The Friends of the Jamestown Philomenian Library Present:
“The Devil Never Sleeps: Climate risk and resiliency in an age of disasters” Discussion with Professor Juliette Kayyem
Saturday, September 27 | 11:00 a.m. | Library Meeting Hall
As we are all well aware, disasters are neither random nor rare. In this timely and thought-provoking discussion, Professor Juliette Kayyem, one of the world’s foremost authorities on crisis management and resilience, will explore how we can better align crisis preparedness in a world where climate disasters are standard and expected. She will also discuss the changes to disaster preparedness in the Trump Administration and the pressures on local and state capabilities. Drawing on themes from her most recent book, The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters, Professor Kayyem will examine the commonalities that link all disasters to provide lessons on how we can “learn to fail safer.” Success, she argues, must be measured not by eliminating all risks, an impossible task, but by ensuring that our investments in preparedness make things “less bad” than they would otherwise be. Professor Kayyem brings unparalleled expertise to this conversation. She is the faculty chair of the Homeland Security and Global Health Projects at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where she teaches the premier course on mitigating and managing crises. She has served as President Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s Homeland Security Advisor, and is currently CNN’s Senior National Security Analyst. A frequent contributor to The Atlantic and NPR, she is renowned for making complex security and disaster preparedness issues accessible and actionable