1-28-06, 9:54 am
Tsunamis come in many forms.
The tsunami that erupted in the Indian Ocean from the massive 9.0 earthquake on 26 December 2004 was incredibly powerful, immensely destructive, and very deadly, perhaps killing a quarter of a million people or more. I felt—and continue to feel—the pain of this event not just as a fellow human being but also as a person who has been to a few of the places now devastated. In fact, I spent my first wedding anniversary on the beautiful beaches of Krabi in Thailand, while teaching English in that country.
Though it was a natural disaster, the consequences were unnatural and not entirely random. Generally, the areas with the most destruction, with the possible exception of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, near the epicenter, were the areas where there had been the most economic growth, the most capitalist development, and therefore the most environmental degradation, e.g., primarily tourist infrastructure and shrimp farming that, among other things, destroyed the mangrove forests and coral reefs that serve as rich ecosystems and natural barriers against tidal waves.
My 8 year old son asked if the people affected by the tsunami were/are so poor, why didn’t we help them before the tsunami? A very good question indeed.
Poverty is a chronic tsunami and the big wave of malnutrition, hunger, and starvation are ever present. With about a billion people—approximately 1,000,000,000 people!—with insecure and irregular access to enough food and clean water, millions of poor people die each year, tens of thousands of poor people each day, another poor person every few seconds of every day of every year. It boggles my mind and pains my heart.
It is wonderful that we have scientists and others researching and working on treatments and cures for various ailments and diseases. That should certainly continue. But we should also work on the treatments and cures for hunger, dysentery, gastroenteritis, and other very well-known, very easily-treated causes of suffering and mass death. Treatment involves taking proper care of suffering people; cures imply removing, reforming, or revolutionizing the structures and systems that result in such massive yet unnecessary tragedies. It may be complex, but it is not complicated. Food must be an absolute right, not a privilege.
Tsunamis come in many forms. Global warming is a slow tsunami. We are overheating the Earth, cooking the planet, slowly boiling ourselves and all other forms of life to death. We already know what happens when we overheat a car; when we overcook a meal; when we overheat our bodies; we can surmise what will happen if we continue to overheat the Earth. It isn’t pretty and it will get much uglier.
Tepidly called global warming, some such as Rabbi Arthur Waskow call this type of climate change “global scorching”. Regardless, global warming is a global warning. Apparently, reports for and from groups as disparate as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Greenpeace, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Oxfam, the Pentagon, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the World Bank, the World Meteorological Organization, and a vast number of other scientists, political economic analysts, and environmentalists agree. The Pentagon report, for example, states that global warming “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern”, higher even than terrorism, warning of riots and declaring that “future wars will be fought over the issue of survival rather than religion, ideology, or national honor”.
The signs of an overheating Earth are clear and the evidence is rushing in and rising: hotter weather in many places, though colder weather in some places; more frequent and violent storms; mass species extinctions; eco-spasms; melting glaciers and polar ice caps; earlier springs; rising water temperatures; rising ocean levels; acidification of the oceans; disturbed Atlantic Conveyor and Gulf Stream systems; submerged islands; and the threat of submerged cities such as New York, Miami, New Orleans, Bangkok, Dhaka, Tokyo, Shanghai, Sydney, and many, many other coastal cities.
While the world has chosen to take gradual steps to reduce climate change with the Kyoto Protocol, which went into effect on 16 February 2005, the US government has chosen to bury its bi-partisan head in the sand. It may be searching for oil or whatever else under the sand, but it may eventually find rising and polluted water there.
Thankfully, many individuals, organizations, and localities are taking action and taking the lead from the grassroots. Reducing consumption, reducing waste and emissions, recycling and using recycled goods, using renewable energies instead of fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal, protecting and replanting forests, reducing or eliminating meat consumption, and reducing or eliminating smoking are some of things that are being done. While we do these things, we also need to pressure our governments to do much more.
Tsunamis come in many forms. I mourn for those killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami. I mourn for those killed each day by the chronic tsunami of poverty. I mourn for the current and future generations who will suffer from the slow tsunami of global warming. We need to stop the tsunamis before they reach land and affect us with disastrous results. We can do it, but we need to be alert and aware, and we need to take immediate action.
--Dan Brook, Ph.D., teaches sociology at San Jose State University and can be contacted via
