Owning Harvey chaos
Watching the hurricane in Texas ravage the coast, and Houston in particular, has been a heart-wrenching experience. Those of us in Wisconsin are far away from the devastation, but many of us have familial or personal connections to the Lone Star State and acutely feel the tragedy.
Natural disasters don’t discriminate. They are, after all, the forces of nature at work, and they don’t care about our race, income, gender, class or any boundaries we draw.
Given all of that, natural disasters may well be one of the few uniting forces in our lives. Even still, their effects tend to reveal, with deadly clarity, what divides us.
As my friend and author Jacob Remes so eloquently put it in a recent piece for Time, “Water has no mind. Wind cannot think. Hurricanes have no intent. Liquid, pulled by gravity, flows to the lowest point. Yet it also flows into the cleavages created by our society, seeping into our social cracks.”
In short: If you see disparate impacts with Harvey, human choices caused them.
You’ll likely see dozens or more think pieces about how the flooding damage in Houston was all-too predictable. Experts and others have been sounding alarm bells for decades but have been met with silence or hostility. Houston is a prime example of hodgepodge laws and regulations and unfettered development.
The city is built on a dry lake bed — one giant flood plain — and much of the surrounding grassland that could have helped absorb at least some of the rainfall has long since been paved over. There is too much cement in the Space City and not enough green space. Still, more than 50 inches of rain in just a few days (the most ever recorded from a storm in the lower 48 states) is a lot for any land to handle.
Texas has dismissed several attempts to pass legislation that would have upgraded and improved infrastructure to help prevent or lessen damage from flooding. Bills introduced never left committee, thanks to a Republican-controlled state government that refused to pass anything that even mentioned the words “climate change.”
We can deny the human effects on climate all we want, but the water doesn’t care. Neither do the increasingly severe and frequent droughts, famines, heat waves, coastal erosion and even the spread of Lyme disease.
They do, however, have a disparate impact on poorer neighborhoods and communities of color, who traditionally have less access to political power. It’s no secret that the majority of Texas’ Superfund sites, refineries and petrochemical plants are located in or near lower income areas, who suffer greater rates of pollution-related illness as a result. Many currently face toxic aftermaths due to Harvey’s impact, having already released enormous amounts of hazardous materials into the air and water.
Why does this matter to those of us in Wisconsin? If the sheer human cost isn’t enough to move you, consider the lessons to be learned: How do we approach development in or near sensitive ecosystems? The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources recently has turned to deregulation, as highlighted by allowing Foxconn to disregard environmental regulations.
It’s absolutely heartening to see all of the regular folks volunteering to help out in Texas, proving once again that, in times of crisis, humans generally rise to the occasion. But we have to get serious about what we’re doing to our environment, and what we can do to help prevent or at least lessen the negative impact of major disasters. Thoughtful development policies and, yes, regulations have to be put in place and fairly enforced.
The most marginalized among us will suffer first and worst, but in the end, the water — and the weather — won’t discriminate.