Episode Details

In this episode of The Gravity Well you hear the importance of community, leadership, and emergency response. Hosts Alex and Jenny, along with guests Mike Westwick and Chris Yeremiy, discuss the significance of mentorship, pre-planning, and effective communication in managing crises. You hear emphasize the need for a structured incident command system, the value of honesty and empathy in public communications, and the importance of training and retaining skilled emergency responders. The conversation also highlights the challenges posed by natural disasters, such as wildfires and water shortages, and the critical role of community engagement and preparedness in mitigating these emergencies. Like and subscribe! Hosted by Jenny Yeremiy, The Gravity Well delves into complex issues to foster understanding and improve the world, from Treaty Seven and Southern Alberta, in Canada.

Background information: the Northwest Territories had a historic wildfire season in 2023. “On June 7, there were eleven active wildfires in the Northwest Territories. At that point, there had been 21 total fires had affected 403,815 hectares (997,850 acres). By August 15, there were over 230 wildfires throughout the territory. By August 17, they were within 17 km (11 mi) of the capital city, Yellowknife, leading to an evacuation order. The wildfires caused telecommunication and internet signals to be cut off throughout the South Slave Region, which led to concerns about the feasibility of a safe evacuation.” – Wikipedia. The NWT fires amounted to nearly 30 per cent of the historically horrendous 2023 Canadian wildfire season, a season in which wildfire destruction was more than six times the long-term average of 7,000,000 acres.

Welcome and Introductions to Mike Westwick and Chris Yeremiy

Alex:

Welcome to The Gravity Well where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle. In our work and at play, we seek the wisdom of elders, individuals, and communities that share our knowledge to care for our water, air, land, life and resource needs. Caring for our homeland is our guide.

Jenny:

Awesome. Thank you so much, Alex. Welcome to The Gravity Well, I’m just going to add in the chat an update of what we’ve been up to, I’ll just get that link in there. So we started this conversation, these conversations, excuse me, about four weeks ago. In our first conversation, we talked about why we’re doing this. Alex and I see an opportunity to bring people together. Again, we have a lot of fractured relationships in the community and trying to rebuild the community in crisis. And so we spent the first week going through our community agreement with, actually Angie Alexander is one of the people in the audience. So Angie and I do a room together on this app. Thursday mornings. Angie hosts it, and so it’s a group of positive intelligence-minded, or sage leadership, I should say that Angie’s brand, idea is to try and stay calm and rational in crisis in terms of building leadership in teams.

That’s the focus of that work, but we’ve been using that framework to help build our community agreement and try to make sure that we’re working in a place where we open the dialogue to differences of opinion and allow people to a shared understanding. So we wrote this community agreement, we’re looking for engagement from our community to help us build off of that, but we’re trying to seek common ground. We want to make sure we have a round table chat. I’ll just show you that if you hold down on your photo, you can do an emoji. So it helps sort of move the conversation along or communicate and yeah, we just want to make sure that we hold perspectives and stay open to other peopl