did together over 50 years across the southeast of Ireland was build a network of farms and school communities to support people with Down syndrome, autism, epilepsy. In Patrick’s Camphill communities, inspired by the Austrian guru Rudolf Steiner, support was founded on love and attention. Music became central in Camphill therapy. So was gardening, both vegetables and flowers. There may be more to see and say about Patrick, but I’m just as hungry for other accounts around the self-disciplined blossoming of beautiful lives. 

When it comes to creative and impressive performances, the London-based Aurora Orchestra really stands out. In this concert from the 2022 Beethoven Festival, the ensemble performs Hector Berlioz's dramatic "Symphonie Fantastique" entirely from memory, rolling heads and all! The program also includes 20th-century Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz's Concerto for String Orchestra and Beethoven's arguably misnomered "Kreutzer Sonata," with Jonian Ilias Kadesha as the violin soloist.