One month after Cyclone Nargis, millions of Burmese remain with inadequate food, contaminated water and no proper shelter. At least 130,000 have died or gone missing, and the toll from epidemic disease in the coming months could be as high again.
We hear much about the administrative and logistical mire of Burma, of a government denying that disaster has struck and obstructing aid work. We hear about the confiscation of relief supplies. We hear less about the host of local Burmese organisations, often enjoying co-operation from local authorities and supported by a smaller number of international agencies, that are present on the sodden ground of southern Burma. There is an Asian response: experienced disaster teams from India and Thailand are arriving. Expatriate Burmese physicians are flocking home to help in a quiet relief effort. Senior monks have also joined the cause, gaining access to the hardest-hit regions, such as Bogale. Monastic, church and local volunteer networks are able to reach even remote villages inaccessible to international personnel. “Building trust with the military is essential,” said a local doctor. “Without it, the politics take over.”
Most emergency supplies can be procured locally, but relief teams lack funds to purchase fuel, rent vehicles and pay volunteers. Tragically, the first days of the disaster, when emergency logistics were most needed, passed without outside help. With a few days’ warning and the aircraft and boats for an immediate response, many lives could have been saved. It’s a rule of thumb in disaster response that the first assistance comes from the nearest source, and that it is small in scale but efficient. People struck by calamity are responders as well as victims. One of the big lessons from the response to the 2004 tsunami was that official aid efforts should support those local responses rather than—as too often happened—foreign experts arriving and deciding that they knew best.
Has the intergovernmental panel on climate change got its numbers wrong? That’s what a recent paper in Nature seems to be saying, to the delight of climate change sceptics. Whereas the IPCC forecasts a rise in global mean temperature of around 0.2-0.3 oC per decade, researchers in Germany using computer modelling found that temperatures are likely to remain flat until around 2015, as indeed they have done since about 1998.
Sceptics will argue this shows scientists don’t have a clue about climate and that the dire forecasts from models count for nothing. But this would be like saying that because we took a wrong turn on the road from London to Edinburgh, we have no idea where Edinburgh is.
Is there a pub bore in the country who has not been shaking his head over his pint and opining, “Well, if you will build on a flood plain…”? These armchair prophets were merely parroting phrases they heard from Westminster. “Gordon Brown has to accept…” said shadow communities secretary Eric Pickles, “that if you build houses on flood plains, it increases the likelihood that people will be flooded.” But David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, countered that, “There’s simply no way we could [say]… that we can’t build any more new homes because of concerns about flood plains… much of the country is a flood plain.”
What exactly is a flood plain? The answer might start with a reminder that rivers, unlike canals, are not compelled to respect fixed boundaries. They are, in fact, not things at all, but processes. Surface water flow from rain or snow melt, erosion, and sediment transport combine to produce a river channel that constantly shifts, redefining its landscape. The meanders gradually push back the surrounding hill slopes and smooth out a broad, flat valley floor, thick with fertile sediment: the perfect setting for agrarian settlements, or so it seems. But when the waters rise above the banks, there is nothing to stop them washing across the plain. Levees may try, but struggle against the fact that a river’s curves are always moving: the Mississippi shifts its tracks by up to 20 metres a year. A fundamental problem for construction near rivers is that buildings stay put, but rivers don’t.
What’s the solution? To judge from recent events, it hasn’t changed much in a hundred years: pile up sandbags. But some precautions are still little heeded: replacing soil with concrete exacerbates the dangers by increasing run-off, and the inadequacies of Britain’s Victorian drainage system are no secret. Flood defence is not sophisticated: it is largely a matter of installing physical barriers. But permanent walls can conflict with access and amenity—no one would want a three-foot wall all along the Thames. And some areas are impossible to protect this way. So there is no real call for new technology, only a need to recognise that flood threats now have to be considered routine, not once-in-a-lifetime risks.
Hurricane Katrina has placed, if only temporarily, America’s race problems at the forefront of international consciousness. The slow response of government and the conduct of some of the affected communities were seen as symbols of the catastrophe that is said to be race relations in America: blacks are marginalised and left behind, some of them respond with behaviour that has no place in a civilised country, and only a deluge of federal money and national guilt can wash away the problem.
But this symbolism was mainly misleading or wrong. Contrary to the impression created by the images of black looters and the filthy conditions in the Superdome, the vast majority of blacks in America are law-abiding members of the working, middle, or, increasingly, upper-middle class. And contrary to the domestic hand-wringing, the solution to America’s remaining race problems lies at least as much within the shrinking number of black problem communities as it does with government.
Above all, this country still provides something which has made it a beacon to the world—an opportunity for people to overcome the disadvantages of their birth. Trust me, I have been there. I was born in rural Virginia into an abusive and impoverished household of 12 children. None of my siblings—seven boys and four girls—graduated from high school. Although I, too, dropped out of school after completing the eighth grade aged 14, I nevertheless managed to earn five college degrees from an array of institutions, starting at a local community college and ending at an Ivy League university. I have been a divorced welfare mother of two sons. I have worked as an assistant in a nursing home. I have been an unskilled worker in a garment factory and a door-to-door salesperson. Now I am a university professor. Nobody can tell me that America does not provide possibilities for people to overcome poverty.
Modern American politics is a kind of media-saturated, accelerated populism. This has led naturally to a nationalisation of crisis response. At the time of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and the Mississippi flood of 1927, America’s federal government bore little responsibility. But today, the public watches disasters on realtime television, sees bodies in the streets, and expects the federal government to act.
The administration of George Bush Snr was criticised for its failure to respond quickly to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and other major disasters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), created only a decade earlier, was a poorly financed dumping ground for minor courtiers.
Bill Clinton had a better grasp of disaster politics. He gave Fema cabinet-level status, expanded its budget, and promised that the agency would not wait for a governor’s phone call before it deployed resources. To head Fema, Clinton chose James Lee Witt, who had experience and sound political sense. A Witt-clone became the hero of a 1997 NBC mini-series in which Fema rescued the citizens of Dallas from devastation caused by a wayward asteroid.
The world’s great cities face serious, even catastrophic problems. Terrorists have planted bombs in London’s Underground and bus systems. Floods have wiped out New Orleans, and fires incinerated scores of impoverished Africans living in crowded, seamy Paris apartments.
Everywhere—from New Orleans to London and Paris—the middle classes, whatever their colour, are deserting the core for safer and more affordable suburbs, following in the footsteps of high-tech industries and major corporations.
Yet rather than address serious issues like housing, schools, transport, jobs and security, mayors and policy gurus from Berlin and London to Sydney and San Francisco have adopted what can be best be described as the “cool city strategy.” If you can somehow make your city the rage of the hipster set, they insist, all will be well.
New Orleans, the most recent victim of catastrophic urban decline, is a case in point. Once a great
commercial hub, the city’s economic and political elites have placed all their bets on New Orleans becoming a tourist and culture centre. Indeed, just a month before the disaster, city leaders held a conference that promoted a “cultural economy initiative” strategy for attracting high-end industry. The other big state initiative was not levee improvement but a $450m expansion for the now infamous convention centre.
This rush to hipness has its precedents, perhaps even in Roman festivals or medieval fairs. But in the past, most cities did not see entertainment as their main purpose. Rome was an imperial seat; Manchester, Berlin, Chicago and Detroit foundries of the industrial age; London, New York, and later Tokyo, global financial centres.
Perhaps even worse, the lure of “coolness” leads cities to ignore the fundamental issues—infrastructure, middle-class flight, terrorism—that have so much more to do with their long-term prospects. Cities once boasted of their thriving middle-class neighbourhoods, churches, warehouses, factories and high-rise office towers. Today they set their value by their inventory of jazz clubs, gay bars, art museums, luxury hotels and condos.
The advocates of this approach are a new generation of “hip cool” mayors, including Ken Livingstone, Berlin’s Klaus Wowereit, San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom, Baltimore’s Martim O’Malley, Detroit’s “hip hop” mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and the gay chief executive of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe.
Ken Livingstone sees London’s future tied to “the richness, breadth and diversity of its cultural and creative resources.” Theatres, sports stadiums, museums and cinemas are, he notes, “what many of us enjoy most about living here.” Culture, not commerce, is “London’s heartbeat.” For a city “vulnerable to the up and downs of the global political and economic system,” the mayor proclaims, culture and tourism represent an ideal way to counteract “the negative impact of such events.”
This refocus of urban policy around culture and tourism has wide appeal, particularly in continental Europe. Expensive—and increasingly economically marginal cities—like Paris, Vienna and post-cold war Berlin have all embraced the notion of a culturally-based lifestyle economy.
Berlin epitomises the trend. In the 1990s, massive funds were expended to make the restored German capital into the business capital of Mitteleuropa. These ambitions foundered on the city’s high taxes, red tape, and generally anti-business culture. Over 100,000 jobs have left in recent years, unemployment is nearly 20 per cent and the population is declining, as people flee to the suburbs or more prosperous parts of Germany.
Faced with such problems, what does the mayor of the bankrupt city propose? Cut taxes, build new infrastructure, find ways to keep the middle classes and businesses? No, Mayor Wowereit pegs the future to selling Berlin as “the city of glamour.” To him, “the most decisive aspect is to bring creative young people to Berlin.” Somehow, he believes, this will turn the city’s sad economy around.
Similar thinking has been picked up by political and business leaders in grittier places like Liverpool and Manchester, Cleveland, Baltimore and Detroit. Faced with population decline of 30 to 40 per cent over the past half century, these cities have all created programmes designed to lure gays, bohemians and young “creatives” to their towns.
This ephemeralisation of urbanism derives, in part, from the theories of Richard Florida, an American academic whose theories about the “creative class” have captivated many city leaders. Using research drawn largely from the dot-com era of the late 1990s, Florida insists that the key to urban success lies in attracting such groups of young twentysomething singles, artists and homosexuals. Florida’s favourite hip cities, not surprisingly, are places like Sydney, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Boston, areas with lots of students, artists and gays—and the lowest percentages of families. Other less hip locales have been duly forewarned, as a headline in the Washington Monthly put it, that cities “without gays and rock bands are losing the economic race.”
There is little evidence that this is really how urban economies work. It turns out that many of the most prized members of the “creative class” are not 25-year-old hip cools, but fortysomething adults who, particularly if they have children, end up gravitating to the suburbs and more economically dynamic cities like Phoenix, Boise, Charlotte or Orlando.
The false promise of Florida’s “creative class” has been obvious for the last five years, particularly with the collapse of the dot-com boom. In the late 1990s there did appear to be a new kind of urban economy—driven by black-clad graphic designers, programmers and marketeers—that was bringing new jobs, wealth and residents to old urban areas from San Francisco’s “multimedia gulch” to New York’s ultra-trendy “silicon alley.”
London, 30th July 2030. The sky is a menacing iron grey, and has been so since soon after the cataclysmic super-eruption in the US five months earlier. Snow lies half a metre deep on Oxford Street, and on the frozen Thames crowds of men, women and children jostle at stalls to barter for dubious meat scraps to supplement their meagre state rations. Across the planet, millions of people have already died from the cold, while hundreds of millions starve as harvests continue to fail. A combination of freezing conditions and civil strife has triggered the breakdown of society in many countries, and the global village has fragmented into a million isolated hamlets, each faced with a daily battle for survival.
Drawing a line between science fiction and science fact, or between scaremongering and informing, can be notoriously difficult, and never more so than when dealing with those rare but inevitable cataclysmic events capable of tearing our comfortable world apart. The horror of Boxing day 2004, when more than a third of a million lives were lost in the space of a few hours, provided a glimpse of the reality. A few months later, the BBC television drama Supervolcano presented us with another taste of what we may face in the future. Reactions to the two events, one factual, one fictional, were contradictory. On the one hand, the Asian tsunami was lamented as impossible to predict or prepare for, a bolt from the blue. On the other hand, the BBC was charged by some with scaremongering for highlighting the terrible consequences of a future volcanic super-eruption in Wyoming’s Yellowstone national park. Yet it is hardly surprising that we are caught napping by extreme geophysical events if attempts to educate and inform about the threat they pose attract such hostility.
Whether we ignore them or not, geophysical phenomena far more lethal and destructive than the Asian tsunami are on their way. Volcanic super-eruptions, asteroid and comet impacts and ocean-wide tsunamis large enough to dwarf the Boxing day waves have left their imprint on our planet’s surface during its 4.6bn-year history, and they are not going to hold back simply because we have arrived on the scene. Furthermore, the hazardous events associated with human-induced climate change could make matters worse. These include a dramatic slowdown or shutdown of the Gulf stream and associated ocean currents, leading to bitter winters in Europe and eastern North America; and a rapid rise in sea levels in response to the catastrophic melting of one or both of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets.
The legacy of the Asian tsunami is not all bad. It is contributing to the establishment of tsunami early-warning systems, not only in the Indian ocean itself, but also in the Atlantic basin and Caribbean, thereby dramatically raising likely survival rates in the future. Equally importantly, the catastrophe has focused attention upon other geophysical hazards capable of having a severe regional or global impact. Notwithstanding some scepticism, primarily in the press, global geophysical events (GGEs) or gee-gees—such as the BBC’s Yellowstone eruption—have successfully made the transition from science fiction to science fact. Broadly speaking, they are now recognised for what they are: extreme natural events with probabilities of occurrence far below 1 per cent in any single year, but approaching 100 per cent in the long term. By forcing individuals, the media, governments, international agencies and disaster managers to recognise that the advent of a natural disaster affecting the entire planet is only a matter of time, the Asian tsunami has helped to raise awareness of the gee-gee menace. This, however, is only the beginning. We need to know far more about the nature of threats and how often we can expect them to occur. Most importantly, we need to know if we can act to prevent or avoid a future global catastrophe, or, at the least, mitigate or manage the worst consequences.
The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed 30,000 inhabitants, and led Voltaire to write a savage indictment of any form of religious belief that thinks God has created the best of all possible worlds. The Indian ocean earthquake has killed over 150,000, and it needs no Voltaire to remind us that God does not always act for the best.
If there is a supreme intelligence that has created this universe, its purposes clearly do not include the preservation of sentient beings from all harm. Yet it remains a plausible conjecture that there is such an intelligence.
In the first days of January, George W Bush summoned his father (the ex-president), his brother (the future president?), and even Bill Clinton (the ex-president and maybe the future ex of a president), directing them all to assist revving up America’s response to Asia’s tsunami. Seldom has so much star power been so superfluous. Even before the stars were activated, a spontaneous emotional earthquake had occurred somewhere deep within the western psyche, and a tsunami of money had begun rolling towards the Indian ocean. By 3rd January, one week after the disaster, private US donations amounted to over £87m; Britons had given £100m; Germans had come through with £107m. On 6th January, the New York Daily News, a gossipy tabloid not known for its interest in global poverty, plastered the number $103,474 across its front page—the amount the paper’s own appeal had raised in a 24-hour period.
Why this incredible response? There has been much talk of Christmas spirit, and of westerners’ ability to identify with a tragedy that killed western beachgoers. But there was something deeper at work here, and something quite ironic too. For the generosity reflected the unspoken feeling that this crisis stood apart from other crises in poor countries. The tsunami was unlike Aids, which seems to spread relentlessly because developing country leaders won’t challenge sexual taboo and social prejudice. The tsunami was unlike the murderous wars in Sudan or Congo, for which the blame can be laid even more clearly at the feet of local leaders. The tsunami was not even like the general problem of global poverty, which most people reasonably believe is tied up with corruption and bad policies, making it at least partly impervious to western assistance. Instead, the tsunami was a simple act of nature. It bubbled up from the sea, and laid waste to half a dozen countries; it had nothing to do with human greed or cowardice or corruption. And so westerners responded generously, confident that an uncomplicated, unpolitical disaster could be swiftly remedied with charity.
This was a return to a simple vision of disasters, one that has been mostly absent since the first postcolonial relief effort in Biafra in the late 1960s. Bob Geldof conjured the same vision in Ethiopia briefly in the 1980s: the simple images of starving children swept away the complicating political context, and the money flooded in.
The French medical relief agency, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), has always been viewed by other mainstream humanitarian organisations as the nonconformist of the relief world. This is not meant as a compliment. The great mantra of contemporary humanitarian action is co-ordination. The assumption is that private organisations like Oxfam, World Vision, and MSF must not set their policies by themselves, or even in consultation with the people on the ground they have come to assist, but must adhere to common frameworks for their actions that they thrash out together and in consultation with the relevant UN agencies such as the World Food Programme, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for refugees and Unicef. Only in this way, or so the conventional wisdom goes, can aid be effective.
From the Cambodian genocide through the Ethiopian terror famine of the mid-1980s to the tsunami today, MSF has argued otherwise. It has pointed out that, in practice, co-ordination often means subsuming the goal of humanitarian relief to other goals such as forging a durable peace or helping to secure a desired political outcome. These goals may be laudable, but the essential intuition of MSF is that all good things do not go together. The view at the UN or among most relief groups may be that humanitarian action is part of a “toolkit” of remedies available to the “international community” to deal with war-ravaged or failed states in the poor world, but MSF’s position has always been to insist that its priorities might not be peace, or development, or some decent political outcome in a Sierra Leone or a Kosovo.
Of course, as citizens, its workers might well subscribe to exactly those outcomes—the restoration of democratic rule in Sierra Leone, say, or a Nato military intervention in Kosovo. But as a member of an emergency medical relief group, this is not their role, not their responsibility and, in an argument that implictly turns the accusation of hubris back against those who routinely level it against MSF (this often means Oxfam), not their right because it passes beyond their level of competence. The MSF view is that emergency aid, above all the medical relief the group provides, is not an archimedean lever for peace-building or social justice, but rather something far more operationally and, by implication at least, morally limited—not charity in the 19th-century European imperial sense so much as the provision of what, in an earlier era, we knew as succour. In this, MSF is actually closer to the International Committee of the Red Cross than to relief organisations like Oxfam, the International Rescue Committee or Concern.
Post a comment »
Above all, this country still provides something which has made it a beacon to the world—an opportunity for people to overcome the disadvantages of their birth. Trust me, I have been there. I was born in rural Virginia into an abusive and impoverished household of 12 children. None of my siblings—seven boys and four girls—graduated from high school. Although I, too, dropped out of school after completing the eighth grade aged 14, I nevertheless managed to earn five college degrees from an array of institutions, starting at a local community college and ending at an Ivy League university. I have been a divorced welfare mother of two sons. I have worked as an assistant in a nursing home. I have been an unskilled worker in a garment factory and a door-to-door salesperson. Now I am a university professor. Nobody can tell me that America does not provide possibilities for people to overcome poverty.
