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September 01, 2005
Attempts to control nature = futile
The tremendous flooding and destruction (not to mention looting and crime) in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast have been well documented in print, TV, blogs, and other media. But what isn't really being discussed -- perhaps now is not the time, but it's going to have to happen eventually -- is that we need to think more carefully about where it is and is not suitable to live.
People who build housing on flood plains, barrier islands, sand dunes, scenic cliffs on the West Coast, and such places need to understand the geography involved and the forces of nature. There is a good reason why insurance companies won't insure properties in a lot of these places -- they know that their destruction is inevitable.
A 1989 book called The Control of Nature, by John McPhee, described the elaborate efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers to control the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana -- it's a distributary of the Mississippi (a distributary is the opposite of a tributary -- it's one river that splits off from another). Millions of dollars have been spent, and millions of tons of earth moved, to prevent the river from doing what it naturally wants to do -- change course from time to time, as sediments are carried downstream.
The Mississippi itself is a larger version of this. The whole levee system that stretches along the river, artificially constraining it, is a maintenance nightmare, and it's a disaster waiting to happen -- as evidenced in the huge floods of 1993.
As any geography major can tell you, building an entire city below sea level does not make sense -- any more than building on a flood plain or coastal dune makes sense. Sooner or later, disaster is going to strike -- it's a matter of when, not if.
Predictably, some elements of the Green movement have claimed that Hurricane Katrina was the result of global warming. If you're a regular reader of my column, you know that I'm a skeptic on the subject. I don't go so far as to dismiss the idea that human activity may be affecting global climate -- but I argue that the evidence is much less clear than is commonly believed, and that there are many factors other than what we do to the air that affect climate. As far as the hurricane is concerned, well, it was a big one -- but it was by no means unique or the biggest hurricane we've ever seen. And again contrary to popular belief, hurricane activity is not significantly higher in recent years than in the past -- last year's total number of tropical storms in the Atlantic was almost exactly the 30-year average. It just looked like we had a bad hurricane season, because there happened to be four in a row that hit Florida. Unfortunate, but not significant in terms of climate trends.
What's the lesson? Nature is not under our control, and we'd do well to pay more attention to that when we make decisions on where we should live.
Posted by Urbie at September 1, 2005 09:24 PM