That was some mudslide that
hit Leyte Island in the Philippines last month, when something like
several tons of sludge and rock a mile wide slid down a mountain
onto the village of Guinsahugan, killing children in their
schoolrooms and villagers in their stores and homes.
No
wonder. In just two weeks before the Feb. 17 disaster, there had
been about 20 inches of rain. It was a natural disaster, as well as
a human tragedy.
But maybe nature had some perverse help.
Mud moves more easily down Philippine mountains than it did years
ago. Those mountains used to be covered by trees. Now, many have
been cut bare. Others have been replanted with coconut trees. Nice
trees, coconuts, but their roots are shallow, meaning they hold the
earth less firmly than did the deeper-rooting trees they replaced.
There is no proof that human activity led to the mudslide
that killed some 1,800 in and around Guinsahugan. But would a
member of the South Leyte Government Board have felt it necessary
to deny that illegal logging was involved if some kind of logging
had not been a factor?
To get this information, though,
you had to read between the lines. News coverage focused on the
survivors mourning their loved ones and on the unspeakable sadness
of little children suffocated in their classrooms. The possibility
that human endeavor might have been a contributing factor was down
in the 17th paragraph, or was absent.
This is common.
Whenever people — or even animals — are harmed or
threatened by earth, water, fire, or disease, readers and viewers
get ample accounts of suffering but minimal exploration of origins.
Should a steer be suspected of mad cow disease, we can be
sure that we will see film of the stumbling beast and hear
assurances from a government official that there is no threat to
human health. Speculation that the presence of huge and densely
packed animal-containment operations has something to do with the
disease is relegated to the back pages, or the tiny-circulation
policy journals.
The same is true with the outbreaks of
spongiform diseases among wild deer or elk. The stories concentrate
on telling hunters what to do and what to avoid, not on wondering
whether deer or elk farms contribute to the epidemics, just as
stories about whirling disease in Western rainbow trout pay little
attention to the possible role played by fish hatcheries.
After all, science does not claim to know that hatcheries cause
whirling disease or that densely packed cattle make mad cow disease
more likely. We may never know if there is a connection between
global warming and fiercer hurricanes. Good reporters reach
conclusions based on what they know, not on what they surmise, so
treading softly on connections between human activity and natural
disaster is to be both expected and respected.
Except
that the tread is just as soft when the science is solid. When the
Mississippi River and its tributaries overflowed their banks in
1993, it took days and some effort for most news organizations to
start reporting about all the “improvements” — straightening
the rivers, building levees, plowing and planting right to the
river-banks — that obviously exacerbated the flooding.
This was not because editors and reporters were in thrall
to the Army Corps of Engineers or the Farm Bureau. It was because
reporters were in thrall, as almost everybody usually is, to habit,
and to the established wisdom.
The floods were a great
story. Reporters, photographers and network cameramen loved the
aerial shots of the flooded plains, the close-ups of the farmer
contemplating his ruined cropland, the stirring example of the
small-town shopkeepers and children working through the night
shoring up the levees. Who needed to complicate matters by asking
whether we all shared some responsibility for the disaster?
But there is probably another reason why we — the
people who bring you the news — are reluctant to explore
human complicity in natural disasters. That’s because you —
the readers, viewers, and listeners — don’t want to hear
about it. It challenges some of our dearest, if least likely,
assumptions.
One of which is that things just happen,
that we are all autonomous, independent individuals going about our
own business, but occasionally bedeviled by floods, mudslides or
bird flu. The possibility, and it is nothing more, that bird flu
pandemics might be more likely because of huge poultry farms,
introduces into the discussion the collective, impersonal entities
that have impacts on our lives and on the natural world.
It’s more comforting to cry for the victims and admire the rescue
workers. Wondering whether the way we live now contributes to the
problem — that’s not comforting at all.
Jon Margolis is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He
leaves home in Vermont to travel the
West.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
