Out along the edges
Always where I burn to be
The further on the edge
The hotter the intensity
The southern California fires of 2007 have dominated media coverage lately in much the same way as Hurricane Katrina did in 2005 and the Florida hurricanes the year before that. Just turn on CNN or MSNBC or go to their websites and it’s pretty much all fire, all the time. Certainly that story is as newsworthy as its hurricane-related predecessors.
But one meme is conspicuously absent from the fire coverage, at least from what I’ve seen: that’s the specious argument that it’s the fault of the residents of southern California for living in a dangerous environment. “They should move or “we” shouldn’t have to subsidize their insurance,” goes the refrain. Remember that from Katrina?
Well, allow me to remind you:
A better model would highlight the fact that a policy of federal disaster relief encourages cities—and the individuals who populate those cities—to locate in potentially disastrous regions.
Let me offer myself as a case in point. I travel to San Francisco once or twice a year, and every single time I visit, I resolve someday to move there. I think my resolve has been substantially weakened in the past several days. Having seen how ineffective disaster relief can be, I am suddenly disinclined to live someplace where I might need to rely on it. And that’s a good thing. The horror being visited on New Orleans today has made it less likely that I (and others like me) will be victims of an equivalent horror in the future. Had the relief efforts been more comprehensive, I might still be a future earthquake victim.
So those are two reasons we might want to rethink the policy of giving federal assistance to disaster victims. It encourages people to live in dangerous places, and it denies people the opportunity to accept higher risks in exchange for lower housing costs. Those abstract principles might be partly offset by any number of real world considerations. But if we want to build a better world, no truth should be ignored.
Steven E. Landsburg, No Relief: Why we shouldn’t aid Katrina’s victims too much. Slate.com, Sept. 7, 2005
Daniel P. Schrag, director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, said that as coastal areas, and islands, recover “there has to be a discussion of what responsibility we have not to encourage people to rebuild their houses in the same way.”
Even the fate of New Orleans should be open to discussion, Dr. Schrag said. “Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild a city that puts it in harm’s way once again and relying on technology such as higher dikes and levees seems to me a very dangerous strategy,” the more so in an era of global warming.
[...]
“You cannot draw up a worse case scenario for increased property damage, risk to human life and cost to taxpayers,” said Robert S. Young of Western Carolina University, who studies coastal development.
Just as a commission was formed to identify military bases for closing, he said, a commission should be formed to identify “those sections of shoreline that are clearly so vulnerable to storm damage that they should no longer receive any federal subsidy of infrastructure rebuilding, they should be yanked out of the flood insurance program, those sorts of things.”
Mr. Young said the commission should be made up of representatives from FEMA, the United States Geological Survey, the Army Corps of Engineers and university researchers. “It could not have politicians on it because coastal politicians, even if they are fiscal conservatives, would want to defend their coastal turf,” he said.
He said he would propose the idea this month, when he has been asked to testify before a subcommittee of the House Resources Committee. “We need to just make a start,” he said.
“Some Experts Say It’s Time to Evacuate the Coast (for Good),” by Cornelia Dean, New York Times, Oct. 4, 2005
There are many, many more such articles. And I recall similar sentiments expressed in the news following the 2004 hurricanes in Florida, although I haven’t been able to link up specific examples.
Yet, we hear precious little about building or rebuilding in southern California. I found one undated source, from a pro-environment group called the Sustainability Institute, that railed on Californians for living in a fire-prone area:
When it comes to Californians who build half-million-dollar homes out of wood, surrounded by dry scrub and inflammable eucalyptus trees, high on windy hills, I’m finding it hard to work up much pity. Even recent migrants could have contemplated the educational spectacle of the Oakland fires just two years ago.
“Chaparral,” it says here in a college biology textbook, “is a Mediterranean-type scrub biome, characterized by mild moist winters and long dry summers. As the vegetation dries out in late summer, fires may sweep the slopes with incredible swiftness.”
Another text, written in 1970, says, “Chaparral is subject to periodic fires that maintain the dominance of shrub vegetation. In areas such as southern California people have built homes extensively in chaparral and suffer the consequences of the inevitable fires.”
Why don’t towns in chaparral country have superstrict fire codes, or better yet zoning laws forbidding expansion out into the combustible hills? Why do people risk their lives and fortunes on floodplains, in hurricane alleys, on wave-bitten barrier islands and beaches, in landslide zones, in all sorts of places where we know that natural forces can be overwhelming and unforgiving?
One could answer that question with just about any of the common human failings. Greed, for example. Developers build houses in places where houses should never be built, because they can sell them to suckers and walk away before the “natural” disaster happens.
If you’re disinclined to accuse people of greed, short-sightedness will do. Most of us don’t think about natural hazards when we build or buy houses. Poorly schooled, raised on television with its five-second time horizon, ignorant of history, we don’t think about much of anything. Maybe it honestly never occurs to builders, zoning officials, or home-buyers that Florida has hurricanes, Missouri has floods, and California has fires.
If you don’t like that explanation, you could choose arrogance. Our culture is big on controlling the elements. Somehow our self-respect, our very manhood (even if we are women) requires us to tempt the power of mountains, rivers, fires, and storms. This cockiness leads us to great triumphs and stupid, repeated failures. John McPhee wrote a wonderful book about both the triumphs and the failures, called The Control of Nature — one chapter of which is about the impossibility of controlling the Mississippi, another of which describes the landslides in the steep, still-rising San Gabriel mountains of California. If the fires and earthquakes don’t get you there, the landslides will.
Besides that, it’s pretty much crickets.
My point is not that we should blame folks in SoCal for living in a dangerous area. Rather, I raise this dichotomy to point out the inherent unfairness of criticizing the people of New Orleans for living where they do while being comparatively silent about a similar issue in southern California.
And I don’t think I have to spell out why the unfairness exists … do I?
