Until 2005 when my house was destroyed
by Hurricane Katrina I hadn't thought so
much about the concepts of resilience
andrecovery.What would it take for us to
bounce back, what do we need in society
when organizations to give us the
capabilities that we need to come back
after a major shock. So my house is up
there it's one of the little red dots on
Canal Boulevard. In the year-and-a-half
after Hurricane Katrina
Rick Weill and I sat down and went
through the entire city of New Orleans
knocking on doors looking to talk to
survivors there across the city, and we
asked them a very simple question on a
scale of one to five; one being no and
five being yes; have you recovered yet,
how's the recovery process going for you.
We mapped those answers to broader
questions of damage to homes and
businesses,
so those red and green dots behind me
they're on a map that shows from yellow
very little water to dark blue very deep
water. And we began doing this research
we expected that the reddish dots, the
worst recovered people, would be in the
darkest blue areas but in fact what we
found was almost the opposite. In many
cases individuals who had fantastic
recoveries, those green dots that you see,
they had a lot of water. In my case 11
feet of water, in other cases seven or eight
feet of water.
Individuals resilience and recovery
wasn't a function it seems of how much
water that they have, and the one thing
I've learned since Hurricane Katrina is
the power of people. We've heard already
two different talks about how important
communication individuals are and being
a leader. Today's talk for me has really
one main point. If you come away with the
idea that social ties are the critical
aspect of resilience, I've done my job.
Because the reality is a lot of theories
that we have about recovery focus on the
wrong kinds of ideas. I think the most
common narrative that we hear in the
media but recovery after disaster is
about money. Did you have insurance? Was
FEMA there for you afterwards? Were you
wealthy beforehand? Did some foreign aid
come in to India or to some place in
Southeast Asia after that 2004 Indian
Ocean tsunami? That's pretty common
narrative that we hear. we also hear a lot
about governance. How well governed was
the area? Was the mayor or governor or
president on board during that disaster? Plenty of stories from New Orleans
we can talk about later about governance.
A lot of theories about also destruction.
How much damage was there? We envision
that a stronger more powerful disaster, a
massive earthquake for example, has a
slower recovery process than a smaller
scale disaster like a tornado. Two other theories I hear all the time: one
is about population density that somehow
the dense areas and cities are slower to
recover than rural areas and finally
inequality that image up there is from
Brazil,
the Favelas where we have the left side
of the image dirt, florid shanty shacks
on the right side condominiums. Those
blue dots you see are individual pools.
So these are the kind of theories that
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sociologists, political scientists,
economists like to argue drive this idea
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of recovery. They're all missing
something really important. They're
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missing the idea that the core elements
of recovery don't come from outside the
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community, outside the organization; they
come from inside it and I would argue
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that really drives the process what we
call social capital or social ties. There
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are different types of connections that
we have. People who are like us, same
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background, same language, and ethnicity
we call that a bonding social tie. Our
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friends, our family from different
backgrounds maybe through a school or a
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church or synagogue or a mosque from a
bocce ball club or through an opera club
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those are bridging ties. And occasionally
we have vertical ties to individuals
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positions of power. If you know the head
of FEMA or the Deputy Assistant I guess
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maybe you know someone here in
Washington, DC. How do these kind of ties
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make a difference during disaster. The
first decision made by any survivor
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after disaster is whether or not to go
back to a damaged home or a damaged
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business. There are all kinds of reasons
you wouldn't want to go back. The most
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obvious are the financial costs that you
face even with insurance and help from
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FEMA is often a huge gap between the
actual costs and the money that you now
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hold, but beyond the financial costs, the
psychological costs. If you lost a family
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member or a loved one got hurt there. Maybe the whole area nearby is destroyed,
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your school or home is gone. Simply being
back in the same area again can trigger
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PTSD, sleepless nights, and depression. We
also know their opportunity costs
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for going back. Everyday you're in a
damaged city or damaged area with a
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business or a school, you can be someplace
else a perfectly healthy area and having
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that business run well. So why would you
come back then with all those kind of
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costs? We've found around the world India,
Japan, the Gulf Coast, Israel those
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individuals, those communities with more
social ties more of a sense of place a
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sense of belonging those individuals
come back. I ndividuals with fewer ties,
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fewer connections, or less of a sense of
place those individuals often get
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up and go. We call this first choice exit
and voice. The second brighter way that
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the social ties help is what we call
collective action. Many of the challenges
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that we face post disaster cannot be
solved by one individual or one family
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by themselves. It requires us working
together. Think about Haiti after the
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2011 earthquake. When that quake
literally wiped out most of the
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government and police officers many
neighborhoods had no one nearby in
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uniform to help them.
How would your family stay safe and keep
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looters away? You couldn't do it by
yourself. you weren't awake all the time.
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You need to have help from neighbors,
people in the community to build a
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community patrol and some neighborhoods
did that. They kept away looters; they
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kept away people who would harm their
families. Others didn't have that kind of
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social ties and they couldn't do it.
These are the kind of things that we
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need post-disaster. We need the
collective action through social ties.
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Finally the third way these ties help is
through informal insurance or mutual aid. Most
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of the providers of things like food,
shelter, daycare for our kids, medical
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assistance are often shut down for days
if not weeks. In northern New Orleans
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where I was it was two-and-a-half months
before a grocery store opened again or
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three months before a gas station opened
again; almost half a year before daycares
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opened again. Where do you get assistance?
Where do you get resources? If you have
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friends, neighbors, people that you know
you could knock on their door and borrow
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those kind of things, have a round robin
to watch the kids, get information about
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restarting your electricity again.
Without those kind of social ties it's
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much more challenging to overcome these
kind of problems so social ties give us
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this kind of informal insurance or
mutual aid. I'm going to give some details now
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how these kind of social ties make a
difference during a massive three part
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catastrophe.
March 11th 2011 in Japan around 2:56 p.m.
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just after school was getting out a
massive 9.0 earthquake struck offshore,
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so powerful that from off outer space
the entire earth jumped. Now that
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earthquake itself didn't do much damage
there's fantastic engineering standards
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in Japan. Most houses, most buildings were
intact but that earthquake set off
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two other major problems :a massive set
of tsunamis; these huge waves as tall as
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six stories in some cases and the
shutdowns of the Fukushima nuclear power
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plant which eventually melted down about
27 hours later. Now this disaster or
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these disasters killed more than
eighteen thousand five hundred people
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across Japan. What's quite interesting is
that if you look at all the cities along
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the coast, all the villages and towns, the
variation in death rates are quite large.
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In most cities across the coast no one
lost their lives that's the big spike
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you see behind me. But in
those small little bumps next to it, in
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some cities 1% 2% even as high as 10% of
the population lost their lives. So as
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social scientists our question is to
understand why did some communities have
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no fatalities, others lost literally 1/10
of the population that afternoon. So we
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first envisioned maybe this was a
function of how powerful the disaster
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was, so simply mapped how tall the
tsunami was versus the death rates in
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the communities. There's some variation
that you see here that lines up, but some
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really strong outliers. The most powerful
waves that we saw inTanohato, 20 meters
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at 60 feet tall, they only lost around 2%
of the population, but Onagawa, Otsuchi
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those communities had much shorter waves
but lost a tenth of the population, and
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even further on reef Unatori, very
short waves that lost around 9% of the
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population. So by itself we can't explain
mortality based solely on how powerful
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the waves were. I spent about a year and
a half in Japan doing research in this
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project asking individuals who survived,
speaking to NGOs, local leaders, getting
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data on all those communities to understand
what then drove the difference is in
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mortality. The most powerful predictor of
recovery
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was actually social networks and social
ties communities across the coast that
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had more social ties. Here we're measuring
this using less crime. Those communities
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had much lower death rates, holding
everything else constant. Meaning even
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the same levels of demographics, of
income, of education, firefighters being
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there, disaster preparedness, exposure to
the sea height, all the factors that we
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could think of the best predictors still
were the social ties in those
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communities. Communities that had more
social ties before the disaster had
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fewer casualties afterwards. Then we
looked at the question of recovery. Who
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rebuilds these cities after massive
devastation. This is an image of
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Ishinomaki two weeks and then roughly
two years after that tsunami. Notice all
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the debris is gone but so are all the
people. There's no evidence in this
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community even though the debris is gone
there's businesses operating again or
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schools operating again. So I spent about
another year in Japan asking questions
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of businesses, local leaders, educators
what's driving the recovery processes,
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how do you know if your cities up and
operating again. I spent some time in Tagajo,
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so here's three images two weeks, two
months, and two years. Now that debris is
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gone, I can't tell you what that white
van is still there. [Laghter]
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I have a theory about insurance fraud
that's a different conversation, but here
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again we see progress over time. The
debris is gone, but we don't really know
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are those fields productive again, are
individual farmers producing again? So we
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measured the recovery in 14 different
ways, we looked at things like business
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restarts, infrastructure housing rebuilds,
school openings. Can you guess what the
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best predictor of recovery in this case
was? So this is a map we can show you
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what happens between the first moment of
the tsunami, that massive amount of damage
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and then two years later. The bottom
access is in a scale from 10 to 60
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that's the capacity of each city that
was still there during that process. So
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you see some of the most damaged areas
that we have their, like Yamada, lost 85
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percent of capacity. Almost all the
schools, businesses, everything was shut
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down, but then two years later it bounces
up. This is the vertical axis, now to
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around 80 percent, 90 percent. Most
communities are doing pretty well two
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years later, some aren't doing so well so
they're investigating those factors. The
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best predictor we had here weren't
horizontal ties that bonding and
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bridging ties, it was linking ties. How
many connections did your city have to
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individuals in power in Tokyo? How many
powerful politicians, representatives,
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people did you know that could pull
those levers of power and get people to
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come to your community and help you out
in the recovery process? So in the first
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stages of survival is the horizontal
ties. In the process of recovery it's the
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vertical ties. I did one more aspect of
recovery this is mental health recovery.
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I mentioned the Fukushima disaster in
Japan a hundred and forty seven thousand
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people left their homes because of four hour evacuation notices in Futaba, Okuma,
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communities right near the nuclear power
plant. Some of them have never been home
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since. So now in 2018, it's been almost
seven years since they've seen their homes.
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Now in those seven years you can imagine
the kind of worries that you have. If
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your house was less than 10 miles away
from the plant that melted down, and you
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left there maybe a day, maybe two days
later with only a bag of stuff and your
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kids, you could imagine all the kind of
concerns, livelihood, health, are my
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children going to be okay, am I going to
be okay, can I ever go home again,
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so we knew up front that individuals,
these survivors from communities nearby
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would have a lot of worries that we
didn't as normal people outside the area.
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So we use a simple mental health
checklist called the Kessler six or K
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six and don't answer out loud but in
your head think to yourself over the
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past month,
how often if you felt nervous? Maybe
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speaking in front of all the audiences
right. How often have you felt helpless
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or restless, depressed, so these K-six are
a pretty common way of measuring mental
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health recovery post disaster. So the
last seven years we've been asking
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survivors from Futaba these questions
these K-6 index and comparing their
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results to individuals who lived further
away from the nuclear power plant and
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individuals even more than 150 miles, 200
miles away. we had some very interesting results.
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We assumed that things like physical
health and wealth would help improve
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those K-6 scores. We assumed if you
had money for a psychiatrist or a
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counselor or could move away from the
area or get a new home we figured those
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individuals would do better over time.
The reality was as these images show we
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had no measurable connection between
health and wealth and mental anxiety
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after the Fukushima meltdowns. In fact
the reality was it was a pretty sad
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story. If you'd been doing well
physically before the disaster you were
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okay afterwards, but if you had any kind of
physical challenges beforehand, your
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mental health got even worse compared to
other individuals nearby. So what
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can alleviate these kind of concerns? The
only factor that we found consistently
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helps reduced anxiety post a nuclear
evacuation we're having friends and
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neighbors nearby that you knew. Social
connections to individuals nearby helped
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you feel normal again despite all the
long-term concerns you may still have. So
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I've tried to argue so far that what's
driving the recovery process, what's
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giving us resilience that's coming from
things like social ties; friends, neighbors,
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and friends of friends. If this is true
then what's our next steps? This is the
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fun part of my job.
Beyond studying disasters I think
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through cities, communities, and organizations,
what can we do now to build these kind of
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social ties around the world. So hopefully
you recognize the guy in the red sweater,
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it's Fred Rogers right, now
Fred has been dead unfortunately for a few
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years. When I was a kid he asked me to be
a very good neighbor each day, right. What
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does that mean? It means in most of the
areas around the world Washington, DC,
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Tokyo, Mumbai, Bangladesh people simply
don't know their neighbors. So if I asked
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