Hopedance

"Learning from Katrina," a lecture by David Orr
Summarized by Harold Dumke


“Katrina is a microcosm of several issues that needed to be addressed. It was an act of God magnified by human behavior,” David Orr said.

One of these issues was the world’s -- specifically America’s -- obsession with the combustion of fossil fuels, which leads to global warming. The temperature of ocean water is higher than it has ever been, and as a result, hurricanes heading inland hit this warmer water and greatly intensify.

Global warming, is actually climate destabilization. Small changes in temperatures have massive implications worldwide. They cause extreme conditions such as lowest low temperatures, highest highs, storms, droughts, rising sea levels, new diseases, changes in ecosystems and the death of coral reefs.

Also, this destabilization causes 150,000 climate-related human deaths each year. This past century was the hottest in the past millennium. To put it in perspective, the average temperature of the Earth rose five degrees Celcius in the 5000 years previous to the year 1900. Since then, the average temperature has risen another five degrees. Carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping, “greenhouse,” gas that’s most commonly produced by automobiles, has aided this warming.
We should also have a larger vision of the effects our actions have directly on the land. For example, the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia are being destroyed at an alarming rate. The federal government is allowing private companies to cut the tops off of these mountains to get at the coal veins more easily. The tops of the mountains are dumped into the valleys between them, flattening the terrain. This practice, while serving immediate consumer interests, is destroying the ecosystem and the people and culture of the area.

So why isn’t anyone trying to stop this? In 1973, Senator Henry Jackson proposed a land use policy for the United States that simply called on the country to have a plan on how they should use the land, in order to stop the sort of destruction taking place now. The plan was dismissed as a communist plot to take over the country. Nothing has been proposed since.

When did patriotism stop meaning “defense of the land”? If Al-Qaeda, for example, revealed a plot to destroy a million acres of American land, we would have been outraged and ready to fight. Instead, the United States will destroy that land over the next few years with projects such as mountaintop removal.

Disasters like the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina have ripped the veil off of the United States. We are not the country we tell ourselves we are. The lack of ecological knowledge has made recovery from Hurricane Katrina more difficult. Environmental concerns are the most pressing issues facing us as a society today. No one should graduate from college without being ecologically literate. We need to learn how to make connections between disparate things like Katrina, the lack of an energy policy and the war in Iraq.

Design needs to become a healing art. As we develop buildings, automobiles, roads and everything else, we need to be conscious of its impact on our world. We should not think of this nation as bitterly divided left to right or liberal to conservative, but that all sides should work together for a sustainable future, so there will be good, usable land for our children and grandchildren.


For the complete story, go to http://spectrum.buffalo.edu/article.php?id=21897

David Orr is a distinguished professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College, Ohio. He is a renowned author and speaker on environmental issues and has won several awards for his work.