My heart is with the two million folks fleeing their homes due to Hurricane Gustav. How frightening and painful! I wish for all of them to be safe and secure.
There is more, though; the head and the heart should always work together. Doesn’t it make more sense to flee permanently to more sustainable homes than to continue living in hurricane-prone areas like New Orleans that you will always have to be fleeing from? See my first post on this topic.
I realize this topic is just as politically charged as the tallest tree in a forest is vulnerable to lightning. The Bush administration’s terrible handling of the Katrina evacuation in 2005 naturally means they have got to do a better job this time, which it appears they are doing. But all of that is focusing on the trees, i.e. the current situation, when we ought to focus on the forest, i.e. the big picture and longer-term situation.
The big picture is that we — both the U.S. and human beings in general — need to shift from trying to dominate the natural world to instead working side by side with it. In the long term, our ‘victories’ over natural forces will always be temporary. We cannot control events like hurricanes, forest fires and rivers flooding into their historic floodplains. They will always happen, and science is clear that global warming will only create more extreme weather events and more flooding of low-lying areas.
Common sense tells us that people should not live in the paths of hurricanes, forest fires and river-floods — and our economy and GDP should not appear to be boosted or improved by all the activity of rebuilding areas that needn’t have been destroyed if they’d been wisely located in the first place. Political leaders of both parties need to become much more far-sighted in policies around land-use and development, and human beings all around the world, not just New Orleans, need to accept that the world is rapidly changing in the face of global warming.
Our hearts may tell us that people should be able to keep living where they have historically lived. But our heads can see that life is all about change, and our hearts can see it is more kind in the long run to accept change, and to relocate people who live directly in harm’s way, than to keep setting people up for more and more of the harm that is sure to keep coming back.
Very well said, when will we learn that we are part of the natural world we live in?