The forests protect us

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Posted on September 8, 2007
Filed Under Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

I think most of us know this now. One of the scary things about the strong hurricanes predicted for the future because of the rising temperatures of oceans and seas is that we have destroyed so much of the natural buffers that protect us from devastating landfalls.

Back in 1998, when Hurricane Mitch struck Central America, it hit one of the most deforested countries in the hemisphere, Honduras, and sat there for nearly a week dropping rain measured in feet, not inches. Between 9,000 and 12,000 people died or disappeared.

In neighboring Nicaragua, one side of a volcano that had been undermined by overdevelopment collapsed under the weight of the water that fell into and along the crater walls. Over a thousand people were buried in the mudslide.

So it was interesting to me that two recent catastrophic hurricanes, Dean and Felix, struck land at Category 5 intensity, one in Mexico and one in Central America, and while tragic devasation occurred, there was nothing like the kind of death toll and destruction that we saw with Katrina (only a Category 3 when it struck Louisiana), or with Rita and Wilma that same year.

Why? Because, reported the NY Times this week, the hurricanes hit heavily forested areas and the force of the storms was quickly blunted when they made landfall. Marc Lacey reported:

There is no way to stop hurricanes, but two fierce storms that slammed ashore recently on the Caribbean coast of Mexico and Central America show the importance of forests and mangrove swamps in slowing them and lessening their human toll.

As explained by Rev. Jose Andres Tamayo, an environmental activist and priest in Honduras:

The trees secure the ground and offer a buffer from the storms.

One of the reasons the destruction was so vast in New Orleans was that, over many decades, the delta was breaking apart and falling into the Gulf of Mexico because the damming and dredging and leveeing of the Mississippi River prevented sediment from flowing naturally to the delta to replenish what was inexorably lost. Add to that the canals carved out to service the oil and gas rigs, and then a city largely built below sea level, and you had the makings of a great disaster.

And of course we have done similar things all along our coasts — overdeveloped, destroyed protective natural barriers, provided expensive beach houses for our summer play, built towering hotels, as in Ocean City, Maryland, right on the sand dunes.

Only protective sea walls protect these playgrounds, and they will not withstand the forces coming from the rising seas as the oceans expand because of global warming.

To put this in perspective, right now Florida is preparing to put a huge section of the Everglades, one of the greatest wetland systems in the world, under pavement for a gigantic new airport.

This in a state that can hardly count the billions of dollars in damages from hurricanes just in the past 4 years or so.

In a google search, I came upon this paper by scientists in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton about our increasing vulnerability to the destructive forces of hurricanes and earthquakes because of our insistence on allowing development in places where, well, we shouldn’t. The article is entitled, Why the United States Is Becoming More Vulnerable to Natural Disasters . I invite you to read it, but here are excerpts:

Increase in natural disaster costs appears to correlate with changes in population and wealth as measured by revenue. Revenue is an indicator of wealth for the region. It is the total common tax revenue in the state, excluding items that are inconsistent among states, such as lottery taxes. As seen in Figure 4, the fractional growth (relative to 1970) of population and revenue has increased markedly in disaster-prone areas of the nation. States most affected by the costs of hurricanes (Florida, North Carolina, and Texas) and earthquakes (California and Washington) show the largest increase in both population and revenue. More people are moving into coastal areas that are vulnerable to natural hazards–particularly earthquakes on the west coast and hurricanes on the east coast. Furthermore, the effect is amplified because the people who are moving into these coastal areas represent the higher wealth segment of our society, plus their wealth has been increasing…

Although global phenomena such as climate change, sea-level rise, and the El Niño Southern Oscillation amplify the impact of certain disasters, such as hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes, they do not explain the large increase in U.S. costs over the last decade. We are becoming more vulnerable to natural disasters because of the trends of our society rather than those of nature. In other words, we are placing more property in harm’s way.

In many ways, the trends seem paradoxical. After all, most natural disasters occur in areas of known high risk such as barrier islands, flood plains, and fault zones. Over time, one would expect that the costs of natural disasters would create economic pressures to encourage responsible land use in such areas.

The long-term economic impact of low-probability, high-cost events such as earthquakes and hurricanes are not being incorporated into the planning and development of our societal infrastructure. Economic incentives for responsible land use have been stifled by legislated insurance rates and federal aid programs that effectively subsidize development in hazard-prone areas. And while there will always be great political pressure to provide economic relief after a disaster, there has been little political interest in requiring predisaster mitigation…

With an improved understanding of hazard vulnerability, we can create (1) public awareness that most natural disasters are not random acts, but rather the direct and predictable consequence of inappropriate land use, and (2) broad recognition of the enormous long-term costs to the general taxpayer for inappropriate land use. If we can develop a society more resilient to earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, perhaps then we will learn to view such events not as random acts that destroy our property and threaten our lives, but rather as the natural processes that build our landscape and shape our environment.

So while we develop, we not only put lives and property in harm’s way, we not only put an enormous drain on the economy and our tax dollars trying to protect all this stuff and pay out when disasters strike, but we are also destroying the very nature that would help protect us from the destruction.

One day, sanity may kick in — when we can finally wrest ourselves from this mentality that development should trump nature every time, if I can just have my beach house or my ocean view.


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