In what the United Nations has termed the “decade of action” with young, influential activists demanding sustainable solutions and alternatives, one filmmaker’s documentary explores the social faultlines and “slow motion” of human-made disasters of structural racism and poverty, which accelerate during extreme weather events.
As part of the “Limits of Imagination” film series, Penn State’s Sustainability Institute and the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications hosted a film screening and panel discussion of director Judith Helfand’s documentary, “COOKED: Survival by Zip Code.”
The documentary is based on a 2002 book by Eric Klinenberg, “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.” It reexamines the story of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which lasted five days and killed 739 people, many of whom were from the city’s lower-income communities and communities of color.
Following the 2018 film, Helfand took part in a panel discussion with Isaac Vergun — one of the 21 student plaintiffs in the Juliana v. United States lawsuit — and Cecile Ortiz-Garcia — a senior Resilience in Sustainable Reconstruction (RISE) fellow at the National Council for Science and the Environment in Washington, D.C.
Helfand, convinced the events that took place in Chicago were a “one off,” said she originally planned to make the film a “whodunit” that investigated why the heat wave caused deaths which mostly occurred in Chicago’s underprivileged communities.
“I’d never heard of extreme weather revealing extreme disparity,” Helfand said. “I was really going to follow the book and do that social autopsy, and then Katrina happened and I just felt like, ‘I can’t quite do that anymore. I can’t quite make that movie.’”
Instead, Helfand said she particularly “wanted to take the white community on this trip” to explore why there were more heat wave-caused deaths in poor communities than others.
The 2018 film documents the reality of Chicago’s south and west side communities, showing archival footage of nine refrigerated meat-packing trucks that collected and stored the decomposing bodies of those who died at such a rapid rate that they could not be contained in the county morgue.
“How ironic it was that they finally got the air conditioning they needed while awaiting autopsy,” Helfand said in the documentary.
Additionally, Helfand’s film questions why, in the heatwave’s aftermath, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was so prepared to invest $2.5 million in rooftop gardens to be built on top of the city hall meant to “cool down” the city, while ignoring everyday issues of residents in poor neighborhoods.
The film questioned why million of dollars were being invested in Chicago’s Cook County natural disaster preparedness plans — or as one interviewee called it, “ a victim containment system” — and why federal funding goes to week-long natural disaster preparedness military exercises but not toward vulnerable communities that are in need of help — communities that are experiencing the effects of a so-called “disaster in slow motion.”
“They’re stockpiling diabetes medication in case there’s an earthquake, but they’re not dealing with diabetes,” Helfand said. “That is so crazy.”
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Vergun said the first responders who prepare for disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes are doing so for the wrong communities.
“They’re preparing for massive things that could happen potentially, but they’re completely blind to the things that are happening right now, things that are affecting people in communities literally right next door,” Vergun said. “A lot of the time people don’t understand that things happen because we don’t see it happen.”
For Helfand, reframing and broadening the scope of what constitutes a “disaster” presents the chance to approach systemic issues in a novel and potentially impactful way.
Instead of focusing national priorities on extreme weather events, Helfand instead presented a call to action to use resources and funds to assist members vulnerable communities now.
The petitions, resolutions and bills in places such as Wisconsin and Pittsburgh to declare racism a public health crisis present an opportunity to address structural issues as proactively as natural disaster programs and exercises are, as opposed to dismissing impoverished and systemically disadvantaged people as a natural result of a competitive economy, the speakers said.
“It’s 2020. There’s a whole bunch of ways people are fighting to oppress someone else and I feel like renaming it in the end will probably be beneficial in giving it a new purpose,” Vergun said. “There’s a whole bunch of other things to racism than just calling someone the N-word.”
Garcia, who is also a Puerto Rican social sciences professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, discussed his experiences as a citizen and professor in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
Similar to State College residents, Garcia said he grew up in Mayaguez with the University of Puerto Rico being central in his life and career. However, after Hurricane Maria, which resulted in more than 3,000 deaths, he said he could no longer depend on the university.
“At the time of need my university wasn’t there and I have to live through other universities coming to Puerto Rico,” Garcia said. “I’m used to being the observer as a scientist, and I became the observed and that experience totally changed me.”
The panel also addressed how members of the State College community can begin to empathize and feel the urgency of acting in response to these disasters in slow motion.
“There’s poverty and racism and the intersection of both spitting distance from the State Theatre,” discussion moderator and Penn State film-video professor Pearl Gluck said. “Driving to just outside our bubble that we’ve placed ourselves in. It’s not as much work as you might think, which is both the good news and the bad news.”
Throughout discussions before and after the film, Helfand stressed the importance of actively rethinking what “disaster” and “disaster preparedness” means and what it could mean, even in seemingly remote places like State College.
“There’s got to be a way that this is relevant here,” Helfand said. “We use Chicago as a landscape, but this story is happening in every city in this country. It’s got to be here.”
