November 22, 2012
Tropical
storm Sandy swept through from the Caribbean up the Eastern Seaboard of North
America in the last week of October 2012. The date is itself important because
by the end of October, it had been expected that the Hurricane season was over.
But this massive Hurricane called a ‘super storm’ swept through the Caribbean
and struck an area of one thousand mile radius on the Eastern Seaboard of the
United States. More than 69 persons were killed in the Caribbean but the
western world did not pay attention until this storm hit the most densely
populated areas of North America. When the winds died down more than 119
persons had lost their lives in the United States with many of the victims
killed by falling trees. More than 8 million people were left without electric
power in the New Jersey and New York area after punishing winds and destructive
floods brought the great tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut
to a standstill.
When Hurricane Sandy landed in New Jersey and hit New York City, the world was exposed
to the realities of rising sea temperatures. As the center of international
banking, finance, media and the infamous New York Stock exchange (NYSE), what
affected New York affected the world. For many stockbrokers, the major
catastrophe lay in the fact that the trading on the stock market floor was
suspended for two days. The business of conjuring wealth in the form of
creating derivatives had to take a temporary backseat as nature asserted itself
with another warning to humans that the present social system must be changed.
The superlatives that described this ‘historic storm’ did not lead the
mainstream media commentators to ask deeper questions about the relationship
between global warming and the basic ideation system that guides our everyday
human activities. The hurricane pointed to the fallacy of the ideas of building
houses everywhere without concern for the wrath of nature. The ideas of
possessive individualism of western culture had run wild with neo-liberalism
unfurling extreme ideas about the role of the individual. Cities have been
built around commerce, financial institutions, industry and the communities to
serve finance /industry and not the other way around. Those with money had the
right to the city and those without property were either outsiders or lived in
areas with very little protection against the elements.
For the majority of Africans at home and abroad, the ideas of private property
are anathema because when capitalism and free enterprise began in the world,
African peoples were considered as property. Individualism, the organization of
life for the protection of property and individual accumulation of wealth over
community, were considered hallmarks of ‘progress.’ Property took precedence
over the well-being of society as a whole. Petroleum companies and those
involved in the production of coal have been arguing against the realities of
Global Warming and have used the power of international finance to block
international agreements to combat global warming. With their millions of
dollars these oil conglomerates silenced politicians who refuse to seriously
discuss the need for alternative energy sources. Hurricane Sandy coming fast
and furious after the numerous storms of this century is one more wake up call
for humans to retreat from the wrong headedness of private accumulation of
wealth.
It was more than 24 years ago, on June 23, 1988, when the noted scientist,
James Hansen, testified before the US Congress that ‘the Earth had entered a
long-term warming trend and that human-made greenhouse gases almost surely were
responsible.’ James Hansen had noted that global warming ‘enhanced both
extremes of the water cycle, meaning stronger droughts and forest fires, on the
one hand, but also heavier rains and floods.’ Dr. James Hansen is one of the
world's leading climate scientists. He had warned that the world had passed a
tipping point in relation to Global Warming. The tipping point has been reached
so that the more we cross the closer we get to the point of no return, ‘where amplifying
feedbacks create runaway climate change. In this possible future, the chaotic
mix of rising sea levels, extreme storms, floods and droughts, would lead to
ecological collapse, ultimately making our planet uninhabitable.’ Bill McKibben
had carried forward this work by drawing attention to the fact that we have
crossed the red line and it will not be possible to avoid cataclysmic climate
events such as Hurricane Sandy. In Africa where the poor have witnessed
devastating droughts, floods, forest fires and daily signs of global warming,
new organs such as the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance have joined with
the global environmentalists to mobilize against the destructive patterns of
the extractive industries in the global South.
We will argue this week that Hurricane Sandy is one more reminder that we are
in the era of ecological collapse and only drastic transformations will repair
the planet earth and our ability to escape catastrophic events such as
Hurricane Sandy.
HURRICANES AND THE MESSAGES
The indigenous peoples of the Americas, especially the Tainos, were keenly
aware of the powers of the storms and they were humble enough to recognize the
powers of nature. The Taino word for storm, hurrican, has been handed down to
us through the Spanish conquistadors who decimated these peoples in their
expeditions to the Americas. These tropical storms that are called hurricanes
emanate from an intense, rotating oceanic weather system that possesses maximum
sustained winds exceeding 119 km/hr (74 mph). It forms and intensifies over
tropical oceanic regions. In short, hurricanes are fueled by hot ocean surface
temperatures. The scientific evidence has been clear for the past twenty years
that temperature in the Atlantic Ocean has been rising. There is mounting
information that the Atlantic Ocean is about five degrees Fahrenheit hotter
than usual this fall (September through December 2012).
Over the centuries as humans began to develop the capabilities to measure the
intensity of these storms, they have given categories to these storms according
to the wind speed. Hence a Category 1 Hurricane is one with a wind speed of
74-95 miles per hour. The Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale categories for
hurricanes are:
1. 74-95 MPH
2. 96-110 MPH
3. 111-130 MPH
4. 131-155 MPH
5. 156-up MPH
In recent years the deadliest Category 5 Hurricane had been Hurricane Katrina
where over 1,800 persons lost their lives in the United States.
MANY LESSONS FROM HURRICANE KATRINA
This storm of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season had crossed from the Caribbean
into Florida as a Category 1 Hurricane and strengthened to a Category 5
hurricane over the warm Gulf waters. This storm weakened before making its
second landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on the morning of Monday, August 29, 2005
in southeast Louisiana. This major Hurricane caused severe destruction along
the Gulf coast from Central Florida to Texas. Hurricane Katrina pointed out the
fallacy of the neo-liberal policies of the George W. Bush government that had
called on citizens to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their own evacuation.
The Republican Party had even called for the abolition of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA). In the 2012 election cycle, Mitt Romney, the
candidate for the Republican Party, argued that FEMA should be handed to the
private sector.
Under this policy of ‘personal responsibility’ in the Katrina manmade disaster,
most of the 1,800 persons who lost their lives and livelihoods were the black
and very poor of Louisiana, especially the city of New Orleans. On top of the
unnecessary deaths of the poor, the failure of an engineering system that was
not designed for Category 5 hurricanes exposed the technical limitations of the
claims of the United States to be a super power. Nineteenth century ideas about
engineering and flood protection ensured that the most significant number of
deaths occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana, which flooded as the levee system
catastrophically failed. Many older citizens had heard stories of the great
Mississippi flood of 1927 that affected millions of people in the South. Racism
had been so pronounced that law enforcement officials had used the poor blacks
as levees so that white citizens could flee the flood. The book by John Barry,
Rising Tide the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America had
chronicled the devastation of that flood and its impact on the politics of the
United States.
Seventy-eight years later in 2005, Hurricane Katrina registered itself as
another historic occasion demanding a rethink of the conception of the
organization of society. Hurricane Katrina had been a wakeup call about
individualism and the free enterprise system. In 2012, seven years after
Hurricane Katrina, one other feature of the aftermath of this storm has been the
ways in which private developers had turned this catastrophe into a profitable
enterprise to move an entirely new class of persons into the best properties in
New Orleans. Thousands of poor and black citizens from this historic city can
never return to their homes as the linkages between individual wealth and
reconstruction were laid bare in the ongoing gentrification of New Orleans in
the aftermath of this disaster.
LESSONS FROM CUBA ON DISASTER MANAGEMENT
Comparisons can now be made between the Caribbean islands and the United States
in their response to hurricanes. Hurricane Sandy had swept through Jamaica,
Haiti and Cuba before ravaging the Bahamas leaving over 69 deaths and
destruction to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. However, the peoples
of the Caribbean had been able to minimize the large scale deaths that had been
witnessed in New Orleans in 2005 because disaster management had been taken
seriously in most of the islands. Cuba, in particular, has demonstrated in
Hurricane Rita in the same period (2005) that the government had to develop
robust measures for evacuation and preparation for massive public health
measures. The Caribbean societies have known since the period of the indigenous
peoples that disasters such as hurricanes must be met by state planning with
emergency management and medical response systems. These societies understand
that hurricanes cannot be handled at the level of the individual and that the
management of disasters is a measure of the seriousness with which a government
is prepared to look after its citizens. The Cuban model of disaster
preparedness is now so well known that the Mayor of New Orleans travelled to
Cuba in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to learn from the Cuban leadership
in the management of disasters. International non-governmental organizations
have invaded Haiti and have crippled the ability of the Haitian people to
respond seriously to disaster management. Hence, when Hurricane Sandy swept
through the Caribbean last week, the bulk of those who lost their lives in the
Caribbean were in Haiti.
Hurricane Sandy created death and destruction in all parts of the Caribbean but
the world woke up when the storm hit the USA. The storm worked its way through
the Caribbean when an Arctic jet stream wrapped itself around this tropical
storm to create an unprecedented weather event.
HISTORIC STORM – WE HAVE PASSED THE TIPPING POINT
Usually, by the end of October, the Hurricane season dies down as the cooler
temperature tone down the ferocity of the winds as the storm enters the
Northern Atlantic. However, with the warmer seas and the changing climate, this
Hurricane gathered intensity as the warm sea surface temperatures pushed the
winds that converged with a winter storm. Scientists had warned that fiercer
and more-destructive hurricanes will sweep the Atlantic Basin in the 21st
century as climate change continues. According to meteorologists, Sandy was a
rare event where two weather systems merged. From the insights of noted
scientists we have learnt that: ‘rising temperatures will give hurricanes warmer
oceans to feed from, and more moisture to dump on us, making them more
destructive.’
This observation going back over the past seven years since Hurricane Karina
have been reinforced by the prediction that ocean temperatures will keep rising
and blocking patterns will become more frequent. Hurricane Sandy was one
example of this blocking pattern. Scientists are now writing that Hurricane
Sandy occurred when an Arctic jet stream wrapped itself around a tropical
storm. Hence North Americans witnessed the bizarre event of a snow storm in
West Virginia while next door there was a tropical storm unleashing massive
floods up and down the Eastern seaboard of the United States. In the words of
the scientists, ‘There are at least three factors which made Hurricane Sandy
historic: 1) Warm sea surface temperatures, 2) a ‘blocking pattern’ shoving the
storm back on shore, 3) a merger with a winter storm.
What made the storm especially destructive was its enormous size, at least
1,000 miles in diameter. The prolonged high winds and storm surges, coupled
with the full moon on Monday October 29 night that increased high tides, all
contributed to the massive, almost unprecedented flooding over such a wide
area.
The destruction in the urban areas of New York and New Jersey has been plain
for the world to see. All the major media houses in the United Sates operate
from New York so the evidence of the devastation was graphically relayed all
over the world.
GLOBAL WARMING AND INTERNATIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES
The scale of the destruction of the City of New York has forced the Governor of
New York, Andrew Cuomo, to openly state that the issue of Global Warming has to
be engaged by US policy makers. Both Michael Bloomberg , the Mayor of New York,
and Governor Cuomo spoke boldly about the realities of climate change and that
there will be more super storms; such as Hurricane Sandy. New York Gov. Andrew
Cuomo said there should be more conversation about ‘a systemic solution
long-term, because this is really a long-term issue. It’s a longer
conversation, but I think part of learning from this is the recognition that
climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that
we are vulnerable.’
‘Climate change is a controversial subject, right? People will debate whether
there is climate change … that’s a whole political debate that I don’t want to
get into. I want to talk about the frequency of extreme weather situations,
which is not political … There’s only so long you can say, ‘this is once in a
lifetime and it’s not going to happen again.’
‘The frequency is way up. It is not prudent to sit here, I believe, to sit here
and say it’s not going to happen again,’ Cuomo continued. ‘Protecting this
state from coastal flooding is a massive, massive undertaking. But it’s a
conversation I think is overdue.’
African people and the peoples of the Caribbean can only say Amen to this
statement. They can ask where Cuomo and Bloomberg were when the US government
was blocking discussions on global warming in the debates at Copenhagen and
Rio. Andrew Cuomo, as the Governor of the State of New York, was making a case
for the Federal Government to come up with billions of dollars for
reconstruction. This case could not be made as a technical one; it needed the
clarity from environmental justice forces that a new ecological infrastructure
can only come out if a new protracted struggle against the oil and gas
companies who spend millions to deny the existence of global warming.
RECONSTRUCTION AND RENEWAL
Governor Cuomo has spoken of the billions of dollars that will be needed to
repair New York and for the building of storm barriers for lower Manhattan.
Engineers and construction magnates are salivating on the new business
opportunities that will come from this disaster, but with this capitalistic
mindset, these leaders are asking the wrong questions. Slowly, city planners in
the United States are wrestling with the weighty issues of the building of
surge barriers and tide gates as storm surge research groups look to the
planning that is going on in places like London, Rotterdam, Hamburg and Tokyo,
where sea walls, levees and wetlands, flood plains and floating city blocks
have been conceived.

Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.
- Order Horace Campbell's recent book, Global Nato and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya
- Welcome to horacecampbell.net. Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University, New York. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is the author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.