We Can't Say
We Weren't Warned
By Richard Steiner
22 September, 2005
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
In the week before Hurricane Katrina struck,
the U.S. government was busy insisting on the deletion of a simple phrase
from the general principles of the United Nations -- "Respect for
Nature." History may now look on Katrina as the perfect storm that
ended, once and for all, such anthropocentric arrogance.
The scale of the
Katrina tragedy offers a painful portal into our very heart and soul,
the way we think about ourselves, one another and our world. In the
rubble of homes and lives and businesses, Katrina provides a potent
teachable moment for society.
The evolutionary
success of Homo sapiens as a species depended on our ability to learn
and to act on that knowledge. When we recognized a threat -- predators,
weather, lack of resources, etc. -- we learned to act to avoid or prepare
for it. In this context, Katrina has much to teach.
First, prepare for
the worst. It is a historic, national disgrace that we did not do better.
Katrina was a well-predicted flood disaster, a well-predicted storm
and, to those observers of government bureaucracies, a well-predicted
failure of government altogether.
Next, prevent disaster
to the extent possible. A decade ago, Louisiana's "Coast 2050"
plan recognized that a century of flood control on the Mississippi was
shrinking the wetlands, bayous, barrier islands and the entire delta
of our nation's greatest river, and, if left uncorrected, would with
certainty lead to catastrophe. It was not a "0.5 percent probability"
as the Army Corps of Engineers is now claiming. It was a certainty.
Scientists proposed
a straightforward $14 billion pre-emptive fix to the problem -- build
canals and floodgates in the south bank of the river in New Orleans
and periodically open them to allow the river and its millions of tons
of sediment to flush onto the delta, rebuild barrier islands, thus protecting
the coast from inundation in future storm events. This would take decades,
but the sooner it begins, the sooner the area will be protected.
The threat was perfectly
clear, the solution was perfectly clear, yet government did nothing.
To officials, these warnings were typical of "environmental alarmists"
and government had other more immediate priorities. When Katrina hit,
this government attention deficit came tragically due.
Herein may lie our
potential evolutionary downfall -- our modern inability to act decisively
and cooperatively to avert certain disaster.
In this way, Katrina
may provide -- in fast-forward microcosm -- a vision of the very future
of Homo sapiens itself. The transcendent lesson of this perfect storm
may be that the natural environment is ignored only at our own peril.
As Katrina swept away lives and life-support systems on the Gulf Coast,
the tragedy may give focus to the deteriorating condition of the essential
environmental services the planet provides for the health and welfare
of all 6.5 billion of us -- air, freshwater, food, shelter, energy,
medicines, nutrient recycling, waste processing, enjoyment, etc.
History is littered
with fallen civilizations that ignored their deteriorating environmental
condition -- the Anasazi, Maya, Greenland Norse, Easter Islanders, etc.
And like Exxon Valdez, Chernobyl and Bhopal, Katrina will now take its
place in history as one of the seminal, time-compressed disasters that
provide an overnight glimpse of the long-term degradation of the life-support
systems of our home planet.
On this larger issue,
the science is perfectly clear. We are dangerously degrading our biosphere,
and for decades policy-makers have been warned of the dire consequences
of ignoring this systemic environmental decline. As with New Orleans,
we are all living on borrowed time. We are rapidly approaching a planetary
tipping-point from which there will likely be no recovery. But just
as with Katrina, governments have ignored warnings of global ecological
collapse as well. How much longer can we afford such shortsighted, selfish
ignorance?
In Greek mythology,
Cassandra was bestowed the power to foretell the future but no one would
believe her. She warned of a Trojan Horse, to no avail. The rest, as
they say, is history.
Will we as a society
learn from this perfect storm, reaffirm our "respect for nature"
and attend to our deteriorating planetary life-support systems before
it's too late, or not?
Richard Steiner
is professor and conservation specialist at the University of Alaska.
© 2005 Seattle
Post-Intelligencer