If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story - the United States safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world - then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story. It is the one that will dominate our politics in the coming decades of this century: America befuddled about how to cope with a planet suddenly turned unstable and unpredictable.
Over and over in the last few weeks, people have said that the scenes from the convention center, the highway overpasses and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues didn't "look like America," that they seemed instead to be straight from the Third World. That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so different from other poor and black parts of the world. Its infant mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirror scores of African and Latin American enclaves.
But it was accurate in another way, too, one full of portent for the future.
A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to add up the number of people at risk of losing their homes from global warming. He looked at all the obvious places - coastal China, India, Bangladesh, the tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta, Mozambique, on and on - and predicted that by 2050 it was entirely possible that 150 million people could be "environmental refugees," forced from their homes by rising waters. That's more than the number of political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just endured.
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Because so far, even as blogs and Web sites all over the Internet fill with accusations about the scandalous lack of planning that led to the collapse of the levees in New Orleans, almost no one is addressing the much larger problems: the scandalous lack of planning that has kept us from even beginning to address climate change, and the sad fact that global warming means the future will be full of just this kind of horror.
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Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared to full life in the abnormally hot water of the Gulf of Mexico. It then punched its way into Louisiana and Mississippi - the latter a state now led by Gov. Haley Barbour, who in an earlier incarnation served as a GOP power broker and energy lobbyist who helped persuade President George W. Bush to renege on his promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
So far the United States has done exactly nothing even to try to slow the progress of climate change: We're emitting far more carbon than we were in 1988, when scientists issued their first prescient global-warming warnings.
Our rulers have insisted by both word and deed that the laws of physics and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish. Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and unhinged. New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives.
The Bush administration is fond of saying that 9/11 changed everything. Soon we will be saying, "Katrina changed everything". Of course, it was not Katrina itself that made the changes. No, it is our own incomprehensible lack of regard for our own welfare as a species that is changing our earth to the point of one day making it uninhabitable.
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ReplyDeleteWhat is even more scary is the potential for Katrina to change nothing if it is labeled as "the perfect storm" which happens only once a century or so. If the administration takes that attitude, they can leave their collective heads in the sand and not change a thing. Unfortunately, I think this is the most likely response from the current administration.
ReplyDeleteCarolyn L.