Shared Ground

Episode 19: Quick Hits - Grace, Grief, and Megafires with Jennifer Grey Thompson

• Sean Knierim & Allan Marks

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How do communities recover after disaster? And what happens when leaders try to move forward quickly, speeding past a process that would honor what has been lost?

In this episode, Sean sits down with Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder of After the Fire USA. Jennifer has walked into some of the hardest-hit communities across the country, helping people navigate recovery after megafires.

They talk about what defines a megafire, why grief cannot be skipped, and how communities find strength not in strategy documents, but in each other. 

Jennifer offers sharp insight into what makes Los Angeles both powerful and vulnerable. She also shares what gives her hope after years of doing this work.  And how she cares for herself while caring for others.

If you care about climate, loss, leadership, or recovery, this conversation will stay with you.

Listen to hear:

  • Why resilience requires opening ourselves to accept grace
  • What makes megafires different from other disasters
  • How communities like yours can show up for one another

Shared Ground is produced by Sean Knierim and Allan Marks. Thanks to Cory Grabow, Kara Poltor, Corey Walles (from The Recording Studio) for your support in launching this effort.

For more stories of resilience & rebuilding, kindness & generosity: visit shared-ground.com and subscribe to Sean's substack. We invite you to share your own stories of resilience at the Shared Ground website - whether in response to the January fires in LA or other situations.

Follow us at seanknierim.substack.com, Instagram, or wherever you listen to podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc).

Sean Knierim:

Thanks for being here with me, as we're part of this whole day talking about resilience and rebuilding after fires. Could you introduce yourself? Who are you and what are you doing for a living these days?

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

So I am Jennifer Gray Thompson. I am the founder and CEO of a nonprofit called After the Fire USA, and we help communities navigate after megafires.

Sean Knierim:

And I'm guessing you've thought of this question before but we're asking a lot of folks how they define resilience. Could you talk a bit about how you yourself are defining resilience?

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

So I think the thing about certain words like sustainability and resilience is they become so used over and over again that we don't even have a physical response anymore, other than a bit of an ugh when we hear it.

Sean Knierim:

But the truth is is that resilience is something that everybody has in some form, and I'm laughing at the UGG question I just asked you, but I'm going to hold to it.

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

I mean, I get the irony in even saying that for sure, but it is something that we.

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

We actually build it our entire lives from the moment that we are born and for some people they have things happen in their lives and as their lives and they build resilience at the time, often from trauma, and they don't know that they're doing it at the time.

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

And even when we're going through hard times we can look back and think I did not need that character building lesson. But then it comes in handy in a way that we never expected it to and I think resilience is iterative and it deserves grace. I think resilience is iterative and it deserves grace and we have to know that, however resilient, we don't feel today that we are going to achieve that in different ways as we move through our lives. That's definitely been my experience. I had a very I had a childhood that required resilience and while it annoyed me at the time, I know that it very much informed my ability to do this really hard work where I walk into every single megafire in the United States and I start to help the people orient themselves and make sure that they're centering their community recovery.

Sean Knierim:

How would you define a megafire? What's in and out of a megafire?

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

Sure, so we use wildfire for so long, but the truth is that megafire is really abnormal behavior. It used to be defined by National Geographic as 100,000 acres or more, and we would see them sometimes, but we really didn't see urban mega fires. We really didn't see what we see now. And on October 8, 2017, I woke up in the middle of the night to a mega fire, and in my home community of Sonoma, we lost 5,900 homes, and most in the first night, and I grew up there and my husband grew up there.

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

I did not know we were opening up the era of megafires, but what they really are is a fire that has an outsized impact on the land and the people. So, for example, in Lahaina, I mean, that's a fairly small footprint of a fire, but 102 people died. It decimated a community and they move really, really fast because of the climate change. Because of climate change and also how we have built our homes in these areas and how we live and how we landscape. And it's not a blame thing, it's not that. It's just in order to build resiliency. We actually have to think about the ways that we're living and building to make megafires rare.

Sean Knierim:

I asked you a question when we were on a Zoom a month ago and you gave me an answer that really changed how I'm looking at a lot of things. I'm going to give you a bonus question, which I did not set you up for, but is you've been supporting communities that have grappled with these challenges for a number of years now and I know you've studied stuff all over the world. I asked you a question about how would you characterize Los Angeles both Altadena and the Palisades. I remember asking are we really different? You're like no, you're kind of the same, but then you described how you were seeing us. Can you share that?

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

I can. I hope I get it right this time, too. It's you are doers, you are creators, you are producers, and you highly value competency, and that's great and will help you so much to innovate your way through this. My worry, I think the false line really in your resilience, though, is you can't skip over the grief. I think there's a deep desire here to do that, and I am trying to slow that desire, you know, to get people to invite it in and to live with it and to understand that, while they didn't deserve, nobody deserved what happened to them, and they didn't ask for it. But you know, grief is part of the journey, as you're walking all the way home.

Sean Knierim:

You said earlier that resilience deserves grace it does. What do you mean by?

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

that I think that we're very self-blaming in many ways.

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

We're like well, why can't I just do this better?

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

I've actually seen this a lot here, in particular, as people who are used to having high levels of competency in everything they do and then all of a sudden they're confronted with this thing, but they have no idea and very few real skills about how to go through it and how to walk through it.

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

And I think the most important thing is to realize why would you have those skills? You've never done this before. That's why a community like the one that we've built needs to come in and wrap ourselves around you and welcome you into the worst club with the very best people who want to walk you all the way home. It's incredibly hard when something terrible has happened in your life to also welcome the grief, because it feels like this is all but done to you. And then you're looking for and then a lot of people show up and they offer to do things for you, and now you are in the whole secondary phase of figuring out who is still wanting to do things to you fraud, for example and who is here to do things for you, and then who is just here to sell you things.

Sean Knierim:

Yeah, and I remember the asking for help was really hard. Accepting help in some ways was even harder when your job forever at least my pristine job was always giving that help. So, as your last question and this one was actually on the schedule of questions for you, where, where are you getting hope?

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

the way that I define hope is that it's what people say no, I'm gonna start again, okay. So when a disaster happens, people do not read, for they don't reach for books. They don't even reach for, you know, binders to tell them what to do. They reach for people to tell them what do, to show them how to do it and to help walk them home, no matter how vulnerable they feel about doing that.

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

And what I learned during our fires is that everything I had been told about how people treat each other when something terrible happens was not true. In fact, what happens is that people, they turn towards each other, they do not turn away, and for me, that the river of humanity and kindness that runs through the space of disaster is what always gives me hope, always. And then, watching people over and over and over again, whether it's in a tiny frontier town like Greenville or a large city and county like Los Angeles, I see them show up for each other over and over again in the most extraordinary ways, and my job is to really help them do that for a long, sustained period of time. And that actually builds soft infrastructure, and that is the core of resilience.

Sean Knierim:

How are you taking care of yourself while you're trying to provide the support and resources to so many others that are going through hard times?

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

Well, the first thing is it's not my disaster and I know that walking into it and so that part's really helpful. I have a very good home life, I have a really good husband, I have a we're stable financially, like there are certain things that if I didn't have any one of those things, I wouldn't be able to do it. But I also understand that at certain periods of time I'm not going to be doing as well as other times and I have to be honest about it. I have to make sure that my husband knows. Like last year there was a period of time where I was holding so much sadness from Maui that I was off. I just felt off and I said I'm said it, just I'm not, I'm feeling this too hard, I don't have the distance that I need, and so I made sure that I took like an extra five days by myself.

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

I went to Mexico alone and I just like sat there by a pool, a part of where I said no big deal, but I have to do a lot of things and I'm always failing at it at some stage. To be clear, I really am. I don't ride bikes for 400 miles. I, you know, I don't do a lot of the things that I need to do, but I can also tell you that, over the almost eight years that I've been doing this full time, that my strategies have changed, but I always have a strategy, and a lot of it, too, is being honest about how I'm feeling.

Sean Knierim:

Thank you for being honest with me.

Jennifer Gray Thompson:

My pleasure.