Swamp Funk (continued)
(Revised and edited, Monday 9-5-05)
Last Monday, as many of us were waiting to find out what Katrina would do, Chris Mooney listed a few Elephants in the Room - i.e., sea level rise, coastal wetlands losses, and the hurricane-global warming link – and asked if anyone had any other suggestions. I was going to add, lack of the capacity to respond to all of the above. As I pondered this, events took over. Now, I’m adding, lack of capacity for shame, and am asking myself if we have been occupied by the Borg. But resistance is not futile yet – this one has resonated across the political spectrum for a change, or at least some of it – even some Fox news reporters have started acting like reporters (Crooks and Liars has the video footage). Regarding the current and immediate situation, I don’t have anything to add to the excellent reporting and blogging being done elsewhere – see Effect Measure for an excellent post – by real public health professionals, that debunks myths about disasters, public health and the spread, or not, of disease. I will raise a few science policy related issues that should be kept in mind as the situation unfolds, and as longer term response issues arise.
In an earlier post about hurricanes and New Orleans written back in June, I referred to a statement by Mary Landrieu, who said that there isn’t a business in the U.S. that doesn’t in some way benefit from the wetlands and barrier islands along Louisiana’s coast and that, if pressed, she is sure she could document this. I added that, if a single hurricane were to take the critical path for New Orleans, she wouldn’t have to. Now she doesn’t – Katrina was close enough. An article in the Washington Post also summarized on the Environmental Economics blog, begins to flesh out some details, going well beyond speculating about the implications of impacts on oil and gas facilities for the price of gas, to examine also such things as the impacts on prices of both imported and exported commodities that rely on the port, the loss of facilities that produce key ingredients used in a broad range of products, the loss of oyster beds, and some expected ramifications across other economic sectors. Don’t expect Santa Claus this year. Furthermore, rather than having to place some trust in science, now we can all participate in this assessment, as we will all be learning more about these ramifications first hand, in the months and years to come, as this disaster exposes these economic linkages, along with all of our other vulnerabilities and social dysfunctions of which it is merely a symptom. And perhaps it will lead us to place a greater value on the wetlands that support 30% of fishery production in the lower 48 states, and that, once upon a time, prevented even more routine storm surges from spilling over the shoreside levees of Lake Pontchartrain, and on the many other services that they provide. According to Bob Gramling, a sociologist at Louisiana in Lafayette, who has built his career studying the relationships between people and the wetlands of coastal Louisiana, this did not happen prior to the current accelerated loss.
To be sure, the loss of wetlands is in large part a result of the construction of the levees that were built to protect New Orleans, which lies in a bowl in between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi, because they also prevent the deposit of sediments that, normally, would nourish and build the marshes. There may have been better ways to engineer river control structures, but, as things have been done up until now, the only way that the city of New Orleans can exist where it is, is through continued vigilance and maintenance of the levees, for which funding was dramatically cut to enable tax cuts and who knows what in Iraq. Another key culprit is the construction of canals and shoreline facilities that support the offshore oil and gas industry. So maintaining levees and restoring wetlands should be considered part of the cost of shipping – the reason New Orleans is located where it is, as well as the cost of doing business in the offshore oil and gas industry.
With all of this wealth that has been flowing out of the region and through the port of New Orleans, we also have to ask why the region leads the nation in poverty rates and can barely even run their schools. This is an issue that has been on my radar screen since the late 1980s, when I toured the coastal region with a committee of the Nationial Academy of Sciences (for which I was a research assistant at the time), that was evaluating the environmental studies conducted by the Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service to support offshore oil and gas exploration and development, which are suppose to include consideration of the socioeconomic impacts. The meeting and tour were hosted by Bob Gramling, who forwarded me a few of his more recent papers after my earlier post and who we may eventually hear from, but my guess is, he is swamped at the moment. For now, I will just recall what one of the other participants in the group, the anthropologist Roy Rappoport called Warrilow’s Law, which applies as much to Louisiana as to Papua New Guinea, which is that “the distribution of benefits of large scale mineral extraction is inversely proportional to distance from it, whereas the distribution of its costs and damages is directly proportional to proximity to it.” In this case, Southern Louisiana gets the holes. The dollars go to Houston, New York, London and probably Mars. The costs are borne by the people of Southern Louisiana, where the looting started at the top, a long time ago. Before the meeting, I also visited MMS to get some documents, and vividly recall the words of an MMS official who was in charge of producing those environmental studies, to the effect that, they just needed a good crisis – then nobody would care about those studies. They would just want the gas.
Just a few things to keep in mind when House Speaker Dennis Hastert asks whether it makes sense to spend billions of dollars to rebuild a city that’s seven feet under sea level, and whether the government should be responsible for footing the bill. Having the capacity to respond to disaster, is perhaps the most basic reasons to even have a government. Access to food and water is the most basic element of human security. And having the capacity to hold public officials accountable is the most basic prerequisite keeping a democracy. Last I heard, not only has there been a failure to provide food and water to those who had been unable to evacuate – most because they could not afford to – others because buses they had hired were comandeered by the government, many are now being prevented from even walking out of the city. The entire Bush administration should spare further agony and just resign, but fantasy is a luxury we can’t afford. We might recall also that it was the Mississippi flood of 1927 that set the stage for the New Deal. The city of New Orleans was spared in that one – although they also blew a strategically located hole in a levee just to make sure. That was done at the expense of even poorer rural communities who were not given all of the compensation promised, but at least they were evacuated. (If you haven’t already, read The Rising Tide by John M. Barry.
So I expect that there are big changes coming. And there is undoubtedly more to come on this blog, and lots of work to do. Flood victims are arriving in places all over the country, including Washington DC. Some personal friends also made it here from New Orleans for events that had been previously planned. For those of you in the DC area, Margie Perez, former DC resident and Part Time Goddess, who has been flooded out of her N.O. apartment, will be performing with friends on Wednesday evening, in what will now be a benefit for hurricane relief. Place: the new Domku bar, 821 Upshur St. NW (DC’s Petworth neighborhood, near intersection of Georgia & Kansas Avenues), 8:30 pm, courtesy of The Deej, donations, $5.
