The Choice Is Ours

As I write this the recriminations and criticisms are still coming in loud and clear. It isn’t clear if the devastation will bring any real change in policy. The press is already retreating, softening their words and downplaying allegations of racism, classism, and cronyism. At least some of them seemed to remember what their role was for a day or two. That devastation was caused by Katrina and made worse by neo-conservative policy stretching back to at least the Reagan administration.

If there is a bright spot to destruction caused by Katrina, it is that the mainstream press are beginning to talk about a part of this kind of disaster that they are usually silent about. They are beginning to talk about the long-term environmental and health risks posed by humankind’s action that helped to unleash the devastation and then make that devastation worse through pollution and disease.

Some are linking it to global warming. While no single event can be attributed to climate change, the fact is that Katrina was a relatively small category one hurricane when it glanced off of Florida. When it hit the Gulf of Mexico, where the water is two degrees warmer than normal, Katrina gained strength. It reached category five strength in the gulf, then dropped to a high category four before it made landfall.

While we cannot be certain at this point that our actions are responsible for Katrina, we do know that the oceans of the world are warmer than usual, that the Gulf of Mexico is warmer than usual, and that warm water is what allows tropical storms to become hurricanes and small hurricanes to become large ones.

The USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued an advisory in August stating that this would be the a bad year for hurricanes, saying, The updated outlook calls for an extremely active season, with an expected seasonal total of 18-21 tropical storms (mean is 10), with 9-11 becoming hurricanes (mean is 6), and 5-7 of these becoming major hurricanes (mean is 2-3).

While US governmental agencies are still downplaying or ignoring global warming under pressure from the Bush regime, hurricanes are not the only indication. Extreme weather events, long considered an outcome of climate change, are on the rise and while there is some dispute in the scientific community if present-day storms are directly related to global warming, there is consensus that future storms will be made more frequent and more powerful as the planet’s temperature rises.

Even if you happen to be one of those who does not believe the vast amount of scientific data, you cannot deny the after effects that our lifestyles have when a disaster like Katrina comes along. The flood water in New Orleans is a toxic stew. It has coliform levels 45,000 times higher than the levels considered safe for swimming in. Cholera has been found. The water grows worse every day as human corpses decay along with the bodies of wild and domestic animals.

People who have been exposed to this water are now being crowded together in refugee camps, many after surviving the horrors of the New Orleans Superdome. While aid workers and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) are doing their best to keep things sanitary and protect people from illness, there have already been reports of diarrheal illness and an effort is being made to contain an unspecified number of tuberculosis cases.

There is also the possibility of a major outbreak of West Nile Virus. The authorities are not talking about the possibility of malaria or other mosquito-borne illness yet, but there have been sporadic cases of diseases like Dengue Fever in port cities before, and those cities did not have standing water in the streets.

Then there is the problem of chemical contamination. Louisiana has incredibly lax standards when it comes to environmental and worker protection. Those lax standards were designed to, and have succeeded in, drawing chemical manufacturers and makers of products like vinyl siding, which require large amounts of toxic chemicals on-site. The media talks about the oil production and refining in the area, and it is extensive, but oil is far from the only pollutant in the water.

All of this water, polluted with such a wide variety of biological and man made toxins that proper analysis is unlikely, is now being pumped into Lake Pontchartrain. While the lake will suffer huge environmental damage from the toxins being dumped into it, there is little choice at this point. The water has to go someplace and the toxins will end up in the lake whether they are pumped there or not. The time to clean them up was before a hurricane hit, not after, now it is up to nature to filter out the pollution.

The important thing about Katrina is that it is on the news all day every day, which should inspire people around the world to learn from it. We’ve now seen what can happen, and if it can happen in the United States, it can certainly happen elsewhere.

The developing world is traditionally much harder hit by natural catastrophes than developed nations are. Even Louisiana’s and Mississippi’s lax environmental and workplace standards seem stringent when compared with the standards of many developing nations. We’ve been seeing, and ignoring, the environmental devastation that follows storms, floods, and earthquakes in less developed countries for a long time now. The initial devastation may make the news, but the aftermath is largely ignored.

The causes for many of the problems are known and understood, but seldom talked about in the corporate-driven news media. According to the United Nations, The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) cautions that the loss of forests, road and dam building, the spread of cities, the clearing of natural habitats for agriculture and mining and the pollution of coastal waters are promoting conditions under which new and old pathogens -- bacteria, viruses and micro-organisms causing diseases -- can thrive. UNEP notes that intact habitats and landscapes tend to keep infectious agents in check, whereas damaged, altered and degraded ones shift the natural balance, thereby triggering the spread to people of new and existing diseases. UNEP also points to possible linkages with climate change which can alter temperatures to the advantage of carriers such as mosquitoes or stress the environment and alter habitats to such a degree that people migrate as ‘environmental refugees’.

Those are some of the same preconditions that have increased the death toll and caused so much concern about disease and the long-term health and environmental effects from Katrina. Throw in that globalization has encouraged many developing countries to allow chemical production and usage with virtually no restrictions and that the governments of those countries lack the funds to even begin to think about precautions like sea walls and systems of levees, and the threat becomes much greater.

The damage being done is not limited to the aftermath of natural disasters, especially in nations like Peru where, the UN tells us, if deforestation increases by 1% in Peru, the number of malaria-bearing mosquitoes increases by 8% and diseases such as the Nipah virus and Dengue Fever, which were relatively rare only a few decades ago, have increased exponentially as forests have been cleared in Asia, Africa and South America and urbanisation allowed to run rampant. Indeed, as humanity has exploited nature more and more, previously unknown diseases have been unleashed. The HIV virus which causes AIDS is thought to have come from green monkeys and outbreaks of ebola and the Marburg virus are becoming more common every year.

The same forests that are being cleared act as filters that clean the water and protection against soil erosion, even while they serve as carbon dioxide sinks and release oxygen into our atmosphere. They are being replaced with factories and unsustainable agricultural practices that spew pollutants into the air and water. Those same environmentally unfriendly practices greatly increase the rate of erosion and the chance of flooding. Should an event as devastating as Katrina hit many developing countries, the environmental problems in the New Orleans area will be mild by comparison. In some parts of Asia the effects, both short and long term, could easily be on a scale matching or surpassing the 1984 Bhopal disaster.

Through globalization, we in the developed world are forcing those in less developed countries to put themselves at increased risk of devastation by an event like Katrina. By forcing them into accepting that increased risk, we force ourselves into a race to the bottom where winners and losers are judged only by the corporate bottom line and we put ourselves more at risk of natural and man-made disasters.

The as yet unknown after-effects of Katrina should serve as a warning to us that the corporate gods that we worship and the wasteful practices that worship induces are no more sustainable than the Moai once worshipped on Easter Island. Our practices are just as harmful to environment and therefore ourselves. If we refuse to see the signs, we are likely to meet the same result as the people of Easter Island suffered.

We have seen where our present course leads and now have a choice to make.