New Orleans is a Microcosm


Donate to the Red Cross. Many thousands are going on their 2nd day without food or clean water, and people are drowning in their attics.

I ache for all those poor people. But I am right now looking at my October 2001 issue of Scientific American at the article called Drowning New Orleans.

Every single thing that is currently happening in New Orleans was predicted in this article from 4 years ago. The policy makers knew New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. The policy makers knew or should have known that for each acre of wet lands destroyed, the next sea surge would be 1 foot higher than otherwise. Yet nothing was done, and the marshes continued to erode through a combination of natural process greatly accelerated by human tinkering and development. No one could agree on what to do, no one wanted to change, and no one in Congress or in the administration would listen anyway.

So despite all these things being known, all the threats assessed and plans drawn up to alleviate the foreseen disaster, nothing was done.

And now New Orleans is drowning, just as predicted.

This doesn't even take into account the related predictions over the last ten years that increased global temperatures would drive more frequent and higher energy hurricane events. Let's leave that ... except as how it touches on how I see New Orleans as a microcosm of our nation, and our planet.

We know so many things. In fact, our society is built on science that tells us how to grow our food most efficiently, how to develop antibiotics to fight disease, how to distribute electricity on a grid, how to control a thousand airplanes in the air at one time, how to network together millions of computers to form an internet, and so on.

Yet science is also sounding warning sirens, long and loud, on a great variety of fronts that we should address for our own safety, but for some reason we are refusing to listen.

I may go into this more in a later blog. I'm too furious to get into it at the moment.

For now, consider those suffering in the inundated regions, and consider what you can do, whether donating or volunteering, or even imitate me and compose fruitless rants for your blog.


Posted: Tue - August 30, 2005 at 10:50 PM          

©