In natural “disasters”, there is no disaster without people. Extreme weather itself is not a disaster, but how it impacts people can be.
In the days following Sandy, the New York Times has done an excellent job of covering the social dimensions of extreme weather. These pieces highlight – as I showed in my thesis in the context of rural Nicaragua- that natural disasters aren’t only an environmental phenomenon, but also very social, economic and political at their core. Furthermore, especially in the case of extreme weather events and climate change, our societies are shaped by our natural environments as much as we shape them.
How New Yorkers Adjusted to Sudden Smart Phone Withdrawl reminded me a lot of what I learned around the social structures of information sharing in disadvantaged communities (in this case, the Tenderloin) when researching the Creative Currency Community Brief. The article shows that when we’re forced to go back to “primitive” ways of communicating and sharing information, we might actually build some social capital that wasn’t there before, and we start to question whether our advanced way is really any better.
It’s difficult to tell whether the journalist of In Public Housing After Sandy, Fear, Misery, and Heroism was writing about a community in the US, let alone New York City, or some developing town in a third world country. It’s easy to distance ourselves from people situations when they’re borders and countries away, but these people live in the same city as I do, only I didn’t even lose power and had easy access to supplies to stock up on. This is the most striking example that natural disasters, even in New York, are socio-economic.
When researching my thesis in San Francisco Libre, Nicaragua, it was clear that the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 was not something that occurred with the landfall of the storm, but was something that was made possible by the economic and political practices and decision carried out leading up to the storm. Taking that into consideration, where does New York’s priority lie when Deciding Where Future Disasters Will Strike?
The comparison of Sandy Versus Katrina by Paul Krugman is less a comparison of storms and more a comparison of political leadership response to the storms. Unfortunately, this will not be the last of the storms – in NY or elsewhere – so who would you rather be there to guide you through the crisis?
Interesting how often we go to such great lengths to differentiate ourselves from disadvantaged communities in our country and developing nations. Yet, when “disaster” strikes, it shines a mirror on those ways how we are strikingly similar. The real question here is, next time, what we do want the storm to show us about ourselves?
Originally posted on Texture Transcribed.
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