Everything Will Be Ok
I was awakened by the rain drumming on the roof at 4 AM. My consciousness returned to the same sound years ago in Karuizawa Japan. We were there for our honeymoon. It was spring, the onset of rainy season and it rained off and on the entire week of our visit to the mountain resort town. Our final day was a day of sunshine. We didn’t mind the rain as the sound of rain has its own poetry. Water is life, the divine medium for all life. No water, no life. Rainy season in Japan brings lush green to the rice paddies and the mountainsides. It was quite magical.
Having said that, there is a dark side to water and everything else that we recognize as Nature. Most mammals will drown given too much water. And water can destroy a city. Water is a mystery: Life and Death.
As I waited my turn in the barber chair this morning I picked up the latest copy of Rolling Stone Magazine. The short article by Jeff Godell was a superbly written analysis of the wider context of hurricane Harvey’s impact on the Houston metropolitan area. The article was entitled, Houston: A Global Warning. I’ll excerpt a few lines here.
If you desire to read the entire 3 page article the URL will be given at the end of this post.
The devastation of Hurricane Harvey marks a turning point and raises the terrible possibility that we’ve entered the age of climate chaos.
Harvey is the worst rainfall event ever in the continental U.S. More than 50 inches of rain deluged parts of Houston. The amount of water that poured from the sky is difficult to conceptualize. By some estimates, 19 trillion gallons of water fell in five days.
This was a disaster foretold. In the 1990s, climate scientist Wallace Broecker said that the Earth’s climate was “an angry beast” and that by dumping massive quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, we were “poking it with sticks” – and nobody could say how the beast would react. That’s where we are today. Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years.
At the same time, we’ve allowed cities like Houston to become empires of denial. If you set out to design a metropolis that is poorly adapted to the future, you couldn’t do much better than Houston.
In Houston, the bayou is just a place to drive your Lexus – this is a city that’s said to have 30 parking spots for every resident.
Houston proudly touts itself as “the City With No Limits,” playing up its Wild West heritage of endless land and opportunity. But it is also the largest U.S. city to have no zoning laws, meaning you can build whatever you want, wherever you want.
The feds bear some responsibility for the disaster-friendly design of Houston, too. Virtually all flood insurance in America is administered through the National Flood Insurance Program, which is supposed to prevent risky development………
Even before Harvey, the program was already $25 billion in debt.
As always, it’s poor people and people of color who end up bearing most of the risk. “They not only have to deal with flooding in their homes, but pollution in water that’s contaminated when water floods refineries and plants,” Texas Southern University sociologist Robert Bullard told Huffington Post. “You’re talking about a perfect storm of pollution, environmental racism, and health risks that are probably not going to be measured and assessed until decades later. The fact is that laissez-faire, unrestrained capitalism and lack of zoning mean people with money can put protections up, and people without can’t.”
In moments like this, it’s always tempting to say that a disaster like Hurricane Harvey is a game-changer, that seeing the devastation and suffering this storm has wrought will help us think differently about the world we live in.
Instead, we are likely to get a lot of rah-rah about rebuilding Houston bigger and better than before, some marginal improvements in building codes, and a lot of fighting in Congress over how much money to spend on recovery.
Beyond the post-storm platitudes, it’s not hard to foresee what is coming. There will be another hurricane – next time it might hit Charleston or Miami or Norfolk,……….
Eventually, taxpayers in Kansas will get tired of bailing out people who live on the coast, and disaster-relief funds will dry up. As seas rise, mortgage companies will stop writing 30-year loans for homes by the sea.
……..And the great coastal retreat will begin.
The simple truth is, it’s not just Houston that’s done a poor job of thinking about the future – it’s all of us. We’ve spent 40 years denying the risks of climate change, thinking that if we can just get everyone to buy a Prius and recycle their plastic, everything will be OK. The message of Hurricane Harvey is that it will not be OK. We’re living in a new world now, and we better get ready. Mother Nature is coming for us.
For the entire article click HERE
