Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

At the risk of being accused of "politicizing" (see comments to this post, and this one) the monstrous disaster that hurricane Katrina has brought to the city of NO in particular and the Gulf coast in general, I want to share an excellent article from the NYT yesterday. First of all, the word politics and all its derivitives come from the Greek work "polis," or city. Politics is a social science having to do with all that concerns us as people living in community. A hurricane is a natural event, its effects on people are bound to move into the political realm. Anyone who thinks that politicians don't make hay from natural disasters needs this land I'd like to sell you in Florida. How people come together, or not, after a natural disaster is also political, how a government handles the aftermath is political. So, that said, I want to make perfectly clear that I am not blaming this hurricane on George Bush, or the Republicans. Okay? It is a disaster that has been waiting to happen since NO became the natural terminal port city for the Mississippi River.

The Gulf Coast has always been vulnerable to coastal storms, but over the years people have made things worse, particularly in Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina struck yesterday. Since the 18th century, when French colonial administrators required land claimants to establish ownership by building levees along bayous, streams and rivers, people have been trying to dominate the region's landscape and the forces of its nature.

Because the planet is an ecological system, whatever we do at one location impacts what happens in others. Because we humans can't help changing the natural systems to make them work for our benefit, we have the largest impact on global systems. In a sense, we have been preparing the Gulf coast area for this disaster for a couple of hundred years. That is a political, economic and ecological reality. Read the article here. I find it an exceptionally cogent analysis of the process that created this disaster-in-waiting: After Centuries of 'Controlling' Land, Gulf Learns Who's the Boss.

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