Weblog 15th October 2005-10-15
Dateline: Jozi
Is the planet beginning to show signs of disaster fatigue?
In this past year alone the devastation caused by natural disasters
Has been enormous with damages surely beyond a trillion dollars [US.].
The total for the decade is probably two trillion and rising. Think about it. The city of Bam-[ in Iran] gone. It may never be rebuilt. Then just the biggies: Algiers, Greece Turkey Iran and over to the other end of the tectonic plate system that runs from and along the Himalayas through South east Asia and the radiating spray from there to Japan and China, not to mention the islands of Sumatra et al. All of these places have experienced natural disasters over the past few years and this discounts the many more places that have experienced servere flooding. Now we have this vast explosion of horror in Pakistani Kashmir. Perhaps this is all not as natural as it appears.
All the people who have for decades denied that there was such a thing as Climate change are now jumping about to demand that present disasters are normal; that the pattern of earthquakes recorded annually is roughly unchanged. But notwithstanding that the weather patterns are now acknowledged to be altering somehow the pattern of earthquakes, flooding, drought and fire is supposed to be ‘normal’. I dispute this.
What makes me think that the rate of disasters is increasing is spurred by a report that the plea by Malawi [among other Southern African States] for food aid to feed huge numbers of people who are slowly starving has been met by a stony silence.
People’s hearts usually go out to those who are in trouble but suddenly there are so many people whose otherwise orderly lives are being suddenly and abruptly demolished forever that pity runs into a myriad of constraints-
We have a new emerging paradigm for AID. Those who deserve help such as the victims of natural disasters get it-albeit slowly due to the vast scale of the need. Those whose horror is perceived to be an outcome of foolish policies designed for aggrandising purposes on the part of ideologically fundamentalist leaderships or straightforward corrupt administrations, are it would seem to be left to sort themselves out. We saw this earlier this year with Niger where desperation was alleviated at the very last minute after wide scale television footage of starving humans was broadcast to the planet’s hard working citizenry..
It is this Blog’s speculation that this subtle shift of mercy activity is prompted by a growing understanding that the present pattern of disasters will continue: swinging pendulum like along the Himalayan fault line as the reverberating shock wave from a series of multiple Nuclear ‘test’ blasts continues to seek out the weaknesses in the fissure. These nuke tests you will remember took place a few years ago in a tit for tat power contest between two ancient enemies India and Pakistan. Since then we have had a surge in bad natural disasters.
This geological reverberation is a process I have called ‘the Ringing’ in some fiction I have concocted for my own desultory entertainment. In my fiction ‘the Ringing’ was an historical event [from my fictional perspective: the tale being set about a century from now] The penultimate climax [ in my fictional concoction] comes in 2012 AD. On this date and roughly in line with an old Mayan prophecy New York is demolished .
Like Bam and the great Tsunami, it happens around Christmas day, when an island called Cumbre Vieja, in the Grand Canaries, that is at the top of the Earth watch ‘bad possibility’ list, falls down, as predicted; and drowns New York and the American East coast which will largely disappear in much the same way that Banda Aceh just-vanished. But, pshew, this is simply a fictional concoction by NiK-It’s not really happening it?
Maybe…what is not fiction though is that the scale of disaster is growing with each event and the response rate are beginning to look “punchy”; and Cumbre Vieja is at the end of the plate faultline that seems to be reacting so violently to the Indo- Pakistani nuclear exchanges..
The response to the disaster in Pakistan has been slower than the response to Katrina, which was already widely condemned. Maybe there just aren’t enough disaster relief personnel drifting around the world waiting for disasters to happen; plus there is this glut of disasters presently.
So it looks like the world could rapidly run out of compassion for those who are widely perceived to have played while history rampaged on its own private rodeo. And the first sign of this fatigue could be represented by the almost unprecedented failure of the Southern African appeal as at a week or so ago. With the Pakistani disaster this past week intervening the Malawian’s cries can barely be heard above the clamour from wretched millions in diverse places.
On the other hand perhaps these disaters are normal and the failure to feed Malawi is just a bit of bad PR.
I suspect though that we must stand by for overwhelming demands for help from our northern brothers. These seem to be People who are being unfairly condemned to genetic extinction because they could not compete with free food. It is arguable that the supply ogf free food over decades has fuelled a wonderfully corrupt syastem that is barely functional, and serves only to keep the Wabenzi class in SUV’s while the populace remain slim n trim.
It isn’t fair to stop supplying free food to people who have gotten used to it. Like the poor citizens of New Orleans we saw recently on our TV screens these are people who have been helped for so long they have lost the capacity to save themselves. Now in the past few years about one hundred million or so have this year been added to the list of people to be helped.It seems the world’s helping hands may be overwhelmed.
We [in SA] may have to decide what we are going to do about them [ MAlawians n all] given our own priorities- We are already supporting twelve million citizens with grants and aid and they are not shrinking the numbers could grow by another five million withing three years so aid is costing.
We have our own fatigue issues.
NiK