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published: September 14, 2005

In internet time the Anthropogene itself appears to have become abandoned, with no articles or even an update being done for the entire summer of 2005. My apologies to those infrequent readers. There have been more pressing concerns to be taken care of recently, such as employment. I am going to attempt to get some new articles up.

(And there is definitely some kind of jinx on my "Discoveries in Climatology" article. For some reason, it summons up an immediate case of writer's block...)

Some thoughts on Hurricane. Katrina, definitely one of the greatest natural disasters in American history. One would think from the shrill, hysterical and myopic tone adopted by our news media, that it was the GREATEST disaster ever.

Hardly.

During the months of July and August in 1931 along the course of the Yangtze River, the greatest natural disaster in recorded human history occurred. 3.7 million people perished in a massive flood. Entire cities vanished. Disease and starvation affected over one quarter of the entire population of China in it's aftermath.

Let's repeat that figure:

3.7 MILLION

Good luck trying to find out any details of this catastrophe. A search on altavista turned up barely anything on this and I started to doubt my memory. Talk about lost history.

Once that benchmark is used, all of a sudden things start looking better (this is not to diminish the human tragedy, instead I seek to put it in perspective.)

Hurricane Katrina was a category-5 hurricane, "the big one." Hurricanes of this level occur every 100-500 years. The levees around New Orleans were only designed to handle a category-3. And since a picture is worth so much more than anything I can say...

Akron Beacon Journal © 2005

(As an aside, the category-3 levees actually held, though at one point the storm surge did top the levees briefly. The flooding happened the day after when a runaway barge took out a concrete storm wall.)

There's been a lot of political and religious thrashing about over the hurricane and its aftermath. Edward Rothstein in the New York Times tackles the human conceit at work in our perceptions.

In the history of humankind, there has rarely been a disaster like the New Orleans flood without a theodicy to go along with it. The word "theodicy," coined in the 18th century by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, derives from Greek roots invoking the "justice of the gods." A theodicy is an attempt to show that such justice exists, to prove that we really do live in what Leibniz insisted was the "best of all possible worlds."

I'm tempted to point out that theodicy sounds like... idiocy.

Germany's environmental minister Jurgen Tritten who must have been working off the same sheet as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., immediately blamed the American leadership for failing to follow the Kyoto Accords or getting Gaia upset, or something. And in case anyone thinks I merely have a beef with the so-called "left" in America, let's include the right where some religious fundamentalists claim that New Orleans suffered the wrath of God because of it's sinfulness - translation - they disaproved of Mardi Gras.

Perhaps the London Times sums it up the best:

"The surprising thing about New Orleans is not that the city should have been engulfed, but that it took so long for it to happen. Cities do not last. Those built in precarious places collapse. The rest are doomed to decay or suffer humanly induced destruction. It is only our historical myopia, which prevents most of us from seeing much of the past at once, that makes us think our cities are solid or enduring."

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New material is added to The Anthropogene once a month or when convenient.