Reflections on the beginning of the ‘06 hurricane season

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Posted on May 31, 2006
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

 Okay, two new studies cited in the NY Times today support the theory that global warming is creating stronger hurricanes.  In anticipation of the report's release, here is the web site of Matthew Huber of Purdue University, one of those involved in the study.  The study results are to be published this week in Geophysical Research Letters.  You have to pay for this service, but I give you the link in any case.  I'm sure there will be other stories about it besides the one in the Times.

I bring up hurricanes today not only because of this study, and in honor of the beginning of the hurricane season tomorrow, but also to take note of the level of denial that exists even after these past two years of devastaing record-breaking hurricanes in Florida and along the Gulf Coast.  Check out this article if you haven't already (also from the Times — forgive me all you daily Times readers if this seems redundant, but I want to make a comment):

"Emergency management officials groaned this month at a poll by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research Inc., which found that of 1,100 adults along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, 83 percent had taken no steps to fortify their homes this year, 68 percent had no hurricane survival kits and 60 percent had no family disaster plan. 

"'I can't rightfully say I see any increased sense of people getting ready,' said Larry Gispert, emergency management director in Hillsborough County, Fla., home to Tampa. 'It's like a psychological issue — 'If I don't think about bad things, bad things won't happen.' "

This is why, though I call my project Ecological Hope, I actually struggle a lot with despair.  My god, if these past two years are not a wake-up call…  How bad does it have to get to change this culture of denial, of exceptionalism (bad things only happen to other people)?  Here we still have tens of thousands of displaced people from Katrina alone — there are others, you know, not just former New Orleans residents — and thousands more living in tiny cramped FEMA trailers, vulnerble to weather far less extreme than a hurricane, and inhuman places to warehouse human beings in any case.

So count on luck, folks.  Maybe this busy hurricane season, predicted to be as busy or worse than last year, will spare you.  And don't count on your government to help you.  The Bush administration doesn't seem to have learned many lessons either — nor have most developers and the cheery business community, ready to defend your right to go right back there and live in the same vulnerable places, and to put more houses and beach resorts on our coasts and in our flood plains — though the globe will warm and the waters will rise and the storms will grow stronger.

And just for fun, here's something I just clicked onto regarding more dire predictions of global warming — from that radical institution, NASA.  Might be something to keep in your files for all those naysayers we encounter.

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