What Accelerating Climate Disasters Are Teaching Us About Survival

Flip through the pages of Outside, or watch an episode of a hit show about the intersection of fine wine and fungus zombies, and you’ll be presented with one unifying message: survival is about rugged individualism. But the ever-escalating climate crisis is bringing us a very different lesson from the real world. Despite the fantasy so often portrayed in the media, real survival is actually about tapping into community.

That was very much the case for one of Outside’s readers, Kyle Moorcones, who lives outside Elk Park, in western North Carolina. He messaged me late last week on Instagram to share his story of survival in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

Moorcones was able to get in touch because his family has a Starlink satellite system, and one of his neighbors had a portable generator. While surveying the damage post-flood, Moorcones says his neighbor rode by on an ATV to see if they needed anything. The two ended up setting up a regular rotation for their little community of eight families, taking advantage of their limited fuel supplies to switch Starlink on each morning and evening so everyone could check in with friends and family, connect with first responders or local authorities, and read the news.

It actually shouldn’t have been that difficult. Moorcones says he’d recently had a whole home generator installed, which was designed to use propane from his family’s big tank to provide power for everything in their house. But the installation had gone unfinished while they waited on a single backordered part to arrive.

It was at one of those Starlink-generator sessions when Moorcones was describing the problem with the home generator that it turned out another neighbor had the missing part. They managed to install it, and now they’re able to provide hot showers and laundry twice a day, in addition to that internet connection.

Another neighbor’s well was still working, providing water that could now be boiled at Kyle’s house. Still another raises chickens, and shared the eggs with his neighbors in need. The one with the ATV was able to ride half an hour across the mountains on a narrow trail to get a few supplies like bottled water and diapers. One family had a big chest freezer they ran off of the portable generator to keep everyone’s food safe.

One night this weekend, Moorcones says he smoked one of his neighbor’s chickens whole and served it to a big group of neighbors. “That was a significant morale booster,” he told me.

Right now, almost two weeks after the storm, Moorcones’ life has almost returned to normal. He told me he went back to work for the first time this morning. Yet no official agency has yet made it to their little community to provide relief—they’ve done everything themselves.

Moorcones says a neighbor was able to hot-wire an excavator that the Department of Transportation had parked nearby, staged for a pre-Helene project. A nearby road bridge was still intact, but left inaccessible by flood debris. As he and his neighbors used that excavator to open up their side of the bridge, the Tennessee Valley Authority showed up on the other side, and now Moorcones’ community is again connected to the outside world.

“The ride’s pretty rough, but it’s passable,” he says of the one road out.

I asked him if he needed to use any of the stereotypical survival skills during the aftermath of Helene. “I definitely haven’t had to drink my own pee yet,” he says, “but I did get a fire going in a cast iron stove to dry a neighbor’s basement out.”

Moorcones says he thinks it’ll be at least two more weeks before grid power is restored, but that he’s not too worried. Over the weekend, a group from Samaritan’s Purse—an evangelical Christian aid organization run by the Graham family—passed through. They told him it didn’t appear he or his neighbors needed any help.

“It was people skills,” Moorcones responded when I asked him what the most vital capability has been over the last couple of weeks. “Just being able to knock on doors, say we’re all humans, and figure out how to help each other.”

And it’s not just some little holler in Western North Carolina where this rings true. When a wildfire raged through Lahaina, Hawaii, last August, neighbors worked together to evacuate their families. When a cattle farmer in Illinois lost his barn during the historic tornado outbreak during March 2023, his neighbors hauled away his cattle, fed them, and helped him rebuild his barn. Last August, a flood in Juneau, Alaska, damaged the home of a couple my wife and I met on vacation in Mexico earlier in the year. We joined hundreds of other people to donate money, enabling them to rebuild.

None of this is to say that individual skill and preparation don’t matter. I just checked in with family members in Tampa, Florida who have chosen to ride out incoming Hurricane Milton at their home. Their home is well clear of any storm surge and, hopefully, is constructed strong enough to withstand the wind. They’ve stockpiled food, water and fuel, have a generator, and feel like they’re ready to spend two weeks or more without access to the outside world.

But, as Kyle’s experience demonstrates, combining skills and supplies goes much further than anything amassed by an individual or single family.

Climate change will continue to make events like that fire in Lahaina, or Hurricanes Helene and Milton, or tornadoes, or flooding, or heat, or snow storms more common and more severe than ever before. And it will bring all the above to new areas. It’s my hope that this story can remind and encourage all of us that humans rely on community to survive.