Catastrophe In Burma

My Top 3

Human settlement is always intruding on nature, and sometimes nature intrudes right back. This week’s Burma cyclone disaster is one of the worst examples of that phenomenon in recent memory. Just look at this Washington Post map of Cyclone Nargis’s path across the Irrawaddy delta:

The storm’s eye made a beeline across the delta region, its counterclockwise winds driving storm surge tides up 13 feet. A delta, of course, is flat and wet. The sea basically rolls inland, swamping everything for miles – in this case, small fishing and rice farming communities with no flood control infrastructure at all.

This disaster is immeasurably compounded by the awfulness of the political situation – the secretive, kleptocratic Burmese regime doesn’t give a damn about such things (or, only inasmuch as they might lead to political instability). I don’t know if having Laura Bush blast the Burmese generals is productive at this point, when the most important thing is logistics. Chris Mooney has an interesting take on the cyclone here.

What worries me, though, is that as the world changes, the frequency and the character of these mega-catastrophes also changes – for the worse.

Obviously, the character of a natural disaster varies depending on where it takes place: urban or rural, the developed or underdeveloped worlds. In the United States and the developed worlds, almost all hurricane strikes are to some degree urban or suburban – the American landscape of homes, apartments, box stores, government buildings – and the population is protected by some kind of infrastructure along with evacuation policies and post-disaster aid. That minimizes loss of life but creates a moral hazard situation where we just keep rebuilding without ever reflecting on whether it’s wise to be there in the first place.

In the developing world, meanwhile, hurricane strikes are more rural – there’s considerably less infrastructure, but lots of people. So many more die. And since there wasn’t much stuff to begin with, it’s easy to rebuild. And so the same pattern repeats.

As time goes by, though, these two distinct scenarios may converge into something even more horrific. It’s the century of the megalopolis, after all. More developing countries will have populations concentrated in vulnerable, built-up areas. In rural areas, environmental degradation will reduce natural resilience to storms. There will be more people and more infrastructure, the oceans will be rising, and the pace of development will far exceed the capacity of governments to anticipate disaster. Katrina was a kind of hybrid, an urban-developed world-underdeveloped world disaster, and it may also be a model for what’s to come around the world.