It's being reported that rebuilding after Hurricane Milton will cost $175 billion. The images of splintered homes and submerged neighborhoods are heartbreaking. It's a crisis of immense proportions, and within 24 hours, FEMA and the Biden administration were already being judged on their speed.

The people need help. This is an undeniable environmental catastrophe, one that demands an immediate and powerful response.

But as I read about the wake of the storm - the impassable roads, the poisoned water supply, the fragile bridges, and the unstable housing - I couldn’t stop thinking about all the forgotten cities of New Jersey: Paterson, Trenton, Camden, Newark.

And I wonder: where is FEMA?

Our state’s cities have been blown through by the generational storms of systemic poverty and environmental injustice, leaving in their wake very similar environmental crises: unsafe water, unsafe air, unstable housing, and whole swaths of the community either unhoused or on the knife’s edge of being unhoused.

This too is a crisis, but where is the urgency?

We’re expected to spend $175 billion to rebuild vulnerable towns, and we should—it's the right thing to do. We need to help the people in Florida, but it's time to demand urgency from our elected officials for the crises in our underserved communities. Naysayers push false narratives of either-or, but after working on Capitol Hill for a decade, I know we can do both.

We know what it takes to make our cities healthier, greener, and more resilient to climate change. We need more trees, more parks, greater energy efficiency, and fewer cars on our roads. We need to clean up our rivers and rethink how we manage waste. Yet, despite knowing all of this, the environmental movement often feels like it's operating from the outside of our urban areas looking in, rather than engaging the communities that need their advocacy and resources the most.

When Newark faced a lead water crisis, they were told it would take a decade to fix. That’s the level of urgency when it comes to protecting the health and environment for communities of color. Instead, Newark replaced 23,000 lead service lines in three years, and became a national model for lead line removal. Why? Because those closest to the problem are often best equipped to solve it.

It’s not theoretical in our cities. While environmental advocates sound the alarm on climate change, there’s little community engagement in the areas most impacted by ongoing environmental crises.

The truth is, we need organizations to fight climate change deniers and push broadly for greener solutions, but it can't just be from the suburbs to the statehouse. We must actively invest in and engage with the people on the front lines, suffering the most from generations of environmental injustice.

The fact of the matter is, the issues faced in Trenton - unsafe water, failing infrastructure, housing instability - are slow-moving disasters that have left our communities in a State of Emergency, declared or not.

So where’s the FEMA-style response? Where are the billions of dollars that should be flowing into our communities to address lead in our water, crumbling bridges, or air so polluted it’s poisoning our children? Why aren’t the environmental organizations in our streets?

We’ve seen that, when the nation is confronted with a dramatic event like Hurricane Milton, the government can move mountains to help people rebuild. And again, we should do that. But we should also be asking why these resources and urgency can’t be applied to the everyday disasters playing out in our own communities. The families of our inner cities deserve no less.

And I’m not just talking about rebuilding. It’s about creating a better, more sustainable future that addresses the root causes of these problems - systemic racism, economic inequality, and environmental neglect. We can’t keep applying band-aids to problems that require surgery.

The fight for climate resilience and environmental justice is one and the same. We can’t protect our planet without working with the people who live in the communities most impacted by climate change, pollution, and poverty.

We must help the people of Florida. But we must also help the people in cities like Newark, Camden, Trenton, Paterson. They, too, are facing an environmental crisis - one that’s been compounding for generations and we need that same FEMA-level urgency to tackle the challenges. Not next decade, not next year, but today.

By James Gee, founder of the Black Brown & Green Conference, a series of conversations with communities most impacted by the climate crisis, and former Chief of Staff to Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman