Ten months ago, I was in the
Indian Himalayas, cut off from the media connections most Americans
take for granted.
On Christmas Day, a young neighbor from
the village, who taught math and spoke limited English, stopped by
to ask if I’d heard the news: A huge wave had slammed many parts of
Southeast Asia, he stammered, and thousands were feared dead in
India alone. In a nation that had long ago earned an advanced
degree from Mother Nature’s school of hard knocks, it didn’t
take long to recognize that this story was of a different
magnitude.
Still, as an American abroad, I could not help
but imagine that the destruction wrought by the tsunami, affecting
not only India but also Sri Lanka and Thailand, had more than a
little to do with the fact that these places are considered part of
the developing world. Superior communications, better roads and the
immense wealth of the United States would surely protect us from
such a fate, I thought.
I was wrong, of course. After the
events of the past couple of weeks, I now recognize, as no doubt
many do, that in our rush towards a global future, Americans have
lost sight of how the natural world works.
In our remote
Indian village, we lived without television, radio and the Internet
umbilical. The mountains, clouds and stars provided not just
entertainment, but information and solace. In America, broadcast
and electronic media tracked the storm called Katrina, until
somehow, the news reports overtook reality.
On Aug. 29,
television anchors declared that New Orleans had dodged a major
bullet. The hurricane veered away from the city, but a storm surge
caused Lake Portchartrain to overwhelm its levees. The surfeit of
coverage since, especially in my home in the heart of Texas where
thousands of Gulf Coast refugees have arrived, makes me feel like
I’m drowning. Then came Hurricane Rita, adding to the destruction
and confusion on the ground.
Here’s one lesson: America
may yet engineer its way out of the coming energy crisis (some will
observe it is already upon us) but, technology notwithstanding, the
earth is going to continue hurling nasty sliders towards home base.
You don’t have to look back to Pompeii to see that this is the way
it has always been; nor do you have to type “San Francisco quake”
into a search engine to envision a future when survivorship will
mean more than outsmarting one’s fellow contestants.
An
old college chum, who found shelter from Katrina in Austin, Texas,
tells me that the talk at backyard barbecues in Louisiana had
tended to focus not on when the levees would break — but if.
It just goes to show the power of groupthink that even
college-educated professionals, who understand the potential impact
of global warming, subsidence and the loss of Gulf Coast wetlands,
could stiff-arm the notion that a hard rain was gonna’ fall.
“I told them it would happen within the next 50 years,”
my friend says. “And they would tell me to get lost. I guess I was
being too optimistic.”
As with this nation’s last great
tragedy, 9/11, Katrina provides us an opportunity to take stock of
our many unwitting assumptions. But there are obvious differences
between what happened in the Big Apple and the Big Easy: One was
manmade, the other orchestrated by nature. Perhaps that’s the
reason I find myself looking to the distant horizon of the
Himalayas, to where it’s commonly believed our karma is not
the result of actions in this lifetime, but the result of actions
that took place before any of us were born.
Put another
way: Nature doesn’t care. It’s not my intention to abdicate
hope or absolve the culpable. In India, where ancient traditions
coexist with the new technology boom, accountability remains a
keyword with regard to disaster response; more so since July, when
monsoon floods killed more than 1,000 people in Mumbai. Meanwhile,
across Asia, people have been rebuilding their lives, in some cases
in the same places their families have lived for generations.
Over the coming weeks, as if by instinct, many Americans
will do the same. As the construction crews arrive in New Orleans
and the Gulf Coast, it’s worth keeping in mind that our presence on
earth is but a single breath in the planet’s history. No matter
what we build, it’s even money that an earthquake, hurricane,
tsunami or volcano could wipe it all away.
Dan
Oko is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org).
He writes from Austin, Texas.
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